Last week’s Warcraft Direct had some interesting news for players of all the major Warcraft franchise titles. Firstly, we get remastered versions of Warcraft and Warcraft II, brining the entire trilogy of RTS games into a playable modern state with some tweaks for modern audiences. Secondly, Hearthstone continues to soldier on with a new year of expansions including a StarCraft crossover set (now do a StarCraft crossover in WoW, cowards!). Thirdly, WoW Classic gets Mists of Pandaria Classic (as anyone could have predicted since Remix was clearly not intended to fill that gap) alongside a fresh run of vanilla progression servers that will move up to TBC Classic and a new Hardcore fresh start realm (which will not move to TBC).

But then the retail WoW news hit, and there’s a lot.

Confirmation is out now that we get patch 11.0.7 with the new (old) Siren Isle zone on December 17th, giving us our second content drop for The War Within in 2024. We received a new roadmap for 2025, confirming that next calendar year will see two seasons of TWW content at a minimum, with patch 11.1 Undermine(d) dropping in the winter and the third season with 11.2 in the early summer. By the end of the summer, we get the reveal of Midnight, the next WoW expansion, and then a couple of placeholder patches with scant details before winter 2025, which is alleging two big things in almost no detail – firstly, early winter 2025 seems to contain the housing update based on the icon banner on the roadmap, and then the season as a whole is colored Legion green, which lends credence to rumors of Legion Remix being a thing that we will see sooner rather than later.

Oh right, I tackled this out of order, so also yes – I did say the housing update for World of Warcraft. Let’s get there in time.

Undermine is The Next World Zone

After we move past 11.0, the next major step on our journey is Undermine, the goblin home that has been the subject of lore as far back as the RTS games. There were several hints to Undermine in TWW as it stands, not least of which is the presence of a lot of Goblins alongside Niffen in Azj-Kahet sniffing around, not to mention that Undermine as a zone fits the expansion theme of underground cavernous places to a tee. Undermine will contain a couple of different types of content – firstly, as a standard expansion world zone, it will have its own Renown faction, new rewards, and a raid. New Delves are being added, which you have to imagine covers the new zone primarily. Lastly, Undermine is getting its own unique mount system called the D.R.I.V.E, which is a ground mount with likely some skyriding-style controls – which conveniently fits with some older datamining near the end of Dragonflight showing some ground-mount dynamic riding controls. Dullards who barely play retail and don’t care about anyone’s opinion but their own will claim this as the victory against Skyriding which they claim everyone hates – but a lot of people I see playing are already questioning what this means about both the size of Undermine as well as how annoying traversal of the zone might end up being. Gameplay wise, I like the idea that ground mounts could get more interesting and faster-overall gameplay, as that being rolled out in dungeons and raids where you can mount would be an awesome quality of life boost – provided it, like Skyriding, is faster than the base mount speed available in those locations.

Undermine is thematically somewhat appropriate, but the obvious question, one Blizzard is winking at in interviews and discussions of this patch, is this: what does Xal’atath and the overarching narrative of TWW have to do with Undermine and a war of the Goblin cartels? And well…we don’t know and I am interested to see!

The raid will be a mix of fights against Goblins and their servants as we aim to liberate the Undermine from the evil influences taking hold of it. A fun and lighthearted raid tier sounds kind of neat, but I am curious to see if it ends up feeling weirdly dissonant from the expansion we’ve had so far. My hunch is that by the time we’re entering the raid, there’s going to be some connection of story elements to feed things together and move towards Season 3’s story and content, but we’ll have to wait and see.

No Season 4?

The roadmap provided is curious compared to the prior 2024 one by omission – no Season 4 of TWW is listed. It’s possible (perhaps even likely) that based on timeline, it wouldn’t be until 2026 anyways, but given that summer will see Season 3, we should have Season 4 by the end of 2025…unless, of course, there isn’t one.

Editorially, here’s my stance – I didn’t like Dragonflight Season 4. It was “fine” but it also wasn’t a really big deal, it was a burnout season for my raid and I who pushed lightly, finished early and short of doing all the raids on Heroic, and then we went into MoP Remix and played that until the restrictions and gearing requirements for that also burned people out and we wound down for the expansion. As a raid leader, I hate Season 4 because it feels like flogging the masses for a crumb of excitement, as a player, I hate Season 4 because it ruins the whole point of doing dungeon rotations and letting current content age out gracefully, and I especially hated Dragonflight Season 4 because it was the start of the quality assurance issues Blizzard has had this year, with new and incredibly game-breaking bugs every week making it not particularly fun to play. I got to fuck around on prot Warrior for a tier, got a prot KSM under my belt, and generally had a bit of fun (hate is vastly overplaying my feelings here haha) but I don’t like the concept and I think that if the time spent engineering Season 4, however small it is in terms of resources, were reallocated to new content for the next expansion, it would be better.

