Me on November 3, 2023: “Alright, a new WoW announcement, let’s check it out. Although, to be honest, I don’t think there’s anything that they could announce that would make me play again after all this ti—”
World of Warcraft is a soon-to-be 20 year old game that I, for better or worse, have a long love and hate relationship with, and I’m pretty confident that I’m not the only one in that position. Personally speaking, and flawed as it is, it is a game that through a series of accidental events led to some good stuff happening in my life at a time when things weren’t good, to say the least.
Like many, I had moved on from WoW some years ago because, long story short, Blizzard kept shooting themselves in the foot through a large pile of bad design choices that sought to maximize green line engagement charts for shareholders at the expense of player enjoyment — then along came the sexual harassment and Cosby room scandal, the knee-jerk faux corporate-approved “sanitization” of the game that came in response, and the near-destruction of the entire franchise through the Shadowlands expansion and its thinly veiled attempt to one-up Marvel and Final Fantasy XIV without actually putting the leg work required to pull such a narrative endeavor.
The game barely made it out of Shadowlands in critical condition. It did experienced some recovery throughout late 2022 onwards with the Dragonflight expansion, one that, while it had several good steps in improving the mess left by Shadowlands at a gameplay level, featured a blatantly obvious corporate-friendly plot ripe with equally obvious “diversity and representation” characters here and there that sought to reap some PR brownie points as the company’s sexual harassment legal woes continued, there’s no other way of putting that.
Skip ahead and then along comes the return of Chris Metzen to help save the sinking ship after roughly six years of accumulated disasters.
Rather than announcing one expansion, Metzen broke new ground™ by announcing three expansions that collectively are referred to as the Worldsoul Saga, which will allegedly bring closure to the past 20 years of Warcraft storytelling — you know, the thing Shadowlands suddenly claimed it would do right around the time its main competitor did, only to nearly destroy everything in the process and not actually give any form of closure.
Now that the first of this three-parter saga has been out for about a month, here’s my impressions of The War Within (TWW), WoW’s tenth expansion.
The tl;dr
Should you play this expansion? No, unless you have people to play it with. The gameplay feels great, and there’s new avenues for casual players to progress, but I cannot under good conscience recommend someone that hasn’t played the game in the past to play it on their own.
It’s a 20 year old game, designed in a way to easily attract and retain returning players, but has it hard when it comes to bringing fresh blood to its (revenue) fold.
Thank you for reading it, I hope you have a nice day. You can close this tab off your browser if you want.
Now, should you wish to continue reading…
The Premise
Through the three expansions of the Worldsoul saga, Blizzard wants to fix things up from a narrative perspective and with more focus to the game’s story, a honestly much-needed decision, especially after the absolute disaster of Shadowlands — but this story focus, well intentioned as it is, might fall on deaf ears for reasons that I’ll touch upon in a bit.
This is the start of a new narrative arc that will span the next six years of the game’s life, and so far, the first content in The War Within stays true to that. The narrative presented very much feels like the first chapter.
At the same time, it serves as a soft reboot. Upon returning to the game you are presented with a “previously, on WoW” recap video covering the most relevant plot points from 2016’s Legion expansion to date that you need to know for TWW while ignoring much of the crap and less well-received nonsense presented in between those eight years.
It’s alright, serviceable even, but, so far, a little bit barebones. As of right now, the “bulk” of the story is an introductory experience and arrival to the new area, wich, much like past expansions, you go zone by zone while the story presents each area’s unique faction(s) and their woes, culminating with breadcrumbs that lead you to the first raid — just like every past expansion.
The story presented feels more of a sequel to Legion than the expansions that followed it were. One of the problems, I believe, is that they’re playing some beats too safe and too similar to what you’ve already seen. The intro shares similar “happening” points to that of Legion, and the final zone, Azj-Kahet, is basically a reskinned plot of Suramar.
The “light vs void” that was alluded throughout Legion (esp. If you were a Shadow Priest), was something I was very much looking forward to at the time, we’ll see how it all starts to pan out at last eight years later.
