Midnight’s big reveal was about a month ago, and in the time since then we’ve had the usual drip-feed of news from a mix of official Blizzard panels at the Gamescom event in Germany and interviews with favorable press outlets, mostly big mainstream ones and close, highly-positive creators. (A quick side-bar, not trying to shade those creators too much, but there’s a degree of obsequiousness in their coverage that I tend to dislike, which is a big part of why I largely don’t watch WoW creators doing news or analysis these days.) This reveal was an interesting one, because Blizzcon 2023 and the whole nature of the Worldsoul Saga has given us a curveball – unlike last time, or really any expansion reveal ever, we didn’t have a complete question mark of what was coming. We knew the name, the logo, the general idea, and so all that was really left to see was some concrete info on gameplay – zones, raids, dungeons, delves, and of course the much-hyped and highly-anticipated addition of real player housing to World of Warcraft. How was the event and how do I feel about the info we now have about Midnight? Let’s discuss.

The Current State of WoW

I think to begin with, I need to find a quick summary to state how I feel about The War Within and where I am at with the game right now. The short answer – it’s the most engaged I’ve been and fun I’ve had in the game for a while. The refocusing on core endgame activities over the last couple of expansions has made running dungeons and raids rewarding and pushed better tuning, the increased emphasis on and diversity of world activities has made playing alts or just goofing around a viable option, and the Warband feature has literally fundamentally transformed how I interact with the game, making alt gameplay increasingly easy and enjoyable on its own terms without creating a massive list of chores or busywork to do. In fact, the best thing to come out of the fiascos of Battle for Azeroth and Shadowlands is that the game has basically removed all manner of “chore” from the gameplay in favor of creating a simple loop that reinforces what you want to do. If you wanna play dungeons, you don’t need to farm Renown or push a new Azerite level – just run dungeons and get gear there. Same for raid as well – the gameplay loop reinforces doing the thing you want instead of forcing you to do busywork to be ready. You could argue that to be optimal requires more stuff, like pushing Delves high early in a season, doing dungeons or raid in addition to the other one you like more so that your gear progression is as high as possible, but in the vast majority of cases, you do not need to be optimal to do stuff in WoW and there’s very little social pressure in most settings to do so. World content players have a good array of activities, including some non-combat options sprinkled in, so you can choose from a pretty good buffet of stuff to do and have a good overall experience.

For me, this focusing on the fundamentals of gameplay in WoW has been a breath of fresh air, one that has revitalized the game for me in a way I didn’t think was possible in the doldrums of late 2021 or early 2022. WoW is very approachable on your own terms and the foundation of the Great Vault as rewards arbiter means that you get the most reward for the smallest units of content completion – a raid slot every two bosses, a dungeon slot at 1, 4, and 8 runs on Heroic or higher, and world content rewards for 2, 4, or 8 activities. The first vault slot in any row can be opened with 20 minutes of gameplay, not counting queue times – and that is pretty great, because it gives a modern take on the WoW formula of drop-in, drop-out gameplay. Pushing harder and longer (phrasing?) is only rewarding in the sense that you might get better drops from the content you do beyond the limits of the vault, but the reward structure of the game heavily incentivizes moving in quickly and doing a small nibble of gameplay for a good reward, and that’s neat, given that WoW in the borrowed-power era could be called “Chorecraft” for how often you had to putter around in game doing random bullshit for random drop currencies and timegated rank-ups.

Given all of that, Midnight just needs to be a step in a journey along this road that Blizzard has already been on for two expansions now. Story…eh, we can talk about that later, because the biggest misses are there for me, but on a gameplay basis, I am thoroughly satisfied with the current formula and anything affirming that it remains the direction is a win to me.

The Downsides of the Announcement Week

Blizzard announcing a new WoW expansion at Gamescom isn’t a huge new thing. It’s been done before – 10 years prior, in fact, as Legion was announced on the Blizzard stage at the show back in 2015. This year was a little bit different in that the cinematic unveiling was hyped as a part of Geoff Keighley’s Opening Night Live event, a stream show that kicked off Gamescom.

