Divided We Fall in Video Games.
- This happens in the GDI campaign of the original Command & Conquer. Partially due to propaganda made by Kane, the United Nations temporarily cut military funding to the GDI. For a few missions, the commander is left on his own to fight without vital base structures. Though when those missions end it turns out GDI's commanding officer suggested the temporary suspension of funding himself as a way to bait Kane into launching a premature offensive. Once Nod was fully committed, he returned with funding not only restored but increased.
- A little distraction like, lets say... a fullscale alien invasion is not a reason for Nod and GDI to quit fighting each other. This caused some irritation by the aliens, calling humans "warlike to the extreme". However, neither the GDI nor the aliens knew that it was all according to Kane's Evil Plan.
- In the fourth game, Kane actually joins forces with GDI (for his own purposes, of course), offering them the blueprints of a "Tiberium Control Network" that can control Tiberium and save Earth from certain ecological collapse. Everybody promptly loses their shit over the decision, leading to a three-way war between GDI (with some of Kane's loyalist supporters), GDI (a breakaway faction under Colonel James), and Nod (another breakaway faction, led by Gideon, yet another of the 'Kane isn't really the Messiah, I am' line).
- Yet another Warhammer 40,000 example is in the Dawn of War series, which contains five different campaigns (so far) in which everyone would much rather kill everyone else than work together to defeat the Orks, Necrons, Tyranids, and/or Chaos that are rampaging everywhere. This ranges from Winter Assault, in which the Imperial Guard and Eldar briefly ally before arbitrarily betraying each other, to Soulstorm, in which three different divisions of the same faction are pounding at each other.
- It gets lampshaded repeatedly in the sequel, especially the Retribution expansion, as you can hardly go two plot-centered missions without someone calling out their same-side enemies on how there's such a bigger issue at stake. The Space Marines deal with the obfuscating Senator, they end up fighting themselves when Chaotic corruption begins to infiltrate their ranks, they have quite a few bitter issues with the Guard, the Eldar want to wipe out the entire planet rather than fight WITH the Imperium against the Tyranids, etc. Ironically enough, only the Inquisitor (the one usually most hell-bent on driving wedges between factions) seems willing to use cross-faction Alliances, even enlisting the Orks as mercenaries during their campaign.
- Dragon Age:
- Dragon Age: Origins takes this trope and runs with it. At the end of the first (non unique) chapter, Loghain ditches the battlefield and lets the king die - along with all but two or three Grey Wardens. The Wardens themselves are then persecuted from one side of Ferelden to another, even as the darkspawn steadily devour the countryside.
- Worse, a civil war starts when Loghain basically shoves his own daughter and the queen off the throne as her "regent" and more than a few of the nobility take offense to this, as the King of the Ferelden must have the support of the Bannorn and Loghain isn't even in line for the throne. It also helps (?) that Loghain doesn't believe that a Blight is occurring and thinks the Wardens (who know that a Blight is happening) are enemy agents from a country that occupied Ferelden and ruined his childhood. Since Loghain is a war hero that freed Ferelden from said country a lot of his supporters follow him even as he grows increasingly paranoid and commits greater atrocities to protect his nation.
- Used to great length in Dragon Age II with multiple factions warring against one another. The templars and the mages fight constantly, even though they should be working together to help everyone in Kirkwall. Members of the Chantry oppress the qunari, who in turn try to overtake Kirkwall in disgust. This even occurs with members of player character Hawke's party. If Hawke picks a side in the final act and the party members on the opposing side don't have their friend or rivalry meter high enough, they'll leave the party. In some cases, they may even try to kill Hawke.
- Most of the plot of Dragon Age: Inquisition revolves around the titular organization attempting to unite the warring factions of southern Thedas (including the Mages and Templars, as well as the Civil War going on in Orlais) against the threat posed by the Rifts and the Elder One. In the Trespasser DLC that serves as an epilogue to the game, the factions making up the Inquisition are at each other's throats with its purpose fulfilled, with one side calling for its disbandment and the other calling for its subordination to the Chantry. This inner conflict is exploited by the Qunari and Solas for their own respective goals.
