10.2.6’s big surprise is live as of this week, and…uh, it’s interesting.

The lynchpin feature of this new patch is an addition to retail WoW playable by anyone with a WoW subscription – a 60-player battle royale called “Plunderstorm.” You roll in as your Battletag, can customize any of WoW’s playable races to suit your needs as an avatar, and play matches either solo or queued with a friend and try to be the last ones standing among the 60 players entered.

Battle Royales are hardly new, and as a genre they’ve been a bit down as of late, with juggernaut Fortnite not being quite as compelling, every shooter on the face of God’s green earth having some take on the mode, and so of course, it is in this environment, several years after the big gold rush, that Blizzard has now entered their take into the genre (hi Heroes of the Storm, some folks remember you and how you came out after over 5 years of development time made you hella late to the MOBA goldrush). Blizzard folding acquired studio Proletariat into their WoW team makes this sort of make sense, as Proletariat’s big game prior to acquisition was Spellbreak, an RPG-styled fantasy battle royale.

Blizzard’s take with Plunderstorm is a limited-time (for now) event where played matches earn Plunder (you get some for kills, some for quests, and some found as gold on the map), Plunder acts as reputation, and the whole mode feeds into its own Renown track like Retail, with that Renown track having battle-pass styled rewards per level. Every 2500 Plunder is a Renown level, and you max out at 40 Renown. Simple enough loop, so you just play matches until you reach the rewards you want. You don’t use your existing WoW characters and the rewards are account-wide, including a bevy of modern WoW rewards and a whopping, I believe, two for Classic.

Regardless of the rest of my take on Plunderstorm (spoiler alert for the post to come…it’s mixed), it is actually kind of incredible that Blizzard pulled this off on a lot of levels. Building a BR game is tough, and it requires an engine with high responsiveness, low latency, and a strong connection to player activity and animations/responses from the game client, and Plunderstorm feels like a real BR title and not a cobbled-together thing bolted onto retail WoW. That it works as well as it does (and it’s actually quite well-built and functional!) is a testament to engineering prowess and strong development, not to mention a degree of internal testing that I wish we saw more in the normal game. It makes some decisive design decisions that peel it away slightly from the modern game – no UI addons, biggest group at 2 players, no power rewards – and it sticks to those guns. Clear effort was made to not just build a barebones BR onto WoW, but to make it kind of work standalone – the addition of a spectator mode is so nice and actually something I want to see for dead players in normal WoW, and a lot of WoW’s more flexible and dynamic modern systems (world events, world quests, event-based rares) all fit really easily to the BR mold in a way that works and makes it feel feature-complete.

Now, before I get to my gameplay opinion, I need to present my battle royale bonafides – very light. I have recently commented here that I am a rare and sometimes Fortnite enjoyer, and I think BR as a genre and mode of play is reasonably compelling. I’m not so into Fortnite or BRs that I play them more than maybe once a month, but I generally get why people like them and how they got popular. I try to avoid being the shithead who goes “Fortnite is for kids!” but I also have at least 3 nephews who are so into Fortnite that it made me the cool uncle to show them how it played on a great gaming PC, and I even built one of them a starter PC for Christmas this last year so he could move off of playing Fortnite on Switch and up to the “big leagues.” (It also has a ton of RGB LED in it because of course it does why wouldn’t it?)

Here’s the thing…putting a BR in WoW doesn’t make me innately more interested in a BR, and so while it is fun, and I played on stream on launch night for an hour or so and generally had a good time, I wouldn’t necessarily care if it stayed as limited time and rode off gracefully, nor would I play it heavily if it became a pillar of the game’s built-in PvP. The action-nature and small/non-existent teams do cut the toxicity of normal WoW PvP (which, good fucking lord, is awful), and I had overall good experiences with Plunderstorm in the time I did play it, but it is still a BR at heart and how much you are likely to enjoy it hinges on how much you like the mode in any other of the 13 million ways it has been produced to date. If the PUBG, Fortnite, or CoD Warzone bug never caught with you, Plunderstorm is extremely unlikely to do it for you.

Blizzard, to their credit (sort of), figured this would be the case and has sweetened the deal with an absolute truckload of pirate-themed cosmetics for retail WoW, multiple pets, a mount, and a tabard. They’re all quite neat, and the Renown track “just play and you’ll keep earning” thing is fine enough, but there is a huge problem – the acquisition rate of Renown is fucking miserable. It is tuned to how well you play and how much plunder you get in each match, so I guess the partially-correct answer is to “git gud,” but most estimates place it so that the pinnacle players will still need to spend around 17-21 hours just playing this mode to earn all the Renown. For my own progress last night, it would likely take me, at minimum, 40 hours of just playing this mode to get everything. Is that awful? I mean, perhaps not – but considering that the estimated duration of the event is six weeks and a player like me would need to invest a full-time job’s weekly hour count into earning the full reward track, that kinda sucks! There are easing measures – daily and weekly quests for extra Plunder mostly – and the funniest thing is that the early Plunder-efficient strategies all involve avoiding fighting as much as possible to just scan the map for gold, loot chests, and then pick off players who are engaged in a 1v1 with someone else already – which is kind of how BRs just generally are but it is also funny to see a WoW PvP map that does not encourage and push towards forced friction.

