Dragonflight Patch 10.1.5 gives us a glimpse of how different WoW could have looked

While you’re playing with Sniffenseeking in Zaralek Cavern and chasing the Evoker Legendary weapon, Blizzard Entertainment is cooking up a new World of Warcraft Dragonflight update, Patch 10.1.5. Revolving around “timey-wimey” nonsense, the patch gives us a glimpse into how different WoW could have looked.

According to Wowhead’s datamining from May 18, the Time-Lost Battlefield encounter will feature the Great Glorious Alliance and the Blood Horde. During this encounter, WoW players will fight alternative versions of the Horde and the Alliance which, by the look and their official description, look far different than the factions we know and love. 

While the alternative version of the Alliance have zealous and Scarlet Crusade-like Inquisitors, Interrogators, and a Sky-Commander, the Horde from a different universe have the Plague-inspired Smokers, Bombers, and Warlord of the Toxic Wastes.

This means that these alternative versions of the Horde and the Alliance have embraced the worst that has come out of them in the history of WoW. This new Alliance have clearly adopted a zealous and fanatic attitude that runs deep in the Scarlet Crusade and the Horde have accepted Slyvanas’ unhonorable ways of spreading the Plague and cleansing Azeroth of both the living and the dead. 

If the happenings of Azeroth played out just slightly differently, we could have been those Horde plague-spreaders and Alliance conquistadors, leading to the long-lasting war between these two factions escalating even more. It’s possible Blizzard has had plans to implement some of these storylines, but has never found the opportunity until now or simply decided to scrap them and move in a different direction. 

Unfortunately, the encounter still isn’t available for testing on the PTR, but it’s likely we’ll see it and learn more in the upcoming weeks. The biggest selling points of Patch 10.1.5, besides the new megadungeon—Dawn of the Infinite, are Augmentation Evokers, Time Rift events, and a fun little questline called Whelp Daycare. The release date of the patch still remains a mystery, but you can expect it in either June or July this year.