So, time skip incoming?

[cuafpr]

the ultimate power reset, we come out of SL find out our bodies have been in "stasis" and while a cult of priest/followers never gave up on us, but the world did and moved on. we awaken and are level 1 again and starter gear due to the time pass and weakening of our bodies. The world has changed, new cities, new alliances, new threats. Technical wise WoW gets a whole new engine for game design.


ok, its a dream...

[LuminaL]

That's plausible.

Though i think we will still keep Velen, the Lightforged gall, Turalyon (if he doesn't die in the pre-exp book), Alleria, maybe the Void Elf head (depending how the void stuff affect his lifespan and, in general, he's an elf), the Blood Elf council (depending how much time passes, again... elves), maybe Malfurion and Tyrande (They are quite old though, so they may not survive much longer) but having in mind that Blizzard pointed out that they wish to work with the Burning of Teldrassil story after Shadowlands, i expect her to survive.

aside from the plausibility you give to the total fan fiction, just wanted to note malfurion and tyrande are not old. they are considered pretty young in WoTA novels and they got 10k years time freeze and just recently they got out of the life time freeze they had, so Im sure they have atleast 80% of their life span left, and you know... elves.

[Tharivor]

The thought of what fresh lore horrors the devs could unleash with the freedom to entirely rewrite Azeroth off-screen genuinely scares me given what we saw in BfA.
That said I can't see much radical change, time-skip or no, because as others have mentioned it would be a big resource sink to revamp everything in one go.

[Caerule]

There is never a Time Skip.

Blizzard always leaves the option open for themselves of course, in case they ever need it. But they always try to make it fit, and always have. Hell, they've done it too well. According to the ingame lore, most expansions have only taken 1 year on Azeroth, even if they were 2 in real life.

Hell, another interview summary mentioned time in the Shadowlands might be faster. Can't say I'm a huge fan of that, but I suppose it that proves true, they could use it as an excuse for not dealing with the Forsaken and Night Elven refugee situations yet.

[matrix123mko]

Honestly i prefer something much darker. And with neons.

Or just desert full of muscular dudes.

We don't know how it looks in the night.

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hopefully, half of the cast die of old age.

then they can give us Azshara expansion and try to fix their legendary Nazjatar.

This will make me happy.

[Wysmark]

Time skip by 20+ years

- The toddler dwarf emperor is an adult and seks to coup Ironforge

- That elf and draenei from Childrens week have grown up and gotten evil dragons like they always wanted

- Jaina has finally replaced Aggra and married Thrall

Plenty of cough good stories

[deenman]

Taken from front page interview:


So will next expansion be a time skip? If so how far into future we will end in? Are they gonna revamp whole azeroth again?

Not gonna lie, i wouldn't mind neo-orgrimmar.

that was basiclay a dodge,dont expect much

it wouldnt even make any sense for a timeskip like this,as wile we are in shadowlands we ofc will have portals to go back to azeroth nomraly,ofc this could just be for gameplay reasons,but they have to present it lore friendly also

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The thought of what fresh lore horrors the devs could unleash with the freedom to entirely rewrite Azeroth off-screen genuinely scares me given what we saw in BfA.
That said I can't see much radical change, time-skip or no, because as others have mentioned it would be a big resource sink to revamp everything in one go.

nothing in bfa was freshly writen...zandalar kul tiras,azshara,nzoth,all things we knew about

[Biomega]

SL over.

Finally get back to Azeroth.

The entire planet is covered in hives.

Silithid back again!

WRONG.

We find out Azeroth is in the Koprulu Sector.

It's the Zerg.

Welcome to World of StarCraft.

[Logwyn]

We all come back. Have to start off in our racial start zones. Level One. First raid.... Molten Core! Classic but with all the retail features they've added over the past 15 or so years!

[Kayb]

Doesn't have to be a time skip. Could be a time compression. Based on Ion's statement, it's just as likely that they could say time would move faster in SL than on Azeroth. So we get back thinking we've been gone for a year or more, and everyone back home is wondering how we cleaned all that up during our lunch break.

I think this is the more likely answer. For anyone in SL it'll feel like two years, for everyone else it'll be two hours. That way Tyrande can still be grumbling about her tree inside a realistic time frame, unlike Jaina who grumbled for years and years

[VinceVega]

Well he said it works differently. Could be it does not move at all

[tromage2]

A timeskip might work pretty well next exp pack.
Alot of events have been set up that might change Azeroth in the next years.

Example:
In the Mag'har introduction line we see other WoD race flee toward the Barrens this might change Kalimdor the next few years.
The Troll tribes now jioned the Horde what might result into a rebuild of troll cities all around Azeroth.

Hopefully they make it so that the timeskip would be like 50-60 years so that some of the older characters died and their childeren are grownups like Thralls son.
And maybe a few known characters are now old beings like Baine ect.

But if they are doing a remake of Azeroth they really need to figure out a good way to switch between the versions of zones better then we currently have by a NPC otherwise we soon have Cata Azeroth, BfA Azeroth and future Azeroth zones and that might become confusing.

[exochaft]

People have said this pretty much every expansion.

In some respects, it's even happened over the course of the game. Time has elapsed quite a bit, with some jumps between expansions to some degree. I'm sure someone's done the math for the exact number of years from start to finish, however this ties into one of my biggest issues with the game: so much of the lore isn't in the game, but 3rd party sources (books, comics, etc.).

