{"id":1524423,"date":"2026-03-12T12:03:14","date_gmt":"2026-03-12T12:03:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sVstAFUUsapYrpAzH56pED"},"modified":"2026-03-12T12:03:14","modified_gmt":"2026-03-12T12:03:14","slug":"wows-horde-alliance-split-was-really-controversial-says-jeff-kaplan-to-the-point-where-it-was-only-locked-in-9-12-months-before-the-games-launch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/arcader.org\/news\/wows-horde-alliance-split-was-really-controversial-says-jeff-kaplan-to-the-point-where-it-was-only-locked-in-9-12-months-before-the-games-launch\/","title":{"rendered":"WoW’s Horde\/Alliance split was ‘really controversial’, says Jeff Kaplan, to the point where it was only locked in 9-12 months before the game’s launch"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The factions of World of Warcraft<\/a> don’t mean as much nowadays\u2014which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. MMOs are having a tough enough time without splitting their playerbase and, furthermore, Azeroth has faced so many cosmic threats that continuing the faction war nonsense while the world’s about to end would be comically stupid.<\/p>\n

But there was a time where it meant a whole lot, forming a part of the original game’s identity\u2014and given the importance of faction warfare in the original RTS, you’d be forgiven for thinking it was a huge part of WoW’s development from the early days, too. <\/p>\n

As revealed in a recent episode of the Lex Fridman podcast<\/a> by Jeff Kaplan, former vice president of Blizzard, you’d be wrong\u2014it was something the development team had been bickering about for ages:<\/p>\n

“The Horde\/Alliance decision was really controversial,” explains Kaplan, “Because in Everquest it was mixed \u2026 [Rob Pardo] and I came from Everquest, where we felt like this was a horrible decision [Allen Adham] was making. And we argued.”<\/p>\n

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