We are getting, by most estimates and the timetable provided by Blizzard in the WoW roadmap for 2024, close to The War Within launching in alpha. If this alpha test ends up like most modern tests, once it escapes Blizzard’s hands and gets to content creators and Wowhead, we’re going to see a truckload of design details, actual content, and get a general sense of where the expansion is going to end up going. To their credit, Blizzard has been releasing big details of the major gameplay feature for everyone, the Hero Talents, but there are still a handful waiting to be shown and I expect that all of the trees will be unveiled prior to Alpha so that opinions and feedback about the flavor and rough idea of gameplay can be received before the actual numerical tuning of these talents comes out. But we are maybe a single big dump of talents away from everything being unveiled on the Hero Talents front, and so I’d expect a one-two punch of a final Hero Talent drop and then Alpha.

And so just like I did previously with Dawntrail for FFXIV, this week I wanted to discuss what I hope for in TWW, what I fear will happen, and discuss the general expectations I have for what we’ll start to see coming down from Irvine over the next few weeks.

Hopes

Aggressive Content Cadence Continues – Dragonflight’s biggest positive has been a steady stream of content coming out with something new, on average, every six weeks. While this cadence is the most aggressive the team has ever been, it’s also been more consistent than Legion, whose 11-week cadence was the previous gold standard for WoW and was still marked by patches largely being defined by raid content with a large swath of the content being held for raid patches, which were spaced out around 22 weeks apart (and then the raid in the raid patch wouldn’t launch for 11 weeks, but that was a way to keep cadence smooth!). Legion’s cadence was big dumps of content followed by minor patches that would often just unlock something or add a small tweak, while Dragonflight’s minor patches have often had significant world content, catchup mechanisms, and storylines, while the big patch versions have usually added something of that same extent but then also a raid and a new Mythic Plus season. What this has led to is that Dragonflight’s raid tiers and content seasons are a little shorter than Legion’s, but then have more other content in-between to vary the pace of the game and have more stuff for a wider sample of the audience. The average season in Dragonflight has lasted about 5 months, with the expectation that Season 4 will last 3-4 months instead, and that at the end, we roll right into The War Within.

I think that overall Dragonflight pacing, now that we know the whole point was to get us into more frequent content drops and more frequent expansions, has been great, and I’d be pretty happy with that continuing into the future.

Continued Focus on Loot as Primary Progression Vector – One of the things that WoW lost sight of in the borrowed power era is that gear is a good way to power up with clear pathways to obtain and upgrade it, and Dragonflight has made focus on upgrades better in particular with the crest and flightstone system. While that upgrade system needs a little work (we’ll get there in a minute!), the overall emphasis on gear as the source of player power has made the current game feel a lot better in my opinion, because it’s no longer this smaller component of a larger power ecosystem but instead the primary focus at endgame, which narrows your focus even as the activity base that can be rewarding is wider. A big part of that for me is that the game feels better when you hit a state of doneness with it, when things don’t matter to your progression as much and you can start to cull them to focus on bigger and better goals. My raid mains have seldom needed stuff like the Forbidden Reach gear, the Dreamsurges or Time Rifts, but I like that they are there and I really like the flexibility (at least with systems like the Dreamsurge) to do work that translates into helping your alts but still encourages you to have something you can also do on those alts that has meaning and purpose.

Gear progression and movement feels like the WoW we all got into and it has more history and precedent behind it than incrementing some progression system by a point or two. It also avoids a lot of the problems borrowed power had on scaling and balancing, where you have multiple different sources of percentage gains all snowballing to make certain abilities or even whole specs feel too powerful and with unclear tuning knobs to balance that out in a smart way. Especially given the return to a large, old-school-adjacent talent tree, it made sense to pull back a smidge and refocus player power onto things with fewer scaling issues – and gear does that. It also looks pretty cool most of the time. Speaking of looking cool…