While people are guessing if this means we are going to get a time skip in the next expansion, I think Ion's statements likely don't indicate either for or against it. If there is some sort of time compression going on, I'd imagine time passes relatively faster in the afterlife (Shadowlands) than in the world of the living... which means when we exit the SL expansion, time will not have moved much at all on Azeroth. If time moves slower in the afterlife, accelerating the relative time we missed on Azeroth in the SL expansion... well, think of the lore implications and mental gymnastics that would have to take place. Alright, they could pull a "lore be damned!", but the afterlife could get crowded very quickly (literally and figuratively). Suppose the big baddies or those in power could somehow be able to alter how fast/slow time relatively moves in relation to Azeroth, but that's a whole discussion that dives into the rabbit hole quickly.

From a story-telling perspective, I think it's better if time in the afterlife moves relatively faster, as it allows room for explanations/changes to major lore characters who are dead to be more readily explained or sensible. For example, if it's been a year since someone died in Azeroth, time moving 50 times faster in death would allow that dead character to have accumulated 50 years worth of experiences to alter their behavior, change their outlook on things, repent for past misdeeds, etc. If time moves relatively slower at same factor as listed above, while you've grown over a year after their death, it'd be only about a week for the dead person. I suppose that could give us a "real time" view of what happens to people of specific character based upon how we knew them as they died when going into Shadowlands, but I think it's more compelling to see how they've changed and explore how they made that journey and where they go from their current point into the future.

There is one downside of time moving faster in SL relative to Azeroth, but it solely depends on how easy it is to travel back and forth between the two. If travel between the two realms is relatively easy, imagine the lore complications if you could send armies or heroes to train and "level up", only to return vastly more powerful with no time elapse in your own realm. In fact, there are many ways this can be abused for various ends, so I hope our ability to travel between the realms is a one-and-done affair that can't be exploited... but I could see a future expansion delving into the fallout of a person or a group of people who exploited such things and we deal with the consequences.

This is all conjecture, of course, as relative time between Azeroth and the afterlife could be different... but it comes down to the magnitude of difference. If the difference is a couple of percentage points, there's likely no ramifications going into the future expansion based upon elapsed time. If we get into orders of magnitude of difference, that's when things start to get interesting and/or problematic. Here's hoping we get some hard rules established with this lore, but the pessimist in me says even if Blizz does set some rules, they'll be malleable or only available from 3rd party sources.

[Tharivor]

nothing in bfa was freshly writen...zandalar kul tiras,azshara,nzoth,all things we knew about

I was thinking more in terms of what they did to the main faction story. Actual zones like Zandalar, Kul'tiras, ect. were quite good but the faction conflict was handled terribly. Giving the dev team free rein to develop the factions off screen for a while could be disastrous.

[erifwodahs]

We come back from Shadowlands with a beam of light - it's dark everywhere, silence. You try to use Stormwind hearthstone but end between the ruins of something that looks similar to Stormwind. Your arrival attracted some shadowy beings, they charge at you but die instantly to your powers.
*Old old man in some rusty armor and cloth runs to you and starts yelling - What have you done fool, they will now know where you are! Users of any magic are tracked and killed!
His face changes as he approaches you... - This can't be, after all this time... Hero, is that..... you?
The old Man is Anduin. Tells you a story about how Void and Light started a war for Azeroth and everything went as collateral damage. Azeroth is now shared by Nathrezim in Northrend, Lightforged have Eastern Kingdom, Void Forces have Kalimdor and MoP has been hidden in the mists again as is the refuge area for survivors who left their home.

Obviously that's a cheesy scenario of several movies and idk if you could recreate that feeling in WoW but something like that sounds awesome.

[huth]

There is never a Time Skip.

Blizzard always leaves the option open for themselves of course, in case they ever need it. But they always try to make it fit, and always have. Hell, they've done it too well. According to the ingame lore, most expansions have only taken 1 year on Azeroth, even if they were 2 in real life.

Hell, another interview summary mentioned time in the Shadowlands might be faster. Can't say I'm a huge fan of that, but I suppose it that proves true, they could use it as an excuse for not dealing with the Forsaken and Night Elven refugee situations yet.

No, they don't make it fit. It would have been better if they would just follow real world time. Events in Azeroth happen way to fast, with the planet being in constant end-of-the-world state for around ten years now, and more wars in that time than most real countries see in a century.

We actually need a time skip, even a short one, just to make it remotely realistic there's still a population left to actually do anything.

[Caerule]

No, they don't make it fit. It would have been better if they would just follow real world time. Events in Azeroth happen way to fast, with the planet being in constant end-of-the-world state for around ten years now, and more wars in that time than most real countries see in a century.

We actually need a time skip, even a short one, just to make it remotely realistic there's still a population left to actually do anything.

That's a fine opinion. But that doesn't mean it's actually happening. Veering off a consistent storyline on a world where something new happens every year, to take us out of that story for years, is opening a whole new can of worms.

Blizzard has a basic outline for what expansions are ahead. If they were doing a Time Skip, Ion would know. He clearly doesn't, if you listen to the interview.

[Amaterasu65]

Could even bring us to the past. Primordial Azeroth during the clash of the elements. But for gonna be open I don't want a big timeskip, future or past.

[kappalol]

Technology in warcraft is more the same for several millennia. time skip will change nothing about it.

[HailToTheKing]

Hopefully. But not centuries ahead. I still want the familiar faces, just, old.