That said, and “bottling the woke away” and all that, it’s still a [current year] western video game, as such, male characters cannot be the heroes they once were, every female lead is a girlboss (one of whom has that sidecut, you know which one), and there is a particular character that, while decently written from what I played, feels very much pulled straight out of Activision’s diversity calculator tool. (dark skinned disabled half elf girlboss).
In 2022, during the sexual harassment scandal boom, Blizzard went on this PR stunt tour alongside game journalists where they praised how “stunning” and “brave” Dragonflight was with representation, diversity, and corporate-sanitized “inclusion.” But at the end of the day, none of that mattered for the tryhard playerbase who doesn’t care about that unless it’d increase their damage output — I know what I’m saying here.
Blizzard faces one big problem with its newfound goals to deliver a story, the playerbase itself, and Blizzard only has themselves to blame for this
The main issue is this: how do you deliver a story focus to a playerbase largely uninterested in the story? How do you, at this point of the game’s history, convince the majority of its remaining playerbase to listen to you and give a damn about the story when you’ve conditioned them for more than 15 years that they need to skip quest text and zoom past every zone so they can reach the game’s actual forte, the endgame treadmill?
That is, without a doubt, Blizzard’s War Within.
WoW is much different now from what it was at launch, that much goes without saying. Since at least 2008 or so, the game has become a “seasonal” game where — just like most MMOs since then — every patch content invalidates the progress of the previous one, and because of this, it needs to churn players into the endgame as fast as possible.
The game has been designed for so long with that mentality, to the point that its story is irrelevant, and compartmentalized without any cohesion between expansions, which is why trying to bring new players that have an interest in its story is easier said than done.
The fact that it’s a 30-year old franchise doesn’t help much. Just to give you an example: Alleria Windrunner has a protagonist role in TWW, but she was first introduced in the Warcraft II expansion (1996), she makes a return to the plot during Legion (2016), and now her plot is finally moving forward in 2024.
Despite the game boasting a renewed story focus, and because of its focus on gameplay (which has always been WoW’s main strength), even the story that has been presented so far has been released in a non-linear manner, because at the end of the day, all content has to be released around endgame.
At launch, here’s how the story released so far was presented:
- 1) The expansion’s intro sequence, and linear zone progression that gives you an introduction to each area, its factions, and narrative plot points. (August 26)
- 3) The launch endgame campaign’s first part and cutscene (September 3)
- 2) The raid and its storyline conclusion (September 10)
That’s not a typo on the numbered list, that’s how it was presented, so it’s a bit jarring that you see the conclusion to the first arc while still skipping the raid storyline conclusion — but at the same time, it doesn’t matter much because it still feels separate even though the “evil plot” follows a linear path.
The main villain is furious that girlboss hunter ruined her plan and yells “this changes nothing!!” but then next week she’s super chill and acts like everything is proceeding just according to keikaku (keikaku means plan).
Then you realize that the events where she was acting chill take place before the cutscene with the girlboss even though the content got released the other way around.
In any case, narrative mishap like the one I described do not matter because let’s be real, WoW players don’t care about any of that, and they just wanna zoom zoom and blast blast to increase their character’s power. A member of my guild liked the cutscene presented in at the conclusion of the campaign but basically skipped everything before so he had no idea how things got to that point.
That’s how it’s been for the longest time, it is what it is — that does not mean the game is devoid of players interested in its story, because I’d be lying if I said so. It’s just that much of the endgame players have no interested in it, that much I’ve come to be acquainted to during my past lengthy career in this game.
As for the zones themselves, it’s some of the best-lookin ones in the game so far. Hallowfall is comfy af tho, Isle of Dorn is very Dorntastic.
Another thing worth mentioning. I’m either going insane (I am), someone at Blizzard knows me, or my data was scraped by an AI, because there are far too many references to inside jokes between me and my close group of friends in this expansion to be a coincidence at this point…
I don’t know, maybe I am finally going crazy — or maybe, just maybe…
The Gameplay
This is the ultimate strength of this game throughout its life and where this expansion shines the most. At a gameplay level, WoW is right now at the best it’s been in years. It’s the one thing I’d vouch for you to try if you’re interested in playing this game, thousands of miles more than the story content itself.
