World of Warcraft

WoW: Midnight First Impressions

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World of Warcraft: Midnight was released a month ago. Here are a few first impressions of the expansion.

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Since Legion, I’ve been hoping for cities as rich and beautiful and towering as Suramar, but nothing has quite come close enough until now. The reimagined Silvermoon City is absolutely gorgeous! Also the Eversong Woods update is delightful. It’s very nice to play in a horde zone and see a Horde city even on Alliance toons.

WoW Midnight Eversong Woods

Harandar looks and sounds interesting. It’s fabulous to be able to quest in an area that nods towards the Wildcamp Or’lay area in Azj-Kahet in The War Within, like I wished to. Flying around the roots can be challenging at times, but I really appreciate the attempts at making the flora and fungi unique. (I kinda now have a headcanon that Zangarmarsh was supposed to look like this, but they weren’t able to do it back then.) It’s fascinating how many features Blizzard designers have made plant-like or flower-based, including campfires.

WoW Midnight Harandar4 Roots
WoW Midnight Harandar6 Campfire

The campaign play has been really smooth up to level 90 (or roughly till Breaching the Voidstorm and Midnight achievements and/or opening world quests). It’s definitely a positive to get housing decor items as quest rewards along with gear. Technically we’ve had very few glitches*, which is a definite improvement over the past few expansion launches.

The new delves are as much fun as the previous ones. During these two expansions, I’ve come to really appreciate being able to set the delve level each time before entering. Persistent in-game adjustability (for the lack of a better term) is a fantastic feature to offset the things that real life throws our way; the days when you can’t handle a run with multiple wipes do not need to happen anymore, at least not with delves.

The new transmog system took a while to get used to (and some repeated tweaking at the back end, I gather) but seems to work now. I do appreciate that the mogged look no longer applies to an individual item but the item slot; that means any gear upgrades are immediately changed to look like you want them to without having to visit a transmogger again. So helpful!

For Erik’s sake, I would’ve wanted to see static flying to be available from the very beginning. Fortunately about two weeks in, Blizzard reversed their decision and opened static flying immediately (instead of being unlockable through achievements, like the plan was). When playing together, I have been taxiing him around on a ride-along mount, but for solo playing he now has the option of the type of flight that suits him.

I can’t say this expansion made me care for the trolls any more than I do (which is very little), but at least the story ran efficiently through the area.

It’s odd to have no pet battling; not quite sure what to think about it yet.

Like I suspected, player housing is fantastic! At early access launch (Dec 2025), we both picked a house plot for our Horde and another one for our Alliance toons. It’s been satisfying to fiddle with the spaces to make them ours.

WoW Midnight Player Housing Kitchen4

During the first few months there were some glitches (for one, not being able to visit each other’s houses even though our settings should have allowed it), and the system did appeared unpolished in other respects, too. (For instance, the Blood Elf style of house exterior wasn’t immediately available for Horde.) From the very beginning, though, the adjustability was impressive**, and bit by bit things improved.

My biggest gripe about player housing was and still remains is the budget for placing items outdoors on your plot. The budget is currently capped at 250 at house level 3 and it doesn’t increase even when the house level does. That’s barely enough for my plants! I. Want. More. Space! (And at this writing we haven’t even been able to place light sources outdoors. Changes and updates are underway, however, including pets-as-decor. Yay!)

Erik

My first housing thoughts on World of Housingcraft: Housenight…

*Ahem.*

Let me try again.

My first thoughts on House of Warhousing: Midhouse…

Okay, now that I’ve gotten that out of my system.

(Housing!!)

In all seriousness, player housing is the most exciting thing for me that has been added to this game since transmogrification. After years of resisting players’ desire for a place to make our own (and the egregious misstep that was the garrison in Warlords of Draenor) Blizzard has finally embraced the build-with-Legos, do-what-you-want, make-it-your-own spirit. I have spent the past four months gleefully building everything from a cozy cottage kitchen to a starship bridge with a Blood Elf flavor. It’s not entirely fair to say that the new zones, stories, dungeons, delves, etc. of Midnight feel like minor secondary systems, but it’s not too far from the truth.

That being said, I am very much enjoying all the new things that Midnight has to offer. It is fantastic getting to see Silvermoon city rebuilt and brought up to the standards of the modern game. The new zones that refresh and reimagine Eversong Woods, Ghostlands, and the Zul’Aman raid (later dungeon) are all fascinating to play through. They feel organic and integral while still allowing for twenty years of change, growth, and recovery. Since stasis is in the nature of massively multiplayer games (your character may have saved the village from marauding monsters, but the new player who just started hasn’t done that quest yet, so the monsters have to keep marauding), it’s rare that we get a chance to see real change in the game world. It feels good to see that not only has time passed here, but there has been a lot of change for the better.

The stories of these zones feel good to play through. There is a theme of healing and renewal flowing through both the new Eversong Woods and Zul’Aman. In Eversong, we get to see not only the physical restoration of the land after its devastation by the undead Scourge but also the Blood Elves as a people coming to terms with their own past, both its glories and its mistakes. Zul’Aman has a strong narrative throughline about the Amani restoring their relationship with their loa after the events of the raid/dungeon. Often the story of a WoW expansion is about us heroes arriving just in time to stop the worst from happening, but no more than that; it’s rare that we actually get to see things getting better.

