Introduction 
I like doing my own little reviews of expansions and have done so for the last few. Mostly just to collect my own thoughts and to reflect on the game experience upon completing it.
I thought I’d write this one now, since we’re about a month into the expansion, so this is as much as you’ll get if you bought The War Within with a month’s subscription.
Everything written is entirely personal and super subjective, so take it as such.
I’ve structured the post so it’s easy to skim through. Click the summaries if you’re mad enough to want the walls of text containing my arbitrary reasonings.
For inquiring minds. 
How it works:
= Amazing, fantastic, superb, etc.
= Excellent, great, respectable, etc.
= Expected, okay, passable, etc.
= Underwhelming, lackluster, uninspiring, etc.
= Terrible, awful, lousy, etc.
Tl;dr conclusion
Summary - Click Here
The War Within is an iteration on Dragonflight. It follows the same formula, but it executes the design slightly better.
It is a satisfying one-time playthrough that quickly shifts its emphasis toward the familiar seasonal gameplay upon reaching maximum level, which will satisfy some and disappoint others. The longevity seems to come from collecting and progressing, more so than ever before.
It’s called The War Within, but it could also be called Dragonflight Season 5. Or Diablo IV: Vessel of Hatred. It appears almost indistinguishable from them.
It is the first in the trilogy of the World Soul Saga, and as such it has to captivate players with its own experience, as well as the promise of what is to come.
But I’m not convinced it does. It is a better product than Dragonflight, but it is ultimately the same product.
Blizzard lacks ambition. They settle for less. Or they hope the players do.
Categories:
- Isle of Dorn
- The Ringing Deeps
- Hallowfall
- Azj-Kahet
- Campaign & Narrative
- Cinematics & Cutscenes
- Music & Voice Acting
- World Quests & Events
- Dungeons & Raids
- Delves
- PvP
- Professions
- Hero Talents & Earthen & Story Mode
- Expanded Thoughts
As follows:
Isle of Dorn
Summary - Click Here
Every expansion has had an idyllic zone with green grass and blue sky, and The War Within isn’t going to be the first one without!
So that’s what the Isle of Dorn is. An idyllic zone with green grass and blue sky. And that’s all it is. It doesn’t try to be more, and that’s a problem in an expansion that only has 4 zones in total. That’s 25% that’s just green grass and blue sky. The zone would have benefitted if it had some sub-areas with different themes and atmospheres.
But there’s a reason why every expansion has a zone with green grass and blue sky and relaxing music. It just works. It’s a crowd pleaser, and that’s sometimes all it needs to be.
Story-wise there’s not much going on. You help the Earthen against the Nerubians, despite their presence being very sparse in the zone. Beyond that it’s just side-stories. And whilst there are some absolutely beautiful vignettes on existentialism and compassion and belonging, you ultimately end the zone without much narrative development at all.
Compare that to Stormsong Valley where you had Old God cultists, Naga, and a Horde attack alongside the local issues of dealing with wolves and bees. That gave the zone some extra layers of storytelling. Something like that is kind of missing in the Isle of Dorn. It’s too idyllic. There’s no element of danger. Where is Xal’atath?! Where are all those Nerubians who supposedly attack here and there and everywhere?!
See also: Nagrand, Stormsong Valley.
The Ringing Deeps
Summary - Click Here
When an expansion only has 4 zones it feels like a sin to use one of them on not much at all.
It’s an underground zone, but a pretty uninspiring one in terms of visuals. It doesn’t hold a candle to Deepholm.
The Earthen are digging and building and maintaining the machines, but where and for what? We don’t really see much of that. It doesn’t really look like a race that’s been working tirelessly for thousands of years doing the Titans’ bidding. It doesn’t really appear like they’ve been doing much at all. Where are all the Titan machines that they’re seemingly in charge of maintaining?!
Story-wise it’s a short affair. The High Speaker you’re introduced to in the beginning turns out to be corrupted. Who would have thought?
And after that short campaign quest the zone doesn’t know what to do with itself, so the remaining storylines are random Goblin and Kobold plots. There’s way too much of it, and most of it feels very irrelevant to what the expansion is about.
