With every expansion from BC to SL, the transition from one to the next, narratively, was pretty clear and logical to me. Going from Cata to Pandaria might be a little less so but the Shadowlands to Dragonflight transition was easily the most incoherent one for me. Okay so we stopped Zovaal and saved Azeroth yet again. Now the Dragon Isles awaken and we must go there? I just don’t see the connection story-wise. Was it explained in novels external to the game or something? Was it just a case of the devs treating SL like a bad dream and just acting like it never happened?
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We head back to Azeroth to deal with unplaguing the Ruins of Lordaeron and after that receive news of the Dragon Isles being accessible allowing us to explore the place for our enjoyment.
While we are getting ready to go there for our Vacation we gain news that the Kirin Tor are going to the Dragon Isles themselves due to the Primalist Threat.
In otherwords the point of the Dragon Isles is that we are going for a Vacation and as an afterthought are aiding the Kirin Tor and Aspects with their Primalist problem(which is clearly going to end with a final battle against Fyrakk at the very least).
The Primalists will leave a fallout in the form of Iridikron working with Xal’atath in corrupting the Earthmother Azeroth into Azshara’s service next Expansion but that is one whole Expansion away.
The theme of this Expansion is Vacation, Dragons and nothing else.
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There was a five-year timeskip between SL and DF. It’s easy to forget that, because they haven’t actually done anything with it.
No, there is no direct lead-in. We had a brief period of relative peace and quiet, and then the islands awoke.
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Theoretically we also went there because that’s where the Primalists have gone, and they launched a bunch of regional elemental attacks in Kalimdor and the EK during the lead-in to the expansion, so presumably we’d like to do something about them so they won’t try to do that again.
Narrative “bridges” between expansions can sometimes be nice, but there’s something to be said for also occasionally showing that a new threat can strike when we aren’t expecting it because it didn’t litter the last expansion with all sorts of spoilers about its approach (we weren’t really on Azeroth for Shadowlands anyway, so it wouldn’t have made a ton of sense to be stumbling across foreshadowing of the Primalists there.)
Technically there was a short time-skip after Shadowlands, meaning the world spent five years or so recovering from the aftermath, likely cleaning up from the Scourge rampaging and presumably using the period of relative peacetime to do some rebuilding from prior conflicts that had been backlogged by the constant back-to-back conflicts of prior expansions.
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Yeah, I did forget about the time jump. The Primalist attacks do make sense as a reason to go to the Dragon Isles. I guess I just didn’t feel there was enough “connective tissue” between SL and DF. I can appreciate a new threat coming out of nowhere. That just hasn’t been their pattern thus far.
I do hope they fill in the gap, narratively, at some point. I was kind of looking forward to the political ramifications of Turalyon becoming de facto leader of the Alliance in the absence of Anduin. Also, the Horde Council, in general, and the Forsaken Council, in particular, seem interesting.
You’re right, there is no explanation as to what woke Koranos up. The Devs don’t even know. Kind of a big deal as we’re moving into the final major patch of the expansion.
So the deal with Shadowlands is that it was pitched as the “final chapter” of its book - which I took to mean that it was the conclusion of all the events that occurred prior to it. Obviously it was not a good final chapter at all, and the only real reason it was is because they retroactively assigned all the bad stuff that happened in the previous chapters to one guy they made up to be killed, but this is what they pitched it as.
The reason Dragonflight is more disconnected from the expansion prior to it is because they are basically starting a new “book” - the loose ends have been (debatably and messily) tied up, and they can move forward with new stories now.
Regardless of my scathing opinions on Shadowlands, and my lackluster ones on Dragonflight, I believe that starting something new, when the last story was essentially a continuous line since MoP at least (Garrosh is overthrown, he brings the Iron Horde, Gul’dan brings the Legion, Sargeras stabs the planet, Sylvanas did BFA for Zovaal), is not a bad thing. The story needed a bookend, and I only wish it was a better bookend.
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Don’t forget we also skipped 5 years forward after shadowlands.
To be honest, the five year timeskip adds almost nothing aside from a few characters are aged up. Time has always been a weird and flux concept in WoW, since they never really commit to a set amount of time from expac A to expac B, and many of the locations just exist in perpetuity as they do in game if the Exploring books are to be believed.
The five year timeskip really isn’t anything of substance or consequence. It’s just an arbitrary five years of nothing at all.
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A time skip would really only matter when an expansion with a world revamp is done.
We would see, feel and play in the world with all the news these 5 years would give us. But as of now the time slip is just a number that means little for the players.
it was probably done to normalize faction relations. Like use it as a “See? its been 5 years since the armistice, no war so there is no need to fight”
They should have a loading screen between Orinoe that says “oh this is gonna take a while”. Then when you load in an NPC says “broooo it’s been five yearsssss”
Wasn’t a 3 year time skip after shadowlands lasting 2 years no?
Well it certainly ended one part of the story. That being said,
- The Burning Legion could return,
- Sargeras is locked away but he could come back,
- Old Gods are still around,
- The Void is still there, whispering to Void Lords and who knows who else,
- The Light has to decide if they will ever talk to Anduin again,
Still plenty of things that are unresolved.
If Shadow Lands was meant to be an end of Book I of WoW, why is Dragon Flight effectivly a sequel to The Cataclysm expanion?
Shadow Lands wasn’t the end of anything.
I am only telling you what Blizzard described it as. I don’t particularly agree with it either, but moreso due to the fact that it was just such a lackluster ending that used the events of former, better expansions to prop itself up, and it ended up detracting from the universe more than it added. When a story is so reviled that people clamor for it to be decanonized, it should not be the final chapter of anything.
Further than that, while DF utilizes many similar themes and characters that Cata did, I would hardly call it a sequel. Cata was largely centered around the Hour of Twilight, whereas DF is largely centered around the Incarnates and the Titans. Compare it to WoD to Legion, or BFA to SL, where the events of the former directly tie into the events of the latter.
A “sequel” revolves more around a continuous series of events. While DF uses many things Cata helped establish, it’s not really a sequel in the same fashion as those others.
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The ‘final chapter of a book’ thing was largely a idea Blizzard’s PR pushed after FFXIV marketing came out with a similar (and more valid) gist to it. Never really made much practical sense, nor was it a thing the developers really thought as far as I’ve read.
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As someone who’s played through all of FFXIV, it’s so infuriating they even attempted this. Endwalker EARNED its status as a final chapter to its story, and it closed things out really well. Shadowlands believed it could simply inherit that status by piggybacking off older and better stories.
It needs to be studied in classes on how NOT to write a serialized narrative.
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You can tell because they didn’t call Shadowlands the “end of the book” for the first couple patches. it was only after Endwalker was announced that they started calling 9.2 that.
I think it’s the pinnacle of hubris that they had the audacity to call 9.2 “Eternity’s End” - as in the same name as the ending cutscene of WC3, where the wisps blew up Archimonde.
Like Zereth Mortis is anywhere near on par with anything that was in WC3. It has the same vibe as Sonic ‘06 being named “Sonic the Hedgehog.”
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