The announcements for the future of the modern version of World of Warcraft made at Blizzcon 2023 are…interesting.

Let me first say this – I’m going to do small cynicsm up top here and then attempt to meet the news in good faith and with the assumption that Blizzard moves as they say they will, because, cynicsm and doubt aside, I think the news this weekend was good for the WoW fans and I think there’s a lot to like in what has been shown so far. There’s some weird plays and some reasons to doubt as well, but overall – I came away from the Blizzcon virtual feed impressed with what I saw.

So what did they do? Blizzard announced an expansion this weekend…and then the two that follow that announced expansion. We got the deep dives and levels of detail we’d expect from Blizzcon (maybe slightly less overall) for that first expansion and then a brief plot synopsis and overriding idea of where the next two expansions go in story terms. For 2024 through 2030, we’ll be seeing The Worldsoul Saga – expansions, in order, The War Within, Midnight, and The Last Titan. The War Within is a story of the world soul of Azeroth crying out for help to her champions, with these cries being heard by Anduin and Thrall, and the same cries but in a very different and triumphant tone being heard by Alleria Windrunner. To aid the worldsoul, we go into the depths of Azeroth, through Khaz Algar and a multitude of underground zones, with the immediate story implications being more understanding of what it was Sargeras was trying to stab at when he plunged his sword into Silithus. Midnight picks up as an elven chapter in the saga, seeing the elves of Azeroth attempt to unite to purge the Void from the Sunwell and a promised bad ending that will plunge us directly into the third announced expansion. That expansion, The Last Titan, returns to old Azeroth and Northrend and sees the Titans return to Azeroth as we explore their true intentions, purpose, and what Azeroth actually is.

On the surface, I think here’s where I land, after a little more than a day to mull it over – I like this overall, but this method of announcement is also not a promise or commitment to uphold these story ideas or a guarantee of their finished quality. Chris Metzen is a compelling and enthusiastic public speaker, but he also veered too close to the truth of many fan’s perceptions of modern WoW when talking about the number of outstanding loose plot threads and unfinished tales. There is no firm ground to say that the team, equipped with even this roadmap, will meet an objectively-high level of quality, and if based on recent history, plenty to suggest that disappointment could be afoot. A big part of the reason that Blizzard stopped doing detailed, far-in-advance reveals of details at Blizzcon and other large events was because they’d often overcommit to some new things and then face disappointment when they had to pull back the scope of what actually launched. I was excited for BfA, excited for Shadowlands, and I remember those feelings quite well as they sting my brain into a less-enthusiastic state of excitement.

It’s also been pointed out that elements of each of these three expansions fly more than a little close to plot elements and stories from Final Fantasy XIV’s recent story arcs, and I think that is a fair catch to point out. I think that doesn’t necessarily mean the work in WoW will be heavily derivative or retreads of FFXIV storytelling through the WoW lens, but it is somewhat difficult to put aside that observation here, especially with how direct some of these things seem to be – the verbiage of the Azerothian world soul veering dangerously close to the same protests raised at our player characters in XIV by Hydaelyn, the nature of an invading void, and the revelation of ancient, world-shaping forces and their true purpose all veers into ground quite similar to that trodden by Endwalker. Is this bad? I mean, I guess it depends on the finished product. It could be bad, because at moments when Blizzard has clearly copied someone else’s notes, they’ve either hit it out of the park (Warcraft itself as an obvious Warhammer “tribute”) or flopped completely (the whole verbiage in 9.2 about how the Warcraft III “saga” was concluding with the patch, a saga no one else knew was even a thing that was still ongoing, and perilously close to the point at which Endwalker hype was peaking and using the same verbiage). Personally, as long as it isn’t clear plagiarism, I don’t care that much if they rip off a lot of FFXIV story and put it through the WoW wash – FFXIV’s storytelling has been objectively better for years and if that’s what it takes for WoW’s story to get its shit together, cool. I do, however, also think that common narrative threads are common and some of the things people point out as derivative are narrative tropes and not unique to FFXIV. Given the social media praise from members of the WoW team for the FFXIV story, do I think that some of the ideas came from that direction? Sure, probably. I just also don’t think it merits a ton of fingerwagging or fandom wars…yet. If Azeroth’s worldsoul was in a fixed timeloop where it waited with foreknowledge from time travel that we’d be coming at a prescribed time to save things and it also turns out that the worldsoul was a Titan in ancient times already that retreated into the world to save energy for this day, well…maybe we can grab the pitchfork-shaped Dragoon weapons from FFXIV then. There’s plenty of room within these tropes to tell a new and unique story.

