Alliance and Horde, together at last
World of Warcraft is getting its patch 10.1 “Embers of Neltharion” as part of the Dragonflight content rollout. And when it arrives, it’ll add a feature that should bring the World of Warcraft a little closer together through cross-faction guilds.
Though guilds had to stay within faction lines previously, the new patch will allow guilds to exist across the barriers of Alliance and Horde. The faction binary has long defined World of Warcraft, as the war of Alliance v. Horde raged on. But in years since, that has loosened; patch 9.2.5 for Shadowlands introduced cross-faction instanced content to the MMORPG. Now, Blizzard is bringing guilds into the togetherness.
“We see this as a conservative step in the same vein as cross-faction instances,” World of Warcraft game director Ion Hazzikostas said in an interview with Gamespot. “This is still opt-in. We want to make sure the focus is not on tearing down Alliance and Horde as entities in Warcraft, or making complete unity the default experience, but making sure players who have real life or other out-of-game bonds with folks on the opposite faction can play with them and experience WoW together, because at the end of the day, that’s the prime value here.”
Why can’t we be friends?
Other pieces of the World of Warcraft pie are still being cordoned off into factional divides, though. Matchmade content and open-world quests still won’t allow opposing factions to group up. As Hazzikostas tells it, those situations are built on the premise that Alliance and Horde would never play together.
But as the years have rolled on since World of Warcraft launched, it feels like that divide has diminished. In some ways, you have to wonder if the war in Warcraft may ever come to close. At the very least, this should make hanging out with your guild buddies a little easier, no matter which banner you go to war under.
World of Warcraft: Dragonflight patch 10.1 does not have a release date at this time.
