Battle for Azeroth Alpha/Beta General Discussion

[Raetary]

Reset is in 40 minutes.

[Magnagarde]

night elves and undead should never have joined the factions tbh

Too late for Blizz to make amends.

[EbaumsTipster]

night elves and undead should never have joined the factions tbh

Night Elf fans would rather they not be playable at all then be in the game as they are. Pretty sad.

[Syegfryed]

The "dogshit" started when they added the undead to the Horde back in the day. It all lead up to this moment.

theproblem WoW have is because there is only 2 factions and not 3

just imagine how better things would be

[Blayze]

theproblem WoW have is because there is only 2 factions and not 3

just imagine how better things would be

A third faction of pure evil would be great. Scourge, elementals, Legion, centaur, Defias... they hate each other, sure, but they hate US more.

It'd stop Blizzard needing to have the Horde juggle the Anti-Hero and Villain balls.

[Aeluron Lightsong]

Night Elf fans would rather they not be playable at all then be in the game as they are. Pretty sad.

I don't think a few grumpy NE fans here speak for the whole playerbase.

he "dogshit" started when they added the undead to the Horde back in the day. It all lead up to this moment.

That became obvious once Arthas was killed.

[Raetary]

7 minutes til reset

[Valysar]

Towellie stream is pretty pathetic, he looks like a homeless man asking gold to his streamers or whatever.

[Somnium]

night elves and undead should never have joined the factions tbh

I fully agree with that, but that's a decision 15+ years removed from us now, not much they can do about it today.

I always thought the game would have been better if the game didn't strive for symetry, if every race was it's own faction, with a constellation of relationships between them. Maybe an individual player could ally with a faction that's not his Racial faction, but that would have consequences on his other reps (like maybe if you're Orc you'll always be allied with Orgrimmar for gameplay purposes, but you risk damaging your Troll rep).

organised PVP would then be in-between those racial factions and their allies (so Warsong Gulch would be Night Elves VS Orcs and not Alliance vs Horde), and if your race is allied with neither, you could either join them as a merc, or you simply don't get that BG (but there would be more BGs, many of them straight reskins, to compensate.

It would be a very different game, but I think it would have been better in many ways.

Big inconvenient of that decision would be, of course, that even more storylines would fall into the "we all come together to defeat a great evil" trap, since now you can't have "Horde VS Alliance", you'd need "Horde vs Alliance vs Night Elves vs Forsaken", at the very least, and that's a lot of storylines.

If we workshop a bit what the relationships of races would be, we would get (incomplete list) :

Orcs are enemies with Humans, Dwarves, Gnomes, Night Elves (so pretty much every Alliance vanilla races), and allied with Troll and Tauren. They are neutral with Forsaken (Thrall's Horde is not victim of the Scourge, they don't really care). That would also mean an orc character would rarely go outside of Kalimdor, which makes sense (until the Black Portal reopens). Humans are their nemesis race.

Trolls are pretty much the same as orcs, with Night Elves as their nemesis races (Night Elves were the most important enemy of the old Troll empires).

Night Elves are enemies with Orcs, Trolls and undead. Neutral with everyone else, maybe allied with Taurens ? Nemesis race is Trolls.

Dwarves and Gnomes are pretty much like Humans in terms of relations, don't know about Nemesis races, probably Trolls and Orcs.

Forsaken are enemies with Night elves (as they were pawns of the Legion), and the human-like races (who were victims of the Scourge). Nemesis race ? Probably humans.

Later races are more complex to determine, as the situations they were added in the game as we know it were often contrived to keep the Horde vs Alliance thing going.

As such, it's unlikely the Blood Elves would ally with the Orcs and (even worse) the Trolls. If races are not confined to the rigid factions were know today, it's likely Trolls are the nemesis race of the Blood Elves, and that Zul Aman would be allied with the playable trolls. It's possible the Blood Elves would still be allied with the Forsaken though, in the same manner as in today's WoW (through Sylvanas).

Draenei would probably not even be in the game, they are an horrible retcon after all. Pandaren was a possible alliance race for BC, and with Races as Factions, we could get fully neutral Pandaren a lot earlier than MoP.

