(POTENTIAL SPOILER) Are we headed towards single faction WoW?

[Milksteakk33]

I was working on the Thalyssra quest chain last night when this came to me:

What if Azshara and N’zoth “mind control” every player into being their slaves and essentially “being on the same faction” next expansion?

This would give Blizzard the opening to see what folks thought of a single faction game, and if it didn’t work out, they could always go back to the way things were if we ever “overcome” Azshara and N’zoth’s influence.

Maybe as the expansion progresses, we slowly redevelop our sentience through subtle quests hinting at something being amiss.

But essentially, we become the villain. But what does this mean?

To me, the most exciting aspect of this idea is the scope of the content that a story like this could offer. Imagine, while the person playing knows very well that their character is mind controlled and not thinking logically nor with the best intentions towards Azeroth in mind, the character and its goals are totally opposite to what they’ve been for the last 15 years.

Imagine, instead of adding a new continent with a similar layout and theme as a past expansion, they could have us begin our journey invading the shores of Westfall or Ratchet, wreaking havoc on unprepared civilization.

What if they trick us into destroying our own cities?

What if raids are based on the destruction of the capitals that we know and love, and the boss fights ultimately culminate in us defeating our heroic leaders?

What if Sylvanus has known about Azshara and N’zoth’s plan all along and has attempted to disrupt the inevitable in an attempt to save her own skin?

…Or maybe she already is mind controlled and has begun the massacre for us, starting with Teldrassil.

Could this be how we are going to get our world revamp? Instead of a massive dragon wreaking havoc upon Azeroth, we become the hated antagonist? We slowly invade, destroy, and take over Azeroth as we know it, progressively changing our continents piece by piece.

With Classic on the horizon, and with Blizzard’s original legacy intact and set to be a massive hit, there’s no better chance to take this risk than now.

-Stankykeg

[InTheEnd]

You are kidding yourself if you think Blizzard is a company that takes risks. And they will never get rid of the false dichotomy that is the faction war.

[Julian Rayne]

I don't think the factions are going to merge. Maybe the paradigm betweem them will change, but I doubt they'll be done away with altogether.

[Sencha]

No.

/10something

[ls-]

You are kidding yourself if you think Blizzard is a company that takes risks. And they will never get rid of the false dichotomy that is the faction war.

They indeed aren't the ones who take risks, they usually look around at what others do, and if it's something they like/want they do it themselves, and that's both their blessing and their curse :P

However, in this case maintaining the 2-faction system hurts the game and is quite risky, pretty much all relevant MMOs that had a multi-faction system dropped it few years after their launches. The last game that did so was ESO that launched w/ 3 factions, but dropped them w/ the 1st xpack launch because it's hurting the game. Factions are still there, used in its story, but they're pretty much cosmetic, you can go wherever you want, you can group up w/ whomever you want, etc. Blizz will probably do the same, they'll soft-merge two factions, will allow cross-play and whatnot, but lore-wise both factions will still be present for the sake of story.

No matter what Blizz do, no matter how they try, it's impossible to keep 2 or more factions equally balanced. People who like a certain type of content will always flock together, it's better for them to play together since it improves their recruiting capabilities and thus increases their chance of success, it's not in their interest to be evenly split across multiple factions.

[Stormwolf64]

A maybe. Who can say anything else really?

[Greengrim]

Think you've went a bit overboard.

And WoW classic will be a "massive hit" for just 2 months, mark my words.

[apples]

Think you've went a bit overboard.

And WoW classic will be a "massive hit" for just 2 months, mark my words.

wow classic will be the single most successful video game of all time. 100m players month 1 and that number sonly going bigger. by month 2 1/2 of all people on earth will have an active subsscription to wow because of vanilla. haters will say its cuse wow got good but the numbers wont lie, 5 billion people farming hogger on a friday night

[kaminaris]

wow classic will be the single most successful video game of all time. 100m players month 1 and that number sonly going bigger. by month 2 1/2 of all people on earth will have an active subsscription to wow because of vanilla. haters will say its cuse wow got good but the numbers wont lie, 5 billion people farming hogger on a friday night

I will just leave it here:

[Blackmist]

No, but we could end up with greater cooperation. Being able to group with the opposite faction for an M+ for example, or a raid.