The use of the no addons rule here is fascinating as well, because the baseline UI provided for Plunderstorm is surprisingly adequate. I don’t even say that as a slight – Blizzard got to a point of having so many addons made for WoW because the base UI kinda sucked, and while Dragonflight’s tweaks and Edit Mode have made it much better overall, it still has some strong pushes towards addons for functionality the base UI wouldn’t dare replicate. Plunderstorm has a simple action bar with 7 buttons and default keybindings that work for BR-style controls, adding to WoW’s assortment an Interact button for picking things up in the world, which you can also just right-click to loot like in the normal game. The keybinds are fully reassignable, so I just set the hotbar as 1-7 to use my Azeron Cyborg with it and it worked well. The only functional hit I have on the UI is that Blizzard still doesn’t have good UI practices for scaling to ultrawide monitor resolutions – on my 3440×1440 resolution, tooltips are on the bottom right corner, a point on the display that is far enough outside my focus that it requires a focus shift to read tooltips and engage with the game in that way. In normal WoW, I could relocate that with an addon, but not here! Even Edit Mode is not available here, so you can’t even move elements around or resize individually to suit your tastes. And like, okay, it’s a BR and that’s kind of the intention and way those games are, but I think it would be nice of WoW to at least offer like the tiniest sliver of the built-in customization the game has now.

On the actual gameplay front, it’s fine. It is genuinely pretty responsive and quick-feeling, and the overall flow of combat and activity in it matches up to the BR standard, but it also carries two sets of distinct frustrations – the Battle Royale gameplay ideas and Blizzard design and balance. On the BR front, all your abilities are random drops from chests, NPCs, and what you can loot from players who lose, so your loadout match to match can vary, but there’s also not a huge variety in attacks and the game enforces a design vision that caps you at two attacks. Unlike in Fortnite, where you have 6 inventory slots to use for weapons or items and you have agency to determine what should be in each of them, Blizzard has forced the slots into attacks, defensives, and a utility slot, and makes up the difference compared to Fortnite by giving everyone a bottomless mug of healing grog on a cooldown. So you’re bound by what you can loot and what slots you have available – the BR special – but then further restricted by category based on what Blizzard wants you to be able to have. Blizzard’s design challenges further enter as the existing abilities have wild swings in viability, which is also kind of normal for a BR, but even there, when you can have more than two, it’s less annoying to get two bad weapons, while in Plunderstorm, getting two meh attacks just means you are probably toast if you come up on someone with Fire Whirl. I do think that public testing would have helped this a bit, but they’ve also already said publicly that balancing tweaks and changes will come to keep things feeling decent, so hey.

Now, then, the big question…

Was This Worth The Hype?

Well…no. Yes and no. I dunno. It’s tough to say.

On the one hand, it is a genuinely cool feature and I think adding it as a surprise was the right play. Honestly, the contents of 10.2.6 help mitigate the worst of it, because if you’re of the opinion that Plunderstorm is a waste of time and just want to know what the next season of WoW content is, well, it’s in the files and Wowhead started diligently datamining and presenting the contents the second the patch hit the CDN yesterday. If you don’t care for Plunderstorm or actively hate it, there’s plenty of other news coming out and the speculation is that Season 4 is likely to be inbound within 3 weeks anyways, so hey, you’ll be fine.

I do think that the patch cycle of hiding the content and hyping some big secret coming kind of backfired in that there is a segment of the community who is so salty that this is the big secret that they’re getting pretty mad on social media, and like, I guess that describes a lot of things in modern gaming (at least no dumbass I’ve seen has complained about it being “woke” or chased after random consultants over it yet), but I do think that Blizzard set a certain level of expectations of 10.2.6 being something big and interesting for retail WoW, but then this mode also exists as a separate component in that client, and it also isn’t quite MMO in terms of character investment or progression, so I kind of get why people could be irritated. I think that two things can be true at once – this is a cool feature and mode that is pretty well made, but it also was overhyped through the silent treatment and placement on the roadmap which resulted in it feeling a bit underwhelming.

However, in the end, I think that this is kind of neat and it’s about to be washed out of the hype cycle anyways, which will lessen the impact of people being mad about it, because my speculation is that we have a The War Within alpha client coming next week and once the floodgates of expansion hype open more properly, no one is going to have the energy to be that mad about Plunderstorm.

For me, even if I am decidedly not a main BR player, it was a fun little surprise, something I’ll probably goof around with here and there while it’s active, and I think it speaks to Blizzard trying to be more agile and experimental to break the cycle of predictability and pre-hype of most WoW content. Give me spectator mode for dead players in dungeons, BGs, and raids and I’ll call it an overall win!