Your favourite soft reset

So, the idea of a soft reset has been floated here a lot. We can’t easily get out of the cosmic lore, but we can back off of it. We could stop continuing the story we are on right now, and get a different one, with different characters and different stakes. And there are some ways that could be done, all of them with their problems. To mention a few:

  1. Let’s just not talk about it!
    The Jailer is defeated, the threat has ended, no need to talk about the ramifications or continue it, just start the newa addon with a new story that’s wholly independent of what came before. Ignoring continuity to that degree doesn’t exactly qualify as great storytelling, but it could get the job done. And it has the distinct advantage of not really having to explain anything. The “we agree that we mucked it up, so let’s just move on” kind of way.
  2. Timeskip forward!
    Timey-whimey Shadowlands stuff and poof, the Azeroth we have is 20 years older than the one we left. The politics have changed, what was current when we left doesn’t matter that much anymore, a new generation of heroes and soldiers is there to make the next catastrophe a survivable proposition. We aren’t exactly resetting the story, but we are resetting our relationship to it. We’d also have enough new stuff to explore to sufficiently distract us. The world moved on without us, so we can create a new place for ourselves.
    It would also open up space for something like a Warcraft 4 that describes the events while we are away, so that might be nice, I guess?
  3. Timeskip backwards!
    'Member the time before they mucked it up? I 'member. So let’s just go there. This could be a Classic+ with an alternate continuing development of Azeroth, or it could be our characters literally being flung back in time to when things were still cool with the Lore. Use some timetravel gimmick to throw us back into the War of the Ancients, the Troll Wars, or whatever cool time they can think of that has knights and dragons and savage warriors going at each other like in the olden days. Might be a bit awkward for aliens like Orcs and Draenei, and it’s a bit of a copout, but it could be the hardest reset available that still leans on our attachment to the property.
  4. Timeskip sidewards!
    Well… Dimensional skip. Destroy Azeroth, have our characters try again in Azeroth 2.0, where things are sufficiently similar to please the masses, and sufficiently different to get rid of most of the bad ideas. Let’s just avoid that pesky continuity with a twirl and a sidestep.

So, anyone else have any great ideas for a soft reset? Or do you want to share which one would be a favourite of yours, or why? Or just post why any kind of reset won’t make anything better anyways, maybe because things are already great? Well, have at it, then.

2 Likes

A reset that undoes the total destruction and extinction of the Night Elves and makes them exist again along with their zones and home.

The Forward time skip makes most sense imho. It gives them an opportunity to rebuild the world and ignore some of the bigger sins of BfA/SL. While still allowing them to keep the threads they want to pick up on.

I think I’m leaning mostly towards number one, as I dislike loose ends and time travel.

Just get things back to normal in the afterlife and don’t bring us into touch with things that high up again. It’s ridiculous that we as puny mortals need to help death function right. Truly.

Let’s get back down to Azeroth and regular warfare. Overhaul the old lands and make them more current.

Then throw in my “Rise of the Forsaken” idea from a different thread or something else - something solid. The world map also still has empty spots for new continents and/or islands.

Take some time rebuilding stuff for the Night Elves and the Forsaken. Build up some new important and relatable characters. Retire some of the old ones in a decent manner. Bring back Khadgar. Expand on some of the newer races’ lore - like the Vulpera, for example.

There are heaps of options.

1 is essentially the Warlords route. And i´d say, it worked well enough. Remember all those issues of time travel and a one-legion-across-infinite-realities? How it comes no one ever ran into their younger self? How Iron Star tech threw us into a new technologcial era? Well, turns out all of that mattered not a single bit, because as soon as legion launched nothing of that was ever mentioned again, as if it never happened. If we can call ourselfs lucky, this might be the fate waiting all the questionable story choices we got in Shadowlands.

2 Likes

Shadowlands itself is fairly isolated so it can be ignored very easily, on it’s own. Bigger issue is the BfA events that set it up. The burnt tree and all that, which is why i think 2 would work better, because it allows time for some things to be repaired, regrown, etc.