It also doesn’t make a lot of sense. You’ve just been told that the Coreway has only just been repaired enough that I, the Champion extraordinaire, can go down there – and then the place is filled with Goblins! Where did they come from?! “We’ve been here the whole time!” Eh?
There’s a lot of exposure to Moira, Dagran, and Magni in the zone. It’s okay, but I wouldn’t say Blizzard does anything with these characters that’s noteworthy. Magni’s character development is absolutely bizarre though, and I don’t care how many times Blizzard tries to straighten him out with Moira, it’s just a bizarre character.
At this point in the leveling experience, if I were playing Horde, I would start to feel very alienated and wonder if it’s all a big joke, because the elephant in the room is that if you’re a Forsaken player and you’ve got the Horde crest tattooed on your forearm, and you’ve been a staunch supporter of both Garrosh and Sylvanas, it makes no sense that you’re going on an adventure with all these Alliance characters as if you’re their best friend and you’ve had all these great experiences together in the past. You’re a rotting corpse without a jaw that dabbles in cannibalism and plague science!!
See also: Searing Gorge, Deepholm.
Hallowfall
Summary - Click Here
The visuals carry this zone, and they carry it to unseen heights. This zone is truly one of the most striking and stunning displays of fantasy in World of Warcraft.
And it’s all Beledar and how Blizzard uses it. There’s the coolness of just seeing it shift. Everything gets darker. The creatures become changed. The townsfolk run inside. And there’s the small things, like how all the plants and flowers face toward Beledar, basking in its light. Or how the treasures change.
It’s the best use of the weather system Blizzard have ever implemented in World of Warcraft.
The stories in the zone are fitting and there’s a good mix between the imminent danger of Xal’atath’s forces and the local storylines that add more background to the Arathi and some of the main characters.
If there is anything to put a finger on, then it’s the information overload you get. Blizzard really wants to explain a lot about the Arathi, Faerin, Anduin, the General, her daughter, Beledar, the Kobyss, and so on. And it’s so much text. The zone takes a long time to get through if you want the full experience, but most of the time is spent reading rather than playing.
But that doesn’t detract from the fact that this is an amazing zone and one of the few in modern WoW that manages to evoke a feeling of “Whoa!”
Several times.
See also: Mount Hyjal, Blasted Lands.
Azj-Kahet
Summary - Click Here
The zone and the story to beat, is The Dread Wastes and The Paragons of the Klaxxi in Mists of Pandaria.
And Azj-Kahet and the Nerubians fall short of that, by a lot.
Blizzard commits the cardinal sin that they have a recent tendency to; they turn beasts, animals, and monsters into humans.
The mantids are insects. They are presented as such, they interact with us as such, and they are purposed as such in the story.
The Nerubians are humans who look like spiders. In their society there are teachers, priests, wives and husbands, traders and merchants, and so on. And they’re presented as such, rather than the spiders they actually are. They talk and interact with us as if we are their equal and an ordinary sight in their streets.
The element of pheromones sounds at first like a cool gameplay element, but it quickly becomes clear that it’s just a convenient way to allow players to easily interact with the “good spiders”.
The addition of both Goblins and Niffin in the zone feels absurd. They have no place there at all and switching to their storyline in an area that is otherwise filled with spiders feels totally out of place and completely irrelevant to everything going on.
The Harronir also feel like an element that doesn’t belong, if only because Blizzard doesn’t do anything with them. You do some quests with them, but who they are and what they’re about is kept vague and shrouded in mystery. And then it just ends, which is completely unsatisfying. Even as a “to be continued” storyline it falls flat, because there’s no real foreshadowing going on. The story just ends rather abruptly leaving you with nothing.
On the visual side of things the zone feels messy. When I see spider webs in real life I see geometry. There’s elegance in the shapes. In Azj-Kahet the webs are simply used as roads between platforms. And there’s no geometry to the layout of the city. It’s all over the place. And it’s not very big! For being the kingdom of the Nerubian empire it really doesn’t portray size very well.
And there aren’t that many spiders! Again, in The Dread Wastes the Mantid are swarming the wall in endless numbers. They are all over the place. The Nerubians are very few. Even when you get into the dungeons and the raid there aren’t a whole lot of them. They don’t visually portray a sizable force to be reckoned with. And where are the Ascended?! The zone is all about the ascension of the Nerubians, but I barely see any of them and I’ve hardly fought them either.