Worgens would join the human block, maybe be allied with Night Elves if they keep the whole druidic shtick they have in their storyline, but I always saw that as something contrived for the sake of factions.

Goblins could be equivalent to the Pandaren : allied with everyone else, but for very different reasons obviously.

That might change the order races are released in, we could see a first expansion with Worgen and Blood Elves and a second one with Pandaren and Goblins.


And even with all that speculation, you'll note that I stay somewhat in the framework of the existing stuff. We can dream bigger : in War3:TFT, the Forsaken are clearly introduced to bridge the gap with WoW (that was a year away from release, at the time).

What if they never did that ? Then undead would still be a faction in that hypothetical different WoW, but it wouldn't be Forsaken, it would be Scourge. That opens the door for playable Nerubians, Blood Elves would obviously hate them, as would pretty much everyone else.

What about the orcs ? With the Scourge as playable faction as early as vanilla, you wouldn't get Wrath of the Lich King, and the book before it that killed Ner'Zhul inside the helmet. The storyline dynamic of the New Horde reacting to Ner'Zhul as the Lich King would be pretty cool to see, something we never got the chance to see in Wrath (and neither did we get that with WoD either as Ner'Zhul was an alliance-only storyline, for whatever stupid reason. Although we got a lot of Gul'dan, which was sweet).

Another big consequence of all that is you wouldn't need to neuter the Night Elves, they'd stay our beloved Warcraft III Matriarcal racists, and we'd probably get playable Keeper of the grove / Dryads out of it at some point.

I don't know where i'm going with this. I love WoW as it is, but it could have been so different a beast.

[TheFirstOnes]

And...

We're lagged out.

GG Blizz.

Can't wait for the WORLDWIDE LAUNCH! -_-

[infinitemeridian]

The siege is so good, one of the few times a scenario feels truly large scale.

[Nevcairiel]

Can't wait for the WORLDWIDE LAUNCH! -_-

That won't make a shred of difference. The separate regions use entirely different infrastructure. In the US one might be worried though since 3pm PDT might mean a lot more people are online then at midnight, but that won't affect other regions.

[Hugnomo]

And wowhead has posted the cinematics.

[Valysar]

I .. am speechless .
Jaina is back ♥ (my fav character)

[Deleted]

Well that was a surprise.

[infinitemeridian]

Not as good as broken shore, but I did like the Arthas callbacks.

[Vynestra]

I .. am speechless .
Jaina is back ♥ (my fav character)

Jaina is the mvp of the assault that’s for sure.

[gcsmith]

"You have won nothing..." and neither did you, because you forgot jaina would use the same move she used last time at undercity. Wonder why she gave Nathanos her bow though.

[DeicideUH]

<too long to quote>

Personally, I always thought WoW should have been based off the RPG setting.

In essence, vanilla WoW, if up to me, would be:

- 1 Continent: Kalimdor
- Zones would be 50% larger, with several subzones
- 2 factions (Alliance and Horde)
- Alliance races: Human, dwarf, high elf
- Horde races: Orc, troll, tauren
- Neutral race: Night elf (works like Pandaren, the race itself is neutral, but you can choose a faction. Alliance night elves embrance change, while Horde night elves would be more primal and nature-leaning).
- 1 Capital per faction: Theramore (Alliance) and Orgrimmar (Horde)
- 1 Neutral capital: Nighthaven (Moonglade)
- Beyond the capitals, there would be 3 large towns: Thunderbluff (Horde), Bael Modan (Alliance) and Gadgetzan (neutral).
- Early zones deal with local threats. Main threats would be Legion remnants (northern Kalimdor) and Qiraji/Silithid (southern Kalimdor)
- Feel of wonder while exploring unknown lands

Then first expansion would be set on Eastern Kingdoms. New races would be ogre (Horde), gnomes (Alliance) and forsaken (neutral, act as mercenaries for both factions). Big threats would be Scourge (Lordaeron and Quel'thalas), the black dragonflight-controlled Dark Horde (center of the continent) and the Gurubashi empire (south).

[Veldoranz]

Anduin is such a good boi. I really hope he dies or something (never going to happen) so I don't have listen to him mention his father constantly and drone on in generic fantasy platitudes.