So firstly…personally, I just find Geoff Keighley to be a charisma vacuum. His shows, presentation, and overall thing is to be boring, inoffensive, and corporate-friendly – and boy was that on display as he and his team awkwardly presented what was a conveyor belt of trailers. The format was just bad and since I was only watching for the Midnight trailer, I was bored to death roasting this show with my guildies while we waited for the trailer to Midnight. I don’t know what editorial control Microsoft and co had over the event if any, given that there were a lot of trailers from all over mixed in, but advertising this as a WoW event with a time and then taking nearly 90 minutes to get to the Midnight cinematic sucked for me. Oh, and also Holly Longdale got to come out in front of the Gamescom general audience to the most awkward silence I might have ever seen at a gaming event. It was painful to watch, because it was clear the room for the show generally was not really hyped for new WoW stuff or even fans of the game at all, so the crowd work she tried to do just highlighted how painfully awkward the whole thing was. That’s not necessarily Longdale’s fault either – they gotta have a tight script and presentation strategy and this was just not the room to do it in, a problem which the later panels at the WoW stage alleviated a lot.

Secondly, the cinematic. I’m on team meh for the overall presentation. The idea is cool and I get that Blizzard’s thinking here is that giving the Elves real eyes for the cinematic theoretically allows them to portray emotions better, but I think that the art was just a miss and the emotion was missing – it didn’t feel more emotive for the eye changes and it felt less like WoW, both of which are big fails to me. It’s a really cool scene idea and the voidy side of the whole thing was neat, but it was missing a lot to get me hyped. It wasn’t as emotional and interesting as The War Within’s unveiling cinematic and the conflict didn’t feel as big and epic as something like the Legion cinematic or even BfA’s – it was just kinda there. I like the expansion idea, concept, theme – all of it is cool to me – but this cinematic almost could not have done a worse job of getting me excited for the expansion. Luckily, it didn’t have to, because if it did, Blizzard would have been in trouble.

Thirdly, I already groused about this very topic once up top in this very post, but I fucking hate the Blizzard PR strategy these days. Before the weekend deluge of panels to fill in details in a single-source, succinct manner, we had a drip-feed of press interviews and Q&As with the teacher’s pet YouTubers where a smattering of details came out, alongside a gameplay trailer that actually gave us the meat of what the expansion is going to entail. I just hate this strategy because it means that the information is spread out poorly, some is in other languages and so machine translations and even native speaker translations are grabbing inaccurate depictions of what was said, which means it just ends up being a mess. Some of the stuff that gets discussed in these interviews is really cool! – but I fucking hate having to dig up every article of coverage and try to parse out the full picture, which wouldn’t be as bad if Blizzard had a simpler, unified comms strategy through panels. You guys had your own stage! You could have hyped everything in a presentation and had the first point of communication be you directly, but you had to give the gold star to friendly media, eh? I feel like ever since they had negative interviews back around Shadowlands like the infamous Preach “pull the ripcord” stream, they just cannot let there be a freeform, open communication mechanism – everything has to be tightly controlled and some of the “fan” interviews have to be given to outlets who would tell me it was raining as Blizzard spits on them.

So in terms of the setup and presentation, I think I was left wanting for more, at least a bit. However, overall, I’m actually pretty stoked for Midnight, so after leading with the downsides of the announcement (pretty much all based on presentation and not content, you might have noticed), let’s talk about the actual meat and potatoes of Midnight.

The Positives of Midnight

Midnight makes a commitment to continuing WoW’s evolution down the current path – a focus on core endgame pillars with further expansion to the world gameplay model of WoW, strong instanced PvE content, and some continuing growth and change for PvP to make it more well-supported (well, outside of the bots, win trading, and other rampant infestations the mode faces!). Buried in the details of the myriad interviews, panels, and YouTube shorts, we have what sounds like a baseline WoW expansion in the Worldsoul Saga era – 8 new dungeons, a smattering of new Delves including an expansion-long new Delve companion in Valeera Sanguinar, and new raid content.