One of the big selling points is Hero Talents. While they don’t radically change the way a class play, they do feel like a nice addition, and unlike the fiasco of Shadowland’s Covenants, these are non committal, and by the time you hit max level you have all of it available to you.
For the most part, all of the classes feel very good to play right now, with some exceptions here and there. It’s a video game, so there will always be a meta, but unless you’re on the upper echelons of bleeding edge tryhardness (where statistical data reveals who are the top dogs right now) it shouldn’t matter to you and you can very well play whatever you like the most and still do great.
As its been the case for years now, prepare for a noticeable learning curve if you’re a new player, when it comes to itemization, talents, stats, consumables, and all that (in case you don’t know, it’s been more than 10 years since you’ve had to rely on websites and simulations to determine if an item is an upgrade or not outside of cases where its rather obvious that it is).
It’s one of the reasons why I only recommend new people play this game with others, because there’s a lot that will be thrown at you.
Another great addition in this expansion are Delves. These are bite-sized dungeons that you can tackle alone or in a group. They’re very flexible in nature and scalable depending on your group composition. Each delve has some rotating twists and quirks with some variants and scalable difficulty that you can tackle solo or in a group. There’s also a challenge boss that can give you cosmetic stuff should you tackle its “omg le elden ring reference” solo challenge.
It’s a fantastic way for new people and new characters to gear up either on their own, or in smaller. It’s not an infinite source of gear, though, and while you can do as many delves as you want, only four per day will give you ‘good’ gear, and you need to spend a currency (key) to get said gear.
Because it’s not meant to be the hardest content there is, the gear’s quality only goes so far, and its rewards will rapidly stop being upgrades to your character. There’s a random chance for you to obtain better rewards on delves, but because it’s random, it’s more of a bonus thing. You can get guaranteed very good rewards at the end of every week through Delves, but by then the Delves themselve will feel rather tedious.
Then along comes Mythic plus, which can be heaven or hell depending on who you play with. It’s fun and engaging to do with friends, a real nightmare to do with strangers because of how punishing mistakes can be, yielding to frustration, broken groups, and lost time.
Not all of it is bad, though:
As for the raid, I’ve only done the normal mode and don’t plan on doing its higher difficulties due to timezone limitations.
My guild is back once again, but I can’t raid with them because they’re based on PST and now I live in Italy (CEST). The ten hour difference is just too much for me (I’d had to raid with them at like 5am my time, so that’s a no-no). There’s no way I’m paying Blizzard for a new copy of the game and reroll from scratch in an Europe server, sunk costs and all that.
As a result, I’ve been focusing my endgame self-inflicted torture on Mythic plus, almost done with my goals there. I can’t tell you about the state of PvP content because it’s been ages since I last engaged with it in a meaningful manner.
For what it’s worth, I’ve heard the raid is fun, my guildmates seem to be having fun with it.
Wrapping up
After eight or so years of terrible design and narrative choices, WoW is back™ for real this time, and it’s the best it’s been at a gameplay level.
But as I said at the start of this post, I cannot recommend new players to try it unless they have friends or can quickly find people who can guide them through it, because, good as things may be (compared to past years) it’s still rather unwelcoming for new players, which is why WoW can for the most part retain its remaining players and replenish its pool from past players over growing through new players.
As for the story of this epic three-expansion long saga, it’s presently at the first chapter of a three season show. We’ll see how it all ends up developing in about six to seven years and if it will have the promised narrative closure to decades of history.
For now, I’ll keep playing a little more until I get fully bored or complete some pending FOMO goals, whichever comes first. No more gold farming -> Bolivar exchanges for me, thankfully.
If you do need a washed out MMO boomer for group content or just help with whatever in the game, feel free to hit me up, always willing and more than happy to lend a hand.
-Kal
