The highly anticipated Embers of Neltharion Patch 10.1 for World of Warcraft will reintroduce cross-faction guilds, and the developers' main reasoning behind that move is wanting friends who belong to one side to be able to play with friends from the other.
In a recent interview published by VentureBeat, Game Director Ion Hazzikostas explained the reason for letting Alliance and Horde players fight side-by-side lies in bringing friends together for a cooperative gaming experience. He said the initial introduction to cross-faction play for instances in World of Warcraft last year was a hit, with many players jumping at the opportunity to switch sides and try out the other faction's races. It came with a cost, though, as feedback from the player community suggested that people were not happy about having to give up access to guild amenities like the guild chat and guild banks.
"We see the ability to join opposite faction guilds that were working towards Embers of Naltharion as addressing that," Hazzikostas said during the interview. "We still want to make this an opt-in feature of the game. It’s not going to suggest opposite faction guilds to you. But if you have friends who play with the opposite faction, we want to remove those barriers as much as possible."
The tumultuous relationship between The Alliance and The Horde extends way back, even further than the release of the MMO title in 2004. The original Warcraft: Orcs & Humans, came out a decade prior, in 1994, with the humans of Azeroth battling against the Horde forces of orcs. Even at its inception, it included one campaign apiece for both sides, although only the orcish campagn was made canon.
Hazzikostas seemed eager to keep the lore of the long-running franchise in mind going forward, but he doesn't feel that a WoW team-up between the two sides would ruin that dynamic, as it's happened before in the lore. "There are still elements of both factions that are very hard in their enmity toward the other faction," he noted. "They’re not going to forget what happened to Teldrassil. Genn Greymane is not going to embrace the Horde any time soon. The Forsaken are not going to reach out to the Alliance any time soon. But broadly we want to give players freedom to make those choices for themselves, just as our characters do."
At this time, there is still no official release date for the Embers of Neltharion expansion, but we know that it will include a new raid with nine different bosses and an expansion to the Dragonflight story. Being the most recent major expansion, Dragonflight released back in November of last year, and Blizzard has big plans in store for 2023, with three additional WoW updates planned to follow Embers of Neltharion before year's end.