Welcome in the future! Blizzard confirms WoW Dragonflight time jump

Many WoW fans have already expected that there will be some time between the launch of Shadowlands and the launch of Dragonflight in Azeroth itself. Blizzard’s Narrative Lead for World of Warcraft, Steve Danuser, posted this on the official WoW forums approved. According to him, there are five years between the start of our journey to the Shadowlands and our new adventure on the Dragon Isles.

“There’s always been a certain amount of time between expansions, although it’s rarely mentioned in the game,” says Danuser. “We keep an internal timeline showing what year each expansion begins, and the gap between each expansion was either one year (like previous expansions) or two years (like most later ones).”

Why Dragonflight starts “later”.

As Danuser mentions, expansions are usually one to two years apart. But between Shadowlands and Dragonflight five years pass for our heroes. Why? “Since the Shadowlands mark the end of a book in the Warcraft saga […]it seemed a good opportunity for us to give Azeroth and its denizens a little breathing space before we embark on the next big story arc with Dragonflight,” explains Danuser. The Shadowlands events took place within the space of two years, and that’s still ticking away some time in which our heroes observe the truce agreed after the Fourth War and the common people among Azeroth’s citizens experience a time of calm and stability.

Among other things, this should be presented in a digital short story that the people at Blizzard want to publish – of course, reading this story shouldn’t be necessary to understand what’s happening in Dragonflight.

The timeline of the WoW expansions then looks like this
For reference, Year 0 of the Warcraft Era is the opening of the Dark Portal for the first time

• World of Warcraft started in year 25
• The Burning Crusade started in year 26
• Wrath of the Lich King started in year 27
• cataclysm started in year 28
• Mists of Pandaria started in year 30
• Warlords of Draenor started in the year 31
• legion started in year 32
• Battle for Azeroth started in year 33
• Shadowlands started in year 35
• Dragon flight starts in year 40

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Mature new heroes

As mentioned, Shadowlands ended a World of Warcraft storyline. “Aside from stretching the WoW timeline a bit, another benefit of this time warp is that our younger characters [Anm. d. Red.: Blizzards Story-Charaktere] get a little older and some of them may take a bigger role in future storylines. However, not so much time will pass that one would expect characters who are already grown up to look significantly different,” Danuser also explains.