The changes are interesting, though, and right up top, raids are different in Midnight, with the launch tier being 3 different raids (a throwback that hasn’t been done since Legion), with a 6 boss main raid that serves as the launch story capstone alongside two additional raids, with a one-boss raid and another two boss raid, for a total of nine bosses in that first season. How this will play out remains to be seen – there seems to be an intended story progression but also flexibility gameplay-wise to tackle them in different orders, which is neat. I personally think that it could help a lot with the ennui of raiding in recent years – there being one singular story raid and aesthetic per season is kind of a bummer and also closes the door on a lot of other possibilities. In The War Within, for example, having some sort of Earthen-focused Skardyn raid alongside Nerub’ar Palace would have been really cool and allowed them to tell some interesting stories about the Earthen, who have largely been forgotten in the expansion where we got the most details about their society and nature.

World content’s major tweak is the addition of and refinement of something that is being tested via Legion Remix (which isn’t even out!) – world difficulty settings. Through the Prey system, you’ll be able to hunt specific enemies that will appear randomly to hunt you and increase the difficulty of world content. Three difficulty tiers exist, each with scaling increases and potential affixes to push the challenge higher. I think this is an excellent answer to the Classic stans who always whine about how world content in retail is too easy or not like it used to be, because it addresses the two vectors for why world content is often not challenging – our skills at the game have improved and the defensive/self-healing kits available to most classes and specs help in a way you couldn’t always access in Classic. Instead of removing those kits or scaling stuff for everyone, making that challenge opt-in is a great call and one I am excited to see come to fruition. My hopes are that the Nightmare difficulty provides a fun experience and also that doing this type of content feeds the World row in the Great Vault.

The preview version of player housing that was streamed from the show is very promising and makes WoW’s housing mode seem like lightyears ahead of its primary competition in FFXIV. The game’s neighborhoods system sounds like it will allow a lot of flexibility with building out friendly neighborhoods, Blizzard is tying small bits of gameplay to it as an encouragement, and the flexibility of creating a house is huge – you can drag and drop template room shapes and sizes together to create a fully customized layout and then use furniture and fixtures from all over the game’s storied two-decade-plus history to decorate. Blizzard is keen on making sure that housing is a marquee feature of the expansion and it seems that a lot of the development of the expansion has gone into ensuring this feature lands. Blizzard has even been uncharacteristically cheeky about housing – without directly mentioning Final Fantasy XIV, they’ve been discussing the downsides of that game’s housing gameplay as things to avoid and have presented a housing mode that seems very open and friendly when compared to placard-spamming and lottery waiting.

The addition of a new Demon Hunter spec, all but basically confirmed in K’aresh’s sidequest content and then in the Manaforge Omega raid, is pretty cool. The Devourer spec is intended to play as a mid-range sort of melee hybrid, where the spec uses void-y versions of the classic DH mobility kit to zoom around but stay firmly distant from enemies. As a playstyle, this is kind of a cool idea, because it looks like it will feel melee-adjacent but not require being in close and give some flexibility for uptime with regards to mechanics that force movement away from a target. Since Survival Hunter was turned into a melee, the game has lacked options in this category of ranged but rapid fire style gameplay, and the mid-range playstyle means that Evokers are likely no longer to feel as alone in that mid-range, not quite fully out gameplay style. The confirmation that warglaives are being turned into hybrid stat weapons with both Agility and Intellect on them and that Devourers are using Intellect is interesting, because it seems weird as a choice (the other ranged physical spec uses Agility!) and also because it then leads me to a point of frustration as someone who plays hybrid classes most often – why can’t all weapons just swap main stats at this point? Since Blizzard consolidated gear into having whatever base stat you use on it, the exclusion of weapons has remained odd given the lifting of a lot of transmog restrictions such that the fantasy of what constitutes a strength or intellect weapon isn’t as much of a thing anymore.