More than all of that though, Season 4 is predicated on the idea that most WoW players engage heavily with the endgame content like M+ and raids, which most statistics we can see publicly do not hold to be true. For world content players, while DF Season 4 was better at rotating content and giving reasons to move around the world (compared to SL Season 4 which was all instanced content extensions), nothing about Season 4 was particularly exceptional or new. Without the wonky raid affixes of SL Season 4 or a new seasonal affix for M+, the instanced content scene was meh, and even PvPers got the same Season 3 armor sets and no real true new thing to do.

So my take, then, is this – fuck Season 4. Get it out of there and get us into Midnight faster. Speaking of…

Expansion in 2025?

I’m going to stake a bold claim here – that we see Midnight at the very end of 2025 or within the first two weeks of 2026. What’s my body of evidence to suggest this?

First, let’s look at expansion launch timelines – November/December are popular WoW expansion months historically, with Wrath, Cataclysm, Warlords of Draenor, Shadowlands, and Dragonflight all launching in one of those two months. If we extend to early January, we can include Burning Crusade too. With 3 seasons and a faster overall content cadence, The War Within will be done with patches by the late fall of 2025 per Blizzard’s own roadmap. While the end of an expansion often means hangtime for alpha and beta testing and a round of feedback gathering and press events, my suspicion is that once Season 3 is out, we’ll see Blizzard push hard and fast to move to Midnight and keep positive momentum going in their favor. Much of what happened in TWW testing was slow-rolling the testing phases in batches, then slow-rolling content once the public beta was open, which only lasted about two months as-is. If Blizzard does something similar to TWW alpha/beta with Midnight, we should see alpha open up in the early fall, roll into public beta by October, which would be damn near perfect for a late December launch in 2025. The roadmap, outside of basic timetables, gives two signs we still need to discuss – one for this theory and one against. Let’s start with the one in support as it is also the bigger news…

Housing Comes To World of Warcraft – In 2025

With the initial roadmap, a weird icon marked the far right side of the roadmap, mysterious and ominous in equal measure. With updates, it is now quite clear what this icon was for and what it means – Blizzard is claiming that player Housing, an already announced feature of Midnight, will roll out in Winter 2025.

There’s not much we can say about this feature yet because the early look was a glossy machinima designed for hype, so we have no idea of features, housing modality (instanced or open-world?), or how the feature is going to work and integrate with the game overall. Blizzard’s laughable first attempt at gameplay-altering housing gave us Warlords of Draenor’s Garrisons, which are only player housing if you squint as you look at them and slam yourself in the head with a hammer at the same time. My hopes are that it integrates well with crafting professions as housing does in Final Fantasy XIV, that unlike FFXIV having a house doesn’t become a death sentence to keep a subscription to the game or else, and I hope that housing has wrinkles and levels to it in order to support individual characters, warbands, and guilds. It doesn’t need to be content or have gameplay outside of decorating and chilling attached to it – just let me own a character house, a warband house, and a guildhall, and I’ll be quite content!

This feature being on the roadmap for 2025 while also being confirmed as belonging to Midnight is my big clue that Blizzard is tipping their hand about Midnight being a 2025 release – it’s early enough into winter on the timeline that it could even be prepatch 12.0 content, available for a month, and then Midnight could still launch at the tail-end of December. But there is also something on the timeline that perhaps contradicts this idea…

Fel Green, What Does It Mean? Legion Remix Hits The Scene

Okay, so to be clear, this is speculation, but it doesn’t feel like a reach to anyone I know.

The end of the 2025 roadmap graphic is colored in fel green for Winter. Color-changing that doesn’t fit the aesthetic of the roadmap and so it immediately stands out as communicating something. There are separate roadmaps for Classic and Retail so whatever it is can’t be Classic-related, and there are only two expansions whose key color choice is that fel green – Burning Crusade and Legion.

Burning Crusade kinda sticks out as interesting, but I think that for as nostalgic as people get for TBC in some ways, it isn’t as popular as Legion. Yeah, I’ll say that and own it – and only partially because TBC is actually my most hated expansion. Legion fits the template of what Remix can be – a large and expansive continent with its own flavor, a beloved expansion that a lot of people would enjoy getting to play again (albeit in a new ruleset), with tons of cosmetic possibilities that can be opened up and earned through gameplay in a remix version. Legion has cool armor sets all the way down to green gear, had Artifact Weapons and skins for them which could be further expanded, and could benefit from a gameplay perspective by being decoupled from the systems and timegating layers that existed when it came out – no artifact power, no legiondaries, just replace all of that cruft with Remix-style gems and gear progression.

