H
Harvey Randall
Guest
World of Warcraft: Midnight is one of the most ambitious expansions in the game's 20-year history, and I don't entirely mean that as a compliment. Blizzard is taking its biggest swings in years, and sometimes Midnight whiffs—but just as often this expansion smashes it, dosing you with a hit of pure refined nostalgia in the gorgeously-remade Silvermoon or hooking you into the dopamine loop of its excellent dungeons.
Need to know
What is it?: An expansion to World of Warcraft that takes you back to Silvermoon to fend off the armies of the void, second in the ambitious Worldsoul Saga.
Expect to pay: $50/£45, with a monthly subscription
Developer: Blizzard Entertainment
Publisher: Blizzard Entertainment
Reviewed on: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060, AMD Ryzen 7 5800 8-Core Processor, 16GB RAM, Force MP600 SSD.
Multiplayer?: Yes
Link: Official site
It's hard to come down too firmly on Blizzard for Midnight's occasional whiffs, though, because look at what the studio's had on its plate—player housing, a complete class design overhaul, a UI revamp to deal with a lack of combat addons (the result of a controversial ban which is itself a huge, risky move), a reimagining of one of the game's most beloved cities, an entirely new gearing system in Prey, and the second book of its first ever multi-expansion story.
As the middle child in the Worldsoul Saga trilogy, Midnight has a tougher job. If The War Within fell flat, then hey, at least it was just the start—and if The Last Titan sucks, then at least it's over and the team can move on. If Midnight hits a sour note, though? Then Blizzard has a big problem.
I'm happy to report that, after a couple of weeks with the new expansion, Midnight's design heft doesn't cause the whole thing to crumble and give way—it's not on solid ground just yet, but all of the cracks can be plastered over in the months to come. The bones are good, and the future's looking bright.
Midnight makes the best use of WoW's 20 years of MMO bulk I've seen out of its expansions yet. It's not as expansive as say, Cataclysm, but the way it digs into pre-existing lore and locales rather than simply whisking players away to a new continent is a delight. In fact, half of its zones are old places given a facelift. And by 'facelift' I mean 'comprehensive redesign.'
Blizzard
Blizzard
Blizzard
Blizzard
Blizzard
The new Silvermoon and Eversong Woods and Zul'Aman share precious little in common with their past-expansion versions in terms of raw design. In terms of vibes, though? As someone who played during the original Burning Crusade when I was (oh god) 11 years old, my 30-year-old self was fully swept up in the tide of nostalgia.
Blizzard's artists and environment designers are some of the best in the business, and they are absolutely flexing here. Midnight is a gorgeous and deeply atmospheric game, making the best use of WoW's enduring artstyle it possibly can. It is a continuing astonishment that a game released in 2004 still looks this lovely.
Eversong is lush and vibrant, Zul'Aman feels wild and overgrown and drenched in mysticism, Harandar is downright jaw-dropping at moments—the only zone that's a little dry around the mouth is the Voidstorm, and even then, every time I look up at the skybox I'm impressed by the sense of scale.
Blizzard
Blizzard
The sidequests in these zones also do a great job of fleshing them out. I haven't ticked every single one off just yet, but Midnight, like The War Within before it, is chock-full of heartfelt little tales off the beaten path. Which is all the more frustrating when I look at the main story, because it comes so close to being something special before falling prey to insecurity.
Midnight's central yarn isn't bad, but it could've been great if Blizzard hadn't designed half of it for people who aren't paying attention. Despite this, I still spent the better-executed half of my playthrough deeply engaged in the fantasy politics of Azeroth in a way that feels completely novel.
(Image credit: Blizzard)
We've got a villain, Xal'atath, with an actually-very-good plan, a pressure cooker that's keeping everyone distracted; zealots being forced to rub shoulders with pragmatists, naturally making both of them unhappy; and plenty of little moments in between all the epic, fate of world important parts that are thoughtful and well-written.
The story's execution, unfortunately, is more of a mixed bag. Take "Relics of Paladins Past" in Arator's journey. You need to go to the basement of Light's Hope Chapel and retrieve five relics from paladins of ages past. Relics that are, contrary to the zeal he's just been grappling with, humble: A stein, a meditation crystal, a medkit, a smithing hammer.
On paper, this is a neat, subtle way to show that Arator is discovering there's more to being a Paladin than holy wrath. In practice, Arator says something along the lines of: 'But X was good at fighting. This relic is… not fighting? Is there more to Light than fighting? Woah.' Five consecutive times. Subtlety cannot survive being wrapped around a big hammer and used to bludgeon you over the head (ironically, for the point it's making).
