World of Warcraft: The War Within is about more than just the Alliance, Blizzard says

polygon.com:

World of Warcraft: The War Within is the game’s 10th expansion, and it launches just a few months ahead of the 20th anniversary of the MMO. But The War Within is more than just a milestone to make longtime World of Warcraft players feel old. It’s also the beginning of the end for the franchise’s first saga.

After The War Within, Blizzard will release a follow-up expansion called Midnight, followed by another, The Last Titan. This trilogy makes up the Worldsoul Saga, which won’t see the end of WoW, but aims to usher it into a new age — similarly to Bungie’s “Light and Darkness” saga in Destiny 2, which just ended with The Final Shape earlier this summer.

With the trilogy so close to beginning, I sat down with associate design director Maria Hamilton and lead prop artist Jordan Powers to discuss this first chapter of the Worldsoul Saga, from The War Within’sinitial Alliance focus to the pressure-cooker nature of caves.

With the beta for The War Within in full swing already, some players have pointed out that its story seems to focus heavily on Alliance characters. With the lines between the Horde and the Alliance softening in recent expansions, and a world-ending threat ahead, I was curious how the narrative team was thinking about balancing the representation between the two factions following the fourth war in Battle for Azeroth.

“I don’t think that Battle for Azeroth has changed anything there,” said Hamilton. “I think we wanted to move away, except where it made a lot of sense, from having different stories being told. Sometimes we want you to understand a slightly different nuance, and then we might have a separate Horde-only or Alliance-only story. But in general, for our main story, we really wanted to make sure everyone understood that same story.

“We did think a lot about where we have Horde representation and Alliance representation. And, of course, we know what we’re doing in the future, as well. And so we’re just trying to make sure that nobody’s feeling