Factions

[zillah975]

So with all the talk on the forums about faction favoritism (and seriously, why did they pick a Horde-side dev to address problems with people feeling like the Alliance gets shafted by the devs? are there any Alliance-side quest writers? and if the devs are all Horde-side, shouldn't this be a clue that they need to beef up Alliance storytelling to make it compelling enough that some of the devs want to play Alliance?) and the snarking from Hordies in the comments about how they're so awesome and Alliance sux and we should just switch factions and stop QQing, it got me thinking about factions and why I keep playing Alliance even though I'm so, SO curious about the Horde-side quests and story lines, and even though I like Thrall about a millionty times better than Varian Wrynn (about whom I know almost nothing. Apparently there are books? Should this be in the game?).

Wow, that was a long sentence. Ooooops.

ANYway.

It mostly comes down to aesthetics, and a little personality.

* My back starts to hurt just watching the Undead and the male Trolls. Why can't they stand up straight? Srsly, I know it seems weird, but there it is, I can't do it.

* The female trolls all look too much like a former friend with whom I had a falling out; I tried, but I can't play one without thinking of her and it's just uncomfortable and not fun.

* The Goblin starting quests make me uncomfortable for reasons I won't share right now. I may try it again sometime, but I also really hate the city you start in. It's too noisy with the engines roaring and all those neon lights, it just doesn't please me to play there. It makes me tense in the bad way.

* The Blood Elves idle animation -- at least the females -- make me want to smack them. It's like they're constantly sulking and rolling their eyes, it's irritating and makes me feel like they think they're doing me a favor by allowing me to play them. Irrational, yes, but I just can't get into the character.

* I really like the personalities of the Night Elves, Dwarves, Draenei, and Gnomes as displayed through voice, NPC text, and idle animations. The Gnomes' voices and NPC text are so chipper, the Dwarves seem really good-natured, and the idle animations for the female Nelfs and Draenei make them just look cheerful and glad to be there. I love that! (I don't know about the male idle animations because I don't play the dudes.)

* The Tauren and the Orcs are my favorites of the Horde races. If I play Horde-side for any length of time, it'll probably be one of them, because I mind them least of all of the Horde-side races, but...

* With the exception of the Draenei, I strongly prefer the landscapes of the Alliance starting zones. It's not that I think the Horde-side starting zones aren't well done, or aren't generally interesting and appropriate, but I really like Teldrassil, Darkshore, Elwynn Forest, and Dun Morogh. The Tauren and Orc starting zones are nice places to visit, but I don't like living there. The Belf starting zone is so sunny and brightly colored it almost gives me a headache, I've already talked about the Goblin starting zone, the Undead starting zone is very sufficiently creepy that I don't want to stay -- and their starting quests creep me out a lot too.

* I also got off on kind of a negative foot with one of the early Orc quests, where you have to go hit lazy workers with a truncheon or something. :/ It set a bad tone. Then later there's some guy waiting to be tortured, and you have to take part in some pit-fighting ring or something and kill enemies who are being forced to fight you for their lives in the pit? It's been a long time since I played on my Orc so I may be remembering wrong, maybe that was someone else. But it seems like something you would have to do as an Orc. Idk.


Also, Orgrimmar is the MOST confusing EVAR. God, that place is frustrating!! If I can ever level a character to the point where they can fly, I might not hate it so much, but argh, foo, Orgrimmar why so hard??

Also, what the hell did you do with my Orc's quest turn-ins? THEY ARE NOT THERE, I DON'T CARE WHAT IT SAYS ON THE MINI-MAP. *tiny fists of rage*



But I really am super curious about the Horde-side quests, after seeing what people have to say about them on the forums.

Now that I have Quest Completist installed, maybe I'll try another Hordie.

What do y'all think? Does the Horde really get better, meatier, more engaging quests than Alliance, or is this a "grass is always greener" situation?

Comments

[strikeslip]

I think the Horde has it better, but I can't stand a lot of the alliance quests, straight up. I prefer the Conan the Barbarian write large sort of atmosphere. Stab ALL the things! Alliance has the "diminish and go into the west" feeling everywhere, while the Horde is building and fighting. Also, we don't have our cameras blocked by huge trees. I get as lost in SW as you do in Org though. That's just a matter of experience.

I've played both sides up to Northrend, for reference.