I also don’t particularly get excited by slivers of WoW lore years in advance because of how little they affect my stickiness with the game. I do care about the story and I want it to be good, but I didn’t quit Shadowlands and the game as a whole for a year because the Jailer story stunk like smelly ass – I quit because the layers of systems and forced time commitments of extracurriculars ground me down. The story helped, as did other issues where the game was more of a stage than active participant, but the primary antagonist of my time in WoW in the worst years was the gameplay design. If the story is good, I’ll be very happy (and probably start writing more lore posts again), and if it sucks real bad again, well, as long as the gameplay is good I’ll still be in the game and probably grumble here twice a year about fundamental storytelling skills and how the narrative design team at Blizzard needs to learn them. If the story is amazing but the gameplay sucks, then the story won’t keep me paying to play, since I could watch streams or lore digest videos on it and get the best part that way.

Okay, so we got the explainer and the cynical take out of the way. What’s the good news?

Well, there’s a lot.

Pre-planning

The biggest weakness of WoW’s last few years is that they seem to be winging it on large aspects of the game, starting pre-production under certain assumptions about new features before player feedback comes around and then ending up overly married to bad ideas while the lore team seems to be writing the story like I used to do homework in high school – 15 minutes before it’s due. Dragonflight, to its credit, has felt marginally better here, like there was an honest-to-god plan and roadmap used internally to guide things at the broad level while they then took player feedback and made changes to systems and design to answer criticisms. It used to be we never got class or spec reworks mid-expansion, and Dragonflight has served up like 12 spec reworks and a whole new spec on top of the two already-new specs for the new class we got to start.

Lore, however, has been the biggest victim of this lack of planning, because so much of the world of Warcraft has faltered due to obvious gaps in planning. Shadowlands in particular has been a sore spot, because the story it told directly contradicts so much of the historical worldbuilding we’ve gotten about how Azeroth and death within it works and the team seems to have realized this because very little of it has come up at all in Dragonflight and even the story moments that deal with death in Dragonflight have often contradicted how that was portrayed in Shadowlands – the whole Blue Dragonflight story quest chain comes to mind as does the Baine questing in Ohn’ahran Plains. In Mists of Pandaria, the team made an effort to move from single, standalone expansion stories to a larger, overarching serialized narrative that would connect expansions and bridge gaps in the story. They did this pretty well, all told, at least for a few years – MoP had a clear path into Warlords of Draenor, which had a clear path into the events of Legion, which set up Battle for Azeroth pretty well, and then in BfA, all of that went to shit, perhaps not coincidentally at the point that it was confirmed Chris Metzen had left the company. BfA only sets up Shadowlands if you squint really hard at Sylvanas’ character development, and likewise Shadowlands only sets up Dragonflight if you take the presence of a single named dragon in one zone story as evidence enough. Even BfA’s more direct Shadowlands tease on the Horde side questing, with Bwonsamdi and Zul’jin, only ends up being a small reference that is paid off in Ardenweald, which so far is the most interconnected zone in Shadowlands to the plots that came before and after (the troll stuff happens here as does the whole Ysera plot).

The announced intentions to have a contiguous, multi-expansion story arc that is preplanned this far out is, if executed, great news. Even in the serialized fiction era of WoW, we often didn’t get those connective bits of storytelling until much later into an expansion, where this preplan allows the possibility that we can constantly be building the Worldsoul Saga through each piece of content, through each story quest and patch in each of the 3 expansions, and there should, hopefully, be callbacks and references to prior chapters that allow us to see the full breadth of the story. Through the lens offered at Blizzcon this weekend, we can in fact also see that elements of Dragonflight have been playing into this quite well – the whole thing with the Incarnates is a distrust of the Titans that led them to fracture from the Aspects, and we should have, after 10.2 this week, two remaining Incarnates in Vyranoth and Iridikron who represent differing ends of the puzzle – Vyranoth who has seemed to accept the Aspects, if not the Titans, and Iridikron, who has rejected them fully and apparently embraced the Void.

