How can you capture the feel of a faction war without having to actually PvP? That's something I've been hearing a lot from you guys lately. I have this deep love of the Warcrat lore of Horde vs. Alliance. I love the RTS games. I love when it's simply the denizens of Azeroth fighting amongst themselves. That said, I really don't like WoW's PvP.
The solution?
Warfronts!
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Warfronts are basically a translation of the RTS Warcraft games into a WoW-like gaming experience. Warfronts are a 20-man cooperative (PvE) mode where you fight against the other faction for control of a location.
It's your job to create outposts and gather resources, build up your troops, attack and claim enemy strongholds, manage upgrades, and manage that battle on the front lines.
I think Warfronts are a really neat idea in theory. I haven't yet tried one out to see how they're executing.
In my head, as always, I'm seeing this amazing RTS battle playing out where you as the player area in the thick of things. That's sort of how they're advertising it.
I remember playing Savage where someone was the commander playing a RTS game of sorts, and you as the rest of the team were the units on the ground.
Warfronts probably won't be Savage calibre, but I'm excited for a chance to play this faction-like battle system. Fingers crossed it pans out. If not, it still seems a lot cooler to me than War Mode.
They will need evolving warfronts over time and most importantly, lots of NPC jobbers and elites around you to support or get slaughtered while you accomplish things in order to make things feel exciting, both for your own side and the opposing faction.
I agree that it’ll need on-going evolution in order to maintain its long-term appeal.
Since there’s no PvP, they have a lot of latitude to make the experience very “cinematic” in its presentation. Simply put, they can do a lot to control the experience so that it feels cool.
I hope it’s not going to be a lot like Warcraft (or any other RTS), as I completely despise playing RTS games.
Hopefully it’ll be some hybrid between an RTS and class order halls, so all I have to do is to pick a mission for my troops and then they’ll be busy with that for several hours.
If it IS a mini RTS inside WoW, I hope it’s completely optional to do.
I figured I’d try to find some video on Warfronts to get some more info about what it actually is, as all I had to go on was the info released on Blizzcon, which wasn’t much.
Found this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WirQxUAL9o
Looks kind of cool, but I wish there was a PvP component to it, I suspect this will be fun the first couple of times and after that I’ll either not do them or it’ll just feel like a grind I have to do because the rewards are too good to not do it.
Also is this gonna scale well for small groups, I’m not at all interested in 10+ man groups.
I read somewhere (probably WoWhead) that a PvP mode might come later if the PvE version works out.