But why Remix? Well, I think it feels somewhat easy to assume given that MoP Remix was a filler experiment for Season 4 of DF, available in parallel as a thing you could do to stay engaged with WoW and in-community with your friends and guildies without just continuing the same old Dragonflight experience. Conceptually, Remix feels perfect as an end-of-expansion activity – power-level some alts that can immediately run into the new expansion as it starts, have fun goofing around in WoW, get to play WoW in a fundamentally different way that still feels like WoW, and collect piles of cosmetic rewards. MoP Remix ran for 3 months and the timeline coloring on the 2025 Roadmap changes to that green in mid-Autumn, coincidentally around 11.2.7, one version number higher than the same patch that added MoP Remix to retail.

In fact, while I started writing this assuming that Remix was a wrench in my Midnight 2025 theory, I think it actually strengthens it as I write this section. Dragonflight, as a comparison, did this:

MoP Remix in May 2024 – August 2024
TWW Prepatch in July 2024
TWW Launch and MoP Remix end are both within a couple of weeks of each other in August 2024

And if we apply the same lens to this roadmap…

Legion Remix in October 2025
Midnight Prepatch in November 2025 (the housing flag location!)
Legion Remix winds down and Midnight launches December 2025

A focused three-month burst of new stuff to do and ways to engage with WoW while new content is cooking in the kitchen seems like an ideal situation for Blizzard, and without the split focus of Season 4 vs. Remix, I think it could be even better. Legion Remix also opens up a lot of possibilities we didn’t have in MoP, like Mythic Plus, Mythic raids for every raid (a consistent raid design through the whole expansion in general), world quests, and other more modern modes of content. And before you groan that I included Mythic Plus, just think of doing Mythic Plus with Remix power – it would be nutty in the best way to smash a key with a full premade in under 5 minutes and to be able to do MDI pulls without having to be MDI good! Imagine having new Artifact appearances introduced, an Artifact added for Evokers, all the ways in which we could see new cosmetics and updates – it would be awesome, I think.

The Death of Blizzcon?

Blizzcon 2023 was a unique experiment at the time, a thing Blizzard did to attempt to bring the event back to roots as a smaller celebration of Blizzard, with major announcements, less focus on demo areas and gameplay and more on community and interactive experiences, which sometimes backfired (the Darkmoon Faire line was so bad YouTuber Dan Olson made a whole video about it). Since then, Blizzard chose not to hold a Blizzcon in 2024, opting instead to simply release new content and to have the Warcraft Direct we just talked about while eyes turn to 2025. However, something interesting I see through this timeline is that Blizzard’s roadmap doesn’t really seem to have a good spot for Blizzcon. Summer was the date once upon a time, and I made the trip down to Anaheim for a few August Blizzcons that would roughly align with the expansion reveal on the timetable, but I am also skeptical.

Doing some research for this piece leads me to two different paths. On the one hand, Blizzard’s typical weekend options for Blizzcon are all open on the ACC calendar of events – end of August, end of October, first weekend of November – all open, no events at all, enough time gap between events for load-in and load-out to occur. Blizzcon is, by most indications, a profit center for Blizzard – the tickets are profit, they use largely volunteer labor from salaried Blizzard employees to staff the con (which is a shitty practice I loathe!), and the sales of merch and digital items are huge motivation for the con to continue. On these lines of thought, it seems like they could and should continue to have Blizzcon.

However, if we take the late summer expansion announcement on the roadmap as August (which seems decently likely as it would be one year into TWW), then that also means a Blizzcon in-person would be a hot, sweaty mess in Anaheim’s summer heat, a thing they started scheduling into the fall to avoid. It also would beg the question of what else would be announced at a Blizzcon this far out – Diablo IV would be overdue for an expansion announcement at that point, Hearthstone is always in development and just dropped their full 2025 plans anyways, and the less said about Overwatch 2 the better. Blizzcon 2023 worked by and large because there was stuff to share across the full slate of Blizzard products, but returning Blizzcon to its roots as the WoW hype event would be an interesting twist I would welcome (I like Diablo but my Blizzard heart was with StarCraft and it being kinda dead irritates me to no end!), although I question how having a Blizzcon with only really major WoW news would go over with the community writ large. I suspect not well!

Plus, for all we know, maybe Blizzcon 2023 wasn’t hugely successful or popular. It certainly seemed to be a bit dunked on by people in groups on Facebook I was in for the event prior to deactivating my account a couple of weeks ago, and I think that Blizzard does distract themselves from the work of building their games a bit by having to stop and build out presentations, a show, and show-ready playable builds for Blizzcon. With Microsoft at the helm, the resources spent enabling Blizzcon could be used on Microsoft’s own imperatives, like putting bullshit awful AI trash into every corner of your digital life!

