Okay, every other addon people start theorizing about time skips, and it is that time again. The Shadowlands do give some convenient background for that theory. Time can move differently there, older quests told us that. So… if this addon is supposed to play mostly within the Shadowlands, a time skip for the world could be introduced without jumping over any time our hero characters experienced. Wimbert just leaves the Shadowlands and notices that, strangely, 30 years have passed while he only experienced one. Bummer. A 29 year gap can’t look good on the résumé…
But Blizzard also seems to be playing into the speculation this time. In a recent interview Ion was asked about the different flow of time within the Shadowlands:
Time Passing in the Shadowlands
It’s complicated.
There isn’t a fixed amount of time like 3x or 10x faster like in a sci-fi movie. It’s more chaotic.
What does that mean for the player? We’ll have to see when we come out the other end.
This seems very vague. Possibly deliberately so, and it could be a sign that they are actively thinking of doing something with this differing flow of time. Not anything close to a sure thing, but they certainly are aware of the option and don’t seem interested in denying that it might happen.
Well, quite a few players seem very exited by that scenario - maybe with a smaller or even bigger time skip, but they would like to see one. I’m not among them. As a role-player I would prefer to be able to have a consistent story without skips for characters other than the Maw Walker Champion of Azeroth’s Faction Garrisons. So I might be more resistant to the idea than most. But I also haven’t heard any arguments that convinced me that it would actually make things better. So… that’s what I’m asking for:
If you do, why do you think a time skip between addons would be good for the story and/or the game as a whole?
What I have heard regarding that until now wasn’t very convincing to me. I’ll make a short list.
A time skip allows for a world revamp
Well, yeah, sure it does, but what is there stopping a world revamp now, without a time skip? It isn’t like nothing has changed, with two faction wars, a global Legion invasion, and a freed Old God trying to press his vision on Azeroth. There are quite a lot of leftover problems that should be sticking around that could be reflected in a remake now.
And any world remake would be dated a few addons later anyways, no matter when it happens.
A time skip allows the populations to recover
The last decades of war certainly have depleted the populations of Alliance and Horde, possibly threatening their super power status, I agree. What I don’t see is why this is a bad thing that should be countered. A world under player faction control actually sounds much less exiting to me than a world where the player factions are barely clinging to survival with the help of powerful heroes like you.
A time skip allows for character changes, and new faces
Only for a few races, really. Many of them have life spans where a few years or decades wouldn’t much matter. The biggest changes would probably happen to orc and human character rosters and… Would that really help? Do we need to age up Thrall’s son to get a new, interesting young orc? Do we really want to see Zekhan grow to be a respected leader while we weren’t there to witness it? Do we really want to kill off Genn offscreen through old age? I’m not convinced.
Narrative reset
Another idea seems to be that with some years/decades between the bad stories we had until now and the new stories, they could just solve all open storylines offscreen and have a clearer vision for the future, with new, less badly done problems.
Well… sounds nice, but I’m just not buying that the writing team would do so much better, if only they weren’t bogged down by all that old stuff. Not only that… I think I prefer older visions of how WoW should look to newer visions. Over time cultures and morality have become increasingly modernized, I feel, and I don’t think remaking the world with a much more enlightened vision than the gritty, brutal Warhammer fantasy WoW started with will make it better.
So… even if a narrative reset might be a good thing, I wouldn’t want it now, because I wouldn’t ant this team of writers to pull it off.
So… that’s what I can come up for now. So I guess that means it’s your turn. I would ask you to try to explain to me why a time skip is a good thing.
We don’t know if they have any major plot in mind. It could be a 5 year jump and use it to build a new place for nelfs and forsaken. it will be nice but there will not be a major change in the setting and the characters of the game.
If it is 20 year jump they will be new characters around, probably some children of current characters. It help the narrative to start fresh. Established characters carry their past so they have constrains. For that we must wait and see could be good could be bad. i can’t think any major cool plot that requires a time skip.
1-4 years I could somehow stomache but anything longer would feel wrong. Like they did with au Dreanor. Last time we were there they told us to call em if we need help and than BAM! Lots of things happened while we weren’t watching and now who’s who and why?
Quick edit:
Reason they could want to do time skip is to prevent our characters from getting old. This way they can progress story to have a clean slate and yet let all the male human paladins remain in their 20’ies. And we all “know” the story is tailored around this specific group of players.
There was a massive data leak about upcoming patches for like the next 2-3 years, one of them was a massive open-world rework; I’m going to theorise that a “time skip” will allow the developers to reshape azeroth into a more updated environment.
I can’t wait to go from 350 fps to 90 fps in Elwynn Forest.
Most old zones are stuck in Cata. You don’t need time skip to show they’ve changed. All those wars (including background undead outbreak in Shadowlands) give plenty of stories for old zones. Crashed Legion battleship here, new dead scar there and some new rogue military groups made of orc and human deserters and marauders.
It’s not about what is “needed”, it’s about what makes it “easier” to explain things; a time skip would account for an example, lots of forestry growth or mountains shifting places (depending how big of a gap).
How much time did pass lorewise since start of Cata? Maybe that would be enough to easly justify most changes.
