For Darkshore and Silithus Zidormi offers a timeline option to before the destruction of Darnassus and the N’Zoth attacks respectively by default without having to do a complex quest chain to access it. I’m not sure why this isn’t also the case in Vale but it would be fun to at least add a timeline to Zidormi in Vale that let’s players go back in time to the beginning of MoP before the Vale was scarred at the end of MoP. Currently it’s not possible for players to experience Vale as it existed at the beginning of MoP, at it’s most stunning state IMO.
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Same. It really bugs me because I loved old Vale. I imagine new players don’t want to read about how beautiful it was; they want to see it, experience it.
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AD discusses this problem at the moment as well. Most people don’t treat the change as important, because time does not matter unless it’s a big change (30-100 years into the future), with the majority of players accepting to ignore Shadowlands completely.
Nothing truly changes for the RPers, because there are not enough justification to accept these changes. Treat your characters without a timeskip, because SL was not this important for regular RPers and only Death Knights will profit from this expansion going forward.
The problem is at this point we have see have seen some events that rebuild places like quest lines like the battle for andorhal or the warfront in stromgard. There are even other things like in bfa the mission table says that the alliance retook southshore. I understand wanting to keep the bigger things like gilneas to a patch but some of these things happened in cata like helping clear out a flood with sandbags for almost 12 years in menethil harbor and sentinel hill being on fire for 12 years just because of a small force of gnolls, or even the retaking of stratholm that has happened a number of times in 3 different quests ( classic, cata and the paladin order hall campaign), my point is just a lot of things have been said that they have changed but nothing has been seen in game in over 12 years with the exception of Anduin going up.
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I feel like there were a couple predictable reactions to a Blue Post.
Some people were like : “That is neat. I am glad to see direct discussion from the Devs. I appreciate clarification. I do not need Blizz to tell me things I want to hear every time - but it does help when they explain their reasons for their actions, whether I like the actions or not.”
And then others were like : “Now is my chance to list every Lore complaint I have, because Blue Eyes are on this thread!”
Blizzard will not always make decisions I agree with. I can appreciate they have a design vision, as long as they take the time to clarify and explain it, if it becomes muddled.
I mentioned in another thread that I get the vibe Blizzard is trying to put the Old Guard on a shelf and raise up a new cast of characters. The Time Skip certainly would help with that.
Veressa’s twins will be older. The Orphans from the Orphan Quest. Dagran Jr. And three years will be enough time to see Finel old enough to walk and talk - maybe even be the new Orphan quest kid for Children’s Week that Alliance people help.
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Hopefully, that nonsense about Malfurion isn’t going to happen. One of the most barely used characters in the game goes out like this? That’s just a terrible decision and bad story telling. Don’t do it. Ysera is boring
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Yes, and can we get Zidormi in a zone to show the “after” major quest chains are resolved? There are great quest chains that majorly impact zones, and not many come to mind where the changes stick - like the “go thin the pack” quests resulting in no change to the number of enemies. And tie it to the zone achievement completion. And on other toons that havent completed it, all they need to do to get Zidormi to appear/get resolved map is unlock the explore achievement for the zone (which happens when you use the heirloom map toys). Maybe this is a bit much, but there it is.
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I see it as a new design idea change. Vanilla, TBC, Wrath / Cata, MoP, WoD / Legion, BFA, SL / DF.
Though you could argue WoD was in the third grouping, whatever, it was a testbed and transition if anything.
This. Steve saying we deserve to see it in game does not confirm we ever actually will.
With Phasing and Chromie Time/Zidormi; this is no longer an acceptable excuse from the devs. You don’t even need new quests and such, just small changes. For example: They could easily turn the fires at Sentinel Hill off and move some NPCs around for the phase once you have completed all the quests there. But as it currently stands Sentinel Hill has been on fire for the past 12 years in game.
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Would have been nice to see this stuff, not just have it handwaved offscreen. I dunno. Whatev. Just seems like this doesn’t serve much point to us.
Anyway, it’s fine. My only really big problem with a time skip is if Orgimmar is STILL half finished from Cata.
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I appreciate someone coming out to confirm this, and I don’t mean to come off as a negative nancy or combative, but… This doesn’t work.
The idea of a Time Skip is, of course, fine and dandy. It’s good and healthy even. I actually even understand the sentiment of major events should happen in game for players to see. And I have to take into account that we don’t know what the pre-patch event is, so said pre-patch events could address some of this.
But just using Night Elves as an example, it’s been 5 years since Shadowlands. That’s 7 years since BFA. But even if we cut it down to 6 years…
The Night Elves grew Teldrassil and built Darnassus in under 4 years. It doesn’t make sense for them to still be homeless or refugees. Even if it means putting some of the massive NE skyscrapers from Darnassus in the Stormwind Park as temporary housing, there are just some literal lore issues that contradict this in spirit.
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.