The other additions are a little harder to assign value to without actual play experience, or are just generally neat. Haranir as a new allied race kinda tracks, and new Druid race too so we get new shapeshift forms, huzzah! We get new delves, a new delve companion in Valeera Sanguinar, and I assume we’ll likely see some tweaks to the delve formula based on feedback from TWW. 8 dungeons across all difficulties launch with the expansion, with the major tweak being that pre-season at the start of the expansion will have all 8 new dungeons available on Mythic base difficulty, although what this means once the season starts is murkier (I assume that we go to the TWW model with just the seasonal dungeons in Heroic and up, but also given the Dungeoneer achievement used in TWW, that formula kind of sucks when you need to run dungeons from current expansion that are out of season). We get four new zones, two of which are new versions of the combined Eversong Woods/Ghostlands and Zul’Aman (while the old versions remain accessible), and the other two are more far-flung new zones, with Harandar (the Haranir home) and Voidstorm, a void-torn realm that seems like it might not be on Azeroth, maybe? Interestingly, there’s some discussion that Voidstorm will have a new form of open-world PvP for those in War Mode, which seems kinda neat, since it has been quite some time since Blizzard last offered world zones with a PvP feature that wasn’t just an FFA fight pit that you can only properly engage with in War Mode.

For the transmog junkies (all of us really, I suppose), Blizzard is expanding the outfits setting to add a lot of flexibility including outfits for different content types and modes of play that will auto-swap, along with making transmog only cost gold to assign to a slot. Currently, you assign transmog per-piece, which means that getting new gear involves a whole lot of cost of redoing transmogs and ensuring the setup is there, and while the current iteration of outfits lets you change quickly, the cost adds up fast. In the new model, you’ll build outfits, pay once to apply the appearance to the outfit, and then as you swap gear, the outfit transmog can be applied at no additional cost, saving thousands of gold, as currently transmog cost scales up based on item level of the receiving piece, meaning high end players actually have to spend substantially more gold on transmog just because the gear base they are applying an appearance to is better. It’s a pretty good quality of life improvement to move away from the existing model in these ways!

Lastly, Blizzard is introducing their first passes at their boss timer, nameplate, and damage meter replacements with Midnight. As part of a plan to eventually disallow API access for in-combat computation to addons, these are going to be keenly watched to see what direction Blizzard is going in with these things being rolled out alongside shifts in gameplay philosophy to bring down some of the insanity of WoW combat at the high end. I have mixed opinions on this topic that could fill an entire post (and I want to write that post sometime soon!) but the gist for me is this – Blizzard is making strides with the experiments they’ve done in TWW, but the first version of the Cooldown Tracker intended to replace class and spec WeakAura packages was incredibly rough and just bad, so my hope is that when these new features roll out in Midnight, we have a first draft we can see while API access remains as-is to allow us to continue to use existing addon packages while Blizzard spends the expansion slowly ironing out the wrinkles to deliver a usable, solid final product. To be fair to the team, the second-draft of the Cooldown Manager coming in 11.2.5 looks a lot better and makes a lot of effort to cover the ground the first pass should have already had anyways, so in the context of these offerings, Blizzard is generally getting better here, although how that translates into other spaces of the addon game remains to be seen. At least maybe a Blizzard damage meter will give us 100% accurate attribution of Augmentation Evoker damage, right?…..right?!

The Opportunities of Midnight

Right up top, I think we need to discuss what the hopes for the Worldsoul Saga were, are, and still can be. As a narrative, the hope I had (and the sales pitch I got from Metzen at Blizzcon 2023) was that this story was going to be a continuous, building narrative, where each expansion would have its thrilling moments and interesting ideas but they’d be wrapping up and building in service of this grand trilogy they wanted to present. And that sounds great, right? WoW’s biggest problem in the past has been how disconnected and weirdly detached things are, like how Burning Crusade kinda just ends and then Arthas is back roaming around causing trouble and now it’s Wrath of the Lich King, and then we kill Arthas and suddenly there’s Deathwing and now it is Cataclysm. So much of WoW’s history, even in the modern era, is full of things like this, where the story doesn’t flow or have any real organic tension building – events just happen and we kind of run around to fix things until the next event happens.

