We need one after constant back to back crises but if it’s simply shown and not told, if the world is still locked in Cata temporal stasis, then what is the point?
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Really hoping this isn’t going to be the only information we get relating to it. It’ll be like people not getting WoD all over again.
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A full world revamp is a lot of work, so I can understand that Blizz doesn’t want to jump into that.
I do hope that they at least include a lot of “Westfall Brigade”-style groups: minor NPCs that the player has met in past content appearing again, who explain a little of what has happened in the intervening time. It’s not as good as letting the players play through events, but it’s still a lot better than learning about the story in a tweet or just never learning about it at all.
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I can’t help but feel like at least a little environmental change is necessary for the time skip to actually matter. Certainly not something along the lines of Cata, but something small, like the refugees being gone from Stormwind and Orgrimmar. Maybe a budding new settlement pops up here and there; something that physically reflects the passage of time more than a few easily missed lines here and there.
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I think the biggest thing is that the old world just feels old. Most of the zones have been exactly the same for years and years now and feel frozen in time. Of course I think a big revamp like Cata is improbable and something that the team won’t really do again, but at the same time I feel like a good path to go down would be those incremental changes. Update a few zones every expac or even patch and soon enough you end up with a world that feels alive.
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So, how are you all going to deal with this for your characters?
The cynic inside me thinks the time skip is primarily so they can point to it and say “Look how much time passed!” when people ask why a certain character is coming back from the dead almost immediately after they died. Or for Sylvanas to come back and say she finished her community service. So actually changing the world isn’t really on the radar. It’s about covering bases for doing things with characters the plot would otherwise resist.
Just going to treat the last four years since the start of BfA canon instead of squishing together the last four Winter Veil celebrations into two.
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We actually get years things take place!?!
This is actually a good day for RPers haha.
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Ignoring the thread you yourself commented in, smh
I actually considered this briefly and decided at least for Zhao that I would finally make her a full Monk. Her story for the last few years now was her catching up on her training, and so I figure if she’s had close to a decade now to do that I might as well give it to her.
Might not even acknowledge it for any others, though. I can’t imagine what I’d even do for a lot of my major characters, since the state I left them when I last left was open enough to where the skip wouldn’t matter much regardless.
Addendum: As most of my most major characters are Nelves, including an undead one, I don’t see five years making a huge impact on them anyway, unless I decided to give them some big event to work through during that time. There was something I’ve been considering on an off, though, maybe writing something for some characters to show how things are going in the interim, but I’m not sure if I’m willing to put time away for that.
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Uhhh it depends.
For my younger characters it’s no big issue. Five years isn’t too bad and I can come up with some realistic stories and things that will occur for my characters. Rose here will probably just be chilling in Kul Tiras, maybe go travelling around the world again. I could lean more into the “obsessed over dragons” trait that she has more now as lead up to DF so that’s fun.
However this puts me in a pickle as I have some characters who are much much older and the five years kinda don’t do me a favor in terms of keeping them alive and relevant. I really don’t wanna kill off some characters but the fact that a whole five years has past? My now nearly 65 year old first war veteran Orc is gonna be more cranky and old man energy which could be fun to play around with.
Like I said in the other thread, Norman is going fishing.
I don’t see any need to even acknowledge time at all for any purpose in how I RP him. It’s never been relevant to his story because he just lives in the now.
5 years or 5 days or 5 pieces of jalapeno cornbread. It’s all happening at the same time.
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Since it doesn’t sound like Danuser wants to make any visible changes to cities that won’t occur as a play-through, the time skip isn’t going to have off-screen environmental changes that we’ll see upon logging in, other than younger characters aging (he mentioned that). I kind of understand it, but it’d also be nice to see some freshness in the cities.
I doubt any of my characters are going to care much about the time skip. I’m not going to bother defining what they did in the 5 years, other than being in Azeroth. I probably won’t make any changes off-screen.
i understand that a full on Cata revamp is never going to happen but there really are smaller, incremental changes they need to make if they want to sell that a time skip actually happened.
Age up NPCs. Show that time actually passed. Restore Brill so it isn’t constantly under construction, age up those kids in Stormwind who chase each other because they stole their siblings’ toy. Am I supposed to believe night elf refugees just sat in Stormwind twiddling their thumbs for five years? Even if they’re still in Stormwind, give them an area of the city they’ve made their own in the intervening time instead of huddling on the streets.
A time skip requires commitment, not just saying it happened without doing anything.
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I’m confused. How am I ignoring the thread?
Welp. Daddy Gen is a go, then.
Time to stop, heal, breathe … get roped into shenanigans that don’t involve a weekly apocalypse. And find out along the way that he became a dad and needs to get a job now.
Older characters will likely have retired, or passed on. Dealing with his own father having died will be a trip for Gen, since we went to Death Itself, the Shadowlands, and his entire belief system just did not exist
Will also give the newer generation of characters time to mature and grow into their roles, so Gatt Dangus am I going to have to start pumping out short stories for myself like crazy …
Overall, I like this concept, and there’s plenty of reasons for characters to have not aged personally during this time period. Exposure to Azerite, going to a different plane of existence, Elf, Draenei, undead, siphoning life energy through blood or fel magic, secretly three Mecha-Gnomes in a trench-coat, etc etc.
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“There has always been some amount of time passing between expansions, though rarely has it been called out in game. We maintain an internal timeline of what year each expansion begins, and the gap between them has either been one year (as with earlier expansions) or two years (as with most of the later ones).”
So potentially 2 years between BfA and SL (2 years of scourge purge?), then 2 years IN SL (is that right?) + 5 years = Potentially 9 years since the end of BfA.
2 years between Legion and BfA, then?
Imagine if they just put a new canon timeline out in graphic form rather than these vague posts.
2 years… with MOST of the later ones.
WHICH. ONES.
edit: oh, 3 years since + 2 years in = 5, so if 2 yrs from BfA = 7 … i think
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Let’s do a quick poll!
If you will take the time to answer this ONE question, I’ll post the results tomorrow (and update later if more folks decide to answer):
This will give us a general idea of how WrA will deal with it.
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Practice my Kul Trian accent I suppose, since five years is long enough to “go native”, especially since I haven’t been active in Shadowlands at all, so presumably Vanndrel’s been settling in Stormsong.
Probably have a little farm somewhere (Likely growing his own Dutotar Black/Peon Leaf since I doubt it’s viewed very favorably in Kul Tiras) while working with the Admiralty in continuing to clear out the lingering tainted members of the Tidesages and Azshara’s agents in the region.
Only time in the man’s life that has been remotely stable was when he was serving Lady Jania. After giving himself over to rabid nationalism that ended up with him exiled and dang near transformed into a corridor for Things That Should Not Be, I figure he’s probably keen on reclaiming a bit of normalcy.
And, assuming I make the plunge with Dragonflight, 5 years is enough time of Vanndrel to start getting a bit of wanderlust. This is an elf who hasn’t stayed in a single region for more than two years since the Second War. 5 years in one place? He’s probably quietly going stir crazy.
Okay, but what about all those dead NPCs from the Scourge invasion while we were in SL?
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