- Dwarf Fortress has an oddity in the way it handles loyalty and enmity, which can result in what Toady calls the "civil war bug" and the fandom calls a "loyalty cascade". Normally, your dwarves are loyal to both your fortress and your starting civilization, because your fort is clearly meant to be an extension of that civilization. Any creature which attacks another creature with intent to kill becomes an enemy of all its victim's factions. So far, this is all very logical and intuitive. However, the dwarven caravan are members of your civilization and not your fort. This, too, seems the logical choice — but it opens up the possibility of one of your dwarves attacking a member of the caravan, resulting in them simultaneously being loyal to your fort yet an enemy to your civilization. Then, any of your dwarves who attacks one of these "separatist" dwarves will become an enemy of their factions — making them "loyalist" enemies of your fort and allies of your civilization. This can result in rapidly-spreading divided loyalties, up to a full-blown all-fort civil war — to the point that a bugged dwarf killing an ordinary citizen is a relief, because it makes them an enemy of both factions and no longer able to spread the cascade. Other possible triggers for loyalty cascades include attempting to train captured enemy mounts and sending your military after a berserk or werebeast dwarf.
- Dyztopia: Post-Human RPG: The Evil Runi route is obtained by having Akira reject Runi's friendship while also not using Activity Points to bond with other party members. This will allow for a choice where Akira can refrain from saving Runi from Gemini's manipulation, resulting in Runi mind-wiping herself and Gemini taking over. As the story continues, Gemini will kill Kael and provoke Virgo into battle, preventing any possibility of recruiting them into the resistance group. When the party defeats Zazz's first phase, Gemini will attack the party in order to steal their Zodiac stones, and then kills everyone except Akira before going down. As a result, Akira is defenseless when Zazz ambushes them, leading to a swift death and Zazz's victory. After the credits, the archangels will call the player out on their blunder and Quot makes it clear that being nicer to Runi will prevent this outcome.
- The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim: Exploiting, and even inducing, these kinds of political fractures is a favored tactic of the Thalmor in their long-term war of attrition against the Empire:
- After taking over their own province of Alinor, seceding and annexing the provinces Valenwood and Elsweyr to create The Aldmeri Dominion, the Thalmor manipulated the centuries of racial strife between the Argonians of Black Marsh and the Dunmer of Morrowind to provoke the former into warring with the latter while they're still reeling from a much bigger crisis, causing the Empire to withdraw from both provinces and leading to Morrowind and Argonia's independence.
- When they finally attacked the empire openly, their invasion was driven back by the combined might of the Imperial Legion, Skyrim's Nord militias, and Hammerfell's Redguard warriors defeating them on separate fronts. Yet because the war had been so costly for the Empire, the Dominion were able to force a "peace treaty", known as the White Gold Concordat, that was heavily skewed to their interests, in particular agreeing that the Empire would relinquish territory in southern Hammerfell that the Redguards were still holding. Rather than accept this and yield to the Dominion, the Redguards chose to secede from the Empire and the Concordat, and continue to hold off the elven invaders themselves. Though the Dominion was eventually driven out of Hammerfell as well, it's thought by many that that forcing this issue and fracturing the Empire further was what the Thalmor had wanted all along.
- Finally, another key concession in the Concordat was renouncing the man-turned-deity Talos from the Empire's pantheon. As the Nords of Skyrim deeply revere Talos, and already hold mutual animosity and suspicion towards elves, seeing the Empire renounce their venerated hero for the sake of elven interests is taken by many Nords as a sign of cowardice and surrendering, turning a good portion of the once-totally loyal province sour towards the Imperials. The Thalmor at this time had also captured a skilled Nordic aristocrat-turned-soldier, one who would naturally become a strong leader and champion for the Nordic people, and subtly manipulated him into developing an anti-Imperial secessionist agenda of his own, planting the seeds for the Skyrim Civil War within the main game, the outcome of which could potentially fatally shatter what's left of the Empire and leave both sides weakened for an inevitable second invasion.
