It’s not only stupid, it defies all logic. Legion aren’t so much a supernatural force then an army with conscripts from worlds they conquer. Let’s take Archimonde and Kil’jaden for example. So there’s at least 2 versions of Velen, one from our Universe and an AU Universe Velen who’s dead now, but what about Kil’Jaeden. Apparently there’s only one version of him, but he wasn’t always apart of the Legion, so what happened, did all his possible timelines just ‘fuse’ together once he ‘officially’ became apart of the Legion?
It’s honestly sounds like something some garbage writer decided to implement into the story for no reason other then to raise the stakes or to give the legion a ‘modern’ feel because everyone’s doing Alternative Universes these days.
IIRC the ‘they’re multiversal’ was a bandaid to fix the fact that WoD potentially doubled the size of the Legion given everything
I actually think it’s a pretty neat idea but comes off as nonsense because it’s so obviously a patch and they’re not going to lean at all into multiversal being timey-wimey headbreaking as an inherent feature of cosmic reality.
I think Blizzard mostly meant that every temporary timeline has it’s own version of the legion, hence the whole multiverse legion idea they came up with. In some other temporary timeline Sargeras and his Legion are still burning worlds, but since 99% will simply fade away on their own, we’ll never see those events play out. AU Draenor being the only exception where a temporary timeline was made permant by outside interference.
I think the multiverse is stupid and WoD should have been an idea killed before it breathed, but at the same time if they had infinite universes or whatever with infinite timelines (and more than one legion), then they would also have had to have infinite titans and, likely, infinite void gods or whatever. I imagine that would be a bigger continuity issue.
I’m not sure I would categorize this as a retcon, but it is possibly one of the most destructive lore elements. It is so incoherent I can’t even try and rationalize it in anyway internally.
Amen to that; Warlords of Draenor was literally a bridge to Legion that stretched too long to hold its weight. They needed a way to both kill off Garrosh and bring back the Legion, but came up with a truly unnecessary and overly-complicated expansion based on alternate timelines/realities in order to do so.
It would have made so much more sense to just kill off Garrosh at the end of the trial in War Crimes, and then have the rogue bronze dragon go to AU Draenor to find AU Grom instead…only to fail the same way he does with Garrosh, of course.
Seriously, it’s insane how you could literally condense WoD into the final zone of the expansion–in which AU Gul’dan still manages to infect the Horde with the Blood of Mannoroth despite any outside interference–and nothing really changes in the long run.
WoD wasn’t really meant to primarily be a bridge to Legion I don’t think; my read is that WoD was meant to be a soft reset for the universe that reintroduced familiar names that had never really been involved in World of Warcraft, free of the baggage of “this guy was retconned seven times sideways to Chicago”.
no ‘so khadgar is a kid who was cursed to be old’ or anything like that, no ‘wait what do you mean THOSE are draenei’. everything in WoD is exactly what it seems to be and you completely gloss over everything involving the time traveling failed warchief until you’re like 2-3 zones deep after the opening
WoD wasn’t really meant to primarily be a bridge to Legion I don’t think
This is definitely true at first. WoD was meant to be the start of possibly a new type of arc for WoW wherein we visit an alternate Draenor, and then an alternate Azeroth. This is speculation on my part, but I believe it to be true based on the alpha content of WoD, where Tanaan was nearly finished and had no legion corruption at all, an alternate universe Medivh showed up, and based on statements made by the developers prior to launch (such as Grom being the final boss, etc).
Sometime during the early alpha they changed tack hard and decided to turn WoD into a bridge into Legion (which was either pushed forward in the dev schedule, or birthed anew entirely) at the cost of sacrificing WoD and everything it was going to originally build.
This is why so much of WoD is nonsensical, abandoned, or outright unfinished. As an expac it was basically scrapped early in development, but because they had nothing that could replace it, it was “finished” and pushed out anyway as a shambling corpse, and left to rot while the devs powered forward on Legion.
Saying as this a long-time Illidan fanboy, I actually would have preferred to see the original, longer, standalone expansion make it to live if this was indeed the case.
I absolutely loved Legion for the reason stated above–I even pre-ordered it just for the mount and early access to demon hunters. But the main problem with what we got with Warlords is that many people–myself included–couldn’t seem to blaze through it fast enough to reach the next expansion.