The problem with the Worldsoul Saga, in short, is that so far, it just doesn’t exactly have those neat hooks either, but TWW also has been flattened and made lesser in service of leaving plot hooks and little details around.

TWW started with a couple of interesting ideas – we have the corrupted Earthen in the Skardyn, the mystery of Magni and the Thraegar, Xal’atath’s motivations and mission, and the rise of the ascended Nerubians under Queen Ansurek. All of those were cool ideas and interesting concepts, but the problem with them all is that we explored them very, very little, and now we’re moving on. The Skardyn? Eh, kinda just a thing that happens, hopefully less now that we killed Eirich. Thraegar? Magni isn’t one anymore, and what that means is anyone’s guess. Xal’atath’s motivations? Power, it seems, but what purpose moving through her pawns to get Dimensius’ power at her fingertips served remains kind of an open question. The major plots we actually kind of resolved in TWW are the least exciting – the progression of Nerubian society past the death of Ansurek and what havoc she wrought while in power, the liberation of the Goblins and Undermine from the tyranny of the returning Gallywix, and the discovery of K’aresh’s worldsoul and re-establishment of population with the Eco-Domes, Tazavesh, and the return of both Brokers and Ethereals. Oh, and Locus Walker got blasted for trusting Xal’atath, RIP. It’s not necessarily a bad set of plots but it is lesser, in my eyes, than an expansion-spanning narrative that could have still offered hooks into Midnight and The Last Titan.

Right now, the hope is that Blizzard addresses the plot hooks on the table in the remaining two installments of the Worldsoul Saga, and some are bound to be addressed, surely. Xal’atath obviously is coming up in short order in the first tier of Midnight, and some of the Earthen/Skardyn/Thraegar stuff feels like Last Titan territory, but also, I have to say this – I don’t trust Blizzard with this many hanging threads. I just don’t. What I see this as is that Blizzard delivered a very setup-heavy and reduced quality story for War Within that leaves options on the table which I don’t trust them to fulfill, leaving me with this gnawing feeling that the story of the whole saga is going to just kind of fall flat at best.

For Midnight itself, though? I think there are some compelling hooks on the table from what we have already seen. Learning more about the Void and the hierarchy of it is a potentially-cool plot thread, and returning to Quel’thalas to see how the Blood Elves have continued on in the years since TBC is a great idea – one I hope we see shared across the board with more races and areas of the old world. The Elf plotlines overall have a lot of potential – discussing the shared origin points of the various Elven races, discussing the factional divide between them, and exploring how to unite them as was given as a hook by Metzen a couple years ago – all of those are great. I also think that my dark horse for best plot point to come is the return of Sylvanas to the story, because as the various elf races unify, there is a disunity among the Windrunner sisters, between Sylvanas and Tyrande Whisperwind, and potentially tension between Sylvanas and the newly-married couple of Lor’themar Theron and Thalyssra, both Horde leaders who worked against Sylvanas during the events of Battle for Azeroth. Obviously, the final chapters of Shadowlands have potential to provide resolutions or paths forward on some of those points, but a well-written, humanized story would have some tension still lingering and ask some hard questions about the nature of atrocities Sylvanas committed as a fractured soul and how much her payment of penance affords her in terms of a life and acceptance among the people of Azeroth, especially given the theme of unifying to face the Void. The Void also, from the post-Legion comics, clearly fears Sylvanas and wants her dead, and this will be the largest Void presence on Azeroth we’ve ever seen coupled with Alleria’s dormant-ish Void power, and we still have unanswered questions about Vereesa who kinda just disappeared from the story in TWW alpha because of what happened to Dalaran. From a story perspective, I just fear that we lose the cool ideas to building towards a conclusion that might never come or get pivoted away from, as it feels somewhat clear to me that TWW itself had a pivot somewhere to move in the direction we ultimately went.