Too much of Midnight's complexity gets smoothed out in the editing room. This means the story is just good, rather than great—a shame, because the Voidspire raid is an excellent hook that's got me by the cheek: An ominous, high-stakes twisting of the knife, a step back for our heroes that that promises a thrilling set of patches I'm actually quite excited for.
I'm largely coming around to Blizzard's vision for a WoW without combat addons, but it's plain to see that the studio has a lot more ground to cover—certain basic functionalities are missing, and the roll-out feels caught between post-band-aid sting and open wound.
(Image credit: Blizzard)
I went through the normal version of the story's raid blissfully unaware, for instance, that healers have been struggling to find and nix dispellable debuffs with the default UI offering. The damage meter, while basically fine, doesn't have an option to only enable it in group content. The cooldown manager is still missing a handful of features, and is certainly woefully uncustomizable compared to what we used to have.
And then there's the class overhaul, designed to make each specialisation playable without addons—there's a list of issues that've soured the whole thing. My initial character, an Outlaw Rogue, had very few problems aside from some subpar damage. My Marksmanship Hunter, meanwhile, hit like a wet noodle outside of her burst windows. As a FF14 player: You do not want the two-minute meta in your game, trust me.
The more I looked for these little cracks, the more I found them. For instance:
These are mostly small scuffs in Midnight's shining plate armour—but they produce a sensation of a developer that's stretching itself thin. World of Warcraft's team feels like it's pulling out all the stops with what energy and time it does have, but there's a distinct undercurrent of plate-spinning.
Contributing to this palpable sub-surface pressure are the game's two big headline features—one is almost perfect, while the other screams untapped potential.
Prey could become one of my favourite additions to the game in years with just a little more time in the oven. It sees you select a Prey-specific NPC target from a list. Then, that target can ambush you out in the world. Fend off enough ambushes, disarm enough of their traps, and you'll be able to hunt them down and fight them directly.
(Image credit: Blizzard)
I've played all three difficulties, normal, hard, and nightmare, and out of the three nightmare is by far my favourite, because it's the most invasive. The promise of Prey's premise is a shot of adrenaline placed into your daily grind, and that's what nightmare delivers—occasional bursts of activity that require your undivided attention, and won't wait for your bio breaks.
Multiple times, I'd find myself scrambling for cooldowns I didn't use outside of harder delves and raiding content—having to, say, interrupt a slowly approaching ghost, dodge a pool of explosive blood, or kill a poor critter at behest of the totally-not-evil Astalor Bloodsworn.
Conceptually I'm a huge fan, but I feel seriously let down by the hunt targets themselves. They… have mechanics, arguably, but they're usually just "interrupt this, here's a bleed, don't stand in the bad". Even on the hardest difficulty, they just don't really do enough to be particularly memorable.
Blizzard has gone for quantity and variety—and I understand, given you're liable to do four of these (even more, if you're grinding out rep) a week. But most of the differences between targets are entirely superficial.
(Image credit: Blizzard)
They all ambush you in a similar fashion, and they all have the same worldquests with different coats of paint. There's one that sees you disabling power sources while evading their guards, and it's literally just the same objective with a texture and model swap.
There's a giant, yawning hole where a ton of personality could be, and I would've happily taken fewer targets and recycled quests for more in-depth mechanics. As it stands, the only hunt that really stood out to me was a jerk who kept placing a nasty black hole I thought I had to run away from, only to discover that distance didn't make me take less damage and it was just a fancy DoT.
Even so, Prey is genuinely promising—and it's not like Blizzard hasn't fleshed out systems over an expansion's lifecycle before. As The War Within progressed, the delve nemeses became more complex and textured, with the final season's scratching the kind of sweaty, soulslike itch I want Prey to scratch.
WoW's player housing, on the other hand, is exactly what it should be—there's still some functionality to be implemented, like letting players own multiple houses rather than just one per faction, but the sheer customisability you're capable of achieving is bang on the money. You can rotate, clip, and kitbash with almost no limitation.
The blue sky through the crack in the stone is a dyed carpet and a window.Blizzard
I spent hours clipping and rotating boulders to make this. Blizzard
The way it controls is downright blissful, too. Blizzard has looked at 20 years of player housing foibles and gone "Alright, we're not doing that". I've messed around with housing in quite a few MMOs, and I can confidently say that WoW's in-built tools are the easiest to use I've found. In cobbling together my apartment, I had just one instance in my multiple hours where a wall wouldn't rotate right. Other than that? Frictionless.
