Extremely debatable. Obviously the presence of any forces after the initial suicide mission demonstrates that limited portal magic was still workable. That guards in Stormshield complained about not being able to go home shows that it was truly limited, but it certainly wasn’t impossible. Given their importance, PCs could certainly get back and forth. Mages, especially.
Actually, I think the original MoP patch had a similar thing. Very limited transport back and forth until Landfall.
Which is built on top of the Dark Portal ruins.
Yeah. Though the Black Gate seems to have lead to the Twisting Nether or maybe Argus rather than Azeroth initially? At least until Archimonde adjusted it last minute before it collapsed.
Right.
But a portal is a portal is a portal.
Location is the hard part. But the two timelines were connected via the Sands of Time or Vision of Time or W/E that thing was called.
So going to a different place with the portal? Possible. Going to a different time? Not without another Vision used as an anchor point.
While it won’t happen for obvious reasons, it would be kind of neat if the time skip happened as the expansion goes on. First major patch, Stromgarde is rebuilt. Second patch, Night Elves and Forsaken have secured new homes. Maybe some characters have aged (including Moira’s kid).
The Kirin Tor made another portal just outside of Stormwind that a Genesaur passed through.
I honestly felt that WOD would have led to a reboot, so I wouldn’t mind seeing it now. But I don’t think WoW needs a soft reboot, it needs a hard “WoW 2.0” with all the stuff they’ve learned over the years but not going so far away from the RPG aspect. Imagine like the concepts of Classic WoW but in a modern game.
So something that is impossible to do
But not a different time.
But even beyond that.
After the disruption of the Dark Portal, the Kirin Tor realized that to fight the Iron Horde on their own soil, they would need a supply line for reinforcements. Thus they created outposts across Draenor with magical links back to Azeroth. Unfortunately, what seemed a prime strategic location near Blackrock Foundry was known to the botani as The Everbloom, a sacred place within the Gorgrond woodlands. The outpost was quickly overgrown, but it still contains a link to the outskirts of Stormwind
There was still some sort of anchor point/link that they used. We just don’t know what. But remember that WoD was also establishing that mages could emulate bronze flight via Timewalkers and even gave mages time spells
Indeed. Khadgar himself used a spell called Call of the Timewalker during the legendary ring questline.
A hard reboot would be nice but I sure as hell along with many others, don’t trust these current writers to not massively make things worse.
Hell the horde has so Little to justify its current existence, I’d hate for blizzard to go back in time and show daelin was right early on, grom purposely drank demon blood again with the sole intention of damning his people and then being its hero to steal the horde from thrall.
Varian always strived for peace with the horde until thrall let Garrosh ruin it etc. etc. the alliance tried to help the bloodelfs in bc but trolls sabotaged their efforts to push them into the arms of the horde, thinking it kill them.
These are the same people who made lightforged undead calia.
I’m erring towards hopeful. I think that the plot has hit such a nadir that it would be very hard for a reboot to make it worse. Like, seriously, what could they do that would irritate players more than BfA?
Edit: Oh damn, I shouldn’t have put that out there like a challenge.
Further edit:
This is a fair point. Remember when Blizzard was all, “The next warchief will be quite a surprise!” and we were all, “It’s Vol’jin,” and they were like “You don’t know that! It could be anyone!” So they could be teasing the timeskip for no good reason. My OP was assuming that they have a coherent plan. That is quite an assumption, in retrospect.
I gave some thought to this, but I don’t think the ability to portal back means much. Ion specifically chose the term “chaotic” to describe the flow of time in the Shadowlands, so if they want to have it so that, for example, we defeat the Jailor and suddenly 5 years have passed the next time we are on Azeroth, they could do it.
I have to disagree. I was active on the forum, and while Vol’jin was a discussed canidate, he wasn’t the frontrunner of speculated future Warchiefs. Thrall and Baine were discussed more than Vol’jin was at the time of that statement.
This was before a Dagger in the Dark was released. It’s easy to look back at the lore now and see Vol’jin was the built up canidate, but at the time of the tweet, he was not the most speculated option, though was like top three or five.
Actually, I think it was this tweet that led to Vol’jin becoming the most popularly discussed choice.
When I made that comment, it was more aimed at “you’ll totally be surprised who burns the tree, you won’t see it coming”.
I think it is fair to preface the answer with the question to understand what Ion meant. Especially the full transcript (I just jotted down from the video, so excuse typos.
It looks like time runs differently in the Shadowlands than in Azeroth. Maybe that’s why Uther, Kael’thas and other characters have been there for ages when it has been just a few years in Azeroth. How does time go by in Shadowlands and what does that mean for our characters.
So, I had to, this is something I’ve actually been actually asking our lead narrative designer Steve Danuser about because I had this same question a couple of weeks ago. The answer is complicated. It’s not like some science fiction movies where in a black hole or something time just moves faster. But time is different in the Shadowlands. Time is a construct of order and structure. And things in the Shadowlands are more chaotic in a lot of ways. Think about how times moves in a dream where there isn’t necessarily a fixed amount of time or things move and bounce around. So the souls that have been in the Shadowlands, to them it might feel like they’ve been here for a very, very long time as they’ve gone on their own personal journies of discovery and evolution. But it’s not necessarily 2x faster or 3x faster, time is different. And what does that mean for our characters? Well that’s something we’ll have to see as we come out the other end.
The way he talks about it more just seems like an explanation for how characters talk about stuff (much like Turalyon and Alleria were given nether time dilation for A Thousand Years of War, but it didn’t change much either).
I do think his last statement teases the possibility of a time skip, especially if he felt the need to ask Danuser to explain. But I think more likely a way of making the characters seem like they’ve dealt with a longer time in the afterlife.
IF they do a timeskip I wonder how long it will be and how it would affect the rp communities as a whole. Like people who rp having children. when they return will they have adult kids now? What about the races that don’t live for hundreds to thousands of years how much will that affect things? And if they did do a time skip how much time in the old world would they invest?
Almost every expansion a dev says something that alludes to the potential of a time skip and every expansion it never happens yet people still speculate to death thinking one could happen.
We’re actually getting close to the literal definition of insanity at this point I think.
Even if Blizzard added a time skip, anything less than several decades wouldn’t do much for the population.
Not with Azeroth’s magical reproduction rates. Exhibit A: the Bilgewater Cartel. Exhibit B: Void Elves. Exhibit C: Pretty much every other playable race except the dwarves.
On Azeroth, a few years is all you need to build/rebuild and populate/repopulate a major city (c.f. Orgrimmar, Stormwind)!
I don’t know if this is another Teldrassil situation or if Blizzard is actually going to deliver. However, I think a timeskip would be good for the story.
A major problem with WoW’s story is that there isn’t any peace. I get that it’s an MMO and it’s literally called “Warcraft”, but there needs to be a period where people rebuild and populations grow. A couple of decades would do that, and it would also give more time for new threats to arise.