Why isn’t their a time skip after each expansion ?

[Utrrabbit]

Okay, I'm not sure where people are getting that there have been time skips.

There have never been, and never will be, time skips!

Eeeevery expansion there's unsourced claims that "definitely confirm" there is a time skip. And before you know it, the whole community is personally convinced that they saw Blizzard itself state this.

Never the case. The ironic thing is that the Blizzard timeline is actually -shorter- than real life.

WoW is 17 years old now. Lorewise, it was the year 25 when it started. Last we got confirmation on the time, it was the year 33, at the start of Battle for Azeroth.

That's right! Patch 8.0 was 8 years after the events of WoW Classic. If we're generous, and we give both BfA and what we've seen of Shadowlands a year, it's now the year 35. 10 years, not 17 years, after things began.

Now is that dumb? It's done that it's not been 17 years. But it's not dumb that it's not been more. Here's why:

People struggle with characters changing to begin with. As time passes and characters do new things, the majority of people feel the character gets "ruined".
Even more so, there's a great dislike of missing out on the development of these characters. Past Blizz was notorious about doing all character development in books.

But at least books were something. A timeskip would skip past it all. We've seen how much characters have changed in the last "10 years". Now imagine a 10 year timeskip, where we return and the characters have changed that much again. Their lives lived. Hardships faced. Relationships and friendships lost and gained. Training archs past. People dying, starting families, being born. Victories, losses and scars suffered. And all without us having any impact or role in the world for those years. No part in the story.

It would suck. And for a ton of people it would be the disconnect that just makes them say "Well, I guess I'm stepping out now".

People think they want a time skip. But what they usually want is just to see the world progressed to the next stage. But we don't need a time skip for that. Cataclysm was in 3.0. Soon we get 10.0. Blizzard has every excuse to progress the game world if they want, without doing a timeskip.

At any rate, Blizz has made the choice for WoW to have a continuous story. It just gets a little hard to fathom sometimes, because the content only appears to us step-wise. If they update a city, this will be done in one patch. They're not making three different versions of the city being slowly constructed over time. No, you'll get it poof-done. It's the limits of the medium. If they do another remake, then yeah, we'll return in 10.0 to find the world changed! But that won't mean all those changes happened overnight, and time skipped forward. The implication is that much of those changes happened in the time between 3.0 and 10.0. They just largely weren't able to show that to you.

Tl;Dr I have no clue what I am talking about. Basically to sum up everthing you just wrote for people who do not want to read your fanfic.

[Caerule]

Well, since the writers can't keep their own lore straight, we can take a look at Anduin. In Vanilla, he looked like this:

[Picture]

He looks 6 or 7 years old, maybe 8 max. Compare him to this:

[Picture]

This dude is well into his mid to late 20s, possibly early 30s. So at the very least, 15 years have passed since Vanilla.

Anduin was using the standard child model at the time, not a specific model. Either way, he's confirmed to be 18 in BfA, which would make him 19 now. Maybe 20. Either way, several sources state he was 10 in Vanilla.

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Tl;Dr I have no clue what I am talking about. Basically to sum up everthing you just wrote for people who do not want to read your fanfic.

If you want to be so satisfied in your ignorance, you're willing to blatantly ignore the official sources so as not to be proven wrong, then I have no interest in even discussing with you either. Come back when you want to have a serious discussion where you bring actual data.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

he's confirmed to be 18 in BfA, which would make him 19 now. Maybe 20.

The Anduin seen in the high fidelity pre-rendered cinematics does look that age, but no way his ingame model looks 20, let alone like a teenager.

There is also Thrall. Thrall was born in year 1. He is a teenager when Lord of the Clans happens. Now he looks like this and has grey hair.



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Lor'themar also looked like he aged a few decades, which is weird given that he is an elf.

BC vs BFA

[Caerule]

The Anduin seen in the high fidelity pre-rendered cinematics does look that age, but no way his ingame model looks 20, let alone like a teenager.

There is also Thrall. Thrall was born in year 1. He is a teenager when Lord of the Clans happens. Now he looks like this and has grey hair.