Alternate Rewards of Cosmetics Are Cool As Hell and Should Stay! – Blizzard has been working towards more cosmetic rewards over time, a move that I have nothing but praise for at the high level. Dragonflight has taken this to another level with smaller cosmetic sets, faction-themed cosmetics for the various inhabitants of the Dragon Isles, Dragonriding mount customizations, and of course, the Trading Post cosmetics. I think that it is wise from a gameplay perspective to give strong hooks to players that aren’t motivated by power, and depending on acquisition, the Bullion currency coming to replace Dinars in Season 4 having cheaper cosmetic-only versions of raid gear so you can buy a Mythic-style weapon skin quickly is a fantastic move, especially if the Bullions are widely available outside of the raids of Season 4 (and there is some early evidence to suggest that this is the case). A lot of WoW’s gameplay since the addition of transmog in patch 4.3 is about looking good and setting your character apart, and while Blizzard has leaned into skill-challenge rewards of cosmetics for a while (Mage Tower weapons and Timewalking Mage Tower armor sets, the Season Hero glow effects for tier armors), they’ve been more hesitant to just let players earn cool cosmetics for world content and other forms of gameplay, and Dragonflight shifting towards more cosmetics is a very good move they should endeavor to keep on with.

Streamlining the Gameplay – This one is going to be controversial, so I’m going to take a big breath and say it with my chest – I like that Dragonflight has, overall, been easier to get into and play compared to the last few expansions. In Shadowlands, you had to learn about the Covenants, change abilities with each zone in the story playthrough, then pick one, learn about Covenant abilities, Soulbinds, Conduits, Legendaries, Torghast, The Maw, Sanctums, and get to farming while also dealing with Renown, the story, and the general foundational bits of WoW gameplay. It was a lot. BfA had this throughout with Azerite armor, then added Essences and Corruption, not to mention the War Campaign table, Island Expeditions, Warfronts, and later Horrific Visions. There were just too many interlocking layers, too much added stuff to do, that felt compulsory or else you weren’t as good as you could be.

Dragonflight has greatly simplified this to a streamlined layer of gameplay. You have a weekly quest for reputation, some smaller individual events like Superbloom and Researchers Under Fire populate the endgame loop, but these are purely optional. At the base gameplay layer for things that interact with your character, talents are more complicated given the return to trees, but the routing simplifies choices, as do the default loadouts and ability to just simply pick a build from the internet and go, now with helpful import and export options to keep things tidy. Gear is just gear, and while you can find yourself wanting and needing to sim every piece and find the optimal loadout, for a lot of players, item level is still generally king, and an underrated thing about Dragonflight’s power scaling is that with secondary stats often hitting first-tier softcaps at this point in the expansion, item level can often still be king because a higher level piece with suboptimal secondary stats is still likely to be useful if your best secondaries are in diminishing returns territory. I’m at a point on my Windwalker where I’m even allowing some amount of Haste on my gear! Haste! There are some arguments about classes and specs maybe having too many buttons, but at the same time, the core rotation and cooldown gameplay of most specs is still pretty straightforward and rarely crosses over to a worrying number of buttons, and you can, in many cases, take talent choices that exchange the button for a passive version of some boost the spec gets as a button, like how Destruction Warlocks can choose to hardcast Havoc for AoE or can get a passive proc that allows them to turret on a priority target and have Havoc passively wind up on a mob or two every now and then, or how Monks can trade Diffuse Magic and Dampen Harm, two strong defensives, for passive effects that are generally okay, if slightly less amazing than the button they replace.

My hope for TWW is that what we’ve seen of Hero Talents so far holds true and indicates that there won’t be piles of new buttons added for the sake of a bullet point on a box (that no longer exists anyways because the game is all-digital!), or that you can choose a tree that gives you one single new button that unlocks some interesting new gameplay interactions. They’re not all winners in that way at the moment, but there’s a while to go and testing (much less numbers disclosure) hasn’t even started yet!

Continued Experimentation – The downside of asking for this is obvious – not every experiment will be a winner. Some will be losers, in fact! But I think that is an important part of the retail WoW experience – for the game to keep evolving in positive ways, new things have to come forward and an iterative, collaborative process with the fanbase has to occur. I’m still mixed on Plunderstorm (Renown 29 btw) but I am glad it exists because it shows that the WoW team is willing to work on things that maybe won’t always hit with 100% of the fanbase but absolutely hook some amount of players. They’ve committed to doing more of these types of things, especially in the window between expansions, and I think that is great. It hasn’t fully hit yet, but the dungeon difficulty changes are something that I think will make the Mythic Plus ecosystem healthier and more interesting – and in Season 4 of Dragonflight, it will feel weird, but in Season 1 of TWW with Delves alongside to fill the low key level gap, I think there is some potential there. And sure, maybe it flops! We don’t know! But there is a sound assumption and rationale put forward for the changes, and I respect the idea that live testing something is better than sitting on a problem forever.