See also: The Dread Wastes, Silithus.
Campaign & Narrative
Summary - Click Here
I am sorry, but it ain’t better just because it comes with sexy feet.
Blizzard continues to have the same problem they’ve had since Shadowlands: They can’t tell a good over-arcing story.
What World of Warcraft had going for it prior to Shadowlands – that sometimes worked – were the factions and the races and the heroes. Blizzard could always write a story that pit the Horde against the Alliance, or the Night Elves against the Forsaken, or Garrosh against Varian, and players would get engaged in it, because they were emotionally hooked to their factions and their races and their heroes – and they rooted for them.
The story was one of consequence. When Garrosh destroyed Theramore, Alliance players got to reap the consequences of that story – because the town was no more.
It was the one thing World of Warcraft had that set it apart from all other games and stories out there.
Now that the Horde and Alliance are together and the races have mended their relationships and the heroes of both sides are colleagues and friends, then the story has become like all other. The protagonists chase the antagonist(s) and ultimately put a stop to them.
That’s the majority of stories in video games. And World of Warcraft doesn’t do better than other games in this field. Quite the contrary.
There are no consequences to it anymore. We just straight up win every time and we suffer no loses and sacrifice nothing along the way. Blizzard have become overly protective of their own creations, so it’s always a victory for the good guys and a happy ever after waiting in the end. That’s not good fantasy writing.
Blizzard are also too fast to adopt this new kind of storytelling where there is only one campaign and everyone goes through it and it’s the same regardless of whether you do it on a Human, Forsaken, or Void Elf. It doesn’t work. It’s bizarre. The roleplaying aspect of the game goes completely out the window when the NPCs don’t consider the difference between talking to an undead corpse and a space goat.
The War Within is straight up an Alliance story that you just have to go along with as a Horde player. Thrall bailed within 5 minutes and now you’re stuck with Anduin. It’s a mess!
A trick Blizzard have recklessly used – and which they are going to pay dearly for – is the Lost series approach of always teasing some new mystery and foreshadowing some great prophecy and hinting at a greater conspiracy and showing clues that point toward conclusions and pieces of a larger puzzle.
But all of that has to pay off at some point, otherwise the backlash is immense.
It’s also weird how the story immediately forgets everything that has happened in the past. So Thrall and Jaina immediately bail to go and get the Horde and Alliance armies. Okay. Why don’t they also get the Dragons?! Didn’t we just help them get boosted with Azeroth’s power? Aren’t they supposed to be Azeroth’s Defenders? Where are they?!
It’s convenient to ignore it, but for anyone with a better memory than a goldfish it’s just poor storytelling.
When you start out in The War Within we’re going after Xal’atath who’s plan is to do what exactly? We don’t know. It’s a mystery!
We meet the Earthen who are doing the Titan’s work. What work? What exactly are they doing in the Ringing Deeps? We don’t know.
We come to Hallowfall and see Beledar. What exactly is it? We don’t know! Surely some Arathi has taken an airship up to study it? Can’t Velen come look at it, he would know. No. It’s a mystery!
Then we meet the Harronir. Who are they? What are they up to? Why are they so secretive? Don’t know!
And it goes on and on and on. And you never really get the answers. It’s a goose chase at this point and there’s a price to be paid if Blizzard keeps doing it. Because the more mysterious pieces they add to their lore puzzle, the harder it gets to fit them all together in the end. And if the end result doesn’t satisfy, then the criticism will land hard.
And it also just doesn’t make for a good story.
Xal’atath is up to no good, clearly. So she goes to the Nerubians and gets them on her side. Then we defeat Queen Ansurek and Xal’atath says to her in the cutscene that she was a means to an end and that her survival wasn’t necessary.
So why did she approach the Nerubians if she didn’t need them for anything anyway?!
Maybe there’s a reason, but the story keeps it a mystery, so you’re just left with a sense of not knowing what the story is about because it’s one giant mystery and you’re just tagging along as a clueless idiot.
