Big spoilers. If you haven't finished the War Campaign quests that went live today, read this later. The quests can easily be completed in less than an hour.
There are very big questions raised in the end by the cinematics. I've also done some research, finding out what epilogues the essentially three factions provide.
Spoilers Ahoy!
Ironically, the character that most fascinates me in the final Old Soldier cinematic is the unnamed Forsaken standard-bearer. We're unlikely to see this figure again - she has no lines and you don't really see her face. But her reactions have the potential to tell us a lot about the future of the Forsaken.
When Saurfang calls out Sylvanas for Mak'gora, this standard-bearer walks out with her - not exactly as a second, but just to attend to the Banshee Queen.
Ultimately, Sylvanas cheats just as Thrall had with Garrosh, killing Saurfang with a blast of powerful, mysterious magic (it's death magic, guys. It's Shadowlands death magic.) But before she can do that, Saurfang gets her monologuing, in true hero/villain confrontation style. And it's during this speech that she basically cops to her utter contempt for the Horde - they're "toy soldiers in tin suits" and she just does not give a Murloc's fart about them except as fodder for wars.
When she refers to the rebels and the Alliance as "nothing," she also calls the Horde, similarly, "nothing." And that gets this standard-bearer's side-eye.
See, the Forsaken have always had this weird status in WoW. Even in Vanilla, Undead characters started at only neutral with the other three Horde capitals/factions, with a little boost to Undercity rep to compensate. Sylvanas has always worked hard to instill a cult of personality around herself - "Dark Lady watch over you" is one of the main "goodbye" voice lines Forsaken NPCs say. She's made herself into some kind of deific savior to her people.
And so, even as Sylvanas has shown indifference or now contempt toward the Horde in general, despite being Warchief, the Forsaken have always had this promise in the back of their minds - sure, she's just using them, but she does care about me.
And the Forsaken have done horrific things in her name - things that, individually, if they had had some leader who strove to uphold the principles that they believed in while they were alive, they may have never been willing to do.
But as Sylvanas abandons Orgrimmar following the death of Saurfang, this standard-bearer, whom I'm sure believed up until that moment that she was hardcore loyal to Sylvanas, nevertheless recognizes the honor and courage that Saurfang displayed. Saurfang got exactly the sort of death he always wanted - bravely fighting for the future of his world, calling upon all people to unite.
The Horde has always tried to uphold this value of honor, and Saurfang himself has shown time and time again a failure to uphold that value. But in his dying moments, Saurfang was exactly the hero that he wanted to be, and the Horde was presented with a paragon of that ideal.
Sylvanas has always scoffed at these high-minded ideals, never actually buying into those values.
But her people have spent the last decade and a half as members of the Horde. Yes, her loyalists have kept an emotional distance from all of that, but many have come to feel at home within the Horde. Here, they were accepted. They have made friends, been honored for their service, and forged bonds of fellowship with the other peoples of the Horde. It might not be the life they knew before the Scourge, but it is a life with some degree of dignity, and one that offers some optimism for the future.
In other words, the Horde gave them hope. And Sylvanas has tried to do nothing but stamp out hope.
So, let's get into epilogues and speculate what it means.
First off, actually, a UI thing. On your character-select screen now, there is an Alliance or Horde symbol next to the character name. What does that mean? I almost wonder if we'll start to see a much greater freedom for characters to serve both factions. Will we see every race go full-Pandaren, choosing a faction regardless of race?
Or, even more crazily, will there be a third faction, perhaps loyal to Sylvanas?
Getting into those epilogues:
Horde Saurfang loyalists get, I believe, only the basic package. They attend the funeral for Saurfang, seeing him eulogized by Thrall and Anduin in the Valley of Strength.
Alliance players then meet with Jaina, who sends them to Stormsong Valley, where they meet Calia Menethil, who is currently taking care of Derek Proudmoore as he adjusts to his new unlife. Jaina suggests that Calia could do similarly for a lot of other people, which she's reluctant to do. I've got to be honest, this to me seems like a real opportunity for, essentially, Alliance Forsaken.
(I believe Horde players also witness this scene, sent to spy by Lillian Voss.)
However, there's another possibility:
If we are truly going to see an end to the faction conflict, it's possible that Calia might simply become the leader of the Forsaken.
Let me back up and cover something else:
Sylvanas loyalists travel to the Ghostlands, meeting the Banshee Queen at Windrunner Spire. She talks about how she's eager to let the Alliance and Horde die in droves fighting N'zoth, claiming that even the Old God will wind up serving Death in the end. Sylvanas is absolutely not out of the picture yet, and the possibility that she's the next expansion's final boss feels very possible.
However, let me go wider and crazier:
If we want this to count, I think that some major mechanical changes have to come to the way that the Alliance and Horde work.
And here's my theory: I think we're getting not one faction, nor a third. I think we're getting four factions.
Tyrande is notably absent when Saurfang and Anduin are besieging Orgrimmar. Pretty much everyone else is there (barring Gallywix - also Ji, who is super-traumatized by sieges of Orgrimmar and decided to go help defend Thunder Bluff instead.) Genn is definitely pissed off that Sylvanas escapes. But Tyrande is, I think, in full destroy-the-Horde mode, and has no interest in just swapping out Warchiefs.
Sylvanas is still at large, and still has people loyal to her, including players.
So here's how I speculate this is going to work:
I think that the Alliance and Horde will each have two sides to them. Each will have a cooperative side - the Alliance following Anduin's example, and the Horde following Saurfang's (likely led by Baine or Thrall.) But I also think each side will have hardliners. Alliance players would be able to join in Tyrande's crusade of vengeance while Horde players would continue to stay loyal to the "real" Warchief.
And I think that those who are in the cooperative factions should be able to group up with one another, quest, and run dungeons and raids together.
Meanwhile, the hardliners might get different stories, and perhaps more incentives to PvP or at least do Alliance vs. Horde content.
It would effectively allow players to sort themselves by how invested or exhausted they are by the whole Alliance/Horde conflict. And it would create really interesting tensions within each faction. The Horde has had plenty of that over the years, often forcing players to play both as war criminals and as righteous revolutionaries. The Alliance has generally had to kind of... not really have much of an interesting internal conflict.
But moving forward, I think this could potentially solve a lot of the problems that a divided playerbase has felt regarding this conflict.
The real question, though, is whether this decision will be reversible. Story-wise, my Human Paladin, Tauren Shaman, and Undead Rogue are super ready to just get along (the Rogue has basically been waiting for an opportune time to stick a knife in Sylvanas' back ever since she started raising more people with the Val'kyr,) while my Night Elf Demon Hunter will probably never forgive the Horde for doing exactly what he feared the Legion was going to do last expansion. (Not sure on my Death Knight. I think after going home to Argus, he's basically let go of his hatred for the Horde, seeing the Legion as the true thing he needed to fight.)
But of course, I might at some point just want to play a Demon Hunter with a friend's Horde group. So if this kind of factional sorting thing does happen, I'll be curious to see how easy it is to swap.
I am incredibly eager to see the announcement of the next expansion at Blizzcon. Not to say that 8.3 doesn't excite me, given how central N'zoth will likely be (I want to see Ny'alotha, which I assume is his realm, so bad!) but I feel like the developments here could be huge... and if they aren't, it'll be a pretty big disappointment.
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