Overall, I like it when WoW’s story is good and this is the first time that excitement and potential has won out over cynicism for me with WoW’s narrative design in like, 5 years, so hell yeah I’ll take it.

The War Within Has Some Gameplay Wins

While it obviously remains to be seen how much The War Within actually delivers on gameplay, with a lot of fine details remaining untold in the public eye for now, what they did share is very promising and easily the most excited I’ve been for the gameplay side of WoW in a while.

First up is the Warband, a feature that allows you to open up the bounty of your account to all your characters with shared resources. Within the Warband system, you’ll have shared reputations and renowns(at least for The War Within factions), an account-wide bank including reagents that can be crafted from by any character, with no faction limitations getting in the way. Transmog farming will open up wide as you can now unlock transmog on any character, regardless of if they can wear the armor/weapon type or not – remains to be seen if actual pieces of tier are included in this, but if so, this is a stupendously good thing and even without it is still pretty damn awesome. There will also be Warbound-bound equipment, typically a few item levels behind the BoE or BoP gear that would come from the same content, but with the idea that you can simply drop it into your Warband bank and let any alt that can use it grab it. The intent here in general seems to be centered on ensuring that playing alts is a decidedly more modern experience without decisions made in design 20 years ago weighing the system down, and while I’ve wished for many of these things for a long time, I also kind of expected that Blizzard would never move on these issues and seeing them do so is a genuine delight. Warbands also add a strictly cosmetic thing to your login screen that is very cool – a warband camp with your characters all visible sitting around the camp alongside the traditional character list. The camp they showed in screenshots had 4 characters, so we’ll see if there are any upper limits to it (I have 18 level 70s Blizz, you’re gonna need to pump those numbers up). All of these are very nice touches and some are very highly-demanded features and it is a joy to see them.

Next up is a tweak to the world content system, or two to be more precise. Firstly is Delves, a new system that allows you to explore open-world areas with friends and an NPC guide you can grow and gear up in search of treasure. This system hooks world content fully into the seasonal model that WoW has adopted since Legion – with each season offering a new NPC guide from lore and likely expanding or shifting the pool of places you can delve as new zones are added. The first season of TWW will have Brann Bronzebeard as our NPC companion for these. Alongside Delves, world content will be replacing PvP on the Great Vault such that you can, over time, gear up pretty extensively through world content without needing to go out to any other mode of content. That and another Great Vault change that is being teased on the screenshot are pretty cool and also, as someone who wrote asking for those, I do expect a royalty check in the mail Blizzard (I just moved so my Bnet address is inaccurate, get in touch). Delves are intended to be flexible and doable in groups of friends or even alone and with no hard cap on doing them per week (although a soft cap at which point higher value rewards will stop was mentioned as a hypothetical that is likely to happen), and the general intent of systems like this is to make evergreen foundations for content, so while Delves might be limited to TWW, I’d expect to see a version of the system powering some future mode of content as we move forward.

For player power progression, instead of a simple talent extension, we’ll gain micro-trees of 10 points called Hero Talents, with the idea being that you’ll pick a Hero Talent tree alongside your existing Dragonflight talents and use these for further niche customizations that emphasize specific parts of your kit. To that end, there is one Hero Talent micro-tree per spec for a class, and if the Druid example holds up, each spec will have access to two of the Hero Talent tree options, with talents in those trees designed to conform to the player spec in question. It seems like the choices will specifically gel with modes of content – the examples shown seemed to allow easy access to prioritize single or multi-target damage and specific modes of play, so it seems like Hero Talents could end up being a go-to customization vector for raid versus dungeon builds, as an example. The other Great Vault change, which they didn’t say outloud but had far too detailed in the screenshot when discussing Delves, is something I’ve been an advocate for since Shadowlands added the feature – the expansion of the dungeon row of the GV to include non-M+ dungeons, specifically Heroic, regular Mythic, and Timewalking. Until it is formally announced, not holding my breath too much, but it would be a lot of trouble to add that to the UI element for the Vault they showed if it wasn’t discussed and planned, even though they could decide against it and pull back. My take has always been that players have enough gear tiering and separation based on the Blizzard-determined difficulty of content they complete and so it doesn’t hurt the Mythic raider or high key pusher if someone does a couple of Delves and gets something equivalent to Normal raid gear that they might, horror of horrors, eventually be able to upgrade over months of effort to match a baseline Mythic raid piece through some upgrade system.