Another big problem I have is that Blizzard can’t figure out if I am the main character of the story, or whether it’s Alleria and Anduin.
Sometimes I get to be center stage and I’m the hero that has to save the day, and other times it’s like I don’t even exist and it’s all a matter between Alleria and Xal’atath. I don’t think Xal’atath has even acknowledged my existence so far, and I’m the one who wielded the blade with her in it! Talk about being frozen out!
Blizzard conveniently makes the player anonymous whenever something major is about to happen, but then puts the player front and center whenever a package has to be delivered or minions have to be disposed of. It’s wholly unsatisfying.
And at the end of the day it’s a story like any other story and so it has to compare to other stories. And I would be lying to myself if I claimed that this was good in any kind of way. If you sit down and briefly summarize the campaign to yourself, then it comes off as a fantasy story essay some kid wrote in 5th grade and got a B+ for.
How am I supposed to claim that it’s good entertainment when I recently watched Shogun, liked it a lot, and duly note it got 18 Emmy Awards.
How am I then supposed to sit here and look at Khadgar in an Arcane wheelchair and say: “I can’t believe he managed to pull that off. That was so surprising. What an epic finale.”
It’s garbage! It’s not good just because it isn’t an outright disaster like Shadowlands. And it’s not good because Xal’atath looks sexy and alluring.
There are video games that manage to tell good stories. World of Warcraft: The War Within is not one of them.
Cinematics & Cutscenes
Summary - Click Here
The cutscenes are definitely an improvement over Dragonflight. There’s a little more action to them now – it’s not all talk.
That being said, they don’t really deliver the truly epic moments that put you at the edge of your seat. There’s a few cutscenes with Alleria and Xal’atath that are arguably the highlights, but they don’t hold a candle to something as old as Wrathgate – and that was 16 years ago!
They also feel cheap in quality. Blizzard don’t seem to invest heavily into making YouTube-worthy reaction videos that you watch again and again.
For example, when Blizzard made the Tyrande versus Sylvanas cinematic for Shadowlands, you can really see that the animators had been hard at work.
In The War Within the characters often stand still and talk, and the moments of action are short and decisive. It’s a budget-friendly approach to it, but it does result in some cutscenes that are below the technical quality that we’ve sometimes had in the past, and a creative result that seems restricted by choice.
The dream would of course be that Blizzard did what they did in the old days and began and ended every new storyline with a full-blown cinematic. That was the approach for Warcraft III and Diablo II and StarCraft and StarCraft II and… – and the stories of those games arguably benefitted greatly from having all those cinematics to underscore the pivotal moments.
It’s hard to sit and watch Baelgrim sacrifice himself against a Nerubian in a fiery explosion that looks like a cheap cartoon from the early 90s when computer animation was still in its infancy and pretend it’s good stuff. It’s not.
This is no longer an area where Blizzard flexes their muscles. The industry at large does better than Blizzard now.
Music & Voice Acting
Summary - Click Here
The music that is there, is good for what it is. It’s a fantasy game with simple fantasy themes that the music leans into. The spider zone has spider music, the Holy Light zone has holy music, the underground-industrial zone has underground-industrial music, and the idyllic zone has idyllic music.
It’s par for the course, but it’s no different, or better, than what you’ll find in any other fantasy video game. In fact, this music could fit in any other fantasy video game.
And that’s where my issue with the music lies. It’s not distinctly Warcraft. There’s no Call to Arms, there’s no Blackrock and Roll, there’s no Nightsong, there’s nothing. Warcraft music is characterized by the themes of the races and the motives of the main characters. But because neither sees much representation in The War Within, then outside of a few notes of Anduin’s theme, we don’t hear any music that leans into the Warcraft themes as we know them.
There’s also too little music. When there’s only 4 zones with 4 themes, then there’s only 4 music scores. And it doesn’t take long to get tired of hearing the same spider soundtracks in the same places.
The approach to music in WoW is getting old. Specific music plays in specific areas and there’s no variety. It’s like listening to the same music CD day in and day out.
In Diablo IV Blizzard did something smart, which was to make variations on a theme. So if you went out into the wilderness you’d hear a theme played on piano, and the next time you went out into the same wilderness you’d hear the same music – but this time played on cello.
