The War in Warcraft: Alliance vs Horde and the Open-World RPG

After two expansions of inter-faction cooperation following the Siege of Orgrimmar, a giant fight is going to erupt between the factions, and it's going to be worse than it has ever been, with both sides losing a major city.

As someone who plays both sides, I have to compartmentalize a bit: I've always had trouble justifying the Horde side of things, as they've typically, in the past, been the aggressors (particularly egregious was the Horde's attack from behind in Icecrown that left a whole bunch of fresh corpses for the Scourge to raise.) The justification for Garrosh, for example, to hate the Alliance (when he had probably just encountered them a couple years before he became Warchief) felt really odd.

So I had a raised eyebrow of skepticism when Battle for Azeroth was announced, and I think I'm not alone. However, what I think I see in this is an opportunity: one that could allow WoW to go back to basics.

Don't get me wrong, I love facing off global threats, and the fact that we're actually fighting the Burning Legion on its home territory right now is very exciting. But as we've built up our prestige to the point where we're not only our faction's go-to commander for interdimensional expeditions, but also the leader of our respective class orders, one does not tend to have that old, low-level feel of being a wandering adventurer, exploring places and righting wrongs along the way.

Higher stakes are required to get both factions to cooperate, and that means that you need to be facing something that is an all-out military threat, where it makes perfect sense to combine to two greatest armies on the planet.

While clashes between armies is the bread and butter of the old Warcraft RTS games, the open-world RPG is less suited to that kind of story. While there are rules in Dungeons and Dragons for massive battles and such, the game is in its groove when you have four or five adventurers delving into some forgotten vault filled with monsters and treasure.

Make no mistake: the faction conflict will mean large-scale battles, and you're going to see that big military threat, potentially from not only the other faction, but also figures like Azshara, who we know will be a raid boss (though it's unclear if she's the final boss or an earlier tier.)

But beginning the expansion without a clear big bad beside the other faction - which will be locked away on another continent until the level cap - we have, perhaps, the opportunity to keep things low-scale as we investigate new and different threats as wandering heroes rather than Commander, Highlords, Huntmasters, and Slayers.

It remains to be seen. But even though my dream (which is almost certainly never going to happen) is for my Tauren Shaman to be able to run a dungeon or two with my Alliance guild, I'm actually not too disturbed about the faction conflict coming back to center-stage. Just give me a Bronze Dragonflight person so I can revisit Undercity (it took us so long to get those Abomination guards back!)