Possibly be better to knock down the realm boundary further first, so you could join a guild on a different realm, trade with them, have one unified AH (that would require the old one to be destroyed as it's in no way suited right now for selling commodity items - have one like GW2 has that just allows instant sell and buy orders, put as many as you want in and people can buy at the current price, it's a game, it can absorb minor rounding errors when two people buy at once), cross realm Mythic raiding from day one.

There's so many weird little barriers to playing.

[Teaon]

mercenary, warmode on/off, BoD raid appearance swap alliance/horde, the new guild feature.

these all are experiments for a factions merge, but when i say factions merge i do not mean removing horde and alliance, but having the ability to play together, raid together and do dungeons together in the same guild.

and they still can do faction wars again with this, simply if the same guild have alliance/horde, they adjust to the raid leader, meaning if the raid leader is horde and have alliance players, their appearance will swap to horde counterpart where its appropriate (i.e fighting alliance boss) just like BoD.

i would fully support this, let people play what they want without limitations.

[Greengrim]

wow classic will be the single most successful video game of all time. 100m players month 1 and that number sonly going bigger. by month 2 1/2 of all people on earth will have an active subsscription to wow because of vanilla. haters will say its cuse wow got good but the numbers wont lie, 5 billion people farming hogger on a friday night

Right on brother!! Right on...

[Toxuvox]

I can't see there ever being single faction approach in WoW. What I can see is the disolution of the Horde and Alliance as we know it, replaced with a different faction dynamic, such as Light and Void, or Life and Death, or something like that. In fact, the thought of being able to roll ANY race, then select which faction suits you best could be the shot in the arm that WoW needs to increase the player base. Obviously things like Allied Races present a bit of a problem, in that who they are allied to would no longer be a thing. I'd say at that point, they just become unlocked races rather than allied.

[Eazy]

You are kidding yourself if you think Blizzard is a company that takes risks. And they will never get rid of the false dichotomy that is the faction war.

Nothing more, nothing less.

Factions are the core of the Warcraft universe since the game started to exist.

It's like saying we won't have light and dark sides in the Star Wars universe.

[Cosmic Janitor]

wow classic will be the single most successful video game of all time. 100m players month 1 and that number sonly going bigger. by month 2 1/2 of all people on earth will have an active subsscription to wow because of vanilla. haters will say its cuse wow got good but the numbers wont lie, 5 billion people farming hogger on a friday night

That reminds me of the game dev tycoon game where you could make and MMO that, albeit during post game, had like 5+ billion people playing it. Due to the costs it was unsustainable and you'd get bankrupt before you push out the sequel. I always imagined what would happen to the world when a game that is played the majority of it's population suddenly vanished, there were probably riots and worse when that little shitty indie studio went bankrupt that entertained most people on earth. Civilization as we know it probably came to an end.

[morph4037]

I've been expecting single factions since they started "modernizing" WoW. This expansion is just the catalyst to set things in motion.

Some good things can come of it though.

[Cosmic Janitor]

Nothing more, nothing less.

Factions are the core of the Warcraft universe since the game started to exist.

It's like saying we won't have light and dark sides in the Star Wars universe.

Another one that didn't get the story of WC3 - the by far most popular part of the series.

[Dartz1979]

I am always gonna remain loyal to sylvanas she is my wow waifu for the horde

[Eazy]

Another one that didn't get the story of WC3 - the by far most popular part of the series.

You meant me? You wrote that I didn't get story of Wc3?

The one where Kul Tiras fleet with admiral Proudmore wanted to destroy Orgrimmar and orcs?
Or that one where Scourge wanted to destroy everything?
Or you meant the moment where Garithos wanted to kill other race than human?

So yeah... your argument is invalid and pretty much pointless.

[Cosmic Janitor]

You meant me? You wrote that I didn't get story of Wc3?

The one where Kul Tiras fleet with admiral Proudmore wanted to destroy Orgrimmar and orcs?
Or that one where Scourge wanted to destroy everything?
Or you meant the moment where Garithos wanted to kill other race than human?

So yeah... your argument is invalid and pretty much pointless.

Maybe you should have also finished the game.