Difficulty of the Game...

[Magis]

Never played Wow but there were pretty much 2 major factions to start: Evil and Good. While there were different shades of grey (elves and humans were dubious in barbarian lands, even though they were technically allies), you would have to be crazy to be a level 10 Ogre trying to go to the elven cities of Felwithe or Kelethin. Later expansions introduced the iksar, who hated everyone and everyone hated them, a band of dwarves that had a 3-way faction battle with dragons and giants, the Vah Shir, a cat-people who had no prejudice, Frogloks, who were on the constant receiving end of beat-downs from Trolls, various adventuring guilds whose respect needed to be earned, etc, etc, so on and so on.


Everquest was a much deeper game than FFXIV in that its lore was deep seeded and soaked into every aspect of the game, not just the story line.

Much of vanilla WoW was based off of Everquest since the lead developers were from one of the large EQ raiding guilds. I can see a lot of influence coming from it.

There were two major factions the players were part of, the Horde and the Alliance. Horde consisted of Orcs, Tauren, Trolls, and Undead while Alliance was Humans, Night Elves, Gnomes, and Dwarves. These two factions were kill on sight and you couldn't rank up or become friendly with each other.

There was a reputation system though which brought in NPC factions. Here is a list:

http://www.wowwiki.com/Faction

The ones I know of are under "Classic" and "The Burning Crusade". You had factions primarily that fell under the above two factions (the cities and their military forces). You had then factions that fell under the Steamwheedle Cartel which were basically the neutral capitalist Goblin cities that worked with both Horde and Alliance. You then had third party factions which was everything else.

You had the holy crusaders fighting off the evil undead scourge who were neutral to the squabbles of the Horde/Alliance (The Argent Dawn). You had things like the two Centaur factions who hated each other (the Gelkis clan and the Magram clan). You had factions like the Furbolgs, Brood of Nozdormu and the Bloodsail Buccaneers, who start hated and you have to become friendly with to open more quests. Finally you had the other factions which were just grinds like how FFXIV treats the beastman quests (ie: Cenarion Circle or Zandallar Tribe).

A more interesting system indeed.