Dumb Thoughts : Bringing Outland to Azeroth

Wyrmrest Accord
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A rogue thought hit me.

We know that Outland is dying. We saw the cinematic with Thrall and Saurfang, and how that endless field of grain was nothing but husks with no seeds, and we know that the Draenei are planning on moving everything they can, including as much of the cities they have as they can safely move, to the Isles they now call home and rebuild their society.

What would happen if the Horde and Alliance decided to start bringing as much as they could out of Outland, literally strip-mining the floating continental chunks, knowing that sooner or later, the biosphere will completely collapse and the Demons are coming, and Outland has been the source of multiple Demonic invasions by now.

I jokingly ran with the idea of my Orc Warrior, Krenk, retiring to Azshara sometime after the Warlords of Draenor expansion because he was too old, in incredibly pain from the cancer caused by abusing healing potions and restorative magic rather than letting his body naturally recover from the injuries he received, and a few of the things he did was to grab some Talbuk and Clefthoof, as well as some Outland plants like terocone, which we now know to be the juvenile form of olemba trees, morning glory and the like, and run a small ranch trying to establish a strong breeding population of both animals.

It kinda worked but the Horde Druids were very annoyed at him just randomly introducing alien animals into the environment, especially given that nobody knew how they’d interact with the native flora and fauna of Azshara, and while the Talbuk part of the ranch took off, the clefthoofs weren’t competitive against the kodos and now they’re pretty much just lazing around the ranch and being sheared for their fur.

And it got me thinking … how many farms and ranches are out there with ‘exotics’ from other continents, other worlds? Like, is the permanent gender-swap option in the barbers the result of us bringing back the resources from Draenor as either trophies or serious attempts to make these things work on Azeroth, and it did work, albeit in small numbers? How badly are the Druids and Farmers alike tearing their hair out because some yutz used to punching Gods in the face brought back the fantasy equivalent of the Cane Toad and just let it go free into the wilds because ‘it’ll eat the bugs!’ and instead it just caused widespread ecological damage and cost the farmers ten times in property damage and loss of crops than the bugs ever could do?

And there’s minerals only found on Outland that are incredibly useful. Adamantite, Fel Iron, I could go on, that are already in critically short supply, so what happens when we eventually cut Outland off for good after evacuating everything and everyone we can back to good old Azeroth? Would the introduction of the surviving Outland flora and fauna be a boon or a bane? I could see the Horde of Kalimdor especially thriving with their introduction, especially the fauna and flora from Nagrand and Terokkar working well to provide the Orcs, Darkspear Trolls, Mag’har and Goblins with plenty of lumber, medicinal supplies, spices and food, but I could also see them being wildly competitive with the local flora, which in turn would have an impact on the local fauna. And even the ‘useful’ animals of Outland, the Wolves, the Talbuk, the Clefthooves, already have analogues on Azeroth that they’ve already interbred with and created much more successful hybrids (Riding Wolves) or are already well-domesticated and adapted to the environment (Kodos basically fulfill the same role as Clefthoof, Talbuk aren’t domesticated but goats, sheep and other ‘exotics’ from other continents can provide much of the same use without needing generations of breeding to be useful as farmstock.) and then we get to the issue of parasites, diseases and behavioral interactions.

And then there’s the issue of unwanted hitch-hikers. Parasites spread disease and are acclimated to specific creatures, who likewise developed countermeasures and suppression of the little bastiges, but what happens when they hit Azeroth, the environment isn’t some dystopian darwinian hellpit, and there’s all these new hosts that have actually literal zero defences against the parasites’ unique brand of shenanigans?

What about the non-aligned races? The enlightened Ogres of the Blades Edge Mountains, the Mok’nathal, the Broken? The hostile ones like the Lost and the non-mutated Ogres, the Gronn, the Arakkoa? Can we honestly just leave them to die slowly in the pitiless Great Dark Beyond, or worse, the churning chaos of the Twisting Nether? While I hold no great love for any of the hostile forces there, we are literally shutting the door and welding it shut and dooming them to eke out a living in a collapsing biosphere with no renewing resources worth a damn, especially drinkable water, surrounded by Ethereals, Demons and Void-Spawn and every other power, Alliance, Horde and Neutral, ripping up everything they can and fleeing through the Dark Portal before destroying the Azeroth side of the damn thing just to make sure it never opens again.