1 Like

Time skip forwards.

•Centaur, Quilboar and Hapries are taking ground in Kalimdor. RFK and RFD revamped into modern 5mans. Plus the greater part of Barrens and the surrounding zones are teaming with these races, reluctantly united against a common enemy (us).

•The undead are swarming Eastern Kingdoms. Scarlet Crusade recives aide from Turalyon the current actiing king, along with Yrel come from a Holy Dark Portal.

•Turalyon has a strangle-hold on the Alliance we left behind and wont let Anduin and company in because ”touched by death and shadow” etc.

• Kalimdors story is more akin to how the Barrens story over all was. And Eastern Kingdoms is more about Undead, Light and politics.

2 Likes

Oooh, I’d love to fight something akin to an unusually aggressive and united beast-like Horde in Kalimdor. Could explore abandoned tethers like Quillboar and Agamaggan lore and even the remnants of Centaur coming to power again after the devastation in Desolace.

Pretty much stuff that had been abandoned story-wise, to be picked up and made into new ones again. There’s potential!

2 Likes

Personally I still mostly play for RP and well, the timeskip forward would pretty much be the most disastrous option to my RP here. You can’t just skip 10 years of character development and tell me to keep on going. And that’s really the main reason I oppose it. But I can see why Blizzard might think it a good idea… though having long-lived peoples like elves and dwarves and gnomes among the protagonists mitigates the advantages a bit. I mean, “the sacking of your city was 20 years ago, things have changed since then” feels to me like it shouldn’t have the same effect on an elf that still remembers the sundering as it does on a human.

I also think that most of the advantages of the time skip can also be had without it. You want to remake the world, have Turalyon taking over and the “beast races” grow in power after being ignored as a problem for years? You can do that now. The last time they updated the old world was in Cata. That’s quite some time ago now. And most of the time we were busy killing off the factions’ troops against stronger foes, so that they probably weren’t doing all the gnoll-slaying they might have done before. Indeed, I think having it now wouzld make for a better narrative than waiting till after a time skip. After the fourth war you can easily claim that the factions are kinda struggling to keep their power, since they burned each other out. A generation later that argument isn’t as fitting. Not that popularion arguments ever mattered to them before, but I hope we can agree that it would be nice if they did so to some degree in the future…). I actually prefer weak factions, like we had in vanilla, since they leave more room for heroism and independent actors without either making the threat irrationally big or finding some excuse why no one else had time for that particular threat at that particular time.
So yeah, just ignoring the crazy parts of the story and moving on, like they mostly did after WoD, would be my method of choice here.

My view on 3 and 4 has also softened, though… I would love a Classic+ story that focuses more on worldbuilding than spectacle. I would have fun with more timewalking stuff that showed me more highlights of WoWs story, instead of the depression I get when looking at the current one. And in the same vein, I do think I could get used to a new version of Azeroth that had had a more relatable history over the last few years… They kind of destroyed continuity anyways. Restarting with another world and sticking to the rules you establish there might be enough for me.

Not necessarily. Finding out what the hell happened would allow for some organic intrigue and allow them to build upon or drop any story thread they could wish. It would yield some much needed legitimacy to Turalyon’s claim on keeping the throne from Anduin, if they chose to go for that kind of a story, as only one example.

Not necessarily… what? I mean, my main claim wasn’t that a time skip wouldn’t achieve its goals, my claim was that most of those goals could be achieved without it, and considering the time skip would wreck my RP and change the scenario to one I might enjoy less, I’m not in favour of it.

I do occasionally have a habbit of changing and editting my posts, apologies. (And of course i don’t know what kind of RP you partake in.)

There always have been undisclosed periods of time between expansions and the grievances, which last are much more impactful and generally have more storytelling potential. Allowing more time to pass would allow, for certain characters to mature and become more relevant (for example Thrall/Moira’s kids), as well as selling the idea the individual narrative foils have had time to consolidate their power, in our absence, which is the kind of storytelling you can’t really achieve, without skipping, at least a few years forward.