You might want to wait for Pandaren? Same starting zone for horde and alliance, and then from 10+ on you can go either way. But really, if you're not comfortable playing the dark side at least a little, you aren't going to enjoy playing the Horde. The Forsaken don't get any nicer.

[zillah975]

I think the Horde has it better, but I can't stand a lot of the alliance quests, straight up. I prefer the Conan the Barbarian write large sort of atmosphere.

*nodsnods* I think that's the thing, most players prefer the writ large kind of thing, and Alliance doesn't get very much of it. So, if you like playing Alliance and you want the big epic gameplay, you're kind of screwed. :(

I mean, I'm not going to quit the game, I do enjoy it. I just feel like at 85 it's lacking the oomph I expected it to have when I was leveling, that sense of being involved in Big Things, being the world-changing hero that the NPCs seem to think you are. The most heroic I've felt has been when rescuing Thrall in that Caverns Of Time quest, and when helping Thrall's girlfriend rescue him from the elementals. Which seems weird for me as an Alliance character, you know?

[strikeslip]

Well, if you aren't heavily invested in a guild, the best way to regain the leveling feeling is to swap games. I'm going to make a big post on SW:TOR, the new star wars mmo, on my DW when I have a bit more time. Oomph is an understatment for the way Bioware wrote their game.

[zillah975]

I want to try those SW MMOs sometime, but I really am invested in my guild, and my sister, and my characters. Also, it's not that I miss the leveling feeling, it's that I want the pay-off I thought I was going to get, and I still haven't been able to get it.

[nagaina]

I think it's a little bit of both.

The Horde has the advantage, storytelling-wise, of possessing extreme moral ambiguity: a checkered past, an uncertain future, an unstable internal political situation. It would take extreme incompetence to not be able to spin story gold out of the Horde in its current configuration.

The Alliance, by way of contrast, has some of the advantages and disadvantages of being the standard Designated Fantasy Good Guys -- they've got righteousness and virtuousness, an untroubled relationship with the setting's Big Good figures (the Dragon Aspects, the Ancients) and most of the neutral factions, internal stability. Their story, as a consequence, comes across as feeling very, very vanilla, generic-fantasy-good-guy when contrasted with the Horde.

Added to this is the application of the "villains and morally ambiguous characters act while Real Heroes™ react" narrative convention -- both sides get this when dealing with Real Villains™ such as the Scourge or the Twilight's Hammer, but the Alliance also catches a dose of this while dealing with the Horde, which can get extremely frustrating.

[zillah975]

Idk, a lot of what the Alliance does doesn't seem very righteous or virtuous to me, and it does feel like there are a lot of places where we could be doing more to protect Alliance interests -- Ashenvale, for instance. Maybe I missed some quests? It just feels like a lot of what I did while leveling had no effect, or just fizzled out and I never got any sense of it being completed, or won -- or even tragically lost.

But even so, if the problem is that the Alliance is too generic-fantasy-good-guy, then that's still a problem with the writing and it wouldn't be that hard to solve. Maybe they'll get to it in Mists of Pandaria?

[ktnb]

Horde quests and Alliance quests come from two very different places, but I don't think one side is necessarily meatier than the other, and I say that as someone who spent the first three years of WoW playing nothing but Alliance characters, and the last four years transitioning to where now 99% of my characters are Horde. So, I really have seen both sides of the equation. And no, Orgrimmar never gets less confusing to navigate. ;)

Really, most people just have a preference about which side they like - there are always going to be "Alliance sux" and "Horde sux" people, no matter what the quests are like. In vanilla WoW, most of the quests were pretty balanced, but I can think of one epic questline that wasn't - getting attuned for Onyxia. Back in the day, you couldn't fight Onyxia without completing a long chain of quests. On the Alliance side, this chain ended with you confronting Onyxia in her human form, and having her morph into dragon form, having all the guards in the room transform into dragons too because that's what they secretly were, and then fighting her down until she got angry and flew away. The catch? All of this took place in Stormwind's throne room, because that's where she was hiding. Not only was the Horde questline *more difficult* but they didn't get the epic ending because it took place in an Alliance city (and there was no such thing as phasing back then). Claims that the Horde quests are now meatier generally come from the Horde quests being brought up to the level of Alliance quests.

These days, most epic questlines are even. The Wrathgate, for example, was pretty similar on both sides - the quests were a little different, but both factions walked away feeling like they'd gone through something awesome.