Secondly, from a gameplay perspective, I think that Blizzard is getting into this weird hole with the talent system they added back in Dragonflight. My thoughts on that topic are this – largely, Blizzard’s new talent system has been kind of a bust, because you either have choices (and thus most of the talents are bad and so choice comes from the meaninglessness of the options) or you have a fixed path per mode of content (which means the talents themselves are good but that removes a lot of choice from the equation if you want to play your best), and then on top of that, the talent system is growing ever more complex. With Midnight, we get 10 new points, divided into 3 new Hero talent points, 3 new class tree points, and 4 spec tree points, with the addition of an “Apex” talent to each spec tree that can take all 4 of those points to provide a multi-faceted, complex interaction with your spec kit. I feared that they would just expand the Hero talent tree by 10 points until they decided it was too much, but somehow I think this option is worse, because it provides so much overcomplication to a system that is already painfully complicated and guardrailed to push players down only a handful of permutations. You just know that Blizzard is going to be putting a lot of power into the Apex talent per spec such that while you could technically decide not to put even a single point into it, doing so would make your spec likely feel weird and play poorly. Hero talents remaining makes some amount of sense, but I also wonder what the power distribution is going to look like. In TWW, Hero talents were expressly made to be around 33% of your total throughput because of how potent they are, but since everyone spends the same 10 points without meaningful deviation, it was kinda alright. With these new changes, it just seems like things are going to get increasingly messy in a bad way, not to mention that there are now 3 different, yet related, systems all at play in a single user interface window in the game, which is a fucking mess for a new player, much less even skilled ones. I had to read and watch the talent system discussion a handful of times to fully grapple with the concept, and I’m sure once we get that drip-feed of datamined alpha and beta info, it’s only going to get worse!

Thirdly, while I really like the current direction of WoW’s gameplay and overall endgame content choice and flow, I do think that some sprucing up is needed and a new hook would be useful. Prey doesn’t sound particularly huge to me in the way that Delves were, and even Delves are just more-rewarding soloable content on-par with what you can encounter in the open world in terms of mechanical density and difficulty, just with a volume knob attached to let you crank things up a bit. Added world difficulty sounds fun, but world content is also often the least interesting WoW gameplay content and it sounds like most of the added difficulty is only when the Prey mark you have for the week is actively engaged with you, so the added challenge is just needing to be ready for an ambush which then segues into a hard fight. I also wonder how well this challenge will scale and present itself across roles or specs – Blizzard has a really hard time getting challenges to be consistent for tanks, healers, and DPS in way where one role isn’t an obvious correct counterplay, even in Delves with tuning levers through the companion to utilize, so I worry that Prey is either going to still be relatively breezy for the sake of making it consistently doable or that it will turn into a solo meta-game activity where if you have a tank, healer, or DPS spec that isn’t your main one but is available to your class, you’ll do world content that way for the sake of meeting the challenge for max rewards. Both have different downsides, and that’s without even getting into the idea of how it might balance for group play or War Mode – can your Prey challenge you during a PvP skirmish, are they locked out of messing with you in the open-world FFA PvP areas the game uses in War Mode, or is playing War Mode with Nightmare Prey enabled just a clusterfuck of constantly looking over your shoulder for a struggle session? Outside of these notions, though, my biggest concern with Prey is that it just doesn’t sound particularly transformational at all – and while I like the current WoW formula a lot, I think some redecoration is in order, certainly at least some further revamps to World Quests, world events, and the like. World content players have gotten a better selection of content options in the past few years which is great! – but I still feel like they get very little compared to the instanced PvE enjoyers.

