If we have a time skip after returning to from the Shadowlands, there’s potentially a lot of information to catch up on. A time skip would essentially miss all that and then thrust us into the new situation (eg; Azshara and Chromantus ravaging the planet, with little to no explanation for how that state of affairs occurred).
Can it be done well?
They’re not inherently lazy, but they can be used as a cop-out.
Ion denied that there would be a timeskip after SL, though.
Ion says a lot of things.
I think a timeskip can be a good thing and honestly is needed. The current timeline feels really silly with all these major threats apparently only lasting 1 year. A timeskip would at least allow some room to rebuild and perhaps establish something new and refreshing in the story.
I’m pretty sure they also said there’d be no more customization options in Shadowlands yet we just got some in 9.1.5 and more are on the way.
Plus a timeskip would be a pretty big deal for the setting of the next expansion. If that was planned they’re not going to spoil that years in advance.
Yes. Time skips can be done well, and are not objectively bad writing.
However, time skips are often used by lazy writers to bypass narrative problems. Allow me to use some hypothetical World of Warcraft sitations which, were they to occur, would be lazy.
The night elves and Horde peacefully coexist on Kalimdor 10 years after Shadowlands. We’re told that after Shadowlands, they both just got over it.
Pre-Shadowlands, the political landscape for the Horde and Alliance was relatively stable. The problematic elements within the Horde’s leadership were mostly gone, and the Alliance has been by and large a bedrock of political stability for 17 years, excepting Tyrande maybe being angry at Anduin. So we skip to 10 years later with old leaders retiring, new leaders taking their place, all so the next expansion can have more political instability.
It’s been ten years since we left the Shadowlands, and in that time a new superpower has arisen. They have taken over the former Forsaken lands and the former Night Elf lands, and now they’re the super big threat we face.
…
Each of these cases has a time skip that benefits the writer, but not the narrative. Hand waving reconciliation between the night elves and Horde so we can go back to a peaceful time between the factions on Azeroth isn’t a good story, but it’s an enticing skip over messy entanglements for the writer. Arbitrarily changing the leadership of both factions to get right to the political intrigue bits harms the intrigue itself by making it too arbitrary. The sudden (to the players) arrival of a long-established national superpower raises far too many logistic questions, skips over the parts that make this threat feel threatening, and favors conflict over world building. Interestingly, it’s similar to the Iron Horde (great superpower coming from nowhere) which by and large players agreed felt unthreatening and uninteresting.
So to sum up: It can be done well, but too often it’s used as a messy shortcut.
Definitely not. Sometimes they’re necessary to give a universe weighed down by the baggage of years of lore a clean break. The alternative is a complete reboot which is the solution DC comics typically employ but doesn’t work so well for a game where the player is a character.
Legend of Korra jumped forward 80 years by necessity for example and it gave them the room to justify updating the setting to the roaring 20s and introducing new characters and a much different global situation to the original.
Thank you for that analysis. What would you consider a time skip done well?
Most of the ones that come to mind follow the same theme; after some major event shaked the main character(s) life, we skip forward a few months. The character is still dealing with the fall-out/trauma of the event, but we’re skipping over months of mourning/etc to go to the next story, where the character(s) still deals with that fall-out/trauma.
Specific examples are something I’m drawing a blank on at the moment, but I’m sure we can all think of medias where we’ve seen that scenario play out. And given time, I’m sure I could think of other examples where years have been skipped.
As a side note, we don’t really think about it but WoW does a time skip after every expansion. We didn’t pick up right after the defeat of N’zoth to rush off into the Shadowlands, there was an ambiguous amount of time passing between our battles on Draenor and the invasion of the Legion, so on and so forth.
Not really trying to make a point there, just pointing it out.
Yeah I wouldn’t really take Ion’s word for anything. He’s a lawyer for one, and also he basically said that Alliance would never get fair haired, fair skined, blue-eyed elves and see where we are now.
Potentially any narrative plot point is good, depending on the skills of the writers.
Warcraft has used timeskips in the past. WC2-WC3 has about a 10ish year timeskip.
Timeskips are not bad in general. Usually you only want to focus on some key events and the events between those are not important to the meta narrative.
To some degree. I would say MoP > WoD doesn’t have one if we consider the trial of Garrosh as the end of MoP and the Iron Horde invasion of the Blasted Lands as the start of WoD. Since I would imagine the moment Garrosh went with Kairoz, the Iron Horde invaded via the Dark portal. At least from our point of view.
We know there was one between Cata and MoP as Nazgrim mentions the horde claiming victory over the Alliance in several naval battles. Mainly one near Taranis and another near Tol Barad. Both of which we do not see on screen. And those are most likely after the fall of Theramore given Nazgrim is just reporting them to Garrosh.