Ultimately both of these new huge expansion features feel like wins, even if I want more out of Prey in the months to come.
Midnight is a real step up in a lot of areas—I found its story gripping, if lacking in confidence to slow down and really dig into the complexity of its themes and characters. Its new zones are downright beautiful, delivering on the promise of an old-world redesign which I think will carry WoW far into the future.
(Image credit: Blizzard)
It's full to the bursting with solid delves, dungeons, and a decent set of opening raids with interesting mechanics. I especially enjoyed one fight, which I shan't spoil otherwise, that saw the entire arena crumple inwards, forcing the entire raid to avoid skidding into the death zone at the centre while dodging puddles of void goop and trying to steer into purging arrows.
And while not all of its mainline features quite deliver on their promises—Blizzard especially needs to figure out what to do with its "Abundance" events, which make me praise the Loa I'm not into crafting or gathering—the studio has stuck a very difficult landing, only slightly hurting its knees in the process.
Given how reactive Blizzard is, I believe it'll get a handle on the expansion's wonky class design and bugs within the coming months. But my job is to assess Midnight as it came on its first few weeks, and while I had a grand old time, there were little nags and snags that kept nipping at me. Nothing ruinous, but signs of ill health all the same.
But then, I'm somewhat pleased to see Blizzard taking those swings at all. It's certainly preferable to stagnation: Adding player housing while you're also trying to do a huge class overhaul, while remaking old zones, while trying to tell a better, more complete story, while adding UI functionality to replace a wide, bustling addon community? It's downright hubristic, and it's even more impressive that nothing completely blew up.
I feel like I'm on a very fancy plane that's going through a rough patch of turbulence: Marvelling at the design of the craft itself, which is pulling off a mechanical wonder—but also a little sore and jostled, with wet knees from a spilled glass of complimentary champagne. Still, that Midnight is basically great with some dents to buff out is a promising sign for the rest of the expansion's lifecycle.
After all, all the thorns have been pulled, all the band-aids ripped off—the hard bit's done, now all that's left is for Blizzard to clean things up, knuckle down for some further class design tweaks, and apply a thick layer of polish.
Continue reading...
Need to know
What is it?: An expansion to World of Warcraft that takes you back to Silvermoon to fend off the armies of the void, second in the ambitious Worldsoul Saga.
Expect to pay: $50/£45, with a monthly subscription
Developer: Blizzard Entertainment
Publisher: Blizzard Entertainment
Reviewed on: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060, AMD Ryzen 7 5800 8-Core Processor, 16GB RAM, Force MP600 SSD.
Multiplayer?: Yes
Link: Official site
It's hard to come down too firmly on Blizzard for Midnight's occasional whiffs, though, because look at what the studio's had on its plate—player housing, a complete class design overhaul, a UI revamp to deal with a lack of combat addons (the result of a controversial ban which is itself a huge, risky move), a reimagining of one of the game's most beloved cities, an entirely new gearing system in Prey, and the second book of its first ever multi-expansion story.
As the middle child in the Worldsoul Saga trilogy, Midnight has a tougher job. If The War Within fell flat, then hey, at least it was just the start—and if The Last Titan sucks, then at least it's over and the team can move on. If Midnight hits a sour note, though? Then Blizzard has a big problem.
I'm happy to report that, after a couple of weeks with the new expansion, Midnight's design heft doesn't cause the whole thing to crumble and give way—it's not on solid ground just yet, but all of the cracks can be plastered over in the months to come. The bones are good, and the future's looking bright.
What is old is new again
Midnight makes the best use of WoW's 20 years of MMO bulk I've seen out of its expansions yet. It's not as expansive as say, Cataclysm, but the way it digs into pre-existing lore and locales rather than simply whisking players away to a new continent is a delight. In fact, half of its zones are old places given a facelift. And by 'facelift' I mean 'comprehensive redesign.'
Blizzard
Blizzard
Blizzard
Blizzard
Blizzard
The new Silvermoon and Eversong Woods and Zul'Aman share precious little in common with their past-expansion versions in terms of raw design. In terms of vibes, though? As someone who played during the original Burning Crusade when I was (oh god) 11 years old, my 30-year-old self was fully swept up in the tide of nostalgia.
Blizzard's artists and environment designers are some of the best in the business, and they are absolutely flexing here. Midnight is a gorgeous and deeply atmospheric game, making the best use of WoW's enduring artstyle it possibly can. It is a continuing astonishment that a game released in 2004 still looks this lovely.