It just occurs to me, with how many horrific monsters, mutant freaks and deranged nutters that are still squatting in Outland, if we start trying to bring people, resources and creatures back, inevitably, we’re gonna end up with a ‘The Thing/Calvin/Xenomorph’ scenario on our hands.

But what are your thoughts?

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I mean, something WoW has failed to properly address since the Cataclysm is the fact the Alliance’s entire non-war based economy has utterly collapsed into ruin to the point in Warlords of Draenor, the farming families of Elwynn Forest from the very start of the game resettle on Draenor because they have been out of work and are desperately seeking better opportunities despite the fact it’s established it could be a one way trip.

So the answer to that question is nobody’s really considering ecological damage because there’s really no one left to consider it. Also post-Cataclysm, Azeroth has been utterly borked anyway so it’s entirely possible these alien species are actually filling voids left in the ecosystem thanks to Deathwing’s temper tantrum.

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My thoughts are nowhere as coherent as yours but I’ve often thought since AU popped up and phasing is a thing…

I would love to see the whole of Azeroth turned into a twisted pretzel that is not what it currently is.

Could they phase the “disappearance” of Outland so that you can visit it leveling/questing/nostalgia/etc and also have it not exist in the current timeline at the same time?

Create an expac that has us visit Outland to dismantle it before it collapses on itself?

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I mean, we’ve seen Portals and Teleporting can go wildly wrong …

The Dark Portal is right near an ocean …

Demonic interference or some other shenanigan happens, the Dark Portal doesn’t just start pulling people and resources through, it inverts and sucks the whole Outland zone into Azeroth and dumps it in the ocean, the continental-sized chunks causing tsunamis that, thankfully due to the placement of mountains on that side of the Eastern Kingdoms, don’t cause too much destruction, but do send out mile-high waves that are gonna mess somebody up.

Maybe Neptulon, Jaina and Thrall can be useful and try to minimize the waves?

But yeah, we’re sitting there realising there’s now a new island chain sitting off the eastern coast of the Eastern Kingdoms and a whole lot of very angry, very traumatized and very frightened people, animals and Elementals now having to deal with being on a planet with an entirely different set of rules and, especially for any Elementals that come along, are now on a planet that is (compared to what they’re used to) overflowing with Spirit and Arcane energies and has a native Elemental population that is :bat::poop: insane and hates itself on a level the occasionally-squabbling Elementals of Outland could only see in their nightmares.

Ooops…

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Instead of Outland, I want us to save AU Draenor and bring it into the prime timeline BEFORE Yrelmageddon gets to happen. Draenor was SO cool, failed expansion otherwise notwithstanding.

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i have been wanting them to add zangramarsh mushroom decor because i specifically wanted Juspion’s house to look like the source of spreading off world invasive mushrooms into the neighborhood lmao. my guy would absolutely be accidentally spreading invasion plants and animals and magics.

Goblin and Gnome joint venture to strip mine the heck out of Outland.

Also Ethereals might be a resource that could help preserve Outland, they could establish domes across Nagrand and as the world collapses and the domes will persist and preserve the natural environment.

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What if we took Outland and PUSH IT SOMEWHERE ELSE???

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We could push it to Inland.

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I don’t know if we’ll ever get it, but I hope Blizzard either just ignores most of Outland (with perhaps Draenei gettin a fully built city in Azeroth somewhere) or progresses the story there enough by either collapsing it entirely or ‘that oughta hold it for another few years duct tape mage scrrrrrrrrpt noise’.

As someone who has characters originating from and still active in Outland, I would much prefer the latter. It’s such a neat place that’s so different from Azeroth, it’d be a shame to just write ‘everyone evacuated and then it imploded’, even if dealing with the consequences of said implosion on Azeroth would be interesting writing.

Folks were born and raised and, presumably, still living in Outland. Blizzard isn’t great at writing ‘what’s been going on in the background since the main heroes were occupied with XYZ’. I’d be surprised if we come to find that they’ve made no progress in trying to figure out how to hold the crumbling bits of rock together…Although on the flip side, I wouldn’t be surprised if Blizz decides they don’t want to deal with it, writing wise, for the foreseeable future and does go the ‘the thing implodes, everyone evacuated’ route.

At some point we’re gonna figure out how the world soul actually works, what The Whole Deal™ is over there, and something something ley lines. Maybe we’ll get some valuable information on how to rebuild Outland with artificial ley lines or something? That’d be neat.

Also, what makes you think we haven’t already ended up with a The Thing/Calvin/Xenomorph scenario.