Fears

Delves Need to Deliver, But Can They? – I really like the idea of Delves, and I think that the gear rewards and overall philosophy shared at Blizzcon, coupled with the dungeon difficulty changes, make a clear niche where Delves can thrive – the players currently doing those 2-10 keystones for rewards but not generally enjoying themselves as much will have an alternate path to gear through Delves, with what sounds like a granular difficulty scaling to allow them to engage as much (or as little) as they want. That’s good!

My fear is that Blizzard will pull back from that philosophy in some ways to dampen impacts elsewhere. There’s a segment of WoW’s playerbase that insists any gear rewards for solo or lower time-investment activities is welfare, a myopic view that centers their own desire for “their” content to stay supported over the health of the game as a whole (or worse, is an elitist jerk off session about how “hard” they worked for those epics). Or that Blizzard in their own weird view of how rewards work will structure Delves in a way that takes the nice rewards people want and puts them just out of reach or clamps down with absurd limiters. Delves can and should fill the void that will be left by the Mythic Plus restructuring – repeatable for rewards, with a lower-friction grind to fill the vault slots available but a long-tail you can chase near-limitlessly if you so desire. It’s fine if rewards taper, but I think the faucet should never shut off completely – just like M+, you should always have a chance of getting something, even if there’s no guarantee it will be highly useful to you. My fear is that Blizzard will disagree and that tryhard sweaty dumbasses will insist on that disagreement to protect the “integrity” of their own shinies.

Hero Talents Need A Clear Path Forward – I like the overall idea of Hero Talents, and a lot of the trees give me hope for exciting new gameplay interactions. Even the ones that I think need time in the oven could be good. What I dislike is that they sound, on the surface, a LOT like borrowed power. There’s not a clear idea that these will proceed forward, and even if they do, there are practical concerns about the potential for bloat and weird progression. My theory, stated previously, is that these just keep expanding for the remainder of the Worldsoul Saga until we have 3 trees with 30 points a piece in our talent panes, albeit with a Hero tree that is fully populated. From a balance perspective, that should lend stability to the whole thing, but the issue is that it sounds really complicated, and then at a certain point, the question must be asked about what needs to remain as the game continues to roll forward beyond this upcoming saga. The issue with old talents prior to MoP was much the same – if you need that additive push to level and change gameplay, then eventually the talent system grows too convoluted and complex, and even a pruning akin to the Cataclysm talent revamp wasn’t enough to stave off the issue. Granted, the current talents are much larger in terms of power per point – as they should be, given the origins of many of these powers as Artifact traits, Azerite traits, and even Legendary powers, but that just means that a pruning could potentially be more effective at reducing complexity in player power – at what cost, though?

I don’t want Hero Talents to be a borrowed power system we discard after TWW, but I also fear what happens in the subsequent steps forward for the game if we just keep them and expand upon them, or worse, bolt additional different progression mechanics to them. It’s a tough problem and I fear multiple different outcomes for this system!

Dungeon Difficulty Changes Go Too Far – Right now, I get the impetus for the change to dungeon difficulty curve and I support it. I think trying it in the fourth season of an expansion will soften the blow, because power scaling means that we’re just not going to struggle as much. A lot more players are in the +20 and up bracket this season, and with more power, softer scaling, and more practice with current classes and specs, Dragonflight Season 4 is likely to look really good for these proposed changes.

