The factions of World of Warcraft don’t mean as much nowadays—which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. MMOs are having a tough enough time without splitting their playerbase and, furthermore, Azeroth has faced so many cosmic threats that continuing the faction war nonsense while the world’s about to end would be comically stupid.
But there was a time where it meant a whole lot, forming a part of the original game’s identity—and given the importance of faction warfare in the original RTS, you’d be forgiven for thinking it was a huge part of WoW’s development from the early days, too.
As revealed in a recent episode of the Lex Fridman podcast by Jeff Kaplan, former vice president of Blizzard, you’d be wrong—it was something the development team had been bickering about for ages:
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“The Horde/Alliance decision was really controversial,” explains Kaplan, “Because in Everquest it was mixed … [Rob Pardo] and I came from Everquest, where we felt like this was a horrible decision [Allen Adham] was making. And we argued.”
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At the time, Kaplan was a quest designer, but he was very tight-knit with the head honchos at Blizzard, working closely with Chris Metzen, too, describing himself as a “medium between Chris Metzen and our level designers and our environmental artists” back in 2009.
Kaplan tells Fridman that “Allen, Bob Fitch and I would have lunch every single day, and we would just talk about WoW and the core design of WoW … We would fight over the Horde/Alliance split and if it was a good idea or not.”
See, Allen—who was one of the progenitors of WoW, but retired before its release—played a bunch of Dark Age of Camelot: “The magic of that game was that you had three factions, and he liked the fact you were instantly on a team, you weren’t a loner in the world, and whether you liked it or not you had people on your side.”
In DAoC, you had three realms you could join, Albion, Midgard, and Hibernia. Basically a choice between Arthurian knights, druidic elves, and Vikings. What’s even more staggering about the fact that inspiration was allegedly controversial is the assertion Kaplan makes that it wasn’t even locked in until around one year before release.
“Some time before beta, Allen retired … I think it was nine months to a year before WoW shipped, which is kinda nuts, Rob takes over as lead designer in Allen’s stead. And to Rob’s credit the first thing he did was go: Allen’s a smart guy, the fact he was fighting so hard for Horde/Alliance? We gotta do it.”
One of the structural cornerstones of World of Warcraft, something that—as Kaplan mentions earlier in the interview—prompted longtime WoW players to get tattoos, wasn’t a concrete part of development until nine to 12 months before release.
Granted, I’m sure Kaplan just means the split—given the Warcraft lore Blizzard was pulling from, I’d imagine the various zones and capital cities were already far along in development at the time. Even MMOs like Everquest still had race-specific zones to help sell that fantasy, but still: We’ve come a long way.
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