/neener neeners off into the sunset.

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I agree that it is a lackluster way for such a cool setting to go.

When they say it’s actively dying they never clarify the time scale as far as I’m aware. We know our sun is “dying” but that won’t be for another 5 billion years. Same could be said for Outland, it may explode tomorrow or explode in 5 billion or more years because it’s all held together by magic so who knows.

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What if we drove a really big sword through it?

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I mean, the hilarity of us trying to go there and the Dark Portal instead reroutes us to Kash’money K’aresh where everyone’s favourite Broker has decided to cut out the middle man and just yoink what remains of Draenor and fuse it to the shattered mantle of her Homeworld to try and splice the two ecosystems together to make a functional whole?

The shenanigans we could have…

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Can I put a Hellfire Peninsula space rock in my backyard and turn it into a chicken coop?

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In my opinion, there are two doable options for Outland given our current understanding of how easily things are undone or altered. The first option does not rely on wibbly wobbly timey-wimey interference of traveling back in time and simply assassinating Ner’zhul before he could become an ultimate threat across two worlds, thus creating another divergent timeline.

This option does, however, require an incredible feat of macro-engineering. First, we stop the slow bleed of Outland from eroding into the Twisting Nether by locking in the atmosphere using incredibly large Eco-domes to contain the environment of each of the floating pieces of Outland that are still salvageable.

Next, we retrofit the remaining Legion Warships to travel on an alternate fuel source. These Legion ships will serve as planetary thrusters for the Eco-domes. With the salvageable parts of Outland now encapsulated in Eco-domes and actively fitted with planetary thrusters, we then slowly begin to draw the pieces together and anchor them in place using a combination of Arcane magic, Elemental power, and Ethereal gravitational technology.

The end result would be a techno-organic moon-sized world that could now begin to heal itself. Convincing the Ethereals and Brokers for assistance would have normally been the largest hurdle, but since events during Ghosts of K’aresh, I’m sure we could convince them they “owe us”.

Now that the theoretical how part of saving Outland is out of the way, the next obstacle is the Risk versus Reward debate. What do we actually gain by risking all this effort to save Outland versus evacuating who and what we can before the rest of what is left crumbles apart and becomes space debris in the Twisting Nether?

If we simply choose to allow Outland to die, then one would think evacuation should be priority. However, I’m willing to bet there will be inhabitants who are too proud and too traditional to leave, kind of like Old Nefu of High Mountain during the Legion expansion.

Likewise, if we chose to gather what resources we could, this also presents an array of its own challenges and obstacles.

  1. Dangers associated with large scale resource collection to overall profitability.
  2. Angering remaining locals and elementals into direct confrontation and hostility.
  3. Dangers of inter-dimensional travel carrying hazardously unstable, unrefined materials.
  4. Speeding up the impending planetary disaster.

There seems to be a lot of intricate details associated with whether to save Outland or allow it to die, but at some point, giving some finality to the Fate of Outland would definitely give me a sense of satisfaction to wrap this up in some way or another.

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If I attach a sail to a floating sky island in Nagrand and pilot it like a ship into the Dark Portal, does it immediately stop flying upon crossing over into Azeroth, or is the flying rock attribute inherent to the terrain (e.g. due to wind elemental disruptions) and it will continue to fly in Azeroth’s atmosphere?

We’ve already got some permanently flying rocks on Azeroth post-Cataclysm, so I think my flying rock sky sailing ship is viable. If anyone would like to join me in sailing a rock through an interdimensional portal please meet me at the rock with a tree on it in Nagrand, and bring bedsheets to affix to the tree. It is a plus if you too played Skies of Arcadia as a youth in the aughts and thus cultivated a passion for sky sailboats at a young age. You can come even if you played it on the Dreamcast, even though the Gamecube version is clearly superior since it added a hostile goth girl with a scythe

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I think what would really make it for me is seeing the Orcs - maybe even some Orc mages and shamans working together? - to try and heal the planet they broke. Maybe alongside some Draenei shamans, and maybe even some man’ari? Start building it into a stronghold for Legion remnants.

I think it’d be a great contrast to whenever we get around to finally dealing with Azeroth the world soul and figuring out how to fix whatever planetary problems arise. Save one planet, rebuild another.

It definitely doesn’t need consistent relevance every expansion, but tying up that loose end without trying to…What’s the phrase for ‘I want more story for XYZ but getting attention from Blizzard is both a blessing and a curse’. That.

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