I’d also like to address this and remind everyone that A) We aren’t normal citizens, and B) Even with that being said, us going on an exploration of Dragon Isles is us being “normal”. We are adventurers. For the first time since Classic, our characters are doing what Adventurers do. Go on an adventure for the sake of adventure. No big threat, no great destruction. Just to explore, see new things, and enjoy the world.
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Thank you for clarifying about the time skip and giving concrete numbers.
Please do give us a chance to see parts of these changes in the game. Please don’t use this to sweep important character and plot developments under the rug with a “character/place that was ‘X’ is now ‘Y’ because I say so, and don’t worry about how it happened”… like what was done with that slipshod Mag’har recruitment scenario plot in BfA.
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In the timeskip between WC3 and WoW Orgrimmar was built, Teldrassil was grown, Thunder Bluff Established…in the DF timeskip Night Elves are still refugees, Gilneas is unclaimed, Orgrimmar is still incomplete, and all the ruins and damage of Cataclysm is still around.
Sorry Steve but it just doesn’t fly. Things change with time.
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Thank you. I really appreciate the time you have taken to level-set with the community.
On a broad level, I completely understand what you’re doing, and appreciate where you are trying to get the story. My opinion is this isn’t the expansion to do it in for two reasons: 1) Blizzard established that more happens in Shadowlands than in the passage of time on Azeroth, which is better represented with no time having passed between the players and select NPCs going into, and then coming out of the Shadowlands; and 2) the discrepancy caused by this disparity is great narrative grist, because you now have what is essentially the “Dove” NPCs having had more time to process their trauma than the “neutral” and “Hawk” NPCs. This fast-tracks a lot of grist. For instance:
- Tyrande and Shandris have come to terms with the events of the War of Thorns and the Fourth War, but her people wouldn’t have had that time. This raises the bar on Tyrande’s task.
- Jaina and Genn Graymane would be far more amenable to any horde outreach the Turalyon and the Alliance/Stormwind would still be reeling.
- Anduin not coming back would throw Turalyon and Shaw into crisis.
- The Horde would struggle with Baine and Thrall’s trust in the Alliance.
So now you take this ticking bomb and you play it through Dragonflight (even if it doesn’t resolve, it’s still lurking about in the shadows of your narrative. Then you have the five year time-skip. And now you have 6? 7 years advancing the major NPCs, and you’ve had an entire expansion to sneakily move various plot elements (Stromgarde, Scarlet Crusade, Army of Light, AU Draenor) into position.
I think we need to remember that while the 5 year time skip has given the local NPCs a respite, the players don’t get that, and we’re still the POV characters in our engagement with the game. And my character has seen some [expletive deleted]. and really just wants to go back to doing what she set out to do all those years ago when she first stepped foot onto the shores of Darkshore some 15 years prior - to restore balance. And ever since the defeat of Arthas, she has been on a “George Jetson treadmill” of one existential crisis after another basically fixing problems caused by the bad decisions of people in power. So if Dragonflight will be our (relatively speaking) “downtime” expansion, I think my druid deserves a 7 year respite, where she can just explore the world and be excited for new lands, just like when she took her first steps into a wider world and just do that for 7 years before some dingbat in a position of authority decides to pee in the interfactional pool.
I mean, it’s not a dealbreaker at all. just a difference of opinion. I have more concerns about Malfurion, and I beg your indulgence as I take advantage of the opportunity.
For the love of storytelling, please do not kill or bargain away Malfurion. Just no more “trauma p*0n,” please. The well is dry. And let’s decouple Ysera from the night elves for a bit. I mean, you’re missing a great opportunity to transform Ysera into the Aspect of the Great Cycle, but if that’s where you were going with it, then really Elune should infuse part of herself into Ysera, so Ysera is connected to both entities. I am living for the cinematic Terran Gregory could devise with that. So let’s keep Malfurion grounded in the story of Azeroth, and not the cosmos.
However, in general, we need more positivity going for the night elves, and I am on board with “corporate couple” Tyrande and Malfurion - two “executives” trying to carve out moments of privacy in the midst of their responsibility. So how better than to use Malfurion to explore how the night elves and the druids fit into this Great Cycle. So instead of making Malfurion leave as a sacrifice, he volunteers to spend time in Ardenweald, not only to understand the Great Cycle, and to bring those teachings back to the druids, but to help rally and organize the Night Elf souls in Ardenweald and int he Shadowlands. You could have an entire book trilogy (to cap the Well of Eternity) to explore Ardenweald, the Great Cycle, the druids’ role, the night elves’ fates (all stuff you just can’t play through). Does knowing their goddess has a sister now change the night elves’ religion? How does the night elf afterlife work? Were they always tending the great cycle but didn’t know it until after death? Will there be night elf souls in the life realm Elune oversees (and I suspect the Emerald Dream is just a portion of that)? But I digress. The plea remains - if Malfurion needs to exit stage left for a bit, don’t make it cheap melodrama. Don’t cheapen him like how you did to Teldrassil because of a mistaken belief that only sad things are good storytelling. Give Malfurion and Tyrande agency. Yeah, they can be tired of having to carry the world on their shoulders, but this has been their MO for over 10,000 years; and in the end, let them be the victim of their own arrogance and pride - refusing to delegate so they can have time for each other and paying the price via their lonely, nigh eternal separation.