Where I worry is TWW Season 1. The first season of every expansion is a slow start, a meticulous grind up a power progression and learning ladder. In some ways, that’s what makes it enjoyable! However, with TWW’s first season, the difficulty curve may be an extra hurdle to jump over to get where you want to go, and not in a positive way. If TWW continues the super-rares in the open world, the community events with gear rewards, and then couples it to the Delves system and new dungeon curves for queuable content, it could potentially be fine – and it solves a problem that definitely exists in the current model. However, there’s a lot of potential for it to be iffy, too. Right now it makes sense because dungeon designs over Dragonflight have had a lot of mechanics that you just can’t learn effectively on low Mythic Plus keys (much less any lower difficulty play), but ostensibly TWW dungeons should be designed and built on a foundation that includes the lessons learned over the last few years – and thus, the issues with learning mechanics could be mitigated in other ways.

I want it to work and I think it simplifies some of the worst parts of M+ like how rating scales as you grind up the key levels, but I fear that it may be a bit too big of a shift and one that will make that early expansion window less sweet. I remember when an expansion-start was marred by high difficulty of dungeons which led to people feeling pushed out – and Cataclysm is an expansion a lot of people disliked explicitly for that reason.

Dull Raid Design Continuing – My overall take on Dragonflight raiding is that I enjoyed it well enough but it was too samey. Damn near every single fight in the raid setting was a pure single target fight, either literally (only ever one thing you can punch!) or figuratively (target count aside, the optimized play was single target damage builds). It exacerbated balance concerns for classes and specs where single target is weak (a big part of why Windwalker is seen so poorly in Dragonflight even post-buffs is that almost none of their talent choices align to single-target damage and their big flashy buttons are balanced around AoE output) and while having a single-target raid meta that could stand apart from a more cleave/AoE M+ meta could be a good thing, I think the raid scene this expansion played too hard in single target fights and felt dull for it. While a difference in tuning from raid to M+ is good as well, you also don’t want someone who plays Windwalker and only raids to feel like they’re nerfing their raid by choosing to play that spec because they don’t have the single-target oomph of another melee.

I want more raid fights that have multiple targets and genuine incentive to consider alternate builds. One thing I will give Dragonflight is that a couple of fights had some interesting utility talent choices you could make – Raszageth needed most of the raid to bring stops for Sparks (and movement utility to avoid the blowoff on Mythic!), and Fyrakk was substantially easier if you could get most of the raid to talent into grips and displacements for the burning soul adds in Phase 2, but both of those also created a disparity between classes and specs with those options versus those without them. A big part of the desire for talent trees comes from having choices where a flexible point you can change between a couple of talents creates new possibilities, and Dragonflight kinda failed at the raid design level to bring out those distinctions. I want TWW to reflect learning from this and to build raid encounters where changing throughput AND utility talents can net a win and show off different ways for specs to shine. I fear we won’t get that given the trajectory of raiding in Dragonflight.

Legendary Design – Dragonflight’s legendary systems, both times they’ve existed, have sucked. Big time. I don’t know anyone who likes the system and I remember in Season 2 when high-level players were speed leveling Evoker alts to get more shots at Nasz’uro to prove how awful the system was. Fyr’alath has been awful too – our ret paladin got to the full bad luck protection at 14 Heroic Fyrakk kills and still didn’t get an axe until the next week, while our main Blood DK got his axe in 2 Heroic kills (and an alt Prot Paladin got the axe in 4 LFR runs…), so while they attempted to pretend at making fixes with the embers and increased bad luck protection, the system still sucks ass.

My fear, then, is that TWW will offer us some dumb bullshit legendary that requires a rare drop with opaque requirements and chances and just stay the course. It shouldn’t, and it would be a bad sign if it did, but Blizzard, for whatever reason (cough player retention in content gaps cough) fucking loves shoving awful legendary acquisition systems into the game. A lot of Dragonflight proved that if you make interesting content people enjoy and deliver it fast enough, players will stay, so knock it off and if you do add a legendary, make it a deterministic system. I don’t even care if the quest chains and crafting systems remain as-is, those are fine – just fix the godawful acquisition if you’re going to do legendaries again, please?