- In Fallout 4, this is one of the Institute's goals for the Commonwealth: their activities (especially the use of their Molecular Relay requires a lot of resources, and a united Commonwealth poses a threat to their continued existence. As such, they use synth infiltrators to sow discord among the people of the Commonwealth, keeping them from banding together and allowing them to continue their activities with only a minimum of resistance. Of particular note is the Massacre of the CPG, wherein synth saboteurs infiltrated the nascent Commonwealth Provisional Government, the first (and to date, only) time that a united governing body was conceived for the Commonwealth, and murdered all of the representatives.
- Final Fantasy XIII. Five individuals are given superpowers and sent on The Quest of vague nature, just like in so many Player Party-based RPGs. The problem is that two of them hate the third one's guts, the fourth has a hidden agenda, and the Only Sane Man is appalled by the others so much, he decides to quit. None of them have the same idea of how to treat their new Cursed with Awesome status and go about their quest.
- Firefall: Despite the fact that literally over 99% of the planet is covered in Melding (alien corruption used by the Chosen alien race) and humanity's populace has dwindled from ten billion to less than a million, you still kill about 4-12 humans per mission. On average. Between the Somalian Pirate look-alikes, the Black Hills gang, the Reaper Assassin's Guild, the Biker Buzzards (though, about a third of these guys are nice people), the android-loving Ophamin, and even some fucked up corrupt Accord Generals, the Accord and Ares have more than they can take. Even ARES teams will duke it out against each other and fill mass graves, especially over valuable resources like mineral-rich mining sites and high-value treasure maps. Luckily for humanity, the Chosen tribes have their own tribal wars in pursuit of total dominance over the rest of the Melding lands, so the Enemy Civil War prevents total victory for the Chosen.
- The main character of Ghost of Tsushima, Jin Sakai, believes this. He chastises fellow warriors for pursuing petty vendettas instead of banding together to fight off the current Mongol invasion, stating that this infighting is only helping the Mongols.
- In Infinite Space, Yuri points out this is the reason why the SMC nations fell into Lugovalos' hand so easily. To elaborate, Elgava was far too confident with its military strength, and both Kalymnos and Nova Nacio were more concerned with their long-running bitter hatred to each other. And in Act 2, the LMC nations almost made the same mistake...
- Parodied in a Lineage 2 comic where an orc father tries to teach his quarreling sons this lesson using the "bundle of arrows" analogy... but is stronger than he thinks and easily breaks the united spears. He makes the best of it and converts it into a lesson in the importance of overwhelming strength.
- This is the plot of the third Spec Ops mission in Marvel: Avengers Alliance. Five of the X-Men got possessed by the Phoenix Force and wanted to use it to save mutantkind. The Avengers, on the other hand, were of the opinion that the Phoenix Force Is Not a Toy, and that it would end up wiping out the entire planet, mutants and all. And while they were at each others' throats, the bad guys were trying to turn the situation to their advantage. This even turned into a gameplay mechanic; you had to choose whether to side with the X-Men or the Avengers each time you started a mission, and you weren't allowed to use core members from the opposite side during fights or deploys. The Syndicate soon fractures when the Red Skull was resurrected, who then proceeded to attack mutants, even those in Syndicate.
- Mass Effect:
- In Mass Effect, Ambassador Udina tries to stop you from saving all life in the entire galaxy from certain destruction because it might damage humanity's reputation (granted, he didn't believe you were telling the truth, but still).
- Shepard can level this accusation at the Illusive Man in Mass Effect 3, calling him out on his descent from quasi-heroic Doing What He Had To Do to out-and-out attacking the Alliance at a critical time. Despite his efforts to brush aside Shepard's allegations, it's clear he doesn't really care, mostly because he's indoctrinated. Conversations with Javik and the AI Vendetta suggest this is pretty common where Reapers are concerned; they had a similar faction in their own politics which prevented them from deploying the Crucible.
