Just watched Tenet a couple hours ago so let’s talk about time.
I think it would be a really cool idea to finally see a real time paradox in WoW.
We haven’t actually seen one yet as far as I know.
WoD was pretty much a “play it safe” type of thing since it was not our universe but an alternate one, making any interference in the time continuum irrelevant. The only real “change” was how Gul’Dan passed through the rift, but that’s about it.
The Caverns of Time are all about preventing anomalies, but it’s more like inconsequential sightseeing than anything. Even in the Well of Eternity dungeon where we fetch the dragon soul, nothing changes. (e.g. future Illidan/Azshara don’t remember us etc).
So how about we do it like this:
Go back in time to fetch something or help keep an event intact (as usual), but when we come back to the present we realize that certain things have changed as on our mission we 'd have met someone we weren’t supposed to meet yet or maybe that someone saw something they weren’t supposed to see. (sort of like the Umbrella Academy).
Do it like Tenet where if you travel to the past/rewind time and fight your past self (or someone else), they move normally but your movements are reversed, like hitting “rewind” on a dvd. That would mean learning reversed combos and strategies for your abilities.
Someone sends us way back in time to destroy something but then we accidentally kill their ancestor which prevents them from being born, which prevents us from going to that time mission, causing us to get stuck in a casual loop until we figure our way out of this mess, leading us into a different continuity.
Anyway, that’s confusing, but cool. Try playing around with that, but do it well.
See you three days ago.
Writing timetravel properly is even more difficult than simply writing it.
999/1000 stories about timetravel are incredibly silly, or simply bad.
WoW writers have shown that they’re pretty far from capable of writing good stories properly, in the past few years.
Asking the current WoW writers to make a good story about timetravel and time paradoxes is similar to asking the current WoW balance team to balance covenants properly.
Everybody knows it won’t work, so nobody in their right mind would ask that off them and expect success.
Jokes and my #BuildTheRipcord aside, I truly believe it’s too much to ask. These writers can barely handle a love triangle, everything more than
“Oh we fight each other, but there’s a greater evil, we must fight together and overcome our differences to fight the greater evil! Yes! Now we’re friends, but there’s still people who hate each other, so we fight each other again, but now there’s a greater evil, we must fight together and overcome our differences to fight the greater evil! - rinse rave repeat”
is probably expecting too much.
To write a good time travel story, you first must define the rules for the system/story universe you are in.
Some 'verses have time being rigid and I moveable.
Others, time flows and bends and reforms around changes.
Yet others use both. Fixed imoveable events to anchor time with everything else able to shift to accommodate changes.
And then you have the spirals and circle cycle 'verses.
I think they (the devs/writers) would need to sit down and set these things on paper first, since I don’t think they have set the rules yet.
