Was it ever explained what doomed Alternate Draenor?

His statement doesn’t even make sense. Can’t wipe something out if it never existed. And if it does exist and is culled, than it’s omnicide

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Do you want a watsonian or doylist answer?

You do you, I think this notion is absurd from both perspectives.

Look, the reason the “true” timeline is centered on us is we are the players.

Now I dont think a true timeline neccesarily means its all predistined, I think like real life nothing is set in stone and whatever we do ultimately will affect how this all turns out.

Whether some major deity decided to create the universe for some unknown and unexplicable reason is sometime we will probably find out from Blizzard assuming WoW last long enough. Or maybe we wont who knows.

Like real life maybe its a mystery that we will someday solve, or maybe it wont.

My favorite part of WoD by a very significant margin (outside of the Shadowmoon Exiles) was Anzu and Arakkoa and their conflict with the Adherents of Rukhmar. It was pretty much the only time since the Scarlet Crusade that I’ve seen a Void/Shadow-Good, Light-Bad story done that was believable and very well written. I’d love for the writers to contrive a way to continue those threads of WoD going forward

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It was not ever spelled out precisely what was causing Draenor to waste away, but the likely culprits are either: timeline disintegration or Tyranny of the Light.

If Draenor were breaking apart because of orc industry, the orcs would be the first to know about it. This is a pre-Dark Portal era of orcs that are still overwhelmingly shamanistic, who commune directly with the elemental forces that comprise the planet itself. So it makes little sense in story that the orcs are reponsible.

Then there’s the out-of-game consideration that the (Horde only) Mag’har recruitment scenario was not conceived of as a story to sell a playable race as losers who get what they deserve. There is no Alliance playthrough of this, so the “both sides are to blame” perspective would serve no narrative purpose. They didn’t “put the dinosaur bones there to confuse us,” the Mag’har are the victims and the Lightbound are the aggressors. If either are indeed responsible for the planet’s deterioration, it will be the latter.

A third possibility tied to timelines and anchoring is that our universe’s history is bleeding into AU-Draenor’s history, and the moment a portal was opened from there to here it became an inescapable fact that Draenor would begin breaking apart to mirror Outland.

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most faultless alliance hero btw

That point falls a bit flat now that there’s a literal AU race in the playable roster though, right ?

And even if you adopt a purely meta perspective (because there’s no way to make sense of it from an in-universe perspective), the consequence of such a writing philosophy would be catastrophic. Beyond the obvious matter that a fictional setting worthy of this name should be depicted as existing outside of the strict player experience (or else immersion is destroyed), doing so would greatly diminish our own agency : the fact that none of our actions leads to the crumbling of our timeline means that every single one of these actions is “the right one”, “the correct choice”, “the conform and expected decision”. Because if it wasn’t, then surely we’d deviate from the True Timeline and so our world would be falling apart, just like AU Draenor.

I… really don’t think the writers would want to deal with the implications of that and support such a negation of agency. Especially since, as I said before, Warcraft is all about valuing free will and responsability for one’s actions.

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Honestly I did think it was the timeline collapsing that did it, But i’m starting to wonder if it is the light’s fault, we see in midnight what too much light can do, makes plants grow out of control, makes people into violent dogmatic zealots, So my theory is the light threw that world into a sort of death spiral, Where it causes the plants to go out of control which sucked up all the spirit in the world, which cause the world to begin to die, and then the plants also died, meaning the world had no ability to recover. Add in Religious zealots who are convince a cultural genocide will somehow break the death spiral and you have a world beyond saving.

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