The Deaths of Chromie and A Real Time-Travel Expansion

Warlords of Draenor was a time-travel expansion. Except that it was not really a time-travel expansion.

Growing up, two of my favorite movies were Back to the Future and Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. While I remember Back to the Future better (I probably watched it more,) I loved the idea of time-hopping the way that Bill and Ted did it.

In case you haven't seen the movie, it's about a pair of slacker Gen-X high school students (played by Alex Winters and Keanu Reeves) who are destined to be leaders of a utopian society in the future, but only if they pass their current history class, and so one of the representatives of this future society sends them a time machine to help them with their class project. (In case you couldn't tell from the title, this is a comedy.)

Anyway, time travel stories introduce the possibility of shenanigans of a complex sort. At two points in Bill and Ted, the pair run into themselves (it's the same meeting, actually, but seen from the perspective of the younger and older pairs.) And of course in Back to the Future, Marty creates a stable time loop by playing Johnny B. Goode in front of Chuck Barry's cousin, who holds out a phone for the originator of that song to hear it.

Right, so back to WoW.

Warlords of Draenor went far out of its way to avoid time-travel tropes. While we were going back to a Draenor that was 35 years in the past (wait, does that mean Thrall is only 35 at this point? If he was born right around the beginning of the First War?) the game made it clear that this was not the same Draenor, and that we were going to only one time-location. Essentially, other than having a lot of characters with familiar names, Warlords made it clear that Draenor and Outland may as well have been totally separate places.

But we've seen time-travel done in fun ways before. And in Legion, we got perhaps the most enjoyable instance of it in the Deaths of Chromie scenario.

In the scenario, after you defeat the four threats in the non-Bronze dragonshrines, you get portals that lead to other moments in Chromie's life - conveniently overlapping with existing content, of course, but still taking you into various parts of the past, from the recent like the Alliance/Horde conflict over Andorhal and Ragnaros' campaign to take over Hyjal, to more distant, the Culling of Stratholme, to far distant, the War of the Ancients.

The stakes here are, at least on the surface level, somewhat low. This is the life of Chromie that is at risk, not the world (though depending on what role she has to play, that could wind up being a big deal.) But it would not be hard to imagine a version of this that becomes an expansion-worthy concept.

In Legion, the zones of the Broken Isles were tied together by the idea that each held one of the Pillars of Creation, and so while each zone had its own independent plot (albeit some sort of Legion presence in each) they were unified in a way to make them work together toward the expansion's primary goal of stopping the Legion.

Imagine, then, a continent-sized area accessible through the Caverns of Time. The area would branch off into different places during different eras. A unifying villain, such as the Infinite Dragonflight, might have gone to each of these areas and disrupted history as it was meant to go, and before we can attack them at their source, we first have to rescue the timeline as it was meant to happen in each zone.

With a full expansion, Blizzard would have the resources to really do justice to certain historical settings. And unlike the Deaths of Chromie, they could do things we haven't seen before. Obviously, one could do something like the Second War, but you could also go less obvious places like exploring the past of the Tauren or the War of the Three Hammers. I'd also think it would be awesome to see something like a future Orgrimmar filled with modern-looking skyscrapers (you know, but with spikes.)

And of course, not everything has to conform to history as we know it because the whole point is that the timeline has been changed. Maybe there's a powerful Tauren Empire in Kalimdor that seems pretty good, but needs to be toppled for the sake of the timeline - introducing the moral complexity of preserving the "true" timeline.

And of course the fact that the Bronze Dragons eventually become the Infinite Dragons sets up some really interesting character moments. In fact, what if that "Infinite" corruption extends to other types of being. Perhaps we would encounter Infinite versions of ourselves and we need to find a way to prevent this corruption from occurring.

I think that after Warlords, Blizzard might be a bit gunshy about doing another expansion with time-travel as a major theme. And to be sure, the genre is a difficult one to write. But I also feel that, as a fan of time-travel stories, I felt seriously let down by Warlords of Draenor. The Deaths of Chromie is probably just an exercise in evergreen, repeatable content, but I think it could serve as a kind of proof of concept for a future expansion that would make me very excited.