Why Time Travel Doesn't Matter

One of the things that kept being repeated over the course of Blizzcon was that the story of Warlords of Draenor will not focus on time travel. Time travel happens, but it's not THE story.

This seems to bother some folks, and this is my take on why it shouldn't.

Garrosh went back in time to rally the warlords to his cause, unite them into a war machine that could come kill all of us. Someone over there engages the Dark Portal that will allow that war machine to come into our present Azeroth and that sucks, so we have to go stop them. This involves us traveling back in time to stop them.

But several things are important:
Garrosh isn't changing our past, he's forging a new separate path from our past, parallel.
We don't go further back in time to stop him, we go to when he is as the portal opens.*
That past and our present are linked together in a way that makes them basically both our present.

If you look at Warlords of Draenor and slap different names on everything you could ignore the time travel component completely.

Garrosh went to planet Xenoth and amassed an army, teaching them how to make fantastic bombs and cannons that can punch you. Then someone opened a door to let punch cannons come attack us on Azeroth. We go to planet Xenoth and meet up with other folks who don't like Garrosh either, and they become our allies in the fight.

That's the same story, right? Just different names to the characters and places.

Time travel was used to explore the history of Draenei and Orcs in game, and let us play in their world pre-destruction. It lets them bring back old big bads that maybe they regret killing, and big heroes that we haven't played along side of.

I don't see why the actions that we take in Warlords are any less meaningful than any other expansion. We will win, because it's what we do, it is what we always do. It's not like it's predetermined that we'll win because obviously we're here so they didn't defeat us 30 years ago, because that isn't our past. For all intents and purposes it's just a different planet. It is a "What If" planet, but honestly the past aspect of it doesn't matter. It's just there for them to play around with the story.

And I believe that's what the devs meant by time travel not being the story...

*Ok, I'm not sure on that but it seems reasonable.