They both stood down, but were prepared to fight each other.
And both of them suffered losses at each others’ hand (LTT is a lot more indirect though.)
Jaina lost her island nation through the use of the Blood Elf creation, the Mana Bomb.
Lor’themar’s people were imprisoned due to some Sunreaver involvement into Horde activity (not debating Jaina’s role with the Alliance/the Night Elves.)
5.1 as a stand alone was a perfect example of how you tell a faction war story. Their was a resolution at the end of it. Granted, my favorite race got hurt, but I’m not here playing Hello Kitty Island Adventure.
Missed opportunity to be honest.
I think Blizzard could have done some great Alliance storytelling if they had used Dalaran, but they went with the Kirin Tor Offensive.
Now granted again - that story would have been very Human-heavy but I’m not sure the lore fanbase was suffering Human-fatigue at that stage in 2013.
Really, I would embrace “human heavy” right now, if I got a story that made sense in return. And Dalaran being Dalaran isn’t exactly the same kind of “human potential” problem as the Draenei Light Crusaders bowing to a human that somehow made it to space, or the dwarves letting the human king decide their new government, or Tyrande learning patience from frickin’ Varian…
Humans have their own story lines, and it is fine, if they rule those. The problem arises, when they take the lead where they really shouldn’t be involved at all.
My problem isn’t that the Blood Elves got a kick in the gut. The problem with it largely comes after the fact, where they team up right away and years later team up to kill the survivors.
Might be just me, but kinda takes away from the impact.
But that’s faction wars for you, as an overall.
For me, the best faction war setting was in 5.1.
That’s true.
It would be a Human/High Elf story.
I suppose that’s why Purge of Dalaran was actually good for the Alliance in terms of narrative because it was a combined effort of Humans and High Elves vs Blood Elves.
Wrath-MoP had a lot of solid stuff, in that regard. 5.1-5.2 was one of the standout moments, for sure. That’S one of the things that really let down the subsequent expansions, where they wanted it to lead from one to the next, but at the same time wanted them to be isolated so they ended up in a situation, where they carried over what they wanted, but left huge story threads just hanging. The Sunreavers were one of them.
In all seriousness a timeskip is nothing more than another missed opportunity.
You can say there was a magic timeskip and now war has stopped bla bla bla.
But If i take ten steps out of a major city and still see people shouting about Death wing burning a town then what does it matter?
Well… I didn’t want to believe that they would do a time skip without giving us a new status quo, since it sounded so horrendously thoughtless… But once again I underestimated the sheer randomness of the WoW story.
I don’t think it sounds that bad…! The idea itself isn’t bad.
With Shadowlands representing the closing of one book in the Warcraft saga … it felt like an opportunity to give Azeroth and its inhabitants a bit of breathing room before Dragonflight ushers in the start of our next major storyline.
/…/
The goal of the fast-forward is to provide the people of Azeroth with a slice of “normal” life without a major threat looming over their heads.
This I think is a good thing. The world becomes less believeable if the world always has to face one conflict after the next. I just hope that the Dragonflight expansion will be very contained, that the new threat only concerns the silly dragon aspects and not the average joe living in Azeroth (meaning more peace). That said, they have to actually do something with this. A revamp of the world like in Cataclysm would be nice to see, but there may be many practical reasons as to why they would never do this.
What I find intersting though is that there’s no mention of time-travel shenanigans involved. They simply create a time skip:
When our heroes return from the Realms of Death, you can imagine them easing back into their lives and duties without an immediate crisis to address or enemy to fight.
Haven’t made up my mind of what I think of that. In general, time-travelling as a story device is a bad thing – but Shadowlands was so incredibly bad that if Blizzard were to use one of the most ridiculed story devices ever of “it was all just a dream” then that would strengthen the narrative and world building at this point.
So I’m not particularly hyped or positive. World of Warcraft has had a Marvel-esque narrative for years now and I’ve never been particularly on board with that. They mention a “joyous occasion” and I can’t help but feel that they’re talking about the marriage between Lor’themar and Thalyssra. And I really don’t care about that, I would rather see a joyous event pertaining to the state of the actual world.
So the idea isn’t bad, I think. I think it’s healthy for the world building to have a pause from ever escalating conflicts. It gives us more distance to the garbage that was the Shadowlands, which can only be a plus! … but the problem for me is that the ball has already been dropped, and while this time-skip could be a positive it all depends on what they do with it. There’s currently nothing in the narrative that makes me want to revisit retail Azeroth.
Should interest some people here.
I’m just asking myself of what my chars dis during the end of SL (2 years) until the beginning of DF (3 years later).
Throwing a number around won’t change anything about how the world feels. And that’s the important part.
It certainly throws a grenade into the RP community. Let’s hope the players can turn that into constructive destruction, but Blizz surely won’t be helping with that.
Well lore-wise, even just a “small” timeskip of 3 years of total peace will be a boon for those races that lost the majority of their population during their history (Blood Elves, Night Elves, Gnomes, Draenei and some others too), so I approve of it at the very least to give a bit more “breath” to these endangered races in order to repopulate quite a bit
…not really, no. 3 years is about irrelevant for the population growth. And populations never made sense in WoW anyways. This doesn’t even work as a weak excuse.
I know that a lot of RPers have not touched a lot of shadowlands
for these players there is a real easy solution;
The timeskip that happened was the time spent roleplaying in the shadowlands expansion (but not within actual shadowlands)
ofc this becomes harder to justify if you did actively engage with the shadowlands roleplay wise
It’s not as easy as that, though. It’s all about the community. It doesn’t matter if you found a solution for yourself to ignore the time skip, if other players decide differently it will still lead to chaos. And following the official lore is usually the path of least resistance, so many people are used to do that, even if they whine about it.
SL was a very different case. You could easily ignore it, because nothing that happened there affected the day-to-day-happenings of Azeroth at all. You don’t have to contradict any of the horrible, horrible Shadowlands lore, to do your RP without being touched by it. The time skip on the other hand hits where it will probably hurt.
