With 7.3.5, Blizzard released four allied races if you pre-order the next expansion, Battle For Azeroth. There are two races for the Alliance: Void Elves and Lightforged Draenei; and two races for the Horde: Nightborne, and Highmountain Tauren.
Each of these races played a part in the Legion storyline, and recruiting them is a very organic development in the story. Each race requires a certain amount of reputation and achievements, which you basically have if you've been playing Legion.
I'm really happy that Blizzard chose to make playable scenarios about recruiting each of these races. A long time ago, I complained about Theramore, wishing its destruction had happened in game, rather than in an associated novel. It's heartening to see Blizzard put important story events in game, and give the player a role to play in those events. It feels like the Blizzard of a couple expansions ago would have just made the Allied races available to play, and put the story of how they joined in a novel or story online, or a cutscene.
Perhaps this change was prompted by competition with FFXIV, which is all in on the storyline occurring in game. Regardless, it's a good change. Hopefully the same thing will happen with the scenarios for Battle for Azeroth, especially the triggers for the war. I hope players have their bloody hand prints all over the burning of Teldrassil or the attack on Undercity, or whatever other events happen.
In any case, I created a Void Elf shadow priest, and have been very slowly levelling her up. She's currently level 35. I really like the scaling changes made to levelling, as well as having zone completion tied to the story lines. I've been levelling in Kalimdor, as I have not seen most of the post-Cataclysm stories there. The new levelling is very enjoyable.
With the Before the Storm novel coming in June I highly doubt we're going to break away from having the stories told via major lore characters outside of the game, which is unfortunate.
ReplyDeleteI'm hoping it will be more like a movie novelization. You still have meat of the story in-game, but the novel retells the story, maybe adding extra scenes or context.
DeleteI did find it a bit weird as I watched the Army of the Light basically say "okay, we're an interdimensional force devoted to fighting the Legion for the good of everyone... yeah, I guess we'll settle down and join the Alliance to fight in a petty factional conflict on a single word".
ReplyDeleteWell, their leaders are Alliance, and they are draenei, so they'd probably prefer to side with their brothers and sisters.
DeleteActually, Blizzard seems to have done 1 "rebellious" race and 1 "family" race. Blood elves exile Void elves, and the Night elves cut ties with the Nightbourne. On the flip side, Lightforge draenei side with regular draenei, and Highmountain tauren side with regular tauren.