Imagine that; it’s almost as if whenever a developer rushes through game content, they’re encouraging players to do the same on their end.
The sylvanas one hands down. You can tell she was never intended to take this path until the new writers took over, and had the retcon of ‘hurpda derp’ she was actually planning this all since wrath!!1!1!!!
When Blizzard retcon High Elves in the Alliance and also ended up creating Blue Blood Elves that is Void Elves.
Then there’s some rumor going on about the Night Warrior being a Male instead of Female. But clearly when I was doing the Night Elf Night Warrior Scenario there was some backstory about the Night Warrior being like Female but that was retcon.
Also Me’dan retcon out of existence making the Guardian Lore in the middle rises more questions than Answers.
Then there was another Retcon of Sylvanas of how she died instead of standing her ground like she did in Warcraft 3. In the BFA War Cinematic It show us that Sylvanas fight against the Undead but then she died by Arthas in just one blow instead of stand her ground or atleast fighting back until she died.
Another worst retcon is making the Light do very mortal grey things that is complete out of no where. Remember the Naaru that was suppose to be the force of good and savior of races that if the light wasn’t there for the Draeneis and etc. They would have all died. But now the Naaru/Light is a force of enslavement instead of having Good Naaru. Yes there was the Scarlet Crusade who used the light to do mortally things but the difference with them is that they abused the light while the Argent Dawn, Silver Hand, and etc atleast used it to heal things instead of destroying a whole world like AU Draenor. It would be like as if the Elementals of Shamanism was used to do enslavement to the races that was using Shamanism instead of living beings that will help races with set shamanism if they don’t abused or forsake them.
I could go on but almost nearly half of WoW’s Lore has been Retcon in a not so good way.
We saw a few high elves allied with the alliance during vanilla, TBC and wrath. Some of them even thought in the battle for mount hyjal as stated by Tyrande in WC3: TFT as a reason to help Kael’thas. Those that survived out of that group most likely followed Jaina to make Theramore and remained with the Alliance.
I wouldn’t say the actions of really one Naaru equates to all of them.
It is also implied that an AU version of Xe’ra is behind Yrel and her crusade on AU Draenor.
That was bound to happen considering that most of the writing team behind Chronicles no longer write WoW for blizzard. Metzen, Kosak etc have either left or moved to other games under blizzard. And clearly the new team don’t want to be constricted by something like Chronicles.
Yeah the Void Lords just sound so lame. And it’s why Blizz has to calm down. Not every expansion needs to be an escalation because you write yourself into a corner quick.
Sargeras wanted to burn all life in the universe and had the power to do it. You can’t have higher stakes than that. What are the Void Lords going to do? Threaten to eat all life in the universe but now they do it with a middle finger waving in your face the whole time?
I know. But it seems that Blizzard has been over shadowing the High Elves with the Void Elves during BFA. Plus also Void Elves are not just overshadowing the High Elves like the Ones from Warcraft 2 and Warcraft 3 in terms of Alleria Windrunner not being shown the spotlight but they also have the Themes of the Blood Elves while at the same time making the Blood Elves more like Light Elves than the Blood Elves that were like from Warcraft 3 Frozen Throne and TBC.
So basically Blood Elves pretty much have lost their theme from Warcraft 3 and TBC and are now Light Elves. I mean sure they can do Blood Golems but that’s about it.
I don’t think the Sylvanas stuff started as a retcon, but their own flubbed development cycle made it a necessity. Per my crackpot theory that Legion and BfA were meant to be four expansions as opposed to two, I think she was meant to get where she was after about 3.5 expansions of being a relatively good Warchief. I believe that her first interaction with the Jailer, or initial knowledge of him and the afterlife, was supposed to be in Legion via Helya and their bargain, and then as the war with the Alliance heated up, she would delve deeper and deeper into the powers and knowledge of the Shadowlands until she made her deal with the Jailer for realsies.
But since they mashed a bunch of stuff together and shortened the timeline, they had to backtrack and retcon stuff so that ‘this was her nature all along’, and then Edge of Night was the first deal.
There is a contradiction there. They could go with Sylvanas-Jailor relation through Helya or even the Valkyrs and place the deal when the war started going south. Why go to Edge of Night and create a pointless retcon?