A time skip can be done well. Nobody can be as lazy as I am.
Even then, there is a time skip for us. The book detailed the trial, but that wasn’t something we participate in or observe. We go from defeating Garry in SoO to the Iron Horde coming out the Portal, with a time gap in between.
I’m not saying the time skips between expansions are huge or undetailed. Most time skips do have details about the events between “then” and “now”, but from the perspective of the protagonist (which in WoW, is our characters) there is a gap in the ongoing narrative where some time has passed.
The books might fill in details of those gaps, but even things like the Trial happened an ambiguous amount of time after SoO and end an ambiguous amount of time before WoD pre-patch. With WoW, we can guess at the amount of time, but it might very well be anything from immediately after Garry got in his metaphorical DeLorean to months later because WoW adamantly refuses to give us solid information when it comes to time.
I’m not saying the time skips between expansions are large, only that they are present (well, and they are of an ambiguous amount of time).
Ironically the writers have sort of done an anti-timeskip, and stated that each expansion, and anything related to said expansion, is one year long in lore. That’s the most recent canon thing was have, but it was a retcon at the time, since Cata quests stated that five years had passed since Vanilla. Their timeline is frankly all over the place, and they can’t even decide how long elves live or how old some of them are.
A time skip for WoW would be the ‘lazier’ solution, but given the metric ton of work they would need to fix the setting, give it actual rules and standardize it, flesh it out again, give the various races proper nuance and lore again… they may as well also do a time skip.
As much as I took shots at the idea of Blizzard doing a big time skip earlier, I’m actually in favor of it.
Skipping over the Alliance - Horde reconciliation is lazy AF, but I know it’s a story we’ll never see anyway, so why not skip ahead ten years to that end point?
I know I’ll never see the trials and tribulations of the Horde adjusting to the new Horde Council, so why not skip ahead ten years to the point where they’re accepted and working, and move on?
I won’t see Thrall’s kids until they’re adults, and if we don’t just skip to that point, then whenever Danusar turns his withering gaze upon them, they’ll get artificially aged to adults so they can be important, so why not jump ten years instead to where they’re already adults?
Likewise, the Night Elves and Forsaken will need to rebuild their old homes or make new ones, and I’ll never see the work progression anyway, so why not skip ahead to where their old capitals have been rebuilt/regrown and resettled? Maybe (hopefully) with new art assets, because the art team will make things to pretty I’ll forget to be mad that I missed the story anyway.
At this point, I know a lot of things I’d like to see developed never will be shown to me, so why not be lazy and skip ahead to where they’ve already been fully established?
While I sympathize there are things people want to see in the story, accepting anything if it comes after a time skip, the “how” and “why” of it be damned, risks encouraging more bad writing, which could mean a favorite character dies, or changes in a nonsensical way we dislike or an enjoyed place gets destroyed.
All those things you talked about skipping are fodder for good stories, and can add to the lore. We may not need to see the entire rebuilding process, but showing and exploring part of the rebuilding the Night Elf or Forsaken capitals can give a good story (look at the Orc bonus campaign in Frozen Throne).
Sure they are. But I don’t hold any illusions about the current writing and development team.
I don’t expect the same people who have spent the last four expansions trying to recapture the nostalgia of the RTS games and largely failing to even tell a compelling (let alone good) story to give me a good and nuanced tale about the rebuilding/regrowing of Teldrassil, the restoration of the Undercity, a long tale showing the progressive aging and maturing of Thrall’s kids until they become heroes in their own right, anything at all related to the Horde Council beyond “it exists”, or any single sign of the conflict and tensions that should exist between the Horde and Alliance in a time of peace.
But I do trust the art department to show me how pretty it can all look when we get there. And if I know we can’t get good story (again, because of the current team and their track record), I’ll gladly settle for good art.
I was wrong. I should have said the things you talked about skipping can be fodder for good stories instead of saying they are. Like you, I’m pessimistic of the current writing team and the lead devs, and am very supportive of the art department. This may be a joke, yet I like and agree; the art department’s backs must be sore from carrying the game for so long.
All those things you want to see I’d like to see as well (or something similar, such as building a new Night Elf capital if they decide not to rebuild/regrow Teldrassil).
No, you did say it right. They definitely are good fodder for stories. If the developers could hire back the people who told the rise and fall of Garrosh (to site just one example), I’d have some trust in their ability to tell long-form stories.
But when their new big idea is to retcon all of the lore to be Zovaal all along somehow, then somehow make Zovaal less of an interesting antagonist than Deathwing, I only trust them to disappoint me.
Which is the one thing we all can agree on.