Eversong is lush and vibrant, Zul'Aman feels wild and overgrown and drenched in mysticism, Harandar is downright jaw-dropping at moments—the only zone that's a little dry around the mouth is the Voidstorm, and even then, every time I look up at the skybox I'm impressed by the sense of scale.
Blizzard
Blizzard
The sidequests in these zones also do a great job of fleshing them out. I haven't ticked every single one off just yet, but Midnight, like The War Within before it, is chock-full of heartfelt little tales off the beaten path. Which is all the more frustrating when I look at the main story, because it comes so close to being something special before falling prey to insecurity.
World of expositioncraft
Midnight's central yarn isn't bad, but it could've been great if Blizzard hadn't designed half of it for people who aren't paying attention. Despite this, I still spent the better-executed half of my playthrough deeply engaged in the fantasy politics of Azeroth in a way that feels completely novel.
(Image credit: Blizzard)
We've got a villain, Xal'atath, with an actually-very-good plan, a pressure cooker that's keeping everyone distracted; zealots being forced to rub shoulders with pragmatists, naturally making both of them unhappy; and plenty of little moments in between all the epic, fate of world important parts that are thoughtful and well-written.
The story's execution, unfortunately, is more of a mixed bag. Take "Relics of Paladins Past" in Arator's journey. You need to go to the basement of Light's Hope Chapel and retrieve five relics from paladins of ages past. Relics that are, contrary to the zeal he's just been grappling with, humble: A stein, a meditation crystal, a medkit, a smithing hammer.
On paper, this is a neat, subtle way to show that Arator is discovering there's more to being a Paladin than holy wrath. In practice, Arator says something along the lines of: 'But X was good at fighting. This relic is… not fighting? Is there more to Light than fighting? Woah.' Five consecutive times. Subtlety cannot survive being wrapped around a big hammer and used to bludgeon you over the head (ironically, for the point it's making).
Too much of Midnight's complexity gets smoothed out in the editing room. This means the story is just good, rather than great—a shame, because the Voidspire raid is an excellent hook that's got me by the cheek: An ominous, high-stakes twisting of the knife, a step back for our heroes that that promises a thrilling set of patches I'm actually quite excited for.
Cracks in the wallpaper
I'm largely coming around to Blizzard's vision for a WoW without combat addons, but it's plain to see that the studio has a lot more ground to cover—certain basic functionalities are missing, and the roll-out feels caught between post-band-aid sting and open wound.
(Image credit: Blizzard)
I went through the normal version of the story's raid blissfully unaware, for instance, that healers have been struggling to find and nix dispellable debuffs with the default UI offering. The damage meter, while basically fine, doesn't have an option to only enable it in group content. The cooldown manager is still missing a handful of features, and is certainly woefully uncustomizable compared to what we used to have.
And then there's the class overhaul, designed to make each specialisation playable without addons—there's a list of issues that've soured the whole thing. My initial character, an Outlaw Rogue, had very few problems aside from some subpar damage. My Marksmanship Hunter, meanwhile, hit like a wet noodle outside of her burst windows. As a FF14 player: You do not want the two-minute meta in your game, trust me.
The more I looked for these little cracks, the more I found them. For instance:
- Some specialisations were scuffed on release, with the Survival Hunter having a big, glowing button that needed a 1500% buff to make it worth pressing, or the new spec, the Devourer, not needing to push its big black hole damage button at all.
- Others were simplified so much they're barely recognisable.
- Harandar was plucked out of The War Within—with a blatant leitmotif from the previous expansion haunting its soundtrack and thinly related story.
- The Haranir themselves were released with a bunch of gear that clipped into their bodies. Sometimes their underwear did this, too.
These are mostly small scuffs in Midnight's shining plate armour—but they produce a sensation of a developer that's stretching itself thin. World of Warcraft's team feels like it's pulling out all the stops with what energy and time it does have, but there's a distinct undercurrent of plate-spinning.
Contributing to this palpable sub-surface pressure are the game's two big headline features—one is almost perfect, while the other screams untapped potential.
Murder and furniture
Prey could become one of my favourite additions to the game in years with just a little more time in the oven. It sees you select a Prey-specific NPC target from a list. Then, that target can ambush you out in the world. Fend off enough ambushes, disarm enough of their traps, and you'll be able to hunt them down and fight them directly.
(Image credit: Blizzard)
I've played all three difficulties, normal, hard, and nightmare, and out of the three nightmare is by far my favourite, because it's the most invasive. The promise of Prey's premise is a shot of adrenaline placed into your daily grind, and that's what nightmare delivers—occasional bursts of activity that require your undivided attention, and won't wait for your bio breaks.