[Thrall Image]

And that's fine to point out for the ingame models. I'd argue Anduin does look that age in the BfA cinematic cutscens. I think we can both agree he looks terrible ingame.
As for Thrall, yeah that doesn't match his canon age. They did a pretty bad job letting his latest model match up with the lore. Like, he has scars on his back now. While in the books he's specifically made fun of for not having scars on his back from his wipping, because his master had healing salves used on him to prevent it.

Anyway, there's been a dozen official timelines and date mentions. We can't just ignore that based on "Well this model doesn't look quite that age". I think the more likely explanation for Thrall's appearance is that he's based on his voice actor Chris Metzen, who also has a greying beard like that ingame model. Which I agree with you, doesn't make sense, given the canon timeline.

Edit: As for Lor'themar, you're comparing his new custom model to his basic low polycon non-custom model. I don't think that's too comparable. He isn't even missing his eye there, which was an established feature for him. I don't think we can toss out the official timelines and date mentions on that.

[Lucetia]

Okay, I'm not sure where people are getting that there have been time skips.

There have never been, and never will be, time skips!

You know that even events and quests in-game contradict this, right?

[Caerule]

Maybe if Chronicles retroactively changed it. Many years ago the devs mentioned that it was approximately a 5 year time skip between Wrath and Cataclysm.

The way I remembered it, there was actually a quest in Mount Hyjal that started all the controversy at that time. Even though in the Thrall: Prelude to Cataclysm book the end of Wrath and the emergence of Deathwing all flow into each other smoothly, and there was a decent overview of the timeline, a questgiver ingame mentioned that it'd been a decade since Hyjal came under threat, rather than 7 years or so. So some folks ran with that, stating that Blizzard confirmed the time skip. Blizz actually corrected themselves on that one a few times, about the exaggerating druid, and has released more up to date timelines in line with that correction, and date statements here and there, confirming they did indeed not intend for there to be a timeskip. That said, it's been a dozen years since then so I might be missing something, and it's hard to look back that far. But that's my recollection.

Either way, from the canon timelines it's pretty clear that Blizz intends for there to be a continuous timeline. But they only update the world in big steps. So even if the Lich King got buried, Orgrimmar burns, and Deathwing emerges, all in the same relatively short period, Blizz isn't going to have intermediate phases to Orgrimmar's construction. So they plopped the completely repaired version ingame with the rest of the world update, with only a building or two in the Drag still forever in an "under construction" state. That's just how it goes. You're not going to put working hours into creating a temporary half-constructed version of Orgrimmar. Any big patch change to an area necessarily has to happen in one go.

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You know that even events and quests in-game contradict this, right?

I've talked about the mistaken quest, and how ingame events work. If you have significant examples of quests that are still wrong, I'd be open to discussing them, however. But I hope you at least understand my perspective that there's also ones that don't. And that we've got a whole bunch of official timelines from the actual game designers and lore guys. And statements on twitter. And dates mentioned in books and comics. And I believe that weighs more than corrected quest writers and the limits of telling a timeline through big immediate patches. It's the setting that the lore and game developers put out in their vision of things that I hold to a higher regard, then how it ends up looking.

[StationaryHawk]

Maybe if Chronicles retroactively changed it. Many years ago the devs mentioned that it was approximately a 5 year time skip between Wrath and Cataclysm.

That was only speculation IIRC. Even the Ultimate Visual Guide has WotLK and Cataclysm take place only a year apart.

Actually it has been closer to over 20 years.

The events of vanilla took around 3 years
Tbc events took around 4 years
Wrath events took around 3 to 4 years
Before cata their was about a 5 year gap between us killing arthas and deathwing coming (thus all the changes to infrastructe not only to ogrimmar but the forsaken buildings
Cata took place for about another 5 years.
Mop was another few years.

The only and I do mean ONLY expansions that havr had no time skips gave been from bfa to shadowlands

Legion to bfa had a 2 year time skip.

None of this is correct.

