by JR Cook - 9 years ago     show comments

Over the last three days, we’ve looked at Azshara and the naga, the South Seas, and the Emerald Dream, all of which are big concepts with a lot of baggage, which is usually the big reason why all of them can’t work as expansions without that baggage either getting thrown out or being altered dramatically to suit new gameplay.

However, the premise behind Warlords of Draenor has opened the door to a lot of other expansion concepts that folks have been talking about ever since we knew things were going to go timey-wimey. All of them have their own logistical problems that largely tank them as actual possibilities, but the point is that WoD opened the floodgates. I’m going to take on two of the most common suggestions I’ve heard.

As a given for both of these concepts, consider that a lot of the louder folks in the WoW community seem to be ambivalent towards the idea of doing another time travel expansion, for several reasons. It’s hard to justify the relevance to present-day Azeroth, the mechanics of how doing stuff in the past does/doesn’t impact the present or future is headache-inducing to say the least, and the underlying issue of “why don’t Bronze dragons just time-travel to before the time-travel happened and nip this in the bud” undoes all of the tension of the expansion unless it’s handwaved away. So before we even address the concepts themselves, there’s already a sense that the community would reject a time travel expansion regardless of where/when it went.

Okay, maybe a War of the Ancients expansion would be kinda tight, and it gets around Azshara doing her Ursula cosplay.

Ancient Kalimdor/Pre-Sundering Azeroth

The Well of Eternity 5-man during Cataclysm planted the seed for this concept, and WoD watered it for the community of folks who might love the idea of decadent Azshara-obsessed night elves before they went down the path of becoming snake-dudes. To an extent, the idea of having an expansion where we’re fighting evil night elves after an expansion of fighting evil orcs has a sense of parity to it.

The arrow that kills this concept, however, is similar to one of the issues with the Emerald Dream: having a Kalimdor super-continent presents a lot of logistical problems for how the expansion even gets constructed. There’s also so much you need to address with what the Ancient world looks like, both geographically and politically. What were the vrykul up to at that point? What does imperial Pandaria look like? What about interaction with the troll empires of the time? Or the Aqir? Or the dwarves?

Doing a pre-Sundering Kalimdor would require a desire to do for Azeroth what WoD did for Outland, in terms of trying to take landmarks and other features from the modern era and imagining where they came from in the ancient world. To a great extent, doing that for modern Kalimdor, Northrend, and the Eastern Kingdoms (remember that Pandaria was untouched by the Sundering due to Shaohao’s sacrifice) sounds like a huge endeavor. Much bigger than Blizzard could even hope to constrain to one expansion.

Wait, so the Keep and the Cathedral switched places post-2nd War?

Alternate First War Azeroth

Knowing that Expansion Six will naturally come after the release of the Warcraft film next summer, plenty of folks have speculated that WoD‘s pre-First War timeframe was a set-up for going to First War Stormwind, in order to mirror the setting of the film itself. Even if we know that the film won’t be in the same continuity, folks coming into WoW following the film might want to interact with familiar characters like Lothar and Llane and Medivh.

However, therein lies the heart of the problem with an alternate Azeroth: is this a “Highlords of Azeroth” expansion, where like in WoD we’re fending off the inexorable advance of a united and evil front of human kings? Are we fighting against the original Blackhand Horde alongside Llane and Lothar, right after we’ve just fought off the Iron Horde? Are we fighting all the trolls?

And that’s without getting into the logistics of how Stormwind looks pre-First War, how similar or different the kingdom is from the present incarnation, whether or not the rest of the Eastern Kingdoms is accessible, what all of THAT looks like… Blizzard demonstrated that looking at a place from a different point in time largely requires that they take some artistic license, and not everyone was happy with how different Draenor looked versus what we expected a pre-destruction Outland to look like.

None of the possible scenarios for a pre-First War Azeroth sound exceptionally appealing, to be honest, and since it’s a revamp of the place that’s on the scale of what Blizzard did with Cataclysm, something that they specifically said got out of hand and detracted from end-game content, that makes me feel like going back to that time frame is ultimately more trouble than its worth.

The Time Is Not Right

The issue of a time travel expansion being relevant to present-day Azeroth is honestly the biggest obstacle, and Blizzard’s performance with WoD doesn’t really do them any favors. Whether the brevity of the expansion was due to the time travel shenanigans, or a new expansion paradigm for Team 2, or simply because the expansion itself didn’t shake out they way they expected, it’s troubling to consider the possibility that future expansions could be similarly short in their scope and what they add to the world of the game overall.

The bottom line? Another time travel expansion will be a tough sell no matter when it goes, and I for one am more interested in seeing stories in the present rather than going somewhen else in time to troubleshoot problems. The story is just cleaner without mixing in time travel, and it’s really as simple as that.

The Final Chapter Approaches

After tomorrow’s entry, it’ll be Thursday and we’ll know what the next expansion will be. That means I’ve only got one more day to tell you what it’s not going to be. So come back tomorrow so I can tell you what not to expect Thursday morning!

Do you really want to go back to some point in Azeroth’s past for an expansion? Tell me why in the comments.