I’ve always been a fan of time travel stories, whether they be movies, books, or games. What interests me most about the idea of time travel is how vastly different each author’s take on the concept can be. For example, if a person travels forward in time, does another version of themselves exist in the future? Or did they slip out of the time stream and disappeared from existence the day they time travelled? What happens if a person travelled back and made some changes to events in the past? Does this create a new alternate timeline or does it just modify the original timeline? Ultimately, it isn’t easy telling a good time travel story and I give much respect to authors who are able to pull it off.
In World of Warcraft’s “Warlords of Draneor” expansion, Blizzard decided to go with the multiple timeline idea. After the players return to the original timeline, their actions resulted in creating a new separate timeline whose history did not directly impact their own. In the newest expac, “Battle for Azeroth,” info datamined by Wowhead shows that players will be returning to this alternate timeline to recruit the aid of the non-corrupted Mag’Har orcs. When they arrive, some 35 years after the events of “Warlords of Draneor,” they find that their actions of saving the orcs from the demons of the Burning Legion had some very bizarre consequences.
When we had last left “Warlords of Draneor,” players had helped build a Dranei priestess called Yrel into a major Alliance leader. Contrary to what we would’ve expected of her, Yrel has instead taken her people down a very dark path. Players returning to this timeline will find that she has become a religious fanatic and leads a group known as the “Lightbound.”
With no Legion to fight, it seems the Naaru have become hell-bent on converting all intelligent life on Draenor to the Light, even doing so by force if required. Don’t want to convert? The penalty is death. From what we’ve learned through the datamine, Durotan the father of Thrall has already been killed for standing against the Lightbound. In a strange twist of fate, in this timeline, he fathered a daughter named Geya’rah before he died.
What’s noted in the datamine text is that Yrel even managed to convert the son of Grommash to her side. Could this still be alternate reality Garrosh? Or is this actually someone new like Geya’rah?
This is definitely a rather strange turn of events for that timeline and a lot of the early reactions to it so far aren’t very good. Considering that the information we have at the moment has a good chance of being adjusted before Battle of Azeroth’s actual release, nothing is set in stone yet. Personally, I’d rather wait for more info to be released before judging these strange developments. One things for sure though, time travel is messy and sometimes leads us to weird places. Here’s to hoping that Blizzard’s take on time travel in Battle of Azeroth ends up making sense: both for its characters and plot-wise.
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