Or maybe they want to push time forward so they can swap young Anduin with older one without having to wait 4-5 expansions for it to happen naturaly.
An alternate dimension where time flows in strange and unfathomable ways, which is inhabited by strange creatures who twist areas of the space in their own image… I feel like I’ve seen that idea somewhere before…
If the time skip leads to Vulpera becoming Skaven-ified then I’m all for it. “Clan Voldunai, assassin-ing!”
All 4 points you named can be about as profound or relevant as you want them to be.
To put it short, a time skip is the sort of phenomenon that writers often use to facilitate major changes that would otherwise require copious amount of work.
It’s cheap, it’s lazy, and reeks of a soft reboot.
But as of now, I do think that the game needs some major face wash. And if the only way to do so is to skip Zekhans puberty, or wait for time to rid me of the likes of Jaina, then that will be a small price to pay.
I could expand on either reason in order to argue how a time skip facilitates it better than the current pace we have for the setting events, but I’ll just leave that regardless of how insufficient it might be, any amount of recovery time between World Ending Threats is better than the almost nonexistent amount we often have.
Also, it’s obvious that the character cast needs some fresh faces to support it. Blizzard has already started doing 180• turns for the recurrent protagonists, or even retconning their past to fit with their present stance.
And it’s easier to replenish the pool, without having to deal with 20 different story arch’s, if you just present said time skip and then retroactively feed players with the background of said new character.
That’s essentially what happened with Umbric, Geyarah, Katherine, and all the new characters we have now. They all had some kind of “skip”.
Well, at least it doesn’t seem like I missed something obvious. Seems like a time skip is neither necessary nor sufficient to deal with WoW’s problems. But it might be helpful if combined with the right kinds of other changes. It’s just that the price tag associated with it isn’t something I would be willing to pay for so little gain.
And bringing up Geyarah, Katherine and Umbric as examples of characters introduced in a way that could be considered kind of similar with loads of imagination… I can’t say I’m impressed.
Those are all characters that required of writers to feed players on their background after they had already been introduced.
The kind of development they’d need to do with any character introduced with said time skip.
Some may be more interesting while other remain dull, but its a hit or miss situation that showcases how not experiencing their arch as part of some gameplay experience, doesn’t in any way hamper the potential said characters have in the current setting.
Honestly, how Umbric was introduced and the role he played for the Alliance in BfA, was one of the best ones the expansion had in terms of character contribution to the story. And we didn’t need to see first hand his whole transition from HE to BE and VE.
The time skip might come as unnecessary in certain aspects, but from a meta perspective it facilitates an overhaul that at this point comes as sorely needed. Factoring writer laziness is at this point something relevant. And said kind of reboot would facilitate a semi-blank sheet to create stories without being as tied to previous events.
If we are to have writers waving aside consistency, the sooner they start using elements that organically facilitate such, the better.
Forcing the engine with yearly Threats that leave no room to actual character progression (as these often demand flashy interventions from the All Star team that push aside newbies), will burn the setting to the ground.
Because that would save them the time and effort to write the transition, and skip to the end result.
Feeding whatever information they feel its relevant, afterwards.
And it would probably be “better” in the sense that it would unburden them from the baggage they so hate to carry around regarding previous stories.
Effectively giving them the oportunity to start almost anew and care not for most of the previous stories.
Well, if you are to have said approach a time skip would certainly fix nothing. But that’d be because nothing else would either.
…but they would still have to plan out everything that happened in that transition. That’s years of development they’d have to do. And if they don’t… well, they just made things worse.
But it wouldn’t. Even if we were to skip centuries, loads of the old characters with the old grudges would still be around and relevant. And we weren’t talking centuries. If we are only skipping a few years, almost all of the old cast would still be around, with the possible exception of Genn. The leadership wouldn’t change much, if at all. There would just be some shifting around of generals and heirs… which they have always done anyways. Side characters.
Is that a bad thing? considering their track record I think it would be beneficial for us. We clearly have a basis of comparison from their previous work and we (most of us) disliked/hated it, so them using a time skip then inserting relevant information would avoid unnecessary plot holes,mistakes, and inconsistency.
Many lore characters have no background or a tiny amount, many of the new Racial Leaders are thrown into the story.
Can you name a main character they developed recently and was received positively?
Circling back to examples such as Katherine or Umbric, that doesn’t seem to require that much effort.
It all depends on the state Azeroth is left in when said time skip happens. Years of tenuous peace are easy to summarise in a few lines.
And if you need to throw a few key changes, then you also have remembrance quests, cinematics, short stories, or books.
How much time did it take for players to catch up on what happened offscreen with Kul Tiras? Or what Turalyon and Alleria had been doing?.
Those are some approximations regarding what a time skip feels like: Elements left on hold, and being highlighted for players after some time.
Rather have a more definite line between the “new” lore and the “old” lore, rather than have the current writing team cheapening, botching, or entirely retconning previous stories.
Giving them the oportunity to start their “own thing”, safe-wards the past stories in a way that prevents writers from having to meddle with them in order to present their current ideas.
And I overdosed on Zarao conversations again. Well done, Zarao, you have won the discussion by making me want do anything but talk to you once again. I won’t reply to you anymore today, and I won’t elaborate on that.