The Story Is Going To Be Meh – The story of the last few WoW expansions has been fucking dreadful. Dragonflight, while a step towards something better, is still largely kind of dull and safe at best. The hook for The War Within is interesting, but I also feel like it opens up some troubling potential for how the Worldsoul Saga could unfold. Like knowing Anduin is free of his self-imposed prison sesh in the Maw tells me that Midnight, the Elf expansion, is going to have a lot of Sylvanas, and how she gets written after the dumpster fires of BfA and Shadowlands is a huge concern to me (she should be there in Midnight! But getting to that point is going to be tough). Likewise, I fear that the trilogy planned for this content will lead to a lot of cliffhangers and dead-ends while we wait for the next patch, the next expansion. WoW’s lore has been a low point for years now, and while the lead creative who a lot of people credit for that decline is now out of the company, you can’t just simply ignore what he wrote and move forward. Well, I guess you could but that’s also a problem! If you build on that awful foundation, it’s tough, and if you ignore it, it will feel weird too. There’s not an easy win and I think being cycnical and negative about the lore of Warcraft is generally a safe play.

While the TWW trailer took a more mature and level tone that hinted at a more serious story (and I liked that), I’m also just kind of unsure that the Blizzard writers have the chops to do it. I love Metzen, but his trope-heavy style skews in a direction that often undercuts some amount of seriousness in his narratives. The existing lore team that was led by Steve Danuser often seems in interviews and press to have internalized a lot of how Danuser interacted with criticism of his writing – which is to say, not engaging with it at all. Sure, at the franchise level, John Hight and Holly Longdale both are willing to say that Shadowlands in particular was a bad story that underused and misused established characters in service of an uninteresting and underdeveloped villain, but I need to see some early assurances in actual content that the people still working on narrative design on WoW have taken those lessons to heart and used them to write better content, because Dragonflight hasn’t really demonstrated that. And, to be fair, given how expansions are worked on and the timing of news like Metzen’s full return and Danuser’s ouster, it’s likely that the learning of Shadowlands wasn’t really in the writing room until halfway or longer into development of Dragonflight. I am somewhat tired of giving Blizzard writing the fair, benefit-of-the-doubt treatment, because the end result of that process has yet to meaningfully change. I hope something has and I hope we get a solid WoW-style story in the expansion to come, but I am not holding my breath for that because I would rather like to continue living.

Old Blizzard Dies Hard: Currencies and Convolution – While Dragonflight has been streamlined and simplified in a lot of ways compared to the other recent retail expansions for WoW, one thing it has not simplified, but instead doubled-down upon, is the myriad network of currencies and tokens used for endgame rewards systems. Upgrading gear takes both Flightstones and Crests – why? You could streamline it to crests and still have roughly the same system, albeit slightly easier and way less frustrating (you either have a severe deficiency of Flightstones or too many you’ll never use with no in-between). Why are there three distinct tokens to interact with Elemental Storms gear and rewards, all of which are used in slightly-different ways and one of which is stored in bags instead of as a currency? Emerald Dream has dewdrops as a currency, but then seeds as items at 3 rarities taking up bag space – what purpose does it serve?

When they discussed Warbands at Blizzcon 2023, one thing that stood out to me (besides a bigger point I’m winding towards) is that a lot of the way WoW is in modern times are because they’re often just plopping new ideas into decaying old frameworks, some of which have existed as a part of the WoW codebase since inception in 1999. Currencies have specific requirements, and so instead of being able to just move them or centrally store them now you have to convert them to an item at a cost and send it over to an alt so that they can have it because the game just doesn’t have the right support to handle currencies in a way that works as an item, since it is something in-between. I hope that while they’re rooting around in the code correcting these age-old issues that they can also work to correct some of the handling of these currencies. I also, however, am not giving them an easy out on that – some of the decisions on such limits are clearly design (if you cared about alt friendliness in Shadowlands, Soul Ash would have been transferrable immediately, it’s not even the first time you’ve had such a system that resulted in buyable, mailable caches of currency!), but I have some hope that they can design better overall systems for rewards and then use engine improvements to support these changes. I fear that they won’t, because in spite of the needless complexity and layers of obscure bullshit that surround what makes a currency item versus a bag-slot hogging regular item, players generally figure out how these things work and deal with the jank.