WoW has none of that. The game just puts on the same song every time, and it doesn’t really know how to transition from one to the other as you go into a new area. It just hits next.
The voice acting is fine, but there’s way too little of it.
I don’t understand if you have Josh Keaton – the voice actor for Anduin – in the studio, why you don’t have him do all of Anduin’s lines? It’s cool when Anduin says something, because Josh can convey emotion really well, which makes the character feel alive. But it’s super frustrating when you can then right-click on Anduin afterward and he has half a page of text that you have to read. Why?! Voice act the whole thing!
There’s also too little of it.
There’s Anduin, Thrall, Jaina, Alleria, Moira, Dagran, Magni. Those characters should have 100% voice acting – zero text. It’s 7 characters. That’s not too much to ask for, I think.
Beyond that, then each zone has like 4-5 main characters related to the campaign. The Machine Speaker, the General, the Widow, and so on. There’s 4 zones, so that’s ~20 additional characters that should be fully voice acted. Currently it’s so and so. Some are, some are not. And some are more than others.
There is a quest in Hallowfall where you have to make dinner and sit down for a meal with the general and her daughter and grandchild. It’s quite wholesome, but it’s all text. And all that you do is sit at the table and right-click each character and go through page after page of text. I cannot imagine most players bother to read all of that. And that’s unfortunate, because it’s a pretty sweet moment in the life of these characters, but it would work so much better if it was voice acted. Then the characters could actually talk around the table like a family does and you could sit there as the player and just lean back in your own chair and listen to the family conversation around you.
But when it’s all text it’s a long and boring affair. And a silent one.
World Quests & Events
Summary - Click Here
I think this is the worst iteration of World Quests that WoW has ever had.
The fantasy for World Quests is that you can log in and spend a good chunk of time on them every day. Not as a side activity, but as an activity in itself.
That the gameplay feels like a relevant extension of the zones and the campaign story and that the setting is made to facilitate the gameplay.
And of course that the rewards are meaningful and worthwhile.
The World Quests in The War Within accomplish none of that, at all.
The only area that delivers a bit on the fantasy, is the northern area in Hallowfall where you have lots of world quests, you have an area of the zone that has a lot of enemies, a lot of triggers and elites and rares and treasures, and good opportunity to play with others directly or indirectly.
But everywhere else it’s random tasks to go to a corner of the map and kill 15 mobs. How is that more interesting than if I just went anywhere and killed 15 mobs?!
And the type of world quest that seems most abundant is Pet Battles. Why?!
The events feel like a step back from Dragonflight – which already left a lot to be desired. The events in The War Within are few and they are overly simplified. Awakening the Machine is perhaps the best example. It is a small room where generic mobs assault you in waves. It is completely devoid of any creativity or care in its design.
Blizzard got ample feedback throughout Dragonflight on events, and they have heeded none of it.
The Theater Troupe. What is this even?! Like, how is it peak WoW gameplay to enact a theater performance of a moment in the Earthen’s history?! Who asks for this??
World Quests also seem rather unrewarding. The main motivation is to get reputation for Renown. So when you complete your Renown there’s little motivation to continue doing World Quests.
And if you don’t care about Renown (because the rewards there aren’t so spectacular either), then there’s even less reason to do World Quests.
That doesn’t feel right. World Quests should be worthwhile doing. There should be reason to play in the outdoor zones, and it should feel rewarding – and continue to feel that.
And why does it all have to be so stupidly easy? Sometimes the hardest part of doing world quests is staying awake through the ordeal!
Dungeons & Raids
Summary - Click Here
When you go into an instance, you should see something new inside. You shouldn’t see the same that you just saw outside. But that’s what you do in the raid and in some of the Dungeons. Like with Dragonflight, Blizzard seeks to save resources by using the outdoor exterior as an interior instance. And it makes for terrible gameplay. Having to fly between platforms in the raid is testament to the fact that Blizzard couldn’t really be bothered to make an actual raid instance, but simply patched some platforms together with some transportation. It’s lazy.
And then you have a Dungeon like Darkflame Cleft which is a masterpiece in its own right, and a love letter to Kobolds & Catacombs in Hearthstone with so many references and all-around a wonderful interpretation of the cardgame’s Dungeon run.