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That was my first reaction, was “Nah, I’m gonna ignore it.”
The problem is, I super regularly play interconnected storylines with two other people, and more loosely/occasionally with many more. They should get a say too. We’ll pretty much have to all three be on the same page for the sake of story continuity. Then we also participate in server-wide projects and guilds. So far, the guild that two of us also participate in will be going with the timeskip, so anything connected to the ongoing guild plots is going to assume a three-year gap. If we were going to all three opt our characters out of recognizing the sudden passage of time, that is going to put our characters significantly out of step with vast swaths of the larger server community. Mismatched timelines is much harder to avoid than politely skirting the issue of “hey, how about that afterlife, huh?” because having three years pass for people would realistically touch on every single part of their lives, even if somehow, magically, not having a major world crisis meant that every single person in the world also didn’t have a personal crisis or change in the meantime.
This is the “hand grenade” effect that I was referring to, where everyone has to now scramble to come up with a plan for the last three years for their characters, projects, guilds and communities. And the effort and the hassle just makes me mad, that our stories that we’ve been making together for years are being futzed with and derailed for the sake of Danauser not having the patience to play with new narrative toys before he fills the story with his own action figures to make it more “his”.
I didn’t need Metzen’s story and I don’t need Danauser’s story to dictate what happens in mine. But because it is a huge, interconnected world and the entire point is to play off of other people instead of just writing my own stories solo is to let the input of other people and random happenstance affect what happens to my characters, if the overwhelming majority of other roleplayers that I play off of are recognizing the skip because they’re excited to have their character wear an eyepatch and grow a mustache to show the passage of time, I’ll have to also. If it weren’t for the people and situations that my characters had experienced in the last few years, driven by other real players, they’d be in sometimes vastly different places than where they are now. And having to just fast-forward over a few years of their lives that I wanted to play out makes me super mad.
The game’s plot has never reached in and forced the hand of my personal roleplay before, and the fact that it is now just strikes me as being blithely disrespectful. Danauser is godmodding us, basically. Railroading our plots in a way that the continuous game’s story never has before, forcing a twist in a game where time clearly passes in annual increments, just so that the story can play out exactly how he has it in his head without having to wait for whatever characters he wants to traipse about to be slightly older.
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Was my initial reaction. But honestly? If they aren’t going to actually show that three years passed in game, I’m probably going to ignore it
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Hi Steve. Thank you for making this post, we really aprecciate it. Void elves have been in the game for years, and received no lore since then, can we expect some changes in Telogrus rift, maybe some buildings there or elsewhere? Void elves need a real city and more lore.
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you know, the sad thing here is that the alliance is never allowed to reclaim their lands and retake it by force, nah, they must wait to be it regiven, they are allways on the mercy on the horde in this situations.
See ashenvale…it will be regiven or the night elves will not be able to push the horde entirely out, or the worgen, they must be have the patient to be allowed to return to gilneas by the forsaken…
it seems not fair…
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girl? you are talking about something you don’t even have a clue…
first there is only one emperor and that guy is Sheev Palpatine, Darth Vader had little to no political power in the empire, he was an enforcer of the emperor from the get go, he was below most Moffs and oficials in the upper ranks of the empire until the destruction of the first death star. he had some specials powers granted by the emperor during the Galactic Civil War, but if the emperor had died before the destruction of the second death star most moffs would brand him a traitor and persecute him, he was totally dependent on the emperor and to tarkin to a lesser extend.
Darth Vader and alot of other moffs where against the construction of the Death Star, it was the Tarkin doctrine and the emperor’s will that made it happen, Grand Admiral Thrawn even said that the amount of resources alocated to the death Star over the 2 decades that take to construct it, would be better used in the construction of fleets and small patrol ships that would control crime and insurgents, thing that a single battle station could not, even if it was a planet killer station.
and finally the doctrine of the rule of two was not something that mattered to the empire, palpatine intended to live forever, and he saw vader as a failed apprentice, both knew that each other wanted from the get go, that is the nature of the sith, the nature of the relation they had with each other, not their relation to the empire.
the empire was a means to an end.
Upon further reflection, I am greatly disappointed an event like Lor’themar and Thalyssra’s wedding won’t take place in-game for players to fully witness and will be relegated to a short story that will likely not do it justice.
We’re talking about the leaders from the two most regal and lavish elves on Azeroth marrying; it should be a grand spectacle with a small but adequate questline, cutscenes, and elven music composed especially for the event.
On one hand, yes, it’s nice to have plot advancement for the characters I like, but not if it’s ultimately squandering a moment that could be experienced in-game to greater effect.
I’d rather wait years for it to be done justice in-game than it to be sort of sent to die in a short story. I guess the most I could hope for is some artwork of Thalyssra and Lor’themar, but even that’s not certain.