Blizzard has finally found the way to make flying on day 1 a thing they are okay with, and while some people may not like it, here’s the deets – it’s Dragonriding, now dubbed “dynamic flight.” The system will use the glyphs we already got in Dragonflight and the same ability tree progression, which is in-fact why the new starting experience in 11.0 will be Dragonflight – ship players in to get those glyphs and abilities, no need to add new ones in the new zones. Dynamic Flight will, as a result, extend to a “3-digit” number of existing mounts in the game already, including Druid flight form and the Dracthyr Soar racial (which was already just a gimpy Dragonriding, but now it will be the full version), and Dynamic Flight will also become available in all flyable zones in the game as of patch 10.2.5. On top of this, there will be a choice element for classic flying, requiring Pathfinder. For Dragonflight, we get the achievement in the upcoming 10.2 patch and it just requires story completion, but for TWW, it will be available at level cap for completing the base story – no added waiting or achievements required. As a set of options, I really like this – I enjoy the gameplay of Dynamic Flight pretty often but sometimes I just want to go to a place directly without thinking about it – and some gathering nodes on small cliffs in Dragonflight zones do make me angry at dragonriding, heh. This, to me, screams of acknowledging what Blizzard often said about Pathfinder in the past – they want the work the art team puts into zones to be appreciated by players who get to see it in full from the low-level, full-scale version and then later can fly over once the investment on that art has been paid off. Dynamic Flight requires knowledge of the zones and a certain appreciation for the maps and layouts, so doing that as you level and then getting the option to AFK fly places is a decent play.

We have some other high-level baseline details – we have 8 named dungeons with 4 for leveling and 4 for level capped play alongside a launch 8-boss raid, a 10-level cap extension, and most curiously to me so far, gear tooltips that seem to imply no item level squish is coming. Granted, Shadowlands featured the same in the demo at Blizzcon 2019 and then went on to squish even more aggressively, so that doesn’t mean much of anything yet, but hey.

My Thoughts

So while I’ve peppered my thoughts in throughout, I wanted to take a moment to summarize and kind of put a bow on things here.

The War Within is a pretty exciting early announcement from Blizzard, one that does reflect a certain degree of improvement from the team that I really appreciate. If they meet all their promises here and remain as flexible and on-point as they have during Dragonflight, there’s a chance that the future of WoW looks really good. It is worth saying that for as good as Dragonflight has been overall, it still very much fits the mold left by Shadowlands and BfA before it – it has stripped borrowed power and made things better for the non-raider, non-dungeon player, but the current game still very much caters to those tastes and hasn’t evolved as much as it would have needed to in order to pull in the most disaffected among the game’s one-time playerbase. It pulled me back, but I already liked a lot of the things that remain similar – I love running M+, raiding is the thing that I have done the most in WoW, and the ways those systems have always worked has generally been pretty satisfying to me. TWW takes aim at that critique and actually gets pretty close to meeting the challenge it proposes – there’s a lot of clear effort here to make the world content, non-instanced content player a fair bit happier with the game while still offering the substantial instanced content those of us who’ve almost always enjoyed the modern game come back for time and again and appealing to the way many of us play – with armies of alts.

A lot remains to be seen with alpha testing in the spring, additional details as we get there, and the launch state of the expansion, of course, but this is a solid start. While “announcing three expansions” was a bit of fluff (you announced one expansion and gave me the name and book jacket plot synopsis of two more), it represents a foundational change to how Blizzard has traditionally operated, and if they stick the landing, it could be a spectacular return to form. My skepticism about Metzen’s return may very well prove to be an egg I would be all too happy to have on my face, and I am rooting for his guidance and the team at large to pull together to deliver 3 very good expansions. From the cynical, skeptical modern WoW fan view, The War Within looks promising and I am eager to see more, learn more, and hopefully get into alpha and play it to see what that gilded future they promise looks like.