The weeks before a new World of Warcraft expansion arrives are always a strange limbo. The “pre-patch” drops, moving the game to a new version number — WoW is now on version 12.0, if you can believe it — and making all the fundamental, systemic changes that are pushed out to all players, whether they buy the expansion or not.
Talents are reset. Abilities are pruned or altered. The interface changes. Old systems are reworked, and itemization is tidied up. The game feels fresh, or at least different. But none of the new content that these changes have been tuned for, or designed to accommodate, is in the game yet, and so some of them seem harshly exposed. It’s like a remodelled house before the new furniture arrives. It can be an exciting, or frustrating, or disquieting moment, or all three, depending on your mood and what kind of player you are.
These emotions feel particularly heightened during WoW’s current pre-patch limbo, ahead of the release of its 11th expansion Midnight on March 2. For various reasons, this is one of the most dramatic and consequential shifts the game has ever been through, and it’s fair to say that neither developer Blizzard nor the community is getting through it without grinding some gears.
In itself, Midnight does not seem like a particularly notable expansion. It’s the middle chapter of a trilogy called the Worldsoul Saga — Blizzard hints that it’s going to be “harrowing” and dramatic, very much the Empire Strikes Back of the set — and not especially ambitious in scope or features. There’s no new character class, no major new content type. It’s certainly not the grand reset of something like Legion or Dragonflight.
And yet Midnight trails some seismic changes for the game — changes that Blizzard has chosen to release in advance. Housing is a massive new feature that’s been requested since the game first launched, and it’s been available in early access since December. Meanwhile, Blizzard is taking a radical new approach to the use of mods — or addons — that completely upends how a huge proportion of WoW players interact with the game. It’s hard to say if Blizzard’s “disarmament” of combat addons affects a majority or a sizable minority of players, but either way, it’s a lot of people, and among the raiding and Mythic+ dungeon-running community, it’s almost everyone.
Housing and addon disarmament are total novelties in WoW’s 20-year history. Coming in just behind them are two other changes that have happened before, but are still destabilizing: a stat squish that refactors the game’s math to bring its exponential increases under control, and a fairly severe pruning of most character classes to streamline their abilities and make their combat rotations more manageable.
Housing seems to be a hit, and it’s implemented very well, but it’s a little siloed off from the rest of the game and it directly appeals to a more casual player. Blizzard’s intense focus on it in its marketing is understandable — it’s clearly a huge development project — but for many players in WoW’s hardcore community, it’s not that relevant. And these are exactly the players who have been most hit by addon disarmament and class pruning.
Add-on features these players relied on to play effectively in high-end content have been stripped away and replaced with official alternatives that, certainly in the case of Blizzard’s in-house cooldown manager, are not yet fit for purpose. Blizzard is right to try to re-engineer its game to be playable at the highest level without addons, but most agree that it’s not there yet. Meanwhile, the rhythms of the new, pared-back combat rotations feel off, and won’t feel complete until they have been fleshed out by the new level 90 abilities coming in Midnight.
One Reddit user likened playing the game in its present state to driving somebody else’s car: “I can get where I need to, but it just feels off the whole time.” Currently, WoW’s hardcore fans feel like their game has been changed beyond recognition — for the worse, many of them would say — and they have nothing else to show for it.
Well, not quite nothing. This week saw the beginning of Twilight Ascension, an in-game event heralding the Midnight plotline. Like most pre-expansion events, this offers a morsel of lore and a fairly simple, speedy grind for some unique cosmetic collectables — now including housing décor, naturally — plus catch-up gear for anyone who hasn’t been keeping up.
There’s a pleasingly old-school flavor to Twilight Ascension. It takes place in the Twilight Highlands, a mountain wilderness on one of the original continents of Azeroth, and involves fighting purple-robed cultists and their deadly summons. This is classic Warcraft stuff. The cultists, the Twilight’s Blade, worship WoW’s current big bad Xal’atath, but they’re also a repurposed remnant of the Twilight’s Hammer, a faction that dates back to the earliest days of the game. It’s nostalgic to fight them, even if zipping around on super-fast Skyriding mounts between timed world quests and mass battles with rare elite spawns is the epitome of modern WoW, gameplay-wise.
Twilight Ascension is fun, but there’s not much to it, and it doesn’t do anything new. Nor should it, really; it’s the live-game equivalent of an apéritif, meant to stimulate the appetite, not sate it. That’s the job of Midnight proper. But for players uninterested in housing, and alienated by addon disarmament, the event’s easy nostalgia and basic grind are pretty thin gruel.
The nature of the pre-expansion limbo is that it’s temporary, and once Midnight launches, all this might be forgotten. WoW’s current wobble won’t last forever, and it certainly won’t be the last one, either. But it’s a particularly fragile moment for a game and a community that have almost unparalleled longevity. With housing and addon disarmament — both of which are strategic investments in the game’s future — Blizzard has thrown World of Warcraft out of balance. Will Midnight restore it?