In Blizzard’s timeline? A month here and there maybe, but elsewise time has been cut rather than added, considering a 2 year expansion usually only counts as one year in-world. Mostly they just added stuff that happened where we weren’t looking at the time. Or do you have examples in mind? I mean, even the Cata revamp doesn’t really seem to have added time beyond the time between Vanilla and Cata.

And people would be interested in that? I’m genuinely asking, because I really don’t care at all about any of the main characters of WoW, and don’t expect to in the future. As far as I’m concerned this is MY story, not theirs. And I don’t relate to a character through mine because they have the blood of a hero, I relate to them because there are actual interactions I have with them. And that can be done with any character, old or new.

Even in inworld-time it will be 5 years since the cataclysm in 10.0 anyways. That’s a lot of time for things to change where we weren’t looking. And even Turalyon will have had a full year. That’s not exactly that rushed of a timeframe to have a coup against an absent monarch. If there even is one, I’m not sold on that particular story either.

I guess it depends on how much one really thinks they need the time to do so in the end. If it’s a year there, month there etc. it doesn’t really matter so long as it is best explained. One could argue a good quickening method to why something was done so quick was because maybe the subject - let’s say Turalyon and the Alliance - just turned out to be more effective, perhaps with the help of some dubious methods that become subject to an expansion dedicated towards such methods (at first).

As an example, and hopefully not risk becoming non-contextual by pulling out more history book-ing into a fantasy world, but a lot of those legendary ‘100-years conflict’ stuff are often collated events into one impressive - or imposing - title. They didn’t really, or at all, last for a literal century. I think some even lasted for just a day on the grand scale of things. o.O

Are all dead.

Are very dead.

Entirely out of character for Turalyon.

2 Likes

Not like that cant be explained away when we are mucking about with the machinery of death. Like anything else - it can just be retconned these days because why not.

Plenty of humans still alive and kicking that can be turned to the extreme with the current undead invasion going on.

So was shackleing someone with the light while your goth girlfriend tortures them with void for information. He can be turned extremist by the light easily.

1 Like

:man_shrugging:

I mean, if it’s preferred, new threats can always come out the woodwork. Or just the completely discontinued ones such as the Saberon randomly running off towards the Barrens.

It’s been a while (not abnormally long) but something could happen around that.

Apathy is death.

2 Likes

Sorry but you are not Kreia.

Making the best out of bad situation. Big bonus for the W4 idea explaining what’s been going on. My only problem with this one is that we would essentially miss out on a lot of really important Azeroth stories, world building, politics etc. Imagine we come back 20 years in the future and all of a sudden… Tadaaa new capitols for all these races, and completely different power play. That would be really lame. But like you said, a W4 type release first that fills in the gap might mitigate that a bit.

Not quite sure where my idea lies on the “reset hardness scale” but here goes, nor can I guarantee it’s “great”. We basically carry on the obvious MCU ripoff. The Jailer “wins” at the end of the shadowlands. He presses the cosmic reset button and he becomes the super god of everything… The only way to defeat him is going back in time, but properly this time, not bizarre multiverse time travel WoD style. We use the caverns of time as a main hub/base of operations to go back to our OWN timeline.

This will mostly involve finding and fighting dreadlords throughout the cosmos and maybe even making sure Sargeras doesn’t go nuts. Sargeras and the other Titans, now at their prime of their power are all pretty confused with our level knowledge, but they believe us. We recruit them all and bring them to our present timeline, and together smash Zovaal and “redo” the universe.

To avoid the whole “let’s go back in time and choke baby hittler in his sleep” every time we loose scenario, we add a price to this. Bringing such powerful entities through the caverns of time, spends them completely, and they basically implode, killing Nozdormu and the majority of the Bronze dragonflight. Maybe we even witness the birth of the Infinite Dragonflight!

We now get to enjoy Azeroth centric content once again.

1 Like