Warbands: An Overly Analytical Look At Wording Choices and Presentation Visuals – I am so here and ready for Warbands, especially as someone planning on having 39 level-capped characters prior to the launch of the expansion (24/39 btw). There’s something, however, that has been bothering me a lot about the Warband presentations at Blizzcon, and it is that the wording left some wiggle room, along with a general lightness on details. If it remains, on surface level, as it appears, than the system is great already. If it is truly just “account-wide everything” as Ion put it in the deep dive panel, fantastic – I love it, thank you, moving on. However, a couple of things have sort of stood-out to me about it as it was discussed.

Firstly, while it states in at least one slide that the feature is just “all characters on your account” and that there isn’t like a practical Warband UI where you assign characters or interact with it as an overarching feature, I fear that it might have some limiters on character counts or some practical upper bound. Now, what I am about to voice light concern for is a ridiculous nerd problem I might have if this is true, so I get this isn’t earth-shattering or anything, but I could see a world in which you might be limited by class or an upper maximum that isn’t quite as many characters as you can have. If I, for example, have to pick my best one character in each class to be in the Warband, that feels kinda bad, especially when the ones I am likely to play at launch of TWW are not the characters I’ll actually want the major boosts of the Warband on. Likewise, I could see a conservative upper-limit being placed on characters in a Warband, just to reduce potential system issues or server-side problems. If the limit is like, 20-25, that will work well for the vast majority of players, but then some absolute freaks like myself will brush into that limit with ease.

Secondly, I could see Blizzard sort of losing interest with some of the ideas in the composite system and us watching support fall-through. The idea of Warbound items sounds incredible for a player like me, but I also see it in the same way that Dragonflight raid BoEs were handled. Up front, Blizzard had tons of interest, designed a whole system around how they’d drop and what the promise of them was, and then we heard less about the idea for Aberrus and it was clear that the idea fell through and Blizzard just quietly reverted back to old-style BoE drops. Warbound items sound so cool and fun, but I could see Blizzard easily just giving up on them in a patch or two, or doing what happened with DF raid BoEs, where the system is disabled up front because of some weird bug, gets barely implemented, and then dies in the next tier.

Thirdly, while the Warband shared crafting idea is cool and I really like it, it will need some support outside of the Warband umbrella to really work. Crafting Orders from the professions revamp in DF are limited to same-server orders, but Blizzard is pushing for a realm-agnostic future, in ways we’ve already seen (regional AH) and ways we know are coming in TWW (region-wide guilds, the end of server-locked Mythic and Cutting Edge), but without added support to the crafting economy, this will fall a little flat. It’s cool if I can craft from an account bank, but it would also be nice to self-submit work orders in an easier way, or be able to submit an order to my warband and have any character with the necessary skill make the item, instead of going personal order or having all my characters in one guild to use guild orders for it. There’s a lot of potential to make things easier and I hope they seize those opportunities!

Lastly, I fear that the move to a player-centric model over a character-centric one will create some flaws in gameplay. In my head, I could see a world where you might only be able to do a weekly quest on one character, or World Quests (often useless as they are now) are similarly locked. In some cases, some amount of restriction is logical (the world quest weekly event rewards a ton of reputation, which would be easier to game for rewards if you play a ton of characters while those with 1 or 2 characters total are going to be disadvantaged heavily), but in other cases, I could see Blizzard clamping down to “respect time” without considering that maybe someone wants to spend the time (imagine a Timewalking event week or the Mythic Dungeon weekly event where you can only get a single item reward cache on your whole account but hey, at least the cache is Warbound!). The gameplay design of the expansion, the interactions of warbands, and more all need to be carefully mapped around this new world, and I full expect teething pains to emerge as possibilities both positive and negative emerge.

Basically, because there was just enough of that classic Ion legalese in presentation, I do have some concerns that exception cases will exist in a negative way, and I hope that the team is ready to test aggressively for these gaps and correct them before we as players ever see them.

Blizzard Plays It Too Safe – Dragonflight has been a good expansion to my eyes, but it has also been a very safe expansion that has played with experiments in a largely additive manner – added content in unexpected patches and places, additive game modes and fun options that exist alongside other updates and features for the game, but the fundamentals of WoW have remained very locked-down. You progress towards one of two very broad goals no matter how you play – you’re increasing player power or you’re incrementing things in a collection. These two broad ideas often intersect – a new piece of power-granting loot is also a new transmog and progress towards one or more achievements – but the entirety (and I do feel safe to say that) of the designed gameplay loop of WoW is these two ideas, and every activity fits loosely into one of these camps with a lot of crossover. Nothing in WoW is made for you to just do independent of these ideas, even things like exploring the world mark down achievement progress, open access to new things, etc.

