I feel like they know they’ve reached the end of interesting stories they feel they can tell and have more or less written themselves into a corner, so having any sort of major time skip makes me feels as though they intend to soft reboot the setting, as a way to wipe away any lingering threads to the past and say ‘here this is the new story’.
Frankly I dislike time skips in general, so I’m not really a fan of it potentially being a thing.
Why does this always pop up every time a new expansion drops. I’ve not seen a single time skip from any of the expansions, they all generally follow the same rough 2 year time frame.
On one hand I’ve always hated how every big thing that happens in expansions are basically chronologically back to back, with at most maybe a year or two between them; on the other…basically Suyo’s imported post.
If their going to move time on Azeroth forward for more than a year don’t do it behind the scenes.
Probably because there was an interview and Ion specifically non-answered in a way that suggested it was on the table. Presuming all the paraphrased information is accurate in context, I haven’t watched it.
I mean, as with all things, he could have misspoke. He could be lying to generate hype. But he did say something that caused a reaction, it’s not just baseless. Not entirely at least.
Now, if you wanna ask “why does anyone care what anyone at blizzard says anymore because they’ve literally lied to our faces before”, I can get behind it.
Here is the summery wowhead posted, but you can probably watch the whole interview and I believe there are youtube videos up on the subject.
Time Passing in the Shadowlands
It’s complicated.
There isn’t a fixed amount of time like 3x or 10x faster like in a sci-fi movie. It’s more chaotic.
What does that mean for the player? We’ll have to see when we come out the other end.
rofl that is such a non comment about nothing
“Time is different there but I’m not saying how, its complicated, you won’t find out until later”
Like… people were already going to speculate on that so what was the point?
WoW desperately needs to extract itself from the dying corpse of Warcraft 3’s plot, so in that respect, I’m all in favor of a time skip. Shadowlands is kind of a step in the right direction in that regard.
I just don’t think they’ll really do it. “How does time work in Shadowlands” is such a weirdly specific question with such a deliberately vague answer that it makes me think it’s a deliberate plant, like Metzen’s question was at Blizzcon, but that sounds like one of those things that the money people will overrule as being “too confusing.”
I have mixed feelings about it. I think I’d like something just five or ten years into the future (give me a chance to gray up Chentao fully instead of halfway, eh?). It’s exciting in some degrees; you can start up relatives and/or offspring of your current characters for plots down the line. On the other hand, for shorter-lived races (like Pandaren), time takes a lot more of a toll on our narrative. If it’s a skip fifty years into the future, many of us won’t have the characters we’ve come to love over the years. But we’ll also have the chance to play on their legacies.
It would be nice if they pulled a GW2 and just slid the whole damned thing a couple of centuries into the future. Start off fresh while letting prior events inform the new setting without having such an iron-clad grip on it.
But, like GW2, if they were to do that it needs to be in a sequel title. Plenty of people here have professed a distaste for time skips and forcing them into it in the current game would be unfair.
I think that’s probably the only realistic way to do it, if only from a logistics standpoint. You’d have to remake or update substantial portions of the world and story to actually “sell” a time skip, and that stuff is probably beyond the scope of a WoW expansion. Cata attempted it to only middling success, so I’m not convinced that it’s even realistically possible.
Though, Cata was ten years ago at this point. They’ve presumably gotten better at doing a lot quickly, so who knows.
My biggest hope is that, since Cata is said to have flopped because of the lack of end game content rather, the new World Quest system can mean that working on the whole world is working on (a significant part of) the endgame content.
If they do a time skip I would bet that it will function like a new continent, just as past AU Draenor functions like a new continent rather than overwriting Outland cata-style. That way you wouldn’t have the Cata issue where content gets deleted and the scope of the continents is set–they could break Azeroth up into chunks depending on how much they want to release/revamp at a time.
It’s difficult for me to have an opinion on this topic, because it does not impact me or my roleplay too drastically. That said I wouldn’t be too thrilled to return to Azeroth to find that 20+ years have gone by, favorite heroes have perished, whole governments have been reformed, and the world is in chaos.
If the aim of a time skip is to revamp the world of Azeroth in the absence of the “Champion of Azeroth” and knock the player-character reputation down a couple of pegs so we’re not so god-tier anymore upon our return, then I think I would be okay with that. Something feasible like 1-10 years into the future, where lost cities could be rebuilt, zones updated, and so forth. Maybe the “Champion of Azeroth” is thought to have perished in the Shadowlands and our characters get to go out and discover their new role in the World of Warcraft upon their return.
That I could see executed in a decent and potentially favorable way. Once you cross into multiple decades for a time skip, it can and will ruin a lot of rich roleplay potential.
“The Ashran portals aren’t IC!”
NGL, as much as I try to hype up The Skip, it is mostly for the fact that so much of the story has been flubbed for the sake of ‘Cool Raid Mechanics’ that pulling a reset, Hard or Soft, is basically the best way forwards for WoW that I can see.
Players getting stranded in an alternate timeline and knowing their old timeline has been ‘folded in’ to entrap N’Zoth after he corrupted our version of the Heart of Azeroth, or that our timeline always was an alternate one and we’ve been brought into the ‘real’ one by the Bronze Dragonflight because we’re useful and we’re now running around alongside Alternate versions of our former enemies and allies because the main timeline keeps running out of heroes, or time is so fundamentally broken after so many world-altering disasters stacked on-top of each other in less than a decade that the past, present and future are bleeding into each other and our fate is now to be forever running back and forth to keep the timeline from collapsing in on itself ala a singularity.
As long as they don’t remove the current Cataclysm version of the zones from the game, I’m totally down for a kind of time skip where we go ahead and have some things fixed throughout the Eastern Kingdoms and Kalidmor while also dealing with new, different issues.
If the timeskip is reasonable - say 3 or 4 years - I probably won’t mind so much. Any longer than that though, and yeah - some of my toons storylines are going to need…“tweaking.”
I’d love a time skip tbh, in part because I feel the world needs it. Azeroth gets shat on harder and harder with every passing year.
That said, there’s no way there WILL be a timeskip, I reckon. I can’t see Sylvanas going to live in a tent for 10 years only to re-emerge later on. Shadowlands is obviously going to directly and immediately follow BFA.
We comeback from the Shadowlands to see Azerite has spread and is a corruption of the land. Huge pillars of Azerite are all over the place and species have evolved in a similar way Night Elves did from Trolls. Towns and Capitals are overgrown and have fallen apart with no one to keep up maintenance.
I want to come back to something nice. Maybe the Draenei have built a city and allow flying. Maybe the Forsaken set up a new capital “New Lordaeron” in Howling Fjord, Northrend. Maybe the Night Elves grew a new tree that’s been trained to slap approaching catapults. Give us something wholesome Blizz. D:
Edit: It’d be cool if the Draenei actually salvaged a part of Mac’Aree and rebuilt it on Azuremyst. It was already sorta floating - that’d be friggen awesome.