So what do we think about a potential timeskip?
Yay or nay?
If you like the idea, how many years would you think would be best from both an RP and a lore perspective?
How would it affect your RP and how would you handle it if it was five, twenty, or even a hundred years?
Or however many you would like?
I’m curious about what people think and how would you handle it.
It’s a subject that seems to come up before every new expansion.
I do not trust Blizzard to do it well.
Five-ish years at most, letting the world heal and giving an excuse to rebuild old areas, revamping racial capitals etc. Anduin gets another model update as blond Varian and Thrall transitions entirely into green Metzen, grey beard and all.
It would be a challenge for storytelling to cut five years from everyone’s life but if the narrative says that time passes differently in the shadowlands which it actually does, the Heroes return to a changed world. The new races would’ve had a proper time to be established too.
Everything would be different, more or less. If canon says the Heroes were missing in the shadowlands for five years I’d have to figure out what Marinya does in the meantime because she isn’t one of them. She might live, love, lose and grow or just have one of those empty half-decades with alot of nothing that you’re bound to experience as a long lived longear.
Frankly, the biggest leap to suspend my disbelief is that Azeroth breaks its constant trend of a world shattering threat every year and isn’t obliterated while the Heroes are away adventuring in the afterlife.
This is an interesting thing actually
5 year without any problem ,any war, 5 year of peace, rebulding and learning form past mistakes
Then the “heroes” return and… something bad will happen
Its a bit like the Batman dilemma - is Batman the product and solution of the crime in Gotham or the presence and existance of Batman creates all those other super/normal villains? Would Gotham and the world would be a better place without a Batman (and thus his Rogues Gallery he “created” - the challange, Batman himself, etc attracted them to the city in the first place?)?
I think a retruning hero would face a smmilar dilemma: Azeroth would be a better place without me?
Wich itself a cool Rp point
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This might not be really answering the topic but somewhat related… I don’t think we’ll see a timeskip for Shadowlands, but I do think we’ll see a timeskip for some characters after Shadowlands.
The reason I think it’ll only be some is because Blizzard dropped a not-so-subtle hint that time flows differently in the Shadowlands. So I think the expansion might last your usual year or so for those not going to the Shadowlands, but the characters that did go could have aged any number of years by the time they return.
At which point I’m suddenly reminded of that pre-Legion comic that dropped a possible future for an old man Anduin commanding the Vindicaar against the Void…
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I think it’s more that Azeroth is a heap of busywork actively falling to pieces without constant maintenance and the Heroes are increasingly exasperated at their yearly efforts being nullified by the next threat. Some have settled into apathy, others keep to grim resolve and the gnome/goblin think tank tasked with producing a workable game theory for the long term had to be committed.
In the end we might’ve saved the world of the living but we return to an Azeroth ruled by the great centaur khanate after their high chief found a magic world shaking maguffin to conquer all when we were otherwise occupied farming rep for a ghost horse mount.
I’d really appreciate it. It’d give everywhere time to rebuild, and plotlines to advance; which I have full faith in because Blizzard are better at implying stories than telling them.
Okay, I must admit… that would be interesting and awesome to explore; always tought Cenariu’s barbarian offspirngs are full of potential, not just me centaur, me smash you… orcs on four legs basically
I’d much prefer that time not only works at a different speed in the shadowlands, but also isn’t even linear - that way it opens up the opportunity to end up in the past rather than the future. I think that would be far more interesting because I’d love to see locations before they were ravaged by the scourge or the burning legion, or even going back as far as before the sundering - and all the historical NPCs from those eras.
Usually time-traveling is isolated to Caverns of Time dungeons and we foil the plans of the Infinite dragonflight to alter the timeline very quickly before any damage is done, but the next expansion could instead give them a far bigger role as the central villain and have us see what happens when things go their way. Of course by the end of the expansion we’ll find a way to restore the timeline so no major permanent damage would be done, but it would be interesting to see events could unfold before that time.
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