There’s the concerns that pop up every time we get a numbers squish, as one was previously confirmed even prior to TWW as coming in Midnight, which the reveal and related interviews have further confirmed. We get to level to 90 but with reduced stat values, either through an item level squish or a simple values squish, and squishes always bring about questions of what things will be missed. My guess is that while Blizzard has generally gotten better at these with time, it’s been 5 years since the last squish (yeah, really) and so something funky will happen in pre-patch with some form of content, will mostly quickly be fixed, and we’ll move on. Will I miss having pulls as DPS where you can burst near to 100 million damage per second? Oh yeah, as always with squishes, losing the big numbers has a mental impact on the fun of the game, but it quickly subsides as the relative scale works itself out and people acclimate, so provided Blizzard doesn’t find a new and exciting way for the squish to blow up, it’ll probably be okay and I’m pretty used to the cycle of value changes in MMOs now, seeing how both WoW and FFXIV have done them in the last few years.

Lastly, I think it’s worth discussing the changes being made to the level-up and new player experience being discussed. Firstly, refocusing on Dragonflight but including patch content is an excellent move, one that I’ve asked for a lot over the years. Introducing story mode raids to that content so that players get to do both patch and raid content in level up to see the stories and have some sense of the fights that went on at the time is really cool. My hope is that the experience curve over that experience actually is designed to work such that a player can experience all of that content as intended, but also, I hope that Blizzard looks at gearing and power-ups during that journey, as a critical blind spot in the current process of leveling a fresh character. The reason the Winds of Mysterious Fortune event was so successful is that it amended a deficiency of gear options during the leveling process, as Blizzard has not meaningfully gone in and updated quest rewards for Dragonflight as a new player experience since that became the case in TWW, meaning that there’s a drip feed of some slots but you’re likely to end up carrying a few very bad pieces of gear a long way, which feels pretty bad. Winds of Mysterious Fortune at least had a pretty high chance of giving you useful gear upgrades with high power such that you felt that progression and it made doing content easier, especially at the expansion level breakpoints where scaling of enemies starts to uptick sharply. I think Blizzard ought to either offer more choices per quest so you always have a semi-viable quest reward option, or use a cache system that will always pick a low-level slot you’re currently wearing and provide a direct upgrade.

Also, while returning players are also being given a scenario in Arathi Highlands to explain story and provide some gameplay guidance with gear, I think that a revamp of Chromie Time is due, and the model being applied to Dragonflight as new player experience is one I would love to see take over for Chromie Time. Imagine being able to level in Vanilla from 1-70 with story mode Ragnaros, Nefarian, C’Thun, and even Kel’Thuzad and the OG Naxxramas? Or being able to relive Wrath of the Lich King in that way? It has a lot of potential – would require a lot of work too, so I am not of the belief that it must happen immediately, but I think it would be a fantastic addition to give the game legs for legacy players who are leveling their 55th character (it’s me, I’m legacy players). Alongside the new changes comes a truncated version of The War Within for 70-80, meaning players coming back in get to level at an accelerated pace while also getting patch content and the story mode raids that exist already in that content, which is really cool. While some would argue that it cheapens existing content, I think that the game offering the highlights to entice players to go back later and explore more deeply is better than just expanding Chromie Time or the new player experience to exclude it, and over time it might even open the door to a way to play the game that does all the story highlights of every expansion in order, so you could potentially do a Lorewalking style excursion through the main story beats from 1.0-11.2, which would be awesome. I’m kind of wishcasting now, so I’ll hold off on more, but this has the potential to open some cool doors with some long-term, high-investment work.

Overall Take

I’m pretty excited for what is to come in Midnight. The current WoW formula is a winner for me and a lot of people I know, and I think making long-awaited additions like housing alongside improvements to that existing formula is a big win for the game overall. The added focus on quality of life and new player acquisition provides some additional solid updates, so while I also have plenty of concerns, I am feeling pretty optimistic about what we might see in February (that’s my guess, mark it down).