Tuesday, July 2, 2019

Possibilities for a Faction Merge

BFA is theoretically promised to "resolve the faction conflict." Given that, one wonders to what extent the folks at Blizzard are willing to actually do that.

There are a lot of ways things could go, and conservatively, one might assume that the fight will simply end in terms of story - we'll get an uneasy peace like we had in Warlords of Draenor or Vanilla through sort of the first couple zones of Wrath.

But that's boring and frankly I don't think it will be enough for players who are really tired of the constant "I must fight against the evil other, despite the fact that I've time and time again been reminded of how they're just people trying to get along in a difficult world" see-saw.

Let's imagine instead that we see a radical shift in the game - allowing players of the different factions to play together.

What forms could this take? I can imagine a couple scenarios. Let's go through them:

Mechanically Only:

Technically this exists already with Ashran, where players of the opposite faction can go in disguise as a member of their enemy's faction - not as spies, but really more as traitorous mercenaries.

Really it was just a solution to allow Ashran to meets its design goal - a continuous open-world PvP zone, not gated by specific battle times like Wintergrasp or Tol Barad, and allowing players to come and go as they please. To address balance, they allowed this crossover.

For player convenience, it wouldn't be terribly hard to implement this system for the whole game - much as players become members of the other faction for three bosses in Dazar'alor, even gaining new racial abilities, you could simply do that and allow players to basically temporarily race-change so they can play with friends.

But given that this change seems to be built into the story, I doubt that such a change would be relegated to a mechanical-only solution.

Opt-In:

This version might be the most complex to actually implement, and runs the risk of dividing up players even more.

Essentially, in this scenario, you would make a choice for a character (either permanent, in which case all my characters would obviously opt in, or reversible, in which I might consider the RP implications for the way I've conceived my characters' individual personalities) and that would put you among the people who have, officially, set aside the faction conflict in the interest of working together to fight the real threats to life on Azeroth.

Where this could get complicated is how you divide opt-in versus opt-out people. If your group leader is opted in, and they invite that Troll shaman to your party, but you don't heal trolls ("let them regenerate if they're hurt so bad!" you snarkily remark while your healing spells simply don't work on them,) what does that mean? Would you have to effectively make a third faction, where if you're a die-hard "Death to the Alliance" Hordie you can't group with your more enlightened brethren in case they bring along their new Draenei buddy?

A third faction, under the same restrictions that exist now, would just divide players even further. Despite that fact, I think that something akin to this - the idea of an opt-in system - is actually the most plausible - probably with some workaround that maybe allows the group leader to designate how open the party is to members of the other faction, and even if you'd normally not be able to heal that Troll, your group leader has told you it's ok, and that you should.

Universal:

This is maybe more plausible than the previous one, actually. In this case, everyone can group with everyone, and maybe they just broaden War Mode and, more precisely, the absence of War Mode. After all, if you're not playing in War Mode, you don't want to fight the other side. And if you don't want to fight them, why shouldn't you be able to toss a friendly healing spell or group up to take down some bad guys?

Total Dissolution of Factions:

This is the most radical take, and would very likely not really work for older content. But in this case, both sides of the entire game would open up to you. You could stroll from Stromwind to Orgrimmar and have friendly conversations with the guards in both cities.

Obviously, older content would get very tricky here. Consider how, for example, some quest mobs for Horde quests are friendly targets for Alliance players. An Alliance character wouldn't be able to do those quests, and similarly, a Horde player who is friends with the Alliance shouldn't be able to kill them either.

This could of course be handled by just grandfathering in old content and simply having the future of the game portrayed as one in which all settlements and cities are simply neutral territory. Honestly, it wouldn't look all that different from the Broken Isles (minus parts of Stormheim.)

It's really going into older content where this would start to be weird.

Getting Along

I think the most important mechanical change to a post-conflict world would be the ability to group up with players from the other faction for things like raids and dungeons. How we arrive at that, if we do, remains to be seen.

I do think that there needs to be a way for players to keep the faction divide going, especially after all the work they've put into War Mode as a new gameplay mechanic.

But in terms of story, and for a game that's 15 years old and does not have the 12 million players it had at the end of Wrath, I do really think that the game needs to allow individuals to set aside the faction conflict and cooperate with the other heroes of Azeroth.

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