Heroes also die. Some even sacrifice themselves and that's why they are called heroes. They are willing to sacrifice their lives for others.
You die as a villain fighting for your cause or ideology or out self interest and motive.
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But baddies too have the other side of the story being told coming from their perspective.
You can have a different story to tell if you are looking on a character from his/her perspective, someone else with her or against her and the story would be different.
I agree with this, WoW villains have very little depth/reasoning/motives you can even remotely relate to, they just exist to get killed. I'd love a more down to earth expansion with some actual intrigue, but for now all the villains are 90s cosmic comic book villains who ramble about the universe and laws of existance before they get offed.
Yeap... all what WoW need is 3rd faction and dividing players base more....
What is even the purpose of a neutral faction from a game design point of view?
It serves no real purpose. It doesn't help the devs, it certainly doesn't help the fanbase, and if you really wanted to solve a faction problem then you'd make 1 faction, not 3.
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There is always a division as long as certain races are tied to certain factions.
For it to be lore-only, it would have to be set up like Guild Wars 2 where you get to choose one of three Factions, and all races are inclusive to them. Factions denote your story and allegiance and somewhat of a significance in World PVP, but otherwise have no gameplay limitations.
I doubt we see the day with all races being individualized to allow you to choose any faction, given that the Alliance and Horde have way too much baggage to start opening up like that now. The writers have a bad enough time progressing the current lore, any attempt at shifting faction politics for the future would just be catastrophic in their hands.
Covenants is literally that system right now, and I can bet a lot of people don't have a lot of personal investment in what Covenant they chose outside of giving them some ability boost they deemed mandatory. The RP aspect of Covenants is very shallow, and considering how much effort they put into fleshing it all out, I doubt many people have any deep connection to anyone else in their Covenant. There's no 'FOR THE HORDE!' feeling of connecting with any of the 4 Covenants right now, and that's exactly how opening up the factions and leaving them to lore would feel like in the end.
Last edited by Triceron; 2021-08-11 at 05:07 PM.
it was pretty clear that WoW is slowly introducing choices, Sylvanas apologist/Pro Horde, Team gift of flesh vs. normies.
The third faction is basically team Shadowlands in another time traveling expac. Since the concept of death is unrelated to life on Azeroth, as if unnatural and antithesis to the ordering of things. Thank you meddlesome Pantheon for screwing with Azeroth.
BfA is death related
Shadowlands is Death related
10.0 will be death related and the story of origination must be undone.
The Reorigination protocol failed when we defeated Algalon, well as if some titan will receive that distress signal. Zovaal's taking the matters in his own hands this time.
You may stick to your colors if you like, otherwise you can go morally grey and in between.
Last edited by vertigo12; 2021-08-11 at 05:09 PM.
And it serves no purpose.
Blizzard already separates the game into 2 with Horde side and Alliance side specific quests to keep it flavoured. Adding a 3rd serves no purpose but to add more work to themselves, and they'd rather just make purely linear content that both factions can do rather than divide it further. And for there to be a 3rd faction means they need to dedicate story moments to make each faction feel unique or purposeful for it to even matter in the lore.
Otherwise you could already RP yourself as the 3rd faction by playing a Death Knight or Illidari, which already exists outside of the Alliance and Horde and your character is simply treated as an agent working for either faction who are otherwise bound to their organizations. You are still absolutely morally grey, just that you have to pay money to swap your faction, as it's always been.
Last edited by Triceron; 2021-08-11 at 05:17 PM.
Currently there's no point to factions to begin with as world pvp is non-existent.
However, should world-pvp be made relevant then it would help if there were more than two factions, preferably more than three factions. This makes it much harder for one faction to gain the upper-hand and dominate a server as the smaller factions tend to band up together.
Ideally players should be able to defect to other factions if they chose to as well.
So this is where Blizzard is on to something with the Covenants. People currently don't like Covenant due to the way they lock you into PvE and tie the aesthetics to your skills and abilities.
So separate covenants as they are right now, including their SL lore, and consider how they help break up potential gameplay. Imagine a Gnome & Goblin covenant, a Pirate covenant, a Moon covenant, or an elven covenant. All themes, they're not excluding races (that's interesting from a lore point of view but doesn't suit what I'm trying to say here).
However in a WoW where world PVP is relevant, the pvp could be fought between Covenants in the form of sub-factions. Covenants could start dominating territories on the world map.
One trick Blizzard is also missing is competitive PvE. Think the Ahn Qiraj war effort, except this time it's weekly and zone-specific. The covenants could be putting their dungeon and world quests into particular zones and being the highest performing covenant in a zone gives you special privileges in that zone (resource gathering, professions, instance buffs, unlocking special locations) for the next week.
Obviously the pve race should be balanced with some restraints on the majority covenant and extra perks for the underdog. Likewise, changing covenant can only be done once every week (or two) to prevent people from defecting to the apparent winner for the current week.
All of this creates a ton of player-generated gameplay. Rather than players getting time-gated, they end up getting competition-gated as no covenant can possibly dominate in all aspects of the game.