Even before the announcement of World of Warcraft Dragonflight, there were rumors that it was time for a time jump in Azeroth. Normally there are only one or two years between the respective expansions – but with Dragonflight it’s different.

The story boss of WoW has explained long and wide: Between the departure into the Shadowlands and the launch of Dragonflight are a whole five years.

What was said? Story boss Steve Danuser has addressed players on the official WoW forum and explained in more detail what is actually happening with Dragonflight. The post is quite long, but one of the most important statements is:

Shadowlands started in year 35 after the opening of the dark portal and Dragonflight starts in year 40.

He elaborated on it a little more:

The events of Shadowlands took place over the course of 2 years, so that leaves a few more years to jump forward. Our goal is to not have a litany of things take place outside of the game during that time that you have to read about in books or other media to understand the game world. The goal is to allow the inhabitants of Azeroth to have a little bit of “normal life” without having a huge threat hovering over their heads again.

When our heroes return from the Realm of the Dead, you can imagine them slowly settling back into their normal lives and duties, without an immediate crisis existing or a new enemy to fight directly. The Alliance and Horde respect the truce signed after the 4th war and the average Azerothian can simply enjoy a period of stability and reflection.

Why is this so important? Importance of this decision is mainly for two reasons. The first is that it allows many “young” characters to mature a bit and soon take up more space in the storyline of WoW. At the same time, however, the jump of three to five years is not so great that older characters change so drastically that you don’t even recognize them.

Roleplayers have to make tough decisions

The second important point concerns a smaller group of WoW fans – role-players. For them, it is particularly significant when several years suddenly pass in the game world. This is because many characters live parallel to real time in the role-playing game – so if a year passes in reality, it does so in the role-playing game as well. Due to the time skip, however, “RPers” are now forced to make a decision: Do they build the time skip into their game and let their characters age and think about what their character has experienced in the last 5 years?

Or do they simply ignore the time skip and then run the risk of coming into conflict with other RPers who have aged their character?

At least there is one good thing about it – Blizzard has already said that they won’t use the time jump to make particularly big events happen in Azeroth that you never see in the game. The only exception to this is probably the wedding of Lor’themar and Thalyssra, which will be told in the form of a free-to-play story.

What will your rook do in the years? Will he dance on the mailbox every day, stare enviously at the NPCs because they have Housing, or visit Icecrown Citadel for many years to finally dust off “Invincible”?