Dragonflight has been a rebuilding expansion, and so it makes sense that the overall content structure of the expansion has remained very safe and close to the baseline model of the game. In a lot of ways, Dragonflight has been fresh because it is predictable and straightforward in a way that WoW often is not, but that safety can lead to boredom or burnout (a problem Final Fantasy XIV faces is that it is so consistent that you can map the content structure of an entire expansion plus or minus 2 bullet points by the end of the Fan Fest cycle, so there’s just not as much hype for the gameplay side of things). The War Within is promising some interesting changes, and we can see that Blizzard is using the end of Dragonflight as a little testing ground to kind of go nuts within. However, I worry that by the time we get to the actual expansion, everything is going to get buttoned back up into a safe loop of predictable gameplay – which is fine and fun for a while, but also tends to feel sort of repetitive over time because there’s nothing novel on the horizon. Dragonflight has been strong in core competencies, but it also doesn’t have much in it that makes me really fond of it. It is a good WoW expansion – but its highs aren’t as high for me as Wrath, Mists of Pandaria, or Legion, and its lows aren’t as low as Warlords of Draenor, Battle for Azeroth, or Shadowlands. I remember Shadowlands more because it had some real highs (Castle Nathria as a raid) and some real lows (Covenant everything, story, Jailer, Torghast, etc). Dragonflight is, for lack of a better term, mid – it is competent and I enjoy it now, but I won’t pine for much of it save for the ambience of its setting.

I hope for the sake of raw enjoyment that TWW is crazy in some ways, like good ways (a really solid first season of content, some insanely fun new world content, Delves fucking nailing it, etc) or even bad ways (some bad storytelling where Magni kills Anduin before the first raid because Azeroth told him to that comes out of nowhere with no plot buildup or narrative tension leading to it). Obviously, I mostly want the good ways it could be deviating from the norm and could be fascinating, but hell, some parts of Shadowlands I still enjoy ironically because they were so bad they almost circle back to being good. There’s room in the world for World of Warcraft to get a little weird and play in the space more, and I’d enjoy seeing them step out of the established comfort zone of Dragonflight to go all-in on some cockamamie bullshit. Hell, here’s my real hot take – rip-off the Hildibrand quests from FFXIV, pick a silly NPC, a funny little guy, and make him the centerpiece of optional story content for the full duration of the expansion where he does crazy shit and inexplicably makes it out and solves problems. Bring us some silly Hozen guy who accidentally solves the population problems of the Earthen but trips on a banana peel every patch! Okay, on second thought, maybe not – Blizzard has one mode of humor in most content and it’s poop quests. Although, if we do an expansion-wide story arc where we discover that all the outhouses in Azeroth have been feeding into the depths of the Old Gods to create a malevolent specter of Void and poop named like, I dunno, Yogg-Shitton, maybe that could be something…? (who is letting me cook here what the fuck did I just write I’m not even on any substances at this hour)

Basically, I want Blizzard to spread the wilding-out with experiments and new ideas over the full expansion. I want the game to feel fresh and for multiple patches to throw curveballs to keep us on our toes. I’m okay if not everything lands, but I just want to see that effort to evolve the game and move forward being put in consistently for the lifecycle of The War Within. My fear is that they won’t – they’ll play safe and deliver a predictable expansion and then drop a bunch of silly things near the end of life of the expansion to get us moving and keep us playing.

Also, pick your poison for joke quests – a monkey or poop. It’s the only way.

In Closing

Overall, my hype level is steadily rising for TWW, now that Season 3’s end is on the calendar and Season 4 is on the horizon with a date and everything. While Season 4 is something to do, I am really most excited for Alpha and Beta, turning attention to what comes next and starting to plan and get ready for that new expansion smell to fill the air (and apparently also poop? what a confusing post).