Faction Specific

Friday, which means it is time for me to pick post for the Reader Post this week. This week decided to go with a post from Arrashi who points out how in World of Warcraft Faction specific quests have been tone down in recent expansions. Now I believe this is due to time constraints and how really the game's story experience isn't supposed to be about making people leveling alts more enjoyable. To that end though I will say the faction specific leveling experience of Wrath was one of my favourites. With all that information going on in your head now, here is this week's Reader Post.

Do you guys think blizzard should go back to more vanilla concept, and give us more faction quests rather than just all neutral or mirrored questlines ?

If you played in Vanilla (or generally pre-Cata) you will know that back then huge amount of quest/questlines were faction specific. From leveling quests in low level zones, to high level dungeons like blackrock or attunements (remember looking for Rexxar ?), there was a lot of quests that would involve faction NPCs, and give us more insight into races and their themes.

This continued in BC, where while we saw more neutral quests, we still had a lot of faction settlements and quests. And just as we have neutral druids in Zangarmarsh, we can also find there Darkspear/Draenei settlements and questgivers. Another example is Nagrand where while some quests share the theme, we still have quests like thralls reunion with Geyah.

Even in WoLK, we still had a lot of unique quests in areas like boring tundra or howling fjord, giving us nice balance of faction and neutral quests.

And then Cataclysm happens where 3 out of 5 zones are purely neutral, Vash'ir is basically only mirror quests, and only highlands offer some unique experience.

In MoP we once again had majority of neutral zones, but it was (at least partially) balanced out by 5.1 and 5.2 questlines.

And then happened WoD, and far all its flaws and shortcomings did one small thing right - faction starting areas. At least in my opinion, both Frostfire and Shadowmoon were unique to factions and this allowed them to tell much more "focused" story.

So to finish that wall of text - do you prefer more of Cataclysm/MoP approach or would you prefer return of longer and more prevalent faction quests?

What are your opinions? Do you think the time should be put in for more faction specific content? Something to think about for the weekend.