The events that happened in each expansion each took roughly a year. But there have been lulls all along, they were the canonical gaps between the release of the final raid of an expansion and the launch of the next one that happened in realtime. Since WoW came out at least, the timeline hasn’t been event, event, event, it’s been more like, event, year of quiet. Event, year of quiet.
This is a post from Danauser explaining it.
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). But NPCs in the world don’t talk about how the Burning Crusade took place in the year 26 after the Dark Portal opened, or how we rediscovered Pandaria in the year 30.
When you look back at the Warcraft timeline, one of the things you’ll notice is that a lot of massive, world-changing events were tightly clustered together. This is especially true for WoW, which since launch has seen a multitude of invasions and catastrophes back-to-back in the chronology.
With Shadowlands representing the closing of one book in the Warcraft saga (as we mentioned in interviews around the release of our Eternity’s End update), it felt like an opportunity to give Azeroth and its inhabitants a bit of breathing room before Dragonflight ushers in the start of our next major storyline.
Shadowlands began in the year 35 after the opening of the Dark Portal, and Dragonflight will begin in the year 40.
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