Multiple times, I'd find myself scrambling for cooldowns I didn't use outside of harder delves and raiding content—having to, say, interrupt a slowly approaching ghost, dodge a pool of explosive blood, or kill a poor critter at behest of the totally-not-evil Astalor Bloodsworn.
Conceptually I'm a huge fan, but I feel seriously let down by the hunt targets themselves. They… have mechanics, arguably, but they're usually just "interrupt this, here's a bleed, don't stand in the bad". Even on the hardest difficulty, they just don't really do enough to be particularly memorable.
Blizzard has gone for quantity and variety—and I understand, given you're liable to do four of these (even more, if you're grinding out rep) a week. But most of the differences between targets are entirely superficial.
(Image credit: Blizzard)
They all ambush you in a similar fashion, and they all have the same worldquests with different coats of paint. There's one that sees you disabling power sources while evading their guards, and it's literally just the same objective with a texture and model swap.
There's a giant, yawning hole where a ton of personality could be, and I would've happily taken fewer targets and recycled quests for more in-depth mechanics. As it stands, the only hunt that really stood out to me was a jerk who kept placing a nasty black hole I thought I had to run away from, only to discover that distance didn't make me take less damage and it was just a fancy DoT.
Even so, Prey is genuinely promising—and it's not like Blizzard hasn't fleshed out systems over an expansion's lifecycle before. As The War Within progressed, the delve nemeses became more complex and textured, with the final season's scratching the kind of sweaty, soulslike itch I want Prey to scratch.
WoW's player housing, on the other hand, is exactly what it should be—there's still some functionality to be implemented, like letting players own multiple houses rather than just one per faction, but the sheer customisability you're capable of achieving is bang on the money. You can rotate, clip, and kitbash with almost no limitation.
The blue sky through the crack in the stone is a dyed carpet and a window.Blizzard
I spent hours clipping and rotating boulders to make this. Blizzard
The way it controls is downright blissful, too. Blizzard has looked at 20 years of player housing foibles and gone "Alright, we're not doing that". I've messed around with housing in quite a few MMOs, and I can confidently say that WoW's in-built tools are the easiest to use I've found. In cobbling together my apartment, I had just one instance in my multiple hours where a wall wouldn't rotate right. Other than that? Frictionless.
Ultimately both of these new huge expansion features feel like wins, even if I want more out of Prey in the months to come.
No doomsday
Midnight is a real step up in a lot of areas—I found its story gripping, if lacking in confidence to slow down and really dig into the complexity of its themes and characters. Its new zones are downright beautiful, delivering on the promise of an old-world redesign which I think will carry WoW far into the future.
(Image credit: Blizzard)
It's full to the bursting with solid delves, dungeons, and a decent set of opening raids with interesting mechanics. I especially enjoyed one fight, which I shan't spoil otherwise, that saw the entire arena crumple inwards, forcing the entire raid to avoid skidding into the death zone at the centre while dodging puddles of void goop and trying to steer into purging arrows.
And while not all of its mainline features quite deliver on their promises—Blizzard especially needs to figure out what to do with its "Abundance" events, which make me praise the Loa I'm not into crafting or gathering—the studio has stuck a very difficult landing, only slightly hurting its knees in the process.
Given how reactive Blizzard is, I believe it'll get a handle on the expansion's wonky class design and bugs within the coming months. But my job is to assess Midnight as it came on its first few weeks, and while I had a grand old time, there were little nags and snags that kept nipping at me. Nothing ruinous, but signs of ill health all the same.
But then, I'm somewhat pleased to see Blizzard taking those swings at all. It's certainly preferable to stagnation: Adding player housing while you're also trying to do a huge class overhaul, while remaking old zones, while trying to tell a better, more complete story, while adding UI functionality to replace a wide, bustling addon community? It's downright hubristic, and it's even more impressive that nothing completely blew up.
I feel like I'm on a very fancy plane that's going through a rough patch of turbulence: Marvelling at the design of the craft itself, which is pulling off a mechanical wonder—but also a little sore and jostled, with wet knees from a spilled glass of complimentary champagne. Still, that Midnight is basically great with some dents to buff out is a promising sign for the rest of the expansion's lifecycle.
After all, all the thorns have been pulled, all the band-aids ripped off—the hard bit's done, now all that's left is for Blizzard to clean things up, knuckle down for some further class design tweaks, and apply a thick layer of polish.
Continue reading...