So I think I’m going to make one shakier assertion to go with my relative certainty that Midnight launches in 2025 – we get no Blizzcon next year either and it remains up in the air if we see one ever again. For me, Blizzcon was an era of my life I look back on fondly – I had a lot of great experiences at the event and as I became less introverted and more willing to just hang out, I had some genuinely fun moments like getting to just chat with the dungeon design team for an hour in the Hilton lobby and spitball ideas, hearing their stories about how certain things were designed – but I also think that yearly in-person events are hard in modern times and especially in the US given the various security concerns that our unfortunate state of affairs requires. I also think that the ACC as a venue has stifled the potential growth that Blizzcon could have had, although in terms of exhibit space versus total usable space, ACC is still one of the largest convention centers in the US and within the SoCal area, only the San Diego Convention Center has more total space (but less exhibit-specific space), so perhaps staying close to home remains wise.

Dungeon Plan Changes

Since Legion, the design model of dungeon content in a WoW expansion has generally been 8 launch dungeons, a mega-dungeon, and then that mega-dungeon is parceled out into two halves for Mythic Plus (Legion also added dungeons every patch but hey its fine less content in more expensive expansions is…trash actually, but hey). BfA did it, Shadowlands did it, Dragonflight did it.

The War Within isn’t.

TWW instead is showing two dungeons added, one in patch 11.1, based loosely on the Waterworks delve in Ringing Deeps, and then a second new dungeon is promised for 11.2. This is a change in design, and what’s more, the new dungeons, at least the one we know more about in 11.1, are being added to the seasonal Mythic Plus pool immediately, meaning that Season 2’s Mythic Plus pool is only 3 throwback dungeons, 1 brand new dungeon, and then the 4 remaining TWW dungeons we haven’t had in M+ rotation yet. That is…actually kind of cool, as it means the Mythic Plus pool gets some variety that isn’t just waiting for dungeons to rotate in that you can only currently do on Normal difficulty. It also raises the question of what the Season 3 pool will even be, given that we’ll have one new dungeon, 9 TWW dungeons prior to it that have had a turn already, and no Season 4 (in theory, at least) to bring back the TWW dungeons for a last run at glory.

Outside of the Direct event stream, we received confirmation of the Season 2 dungeon pool for Mythic Plus/Mythic/Heroic – it’ll be the new dungeon Operation: Floodgate, the remaining 4 TWW dungeons that haven’t had a turn yet (Cinderbrew Meadery, Darkflame Cleft, The Rookery, and Priory of the Sacred Flame), and then 3 throwback dungeons, with Shadowlands’ Theater of Pain joining two BfA dungeons: MOTHERLODE!! (of course the goblin dungeon this patch, fits like a glove) and Operation Mechagon: Workshop (marking the first time a non-current expansion dungeon has made a second trip into the seasonal pool, as this dungeon was also in SL Season 4).

My opinions are mixed. I didn’t do much in SL Season 4 after returning to the game and I didn’t really do M+ much in BfA so I have no basis for comparison on these dungeons, I generally enjoyed Theater of Pain in Shadowlands, and I like the thematics and overall execution of the TWW half for the most part (very concerned that I will hate Darkflame Cleft as a Mythic because the last boss and stretch of trash is kind of a clusterfuck), with the obvious caveat that no one knows jack shit about the new dungeon so that is also a wildcard. Ion did an interview linked with the Direct discussing how they want to fix Mythic Plus “onboarding” since it seems like the difficulty squish isn’t quite doing what they wanted it to, instead making getting into keys a more daunting task for players, alongside concerns about rewards.

Either way, we’ll probably get to start seeing more in the coming weeks, as I expect either PTR immediately after 11.0.7 drops, or we get the Dragonflight special and the 11.1 PTR starts concurrently with 11.0.7 final testing and likely goes up after the Thanksgiving holiday here in the US.

In Conclusion

The Warcraft Direct event was a glossy, standard Blizzard hype display meant to drive excitement for the future of the franchise as the overarching property turns 30 and the MMO that changed the world turns 20, and it succeeded to some extent on that front. Genuinely, having a 2025 roadmap alone is a big excitement builder for me as it codifies that Blizzard has plans for TWW and shows some promise as to what they can do in the coming year.

The War Within is the most fun I’ve had with WoW in a minute, and at the same time it has been a buggy mess with some confusing design decisions that have dampened aspects of the game for me, but the overall trend, in my opinion, is positive, and I think now is the time for Blizzard to pump the gas pedal and keep charging forward to make the modern game a constantly-updated, enjoyable experience.

However, there’s also some real big gaps in information here that are hard to be too excited about until we see more, so until that time, I am tentatively happy with all of this.