WoW Midnight Is Ticking All The Right Boxes So Far.
We’re on a new World of Warcraft expansion! Always my favorite time of that vague amount of time that serves to fill as the gap between expansions. We have fresh new zones, new characters to interact with, new music, new mechanics, and we also have nicely updated ways of playing the game at all! Midnight, so far, which is to say not very far at all given it only just launched this month, has been fantastic, if a bit disjointed. The main bulk of the new content centering around the beautifully updated Silvermoon and Eversong Woods zones is nothing short of stunning. Zul’Aman has been wonderfully expanded into its own proper area that reminds me of the best parts of Stranglethorn Vale and The Azure Span combined into one perfect forest troll vibe. Harandar is a bit of an outlier, but an interesting one of those (even if it’s fairly obvious to me that this zone was meant to be in The War Within; even the zone’s story sounds like it vaguely answers some questions that were left abandoned by the last expansion). Finally, Voidstorm is far more interesting than I thought it would be, not as much visually but in the strength of the fun new characters it introduces. I was worried Voidstorm would just be a re-run of Ka'Resh, but thankfully it carves out a personality of it's own with the same basic set of visual elements. While certainly controversial among players l, I think I can also be counted among the fans for the skill and spell purge that led into Midnight, at least for the most part. Some of the classes I like to play got the raw end of the stick if I'm being honest, Beast Mastery Hunter, for example was stripped down to a near comical degree. But others got crucial updates that have left them feeling fresher and more fun to play than they’ve really felt in years. Affliction Warlock hasn’t felt this true to the spirit of the DoT-based DPS character in years; I finally feel like I’m doing the coolest version of casting a time spell and waiting for the bad guy to die again. I’ll likely dive more specifically into the zones and other aspects of the expansion later on, but as of right now I’m of the mind that Midnight is off to an extremely impressive start. I think a lot of us guessed that War Within was something of a last-minute switch to be the first part of the World Soul Saga. Midnight, I think, proves us largely right in that question, but does so via providing an excellent, cohesive, and thrilling new chapter of World of Warcraft so we need not sit around feeling pleased about our guesses; we can just enjoy the great new game in front of us. A new WoW expansion is always a happy time; I’m just glad we all get to experience it yet again, and hey, here’s to Last Titan, am I right?
