In Warcraft III, the Alliance and Horde were only two of four factions. Perhaps upping the ante from Starcraft, which created a three-faction RTS game, WCIII kept the old Alliance and Horde, but also gave us the Scourge and the... Ancients? The Night Elf faction.
It was in the midst of this game, at the end of the third, Horde-centric campaign, that we first saw the factions set aside their differences. Sort of. See, Grom Hellscream drank the Blood of Mannoroth again and more or less instantly started playing for the Legion, so Thrall was forced to team up with Jaina (their coalition orchestrated by Medivh) in order to capture Grom and basically knock some sense into him.
With cooperation achieved, the story shifted to the Night Elves, who saw both Alliance and Horde as invading outsiders, and they eventually have to go through a similar reckoning to recognize the true villain - which was the Burning Legion, though primarily making use of the Scourge as their armies. (The idea of the Scourge as an independent entity was told in the Frozen Throne expansion, which also ended with Arthas becoming the new Lich King).
WCIII saw a profound reimagining of the Horde - in the first two games, the Horde was explicitly the bad guys - invaders from another world who just slaughtered anyone in their way. WCIII introduced a version of the Horde, and a leader of the Horde, that was not motivated by greed and malice.
Now, I generally think that in the real world most people ultimately mean well. You pick a random person in any country and I think they'd probably say that they don't really want anyone else to suffer. But we are each granted only a limited perspective, and even if we wish to be fair, we're generally going to see our position as the more reasonable one. Furthermore, there are unscrupulous people who intentionally inflame distrust and fear to fuel conflict in the world.
One of the ongoing tragedies of Warcraft as a setting is that basically any of the playable races ultimately just want to be allowed to live in freedom and prosperity. Even the Forsaken, at least when portrayed in the way I find most interestingly, just want a piece of the world where they can feel safe. (The controversies surrounding Sylvanas' characterization make me wonder a lot what the story might have been like if the cinematic of Vol'jin's death, with its shot of the Banshee Queen lingering in the throne room as they take her predecessor away, had portrayed what it seemed to at the time - a Sylvanas who was faced with a great responsibility and actually humbled by it, rather than, I don't know, thinking "it's all going according to plan, mwahaha.")
I think that there was a marketing aspect to really pushing the faction conflict as part of World of Warcraft - even if WCIII ended with a sort of truce and burgeoning small-a alliance, playing up the conflict increased engagement. At the risk of seeming like I'm blowing this out of proportion, it's almost like it anticipated the weaponized polarization of American politics - there's profit to be made in getting people mad. And to be fair to Blizzard - this is meant to be a safe way to feel that kind of factional antipathy: it's just a game.
I've always been a peacenik, so I can't say that "my experience in the real world made me tired of this factional conflict in the game" because, well, I was never really into the factional conflict in the first place. But I do think it's worn on me.
So, I was very excited to hear today's announcement that 9.2.5 will see ways to allow players to do group content with members of the other faction. I'm really jazzed to see gnomes and tauren fighting alongside one another. And this is even though my engagement with the game has dropped to maybe its lowest levels since I started in 2006.
What I would like, though, is to see a rapprochement baked into the story. I don't want to rob pvpers of their joys in the game, of course, and even those who don't like pvp but do enjoy having that sense of conflict should still get some elements to play with, but I remember feeling very disappointed that, after BFA was supposed to "resolve the faction conflict," we didn't really see any changes to factions in Shadowlands.
As it turns out, that's a bit of a technical hurdle. Alliance/Horde conflict has basically been nowhere in Shadowlands, a bit like Warlords of Draenor (that also followed a major faction war that started with the Wrath Gate in Wrath of the Lich King). But I've felt some anxiety that, as the next expansion will presumably be a more down-to-earth one set on Azeroth, that we'll have another faction conflict shoved down our throats.
This change, though, could indicate no (also, Ion Hazzikostas said they're very unlikely to do a faction-conflict-centric expansion again, having sort of been there/done that). At the moment, though, the feature seems more of a technical one than a story-based one.
But I'd love to see WoW evolve in a direction that lets players decide for themselves whether their characters are hardcore faction fighters or if they want to focus more on the broader existential threats to Azeroth.
We still don't know what the next expansion will be, so maybe this is a little test balloon announcement before they get into bigger story changes that tie into it. But I will say this is the most exciting announcement out of WoW in a long, long time.
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