But that again has to be held up against a Dungeon like The Dawnbreaker, which is also just an outdoor area turned into an instance and weaved together with transportation in the form of flying.
It’s kind of cheap and it doesn’t feel like a Dungeon experience. It’s something I feel would have worked better as a solo instance as part of the campaign story.
The follower system for Dungeons is excellent. There are obvious ways to improve upon it, but what’s there is solid.
But ultimately, for an expansion that revolves so much around its endgame and where Mythic+ is such a key part of it, to only get the bare minimum of 8 Dungeons is unsatisfying.
How Blizzard have managed to normalize 8 Dungeons as a standard for a new expansion is beyond me, but I don’t approve of it.
What’s delivered is better than Dragonflight, but the volume of content provided is still unsatisfying.
Delves
Summary - Click Here
It’s a foundation to build on.
Between Brawler’s Guild, Scenarios, Island Expeditions, Horrific Visions, Torghast, and Delves, I’d say Delves are the most boring from a creative point of view. The instances aren’t really anything to write home about, and the enemies you’re fighting are for the most part Kobolds and Nerubians and Cultists. There’s nothing that invokes awe and grandeur in the adventure itself.
And for being advertised as something you’d randomly discover in the world and how it would seamlessly transition into the instance and how it would help tell stories and…No. It’s just a small Dungeon with trash mobs and a boss and some random objectives along the way. Delves fail to be any more than that.
There’s no real profile to Delves either. Brawler’s Guild was all about the encounter design, Scenarios had a strong emphasis on story, Horrific Visions were all about the sanity system, Island Expeditions were heavily randomized, and Torghast had its power progression system.
Delves have Brann, but only if you play solo. There’s variety in the map layout, but it’s so inconsequential that it doesn’t matter much anyway. There are power-ups and buffs you can find, but they’re kind of superfluous and not integral to the experience.
You’re really just playing your class in a small Dungeon that’s scaled to offer a desired level of challenge.
And that seems to be enough! Maybe it’s because WoW never really had anything like that before. A piece of replayable content where you can just play your character and be challenged to make use of your entire toolkit and face a modicum of challenge that you have to overcome as a player?
That’s bread & butter gameplay in any other game, but evidently a rare sight in World of Warcraft. But it seems to be hugely popular, which is saying something.
So there’s a foundation to build on. There really isn’t much to the experience that stands out as it is, but the core gameplay just lands like a bucket of water in the dry desert.
Playing your class and using your entire toolkit is fun. Who would have thought?!
There is lightning in a bottle here, if Blizzard handles it with care.
PvP
Summary - Click Here
Neglect. Abandonment. Extinction. Those are the words that define PvP these days.
Battleground Blitz is a new mode, but it’s really just Random Battlegrounds that now give better rewards because it’s rated. That’s nice, but it has the consequence of making people more toxic when they lose, and it seems to suffer from the same MMR rating hell that also affected Solo Shuffle, where the rating progression feels unsatisfying.
Deephaul Ravine is the new Battleground. It’s alright. Familiar in design. Apart from the announcer who talks too much it won’t offend anyone.
The big issue with PvP is that it’s just the same old, same old.
You queue up for a Battleground and you get thrown into Arathi Basin or Warsong Gulch for the 10.000th time. Or you queue for an Arena and find yourself in Nagrand.
It doesn’t feel like I’m playing a new expansion, let alone The War Within, when I’m playing PvP. It feels like I’m just playing the same old content I’ve played for the past 20 years already.
Also, if you want to play World of Warcraft in singleplayer, turn on Warmode.
There is so much Blizzard could do with PvP and yet they do almost nothing.
PvP is at an all-time low, and sadly it doesn’t feel like we’ve reached the bottom yet.
If you’re mainly a PvPer and you pay €50 for The War Within, what are you really getting for your money?
Professions
Summary - Click Here
The sheer volume of community criticism on Professions is staggering.
Blizzard have turned something that everyone engaged with, and was at worst indifferent about, into something that few seem to engage with and fewer still seem to truly enjoy.