Basically, QQers are always gonna QQ, and don't feel like you need to make a character on the Horde side if you don't want to play one. If you do want to make one, I'd recommend the Tauren, since they're the least evil of the Horde races, and don't have many of the "beat the peons with a club to get them back to work" quests that the other races have. But eventually, you're going to run into the Forsaken, and it might not be good.

[gramina]

I managed to get through the Orc starting quests by figuring that Ekka was young and hadn't figured out yet that Enemies were people too, and perhaps torture and random killing of people who couldn't choose to fight or not fight was not exactly perfectly aligned with cultural values like honor and respect.

Contrariwise, there's a Stormwind quest where you're supposed to go beat up a prisoner until he gives you information and then kill him; I still don't know how that turns out, because I have yet to have an alliance-side character who thought that was an acceptable way to treat a prisoner.

The Horde-side quests have the advantage that the Horde is often the underdog -- they're defending their *actual homes* against the people who are trying to drive them out, while Alliance is trying to protect settlers from the forces that want to retain their rights to the land being settled. (Gosh, familiar tropes much?)

But both sides end up having to interact with Forsaken, as well as fighting the forces of the Lich King; I just find I can't get much past level 20 on a Forsaken without either getting bored or getting stuck because the next Required Quest is one I won't do. I may eventually work out a backstory for a character who thinks poisoning an entire village is peachy-keen, but I haven't managed it yet. ...Maybe a lunatic, who's decided that being undead means being immortal and is therefore the best thing since sliced bread and it's a gift that should be shared with *everyone*?

Anyway. :) I like running dwarves, gnomes, worgen, and orcs best, I think, with tauren, night-elves, and draenai (sp?) coming in fairly close second.

[faesdeynia]

Heh, I find SW to be the most confusing city ever, and the Exodar gives me fits. I love the Horde cities, but 99% of the time I play Horde.

My impression of Horde quests in general is that they are grittier. Well, as gritty as WoW gets, anyway. I haven't seen much of the redesigned lower zones, but in the old world, they certainly were darker.

Before the redesign, the Belf starting zone was my favorite. Since then I've played the Goblin (which was excellently done) and the Undead (also excellent, engaging, and interesting, but not so much if you don't enjoy the macabre. The Tauren was okay, and the Orcish was confusing; I've played both the Orcish and Troll since the redesign, and they are way better. Not my favorites, but quite good!

I've done the Nelf (hated it with passion) and Drannei (IMO the best of the Ally starting zones, probably because the devs learned a lot about how to design the game by the time BC came around). The human's I found utterly dull, and I've never done the dwarf or gnome.

[brisus]

I have two 85 ally toons and a 68 horde dk. Right now b/c I'm so used to alliance, it is nice to play horde.

However, horde definitely has it rough for the pilgrim quests and getting into capitals. LOL I found that out the hard way. *ugh* Other than that, I can't really say if one is significantly better than the other.

[badducks]

It's kinda funny because before The Shattering my reason for choosing Horde over Alliance was purely for travel convenience. I found that the placement of Horde cities paired with the zeps made travel for non-mage types a lot less of a pain than on the Alliance side. The Horde cities were all connected fairly easily. Org was fairly close to TB that the flight didn't really take that long. Zeps between Org and UC. UC got that handy translocator to SMC. And the boats to STV were a hop, skip and a jump away. The Alliance just seemed more spread out to me.

Horde has become default for me despite my first serious character was Alliance. I've tried to stick to Alliance in recent years, but something will stop me and I'll end up switching back. I think it's either been uninteresting quests or unbalanced factions. I know it doesn't help the server if I switch, but it can make things a lot tougher (especially on PvP servers).

I like the visual appeal of Stormwind (it'sacastleOMG) more than any of the other cities. And I do enjoy the Alliance starting areas more (ugh, I hate the goblin zone). On a side note, I thought Org was really confusing at first until I got used to it. Then they had to change it all and now I'm always getting lost and turned around lol. My boyfriend on the other hand thinks Stormwind is the most confusing place ever and gets lost navigating through it.

If you make a Horde character I strongly suggest you go through the Eastern Kingdom zones if you care more about interesting lore. Silverpine and Hillsbrad had some good quests. The Kalimdor ones were ok, but it was a lot of rebuilding/saving people with some fun interactions thrown into the mix, mostly from the Goblins and their toys. Personally the Sylvanas and Garrosh tension was more entertaining. :) Maybe that's what the Alliance are missing. More drama within the faction?