- Pokémon Gold and Silver has your rival. He hates Team Rocket beacause Giovanni was his father and after Team Rocket was defeated by Red, Giovanni left him and he blames Team Rocket. But on the other hand, he absolutely hates the player character, pushing them around, and even taking off your disguise while you're Dressing as the Enemy. He's actually the worst rival; Kanto's rival says things like "Smell ya later!", Hoenn's rival is a pretty good friend, and Sinnoh's rival is your best friend.
- Rengoku: In the past, Mars got killed by overusing own AI Suit, Lycaon got burned alive by Gryphus and Minos out of Revenge went against Gryphus alone, thus Gryphus getting 4 AI Cells. It was proposed by Statius and Sphinx to do the same and fight him with 5 AI Cell Suits versus 4, though of course they wouldn't wait for consensus. In the end Gryphus managed to get all AI Cells with Gram finally killing him before dying himself.
- This is a prominent theme in StarCraft, particularly the first Terran campaign, which is almost entirely about humans fighting each other, rather than fighting aliens. The Protoss Judicators are also more worried about the Dark Templars than they are about the Zerg. The dominant force at any moment is the faction that is able to act as a unified team without infighting. Not even the Zerg are immune.
- In Star Trek Online, all of the Iconians' schemes were attempts to prevent the races of the galaxy from becoming an alliance. They were defeated by an alliance in ages past, and they do not want history to repeat itself.
- In Suikoden Tierkreis, this plagues the Magedom of Janam. The Mage Forces are led by Danash VIII's first wife, Shairah; their Arcane Acadamy is headed by his second wife, Rizwan. Then there's the Blades of Night's Veil, commanded by Chrodechild, who Danash wants to take for his fourth wife — yes, there's a third, who complicates things even more without her own command... Needless to say, they have problems without The Order of the One True Way breathing down their necks.
- In Thomas Was Alone, a track of the OST is actually called "Divided We Fall". In the plot, the group realizes they can do less things when they are alone than when they are together.
- Happened in the backstory of Tyranny, as the nations the game is set in (the Tiers) all fell to Kyros' invasion because of this. Eb points out that if Stalwart, Apex, Azure, the Sages, the Free Cities and the Bastard City had all banded together from day one they could probably have given a much better account of themselves, but instead they stood aside, guarded their own borders, and watched Kyros' armies dismantle their old enemies one by one. It is possible for the Player Character to resurrect the Tiers by building a coalition between the survivors of several of these factions, but only because Kyros' forces have themselves fallen victim to this trope in the following years.
- World of Warcraft and all its expansions, are is built by this trope.
- In the vanilla game, the Alliance and Horde are in a cold war, but that does not stop either side from having adventurers(i.e. players) screw with the other side. When C'thun shows up and kicks off the Old Gods plan to kill the planet, it is only because they worked together did they stop Crisis #1. Once that's dealt with however, it's right back to screwing the other which starts Crises #2 through #4.
- Burning Crusade brought Crisis #2 which opened the Dark Portal to Outland and an invasion from the Burning Legion. The Alliance and Horde team up and push them back and, once they get through the gate, the first thing they do is screw the other side over. Because they are so busy screwing each other, they do not deal with Illidan Stormrage, and tha t threat falls to the Sha'tar and adventurers to deal with. When Kael'thas goes all Burning Legion, the Sha'tar form the Shattered Sun Offensive which was comprised of both Alliance and Horde and they successfully averted Crisis #2.