I think Blizzard got a pass in Dragonflight because the Profession overhaul was so encompassing that some flaws and rough edges were to be expected.
But hardly anything has changed between Dragonflight and The War Within – despite plenty of feedback having been given in the time between.
It is the exact same system and design, and now the flaws and rough edges don’t appear as shortcomings to be dealt with, but rather as bad design that players are stuck with.
It isn’t the Blizzard brand of design quality, and it sure as hell isn’t Blizzard polish either.
It’s awful.
Plus, the prospect of having to repeat the “joy” of leveling Professions and getting Knowledge Points with every new expansion, every 1½-2 years, is completely bonkers. Who wants to do that?!
All that work people put into Professions in Dragonflight is today totally worthless.
Beyond that, then I’m inclined to believe that the design is a deliberate push to encourage players to buy more WoW Tokens. That can of course be disputed, but it is telling that resources are more sparse, crafts require more, and gold is harder to come by through ordinary gameplay.
The economy at this point feels exactly like the Real Money Auction house economy in Diablo III. Money or not, I don’t think it made for a good game experience, and I would say the same with the WoW economy as it is now. Like, what’s the point of it except to get poor players to buy WoW Tokens?!
Hero Talents & Earthen & Story Mode
Summary - Click Here
If you’re going to add new features to the game, they should be ones that players are actually interested in, and they should be a meaningful addition to the broader game.
Female Horde stone Dwarves with beards is not a meaningful addition to the game, and neither is it something players have expressed an interest in.
Hero talents generally don’t provide any meaningful addition to the classes’ toolkits. They are just more laser show in a game that absolutely didn’t need more of that.
Story mode…I mean, what is this garbage? I get teleported directly in front of the boss. Prior to this I had barely seen or interacted with this spider queen - now I’m standing in front of her with my follower army and simply have to kill her? Where’s the story in that?!
And it’s not even a boss fight. It’s an amputated follower encounter that you cannot fail.
This is such a lazy game experience that it’s beyond all criticism. Other games do story modes, and they do it 1000x better.
These are all poor expansion features. They don’t deliver anything players have actually requested, and what they do deliver is lame.
Expanded Thoughts 
Summary - Click Here
I wish I liked this more than I do, but alas, I don’t.
It’s still World of Warcraft, so there’s a degree of satisfaction in the familiarity and the variation on a theme, so to speak. That in itself makes it enjoyable to play through as a new game experience. And the initial Seasonal gameplay is also enjoyable enough in its dopamine-driven progression to be fun for a while. But I suspect the Dragonflight fatigue will set in shortly, because the hamster wheel is very much the same.
The difference in design between older expansions was more profound. Going from Warlords of Draenor to Legion felt like a whole new game experience, because it was so different. And likewise with going into Battle for Azeroth and again into Shadowlands. But after that it gets increasingly similar, and The War Within is almost completely the same as Dragonflight. I don’t think that will help on its longevity. I think players will get really bored after New Year if Blizzard aren’t ready with a major patch that adds something completely left-field and not just another zone and a raid.
I also find it striking how much Blizzard are dialing the WoW design in on Diablo IV.
The games are almost identical at this point.
Here are the WoW activities with the Diablo IV equivalent (in Vessel of Hatred):
Item Upgrades ↔ Masterworking
Enchanting ↔ Tempering
Delves ↔ The Gauntlet
World Quests ↔ Tree of Whispers
Raiding ↔ Raiding
World Bosses ↔ World Bosses
Outdoor Events ↔ Legion Events
Normal / Heroic Dungeons ↔ Nightmare Dungeons
Mythic+ Dungeons ↔ The Pit
Group Finder ↔ Group Finder.
Even down to the fast mounts, the teleports and other means of fast travel. The main campaign with side stories, the scaling outdoor world, character progression, gear progression, Seasonal goals, and so on.
It’s the same. And WoW players seem to increasingly play WoW like it’s Diablo.
I spent like 2 weeks leveling and going through the campaign and all the quests in The War Within, whereas many others blasted through it in less than a few days. People were blasting right out the gate, as if they had picked up a Maxroll guide by Raxx on how to level fast.
