Shadowlands took 2 years, Dragonflight took 3.
Given that only a small force of Azeroth was inside the Shadowlands, let’s compare what little this time gap has done to the lore.
I’m going to use the example of the timelapse between Warcraft 3 and Vanilla WoW, which took 4 years.
In those 4 years:
Orgrimmar was built
Teldrassil was grown
Blood Elves reclaim some parts of Silvermoon city
Taurens settle inside Mulgore and build Thunder Bluff
Stormwind is finished with the construction
The undead have transformed the undercity into their capital.
Let’s see what happened in the timegap of SL and Dragonflight:
Lor’Themar and Thalyssra got married.
That time skip was baffling to me. Essentially, they just changed the year number to reverse their former stupid policy of having addons just last one in-world-year. The marking stone for a “new era” of Warcraft. The only “benefit” I see here is that they can point at 5 passed years to explain why everyone is suddenly all cuddly with each other and… well, that doesn’t exactly work well, either.
Like so much the Warcraft team does this decision about the story doesn’t really seem to be about the story, but about dev communication.
To be honest, most of these aren’t realistic at all, they just needed these to create a set for the world they created and that was it. Since then the world didn’t really needed such a rewamp not gameplay nor lorewise.
Made me laugh. It’s true though. The time-skip may as well not have happened because the world was 100% stagnant in that time. Nothing happened, the marriage itself didn’t even happen yet. It’s the clearest indicator of incompetence in the writing. They can’t even use a time-skip right, the most basic and fundamental of “Lets progress the world a bit”-tools. Embarrassing.
Who even knows what goes on inside there. From what I’ve seen from Preach’ interviews, the way they go about designing zones and lore is just a bunch of separate people throwing stuff at different walls and seeing what sticks. Then they combine all that into a disjointed, nonsensical setting. Amateurs.
I struggle to read what you wrote here but 5 years is plenty for a world with magic and rudimentary tech to do such things. But if I read you right, you’re saying that they just needed to create a new ‘set’ to tell new stories from since the old one had been milked dry, to which I agree.