[Biomega]

Time skips take a ton of development work they'd rather spend elsewhere.

Time skips mess with storylines.

Time skips change the experience for new players, who now don't get to follow everything from day 1.

Probably even more reasons they're done rarely if ever.

[Caerule]

The current canon timeline with multiply confirmed dates is:

20. The Third War.
21. The Battle of Mount Hyjal On Kalimdor.
22. Rise of the Lich King.
25. WoW Vanilla.
26. The Burning Crusade.
27. The Wrath of the Lich King.
28. The Cataclysm.
30. The Invasion of Pandaria.
31. The Warlords of Draenor invasion.
32. The Incoming Legion Invasion.
33. The Battle for Azeroth.
?. The Shadowlands.

Most of that is directly from several official timelines. The last two had a book, comic, and multiple tweets.

[Kiivar86]

Lmao your following chronicles? Something that is notoriously awful for getting nearly everything wrong.

Yes, I'm taking an official timeline instead of guessing at it like you are.

[hulkgor]

Pretty sure we've had a lot of time skips already, maybe not as big as you are talking about or expecting, but plenty. Pretty hard to tell a story (regardless of how well or bad), if in every expansion every npc dies of old age due to a big skip.

[VinceVega]

Tl;Dr I have no clue what I am talking about. Basically to sum up everthing you just wrote for people who do not want to read your fanfic.

Well he is right though... no idea where your information is coming from but it does seem quite... pulled from someones behind^^

[Lahis]

It works much better than how they’ve done it.

After watching LoL arcane and doing some wow catching up reading, I am miffed that these threats keep happening like clock work every two years.

Is there a reason this has to be the case in game? That it has to match real time?

I think it would have been far more interesting if they time skipped a little or a lot each time and not matched real time to game time.

What’s the logic of that? It just limits you unnecessarily from a narrative POV. There isn’t any technical reason the in game time line has to match real time, is there?

Thing is, the WoW timeline doesn't follow real time.

Each expansion only last for one year in-universe time.

That means that every year for the past 9 years here have been one or multiple world endign threaths hitting Azeroth.

[The Stormbringer]

They have skipped for a few. The biggest block of doing that would be the age of NPCs

Naur, there haven't been any time skips in WoW. If anything, the timeline of WoW is actually shorter than the 17 years the game has existed.

[kranur]

Because that will require a lot of updates and they need to also make sense. The game barley makes any sense from one patch to another lol.

[Myradin]

Oh nooo, the complex and interesting characters of WoW would age and die out

Oh, oh dear

Oh what misfortune

WoW has always run on WC1/2/3 nastalgia. Pretty much the only wow-exclusive characters who got any real spotlite was Garrosh. Anduin's a mixed bag, and blizz seems afraid to use Wrathion for some reason.

While I certainly agree they need to move on to new stories and new characters, its not like this is new for blizz. Heck just look at shadowlands at how much people feel its 'not wow' because there's so many new things.

[XDurionX]

They should just stop releasing expansions, so there's peace on azeroth #bigbraintime

[LedZeppelin]

Maybe not "time skips" but its not like the wow world is going to age in real time.

[Alvito]

Naur, there haven't been any time skips in WoW. If anything, the timeline of WoW is actually shorter than the 17 years the game has existed.

There have been time slow downs too, but there have definitely been skips Cata and WoD both gave us one. It is often relayed in the books

[Caerule]

There have been time slow downs too, but there have definitely been skips Cata and WoD both gave us one. It is often relayed in the books

Quite the opposite actually. The books bridging the gaps between expansion content exist specifically to show its a continuous story that flows from one expansion into the next with little time in between. And all the lore books and dates mentioned in books and comics confirm this. As do all the Blizzard Dev statements.

The Thrall: Prelude to Cataclysm book is actually a great example of this. Where the book starts after the death of the Lich King, and follows the adventures of Thrall, as he tries to discover why the elements of Azeroth are becoming unstable. Ending with the Cataclysm being unleashed by Deathwing. It's not a book in which years pass. Quite the opposite.