Tuesday, May 27, 2014

The Infinites in Draenor

This is about 99% speculation here, so I don't know if I'd classify what I'm going to talk about as spoilers, except for a bit of information from the War Crimes novel.

This is stuff you might be able to suss out anyway just from the premise of Warlords of Draenor, but just in case you're very spoiler-conscious, I'll give you this SPOILER WARNING.

This is a sentence for you to read in case your eyes skimmed past the big bold spoiler warning!

Right!

It would seem that the Bronze Dragonflight is enduring a schism within its ranks. Following the defeat of Deathwing, the Dragon Aspects were de-powered, essentially becoming just ordinary dragons. But of course, the dragonflights themselves had some special power linked to the Aspects. The Bronze flight, for instance, could see through the fabric of time. However, because Nozdormu expended all his powers in order to seal Deathwing's fate, the Bronze Dragons are now no more inherently capable of guarding the timeways than the Green Dragons, or even just mortals.

In the aftermath of all of this, some mortals have come down to the Caverns of Time to offer their services, forming the Timewalker faction. With the dragons weakened, it seems fairly logical that the great heroes of Azeroth would pick up the slack.

Yet among the Bronze Flight, there's been something of a difference in opinion about how to proceed. Some wish to keep up the tradition of safeguarding the prime timeline. Chromie, for instance (everyone's favorite dragon, and if you disagree you're just wrong,) advocates for continuing their work.

But there are other Bronze Dragons who are beginning to wonder if there's something else they could be doing. They feel that, using their knowledge of the flow of time, they might be able to guide it, either improving our timeline or even creating entirely new parallel universes.

There has been a dreadful suspicion that was more or less confirmed in patch 4.3, and that is that the Infinite Dragonflight, who seek to alter the timeline, are in fact future versions of the Bronze Flight. When we fight our way through the End Time, the final boss is Murozond, a corrupted, Infinite version of Nozdormu. Nozdormu himself accompanies us as we attack his future self, eulogizing Murozond and thus affirming his own fate.

But what, truly, are the Infinite Dragons? The creed of the Bronze Flight was that there was only one true timeline, and yet we are set to be attacked by an Iron Horde coming out of an alternate universe created by time travel.

If Murozond truly is a future Nozdormu, how, then, is he supposed to get to End Time, if that is a future that has been fully prevented? Surely, End Time is an alternate universe, but if that's the case, then might the Infinites not just be the alternate universe version of the Bronze Dragonflight, as opposed to their future?

Kairoz could be the first of the Infinite Dragonflight, or perhaps he was corrupted by them. Because we are speaking about time travelers, these two notions are not mutually exclusive. On the other hand, we could imagine seeing the Infinites arise organically, through dissent among the ranks of a disillusioned Bronze Flight.

The question I then have is how much we'll see these guys in Draenor.

The various raid tiers of Warlords remain something of a mystery. We know that in the first tier, we're going to be taking down the Ogres of Highmaul and the Blackrock Clan. But other than a vague sense that at some point we'll be fighting Grom Hellscream and maybe Gul'dan, there's not a lot clear about what major threats we'll be facing.

Given that, for all the chaos it will have caused, Draenor-B is a pretty successful attempt at creating a "new world," it seems like it might be a place that holds some interest for the Infinite Flight. Might we, in fact, see an Infinite-themed raid? The Infinite Dragonflight actually only shows up in four of the dungeons in the Caverns of Time, and neither of its raids. A time-bending raid might be an interesting environment. It would also be cool, seeing as we might approach it form Draenor, to have a time-themed instance no longer locked to the Caverns of Time (that place is pretty crowded by now.)

I wonder, what are the Infinites' goals? Before now, you might have guessed destroying Azeroth through either preventing the coalition from forming during the Third War or keeping us from retrieving the Dragon Soul, but now I wonder about that. It's suggested that Nozdormu was corrupted by the Old Gods into becoming Murozond, but I kind of hope that it's something else (partially because man is that a card that they have already played, and with a Dragon Aspect, too!)

I recognize that their mystery is part of their mystique, and perhaps their motivation should remain unknown, but the premise of this expansion provides us with an opportunity to explore these guys, and I hope it's an opportunity that Blizzard takes.

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