Just had this thought, and I think there is a good chance this will be a future expansion, if not the next one.
One enemy we still need to face is the infinite Dragonflight, Nozdormu’s future self Murozond. An interesting thing I noted is that Murozond’s color is blue. Black and blue anyway. I wonder if the color of Azerite being Gold and Blue is foreshadowing the duality between the Golden (Bronze) Nozdormu and his darker, blue future self?
Regardless… It would be cool and has all the making of WoW expansion.
An enemy with a rich lore background.
Potential for Nostolgia. (Caverns of Time, maybe even a revisited AQ.)
A Warcraft 3 call back “The Sands of Time have run out, Son of Durotan”.
I think the biggest hurdle would be the zones, but with what Blizzard has been doing with Arathi and Darkshore, its possible they can just remake the zones of Southern Kalimdor. In addition to whatever time-related craziness they can fit in.
Personally? I just want a War of the Shifting Sands Novel, and I just like Southern Kalimdor in general.
It would probably be difficult to pull off an expansion like this as the leveling zones could literally be anything, really, and they might not even be connected. Imagine, as an example, one of your leveling zones is Tirisfal Glades at the time Lordaeron was founded. Or Un’goro while the Titans were establishing it as a testing sight for biological life. Or perhaps even a zone that exists during the height of the Black Empire.
There is a lot of selection and how it is all connected would be fairly haphazard.
As much as I think the idea of Caverns of Time: The Expansion sounds like it could potentially be really fun, any hopes I had for Blizzard telling an interesting, consistent, and fun time travel narrative were very thoroughly killed in Warlords of Draenor.
We do need the Caverns of Time to come back though. Small doses of time travel shenanigans will always be welcome.
I would be optimistic if they had William King write the Shifting Sands Novel. Featuring Nozdormu and who has basically seen the catastrophic events of the war over and over again, really revealing just how detached from the present he is at every given moment. It would be really cool if the quirks and mannerisms of Nozdormu is near indistinguishable from Morozond, and thus revealing just how tight of a rope he had been walking just above the pit of insanity.
William King could do that very well I think, as well as capture just how terrifying the whole war must have been.
I think the big thing would be the goal of the Dragonflight. Which is to bring about the Hour of Twilight. I think, rather than focus on time travel, they should focus in actual zones on Azeroth. Perhaps something to do with Azerite and/or the Sword of Sargaras. And the resurrection of C’thun.
With that being said, a little Time Travel would be fun. Exactly where, when and why we go to certain places can just about be anything.
The End Times dungeon sort of is just based on the fact we shifted the timeline back away from happening as it was there, but the entire point of the Infinite Dragonflight was attempting to shift the timeline to that end because it is specifically a much “better” end than whatever is down the line in the unaltered timeline.
Our timeline is already thoroughly off the rails. Bronzies failed bad with the the AU Draenor thing, which in return caused a Legion Invasion that never should have happened and led to the imprisonment of Sargeras.
That’s a good point, and weird how we havn’t really heard anything from Nozdormu during all of this. Perhaps his mind has already started to slip? Maybe he is already plotting to bring about the Hour of Twilight.
The Infinite Dragonflight can easily bring shades of what could have been to the present including Desolace’s less Desolate form, The South Barrens’ original form(which would promptly be subject to the Emerald Nightmare as one might expect since it’s now in the present), Thousand Needle’s intact form, Eldre’Thalas in pristine form… Of course the North Barrens would be restored by the Botani while this is all happening.
Pocket Dimensions the size of Zones are more than possible for the Infinite Dragonflight and other Dragonflights! Even a Goblin Mage can create a Pocket Dimension without being a full Archmagi!
We just start from BFA with our Time MacGuffin powers + Chromie and slowly work out way backwards through the expansion until we get back to WC3, and start fresh.
I accept this idea if it’s explained he vanished from Un’goro because he became the Hero of Time and we have half a zone dedicated to an Ocarina of Time parody.
CoT portals don’t send you to separate timelines. If it did, you wouldn’t have to go in them in the first place because nothing the Infinite Dragonflight did to mess up the timeline would have any effect on us.
Because there is little point in going back in time to change something that has already happened. Just by the nature of you existing at all implies that the infinite dragonflight has already failed. Unless every single strand of time is in itself a separate timeline, which seemed to be the case with the existence of WoD.
In other words… You, one hour ago, is a different you, from a different timeline, than you in the present.
The Caverns of Time dungeons operate on a semi-broken Back to the Future philosophy of time travel. Going back, you’re going back to your past, and your actions can effect it. That’s why the entire goal is to throw it back on track by preventing the Infinite Dragonflight from screwing with the events that already happened, and everything that happens after gets overwritten. Of course, thsi shouldn’t work because we shouldn’t be present to be able to go back, but paradoxes are a pain in the butt.
This is different from the WoD philosophy in which every action ever made creates a different, co-existing timeline we see with the timeways, and you can theoretcially (not so much in WoW’s case) jump between any of them and not affect your own timeline.
Of course, these two really shouldn’t be able to work together, but if the CoT dungeons existed in different timeways, then it really wouldn’t be any concern to the Bronze Dragonflight at all since the Prime Timeline they’re sworn to protect would remain unaffected by their changes.
TL;DR Blizzard never laid down the laws of time travel, are kind of using two different, contradictory systems for it within wow, and paradoxes make my head hurt.
That’s nice, but time travel isn’t real, and what you’re describing is only one fictional ruleset for how time travel can work.
And is presumably not how it works in CoT. Because if it did, again, there’d be no point in following after the Infinite Dragonflight to stop them. Because any changes they make would just make new timelines that wouldn’t effect your timeline anyway, so what’s the point.
But that’s not how the Bronze Dragonflight frames it. They’re all “The Infinite Dragonflight is gonna change the past. You have to stop them or it’s going to completely change the present.”
Incidentally there are fake/illusory Timelines where we kill Azshara during the War of the Ancients and Nozdormu is aware of them(though as he states they are rare which is why he has doubts on us killing her) according to the Quest to distract Azshara in the Well of Eternity Dungeon.