- In Wrath of the Lich King Crisis #3 takes center stage. At this point, WoW takes this trope and goes ham: the the Alliance and Horde weren't fighting each other at first, they just thumbed their nose while they actually dealt with the Lich King. Then rebel Forsaken kill both the Alliance and Horde troops at the Wrath Gate, then the Alliance invaded Undercity in an attempt to take back Lordaeron while the Horde was in disarray, then King Varian Wrynn and Garrosh Hellscream got into a fight and open war was declared, while they were already fighting a war against the Scourge. This led to the Broken Front, where the Alliance was beating Scourge forces, only to be attacked from behind by the Horde, who were in turn slaughtered by the Scourge giving the undead two battlefields worth of troops in one victory. Meanwhile, the Argent Crusade, realizing that the Lich King would not fall to a world divided, decided to host a friendly jousting tournament designed to get the Alliance and Horde to work together when the time came to assault Icecrown Citadel, but this ended up being all for nothing because the two factions ended up fighting each other again in a gunship battle over Icecrown. The Lich King would have won the final battle if it were not for the intervention of Tirion Fordring and Terenas Menethil's ghost. And it should be pointed out that while the paladins and death knights of their respective organizations don't get along perfectly well due to their contrasting motivations and methods for their fight against the Lich King, they are able to work together.
- Cataclysm shows up Crisis #4 & spends a large portion of time on the very costly and devestating war Garrosh Hellscream is waging against the Alliance, and not the giant pissed off dragon that wants to end the world. Various lesser factions end up pulling most people's heads out of their asses and avert the end of the world.
- In Mists of Pandaria, the Horde under Garrosh's leadership is falling apart because everyone started to notice how big of a prat he was. Garrosh's warmongering, disregard for all life that isn't an orc, and his love of Kick the Dog tactics have caused the Horde to fall apart, while the Alliance solidify their unity and take advantage of the fracturing Horde which will eventually lead to a two sided invasion of Orgrimmar to end Hellscream's rule.
- Following their formation in Cataclysm, the dwarves' Council of Three Hammers was beset by mutual distrust on the part of the Bronzebeard and Wildhammer representatives towards Moira Thaurissan of the Dark Iron Dwarves. This paralyzes them in Mists of Pandaria when the Zandalari trolls get the local trolls to rise up against the dwarves. Neither Muradin Bronzebeard nor Falstad Wildhammer will send troops out of fear Moira will take advantage of their absence. In response, Moira sends her troops out to fight and aid Varian Wrynn. Shamed at how their distrust nearly doomed them, Wildhammer and Bronzebeard swear to not let such feelings get in the way of what has to be done again. As a result, in Warlords of Draenor, the Dark Irons are an active participant in the Alliance's campaign into Draenor.
- Legion starts a whole new crisis in the form of a fresh invasion by the Burning Legion. At the beginning, the Alliance and the Horde were working together, launching a joint attack on the Broken Shore. Things go sour when the Horde is forced to retreat and, to the Alliance, it looks like they're being abandoned. This, as well as the fact that the battle cost both sides their top leaders, leaves them disinclined to work together in the Broken Isles and even has Gilneas's Genn Greymane actively gunning for Sylvanas Windrunner.
- There's some of this in the Order Hall campaigns unique to each class. Some of the campaigns consist of avoiding this trope by bringing together disparate factions of the same class under one banner regardless of being Alliance, Horde, or other. For example, the multiple paladin orders joining the Order of the Silver Hand. The Shaman campaign consists of trying to unite the four elemental lords together under one cause, the problem there being most of them are concerned only for their own realms and the Firelands and Skywall both being in the midst of a Succession Crisis that the Earthen Ring shamans must resolve before securing their aid. The death knights of the Ebon Blade actively attack the paladins' Order Hall out of a desire to resurrect Tirion Fordring into their ranks, despite the rift and outrage this would cause.
- The backstory of Battle for Azeroth has Sylvannas intending to cause this in the Alliance with the War of Thorns. She believed that occupying Darnassus would force an immediate response from Anduin to free the hostages. However this would anger the Gilnean refugees, who have spent years waiting for the Alliance to retake their homeland from the Forsaken. The resulting friction would have weakened the Alliance and given the Horde the upper hand, were it not for Genn becoming more level-headed and Sylvannas deciding to simply burn Teldrassil and Darnassus with it.