And more than that, because people play WoW like it’s Diablo IV, it feels like Blizzard finds their solutions to all of WoW’s problems across the hall at the Diablo development team’s offices.
After all, if players behave the same in both games, then Blizzard gets the same kind of player feedback, and therefore implement the same kind of design in both games.
It is bizarre. I’ve played all the Diablo IV Seasons, but it feels ridiculous to play both WoW and Diablo IV now that they are so similar. Pick one. Doesn’t matter which. They’re essentially the same!
I’m sure Xal’atath will turn out similar to Lillith as well!
And of course all the MMORPG elements of WoW are just being eroded completely.
A guild? Why? Delves reward such good gear that any content below Mythic +8 Dungeons and Mythic Raids is essentially pointless to do in PvE. So what’s the reason for a guild if it isn’t a hardcore raiding guild or an oldschool social guild of tight-knit friends that’s survived since Vanilla?
Leveling, story, and the roleplaying aspect of the multiplayer world gets run over faster that France in WWII. It’s just gogogo and full-on blasting through all the content like it’s a true hack 'n slash ARPG.
And I’m startled by Blizzard’s low ambition with this expansion. I felt like Dragonflight was made in a way that saved Blizzard a lot of resources, which I assumed would be pooled into The War Within, like they had done with Warlords of Draenor and Legion. But that ain’t the case. The War Within is no more than Dragonflight was.
Is the ambition for World of Warcraft no more than EA’s yearly Madden updates? Is that what Blizzard are staking out for “the next 20 years of adventure”? I hope not.
I’m also a bit soured by the initial playthrough of the expansion, because there have been so many bugs and flaws and imbalances and just sloppy polish. This needed at least two more months of Beta testing.
I feel like it’s pretty off-putting that you have to get several months into a new expansion before it feels like it’s at the level of quality it should have had to begin with. I mean, c’mon…
I don’t understand the reward design in WoW either. Blizzard are going ham on collectibles and I don’t care about any of them.
“Collect a million currency to get these 50 transmogs! Do this thing a thousand times over to maybe get 1 out of 40 new mounts! Have a toy! Have 10!”
And I’ve got hundreds and hundreds of them all. I’ve started to completely ignore it all. Which only leaves gear and item upgrades as the only somewhat meaningful reward in the game. So again, more like Diablo IV. And I’m sure Blizzard in their quest to keep people engaged will expand on the item design in WoW by taking more hints from Diablo IV.
Another thing that infuriates me a bit is that all The War Within does is recreate Dragonflight 1:1 with new visuals. And because Blizzard puts all their resources into that, it just leaves so many old systems and designs in decrepit, desperately in need of overhauls and reworks. Like an old abandoned weatherworn house that’s just left to slowly fall apart.
And just to round it all off, I really miss Horde and Alliance!
Not so much as an Orc General or Human barrack in sight. It used to be the concentrically design of the WoW experience, that we went to a new expansion with the Horde or Alliance armies, set up some barracks and outposts, got our quests from the commander of the operation, and had a distinctly different experience based on faction.
The War Within is the third expansion in a row where we go as an adventurer or lone champion and explore these new lands, befriend the local denizens, and get all our quests from them.
There’s no anchor to any of it. It’s anything from Niffin to Kyrians and Tuskarr. It’s just random fantasy creatures. Where’s the seasoned war general who’s been with me on expeditions since Northrend?!
It feels like like Warcraft with such an absence of Horde and Alliance, and more like a standalone fantasy adventure game.
Anyway, an okay initial playthrough. Weird that it’s so linear when Blizzard encourages alts so much. Eh, I guess they’ll find a solution for that in Diablo IV as well (difficulties in the outdoor world? an adventure mode?).
The initial Seasonal gameplay is always enjoyable for the dopamine kicks you get. And then there’s the patch with the 20 year anniversary which I guess will have to satisfy players until after the holidays? The new car smell will have worn off by then and the player fatigue will start to set in, I think.
The War Within is like Dragonflight in design, so it stands to reason that the player sentiment toward it will also mimic Dragonflight.
My Starry Review of Dragonflight, for reference:
My Starry Review Of Dragonflight - Community / General Discussion - World of Warcraft Forums (blizzard.com)
