World of Warcraft has entered its 21st year in operation, which makes it a true rarity within its genre, and potentially within the industry in general. It remains the world’s most popular subscription-based MMORPG, with millions of players funding large ongoing story and PvE content drops every few months, with large world-growing expansions every 1.5 years or so.
WoW has enjoyed something of a renaissance recently. The “current” retail version of the game has received what may end up being remembered as one of its best expansions ever, with The War Within.
The latest content patch delivered an entire new city, new raid, new quest hub, ambitious new story beats, and more. Beyond that, Blizzard has thrown the rulebook out of the window, aggressively pursuing what players say they want, rather than what Blizzard thinks they want — WoW: Classic delivers the nostalgic experience people of a certain age yearn for.
WoW: Hardcore’s new perma-death mode has become social media fodder, creating emergent and shareable hijinks ideal for the streaming era. Blizzard has also been experimenting with “remixed” events, retelling previous storylines with new gameplay elements. Despite it all, World of Warcraft has remained relevant, 20 years after the fact.
As a long-time player, I feel like World of Warcraft is enjoying something of a quiet renaissance right now. Emphasis on quiet, because part of me wonders how ready World of Warcraft is to go truly loud right now.
World of Warcraft ‘The War Within’ Season 2 patch is absolutely phenomenal
I need to preface this with an admission of bias. I am a goblin, and have been since Cataclysm 15 years ago. But let’s put that to one side for a moment, and speak purely analytically: WoW’s Undermine update is absolutely peak.
Undermine was fairly long in development, but the results speak for themselves. Undermine has been long established in lore as the goblin home city, and it’s pretty clear that Blizzard wanted to deliver on those expectations.
For those who don’t know, World of Warcraft goblins are a bit steampunky thematically, wielding their engineering prowess (or lack thereof) in the construction of various mechs, tanks, robots — many of which are prone to spontaneously explode.
The goblin’s iconic penchant for chaos and their hyper-capitalistic society makes for a uniquely poignant setting given the current state of, well, everything, but Blizzard adeptly satirizes its themes with grace and good humor, but it’s not all light-hearted neon-washed fun.
Undermine is run by a heartless kingpin known as Gallywix, who has a long history of general villainy. Players join other goblin mainstays like Gazlowe to lead something of a revolution in the city, uniting the disparate cartels against Gallywix — who seems to have aligned himself with saga antagonist Xal’atath.
While Undermine is full of crazy inventions and wacky hijinks, Blizzard also confidently injects genuinely heartfelt moments into proceedings, while also pushing forward the overarching saga
I won’t spoil for those who haven’t experienced the story yet, but it was, for me, the best mid-expansion storyline in years, and beefy, with plenty of high-quality cutscenes, voice acting, and juicy lore. I also have to give a big shout out to the music and soundtrack here — absolutely sublime filthy jazz and blues is a breath of fresh air.
On top of it all, Blizzard baked Undermine with new dynamic driving mechanics, a mountain of reward tracks to grind out, a new raid, a new dungeon, new delves — so much stuff, I find myself discovering new things almost daily. But, is it too good?
Hear me out.
But WoW continues to be difficult to recommend to new or long-lapsed players
Can a patch be too good? As Blizzard seems to want to raise the bar in every way for World of Warcraft, I find myself worrying about how poor the “new player” experience continues to be for the game.
I’ve written about it before, but years later, nothing major has really been done to improve things.
New players in WoW get dumped into a very dull, generic zone called Exile’s Reach, which tutorializes the basics of the game in a patronizingly easy and poorly paced island of banal linearity. The original WoW starting experience put players into a huge world, immersing them in a racial starting zone steeped in player fantasy-building lore.
The non-linear levelling experience of the original World of Warcraft is simply unmatched, and not really available to experience in the modern game in an intuitive way.
Players can opt in to it, but the content is painfully outdated, creating story continuity issues, replete with pacing problems born of WoW’s updated levelling speed.
The reason I worry that Undermine might be too good and the upcoming Midnight expansion with its player housing might be too good is that the quality bar Blizzard has reached lately seems like it must be very expensive.
And it’s all content geared almost entirely to veteran, end-game players. There’s been little to no investment in actually improving the experience for completely new players, besides the bare minimum.
I feel like without a solid starting zone experience, players won’t as easily get invested in their characters, or in the over-arching story of the game. I also feel like they won’t learn the ins and outs of the game in a well-paced way, instead being sped through the bare basics and then thrown into the deep end with a rapid delivery of new systems and mechanics.
Selfishly, if WoW is to maintain the quality bar that I am thoroughly enjoying right now, I’m concerned that not enough investment is being made to find those shiny new players.
Although my concerns might be totally unfounded. WoW Classic Hardcore has been popping off on socials after all, and maybe players don’t mind the starting experience as much as I presume.
My current conspiracy theory is that, with zones like Undermine for goblins, the revamp to the Eastern Kingdoms in World of Warcraft: Midnight, and previous recent new zones like Bel’ameth for night elves, might be part of a gradual effort by Blizzard to create new starting zone experiences for different races. But there’s no real evidence that’ll happen.
I sincerely hope the new World of Warcraft development cycle is sustainable, either way, because it’s absolutely fantastic. Is there a universe where World of Warcraft can return to the numbers seen during the Wrath of the Lich King days? I want to believe the answer is yes, but perhaps the landscape has simply changed too much.