The new zones are interesting in their own right. There has been speculation that Harandar was originally intended for The War Within and got bumped to Midnight when Chris Metzen’s return to Blizzard prompted a rewrite of planned stories. I’m not in a position to know whether there’s any truth to that speculation, but Harandar does feel to me like the odd zone out. It doesn’t seem to connect in any organic way—physically, thematically, or narratively—to the rest of the expansion, and does feel somewhat awkwardly bunged in. The campaign quests in the zone did teach me new and interesting things about the Haranir, but I never quite felt like I knew what I was doing there in the first place. Despite it not feeling like a proper part of the expansion, I have thoroughly enjoyed my time wandering around the zone. Harandar is a wild tangle of roots and fungi which is reminiscent of things we have seen before (it shares some creative DNA with old Teldrassil, Ardenweald, and the War Within underground zones), but still feels like a place we’ve never been. I look forward to exploring more of the zone and seeing what else hides under the mushroom caps. I think I’ll be spending plenty of time just enjoying the zone.

Voidstorm is the complete opposite. It feels like an integral part of the Midnight story. More than any other zone, its relevance to the overarching expansion story is obvious. I know exactly why my character would go there, I just don’t want to. The zone is a blasted, hostile, dangerous place that feels right for a center of the Void’s power, and I don’t want to spend any more time there than I have to. My reaction is not a criticism of the design. In fact, it is a triumph of zone design that Blizzard managed to create another rugged, inhospitable zone that feels just as threatening as past examples of the genre like Maldraxxus in Shadowlands or Azj’Kahet in The War Within while also feeling like a new and distinct place. The fact that I don’t want to spend any time there is because the design team excelled themselves, but it is still the case that I don’t want to spend any time there. I’ve done the campaign quests, and I’ll probably go work through the side quests a little at a time for completion’s sake, but it is not a zone I look forward to exploring and enjoying. That’s about par for the course, though. Quite a few recent WoW expansions have had four base zones, and I’ve mostly avoided one of them and still had a satisfying experience.

At this point, I’ve barely dipped my toe into the expansion’s content beyond leveling. We’ve been through a few dungeons and delves, and I’m enjoying them so far. (The dungeon followers seem to have gotten extra good at body pulling between expansions, but as long as we manage to get through to the end, I don’t feel bad about letting them die when they hop straight into a pack of monsters.) I haven’t sampled the prey system yet, and I’m not sure how much I’ll want to make use of it, but it’s nice that things like that are optional, so if it turns out not to be for me, I can just leave it alone. Professions so far look pretty much the same as The War Within, which is to say overstuffed and overcomplicated, but fun to poke around in if you keep your expectations low.

In the end, though, I’m just looking forward to having more things to put in my house.

*) Sadly, I seem to be one of the people suffering from the minimap glitch. This problem doesn’t seem to be limited just to Midnight—I’ve seen reports of the same glitch going back years—and frustratingly, aggravatingly, isn’t consistent, nor is there a fix from Blizzard. (Not that I’ve found, at least; merely player-to-player tips and tricks.) (Anything and everything I’ve tried works some of the time—but not always. And at times, nothing works at all. Every single “fix” is temporary. GAH!) But! An update: I seem to FINALLY have a solution… at least for now. Here’s hoping it’ll actually stick!

**) Ok, the decor item adjustability is mostly impressive. You can place items almost anywhere, but you can’t edit the items themselves. I’d like to take a bench or table, for instance, and shrink the width while retaining the original depth, but I can’t. (The proportions are locked.) Neither is it possible to change the look of some textiles or the placement of exterior windows, for example. (Apart from color in some cases—you can use dyes on some textiles and items, but even those can’t be applied universally.) That might still change, though; I haven’t yet gotten my house to level 8, which apparently unlocks medium-size house exteriors, whatever those are.

Any Midnight-related thoughts? Do chime in!

Images: screencaps from World of Warcraft

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A WoW Player Housing Treasure: Winter Sauna by CottageWizard

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The next World of Warcraft expansion, Midnight, will be released at the beginning of March, but one of the new features—player housing—was made available already at the beginning of December 2025.

This early access has been hyped quite a bit in some circles—we were certainly excited about it, and followed various news items. A lovely feature I stumbled upon is the Midnight beta gallery of user-submitted builds at Wowhead.

There are so many inspiring houses and rooms at the gallery, with inventive uses of items and decorative elements—not surprising from gamers, right? 🙂 However, I want to especially highlight one: a Winter Sauna Cottage by CottageWizard.

Wowhead CottageWizard Winter Sauna Cottage Mashup Sm

In real life, little cottages like this are quite popular here in Finland, and typically contain a multipurpose room (or two) plus a sauna room with washing facilities in a corner.

CottageWizard describes the idea like this: “Winter sauna cottage built on the Midnight Beta. Tried to create the illusion of a snowy environment without snowy housing items! This was created at house level 3.”

The whole is really, really impressive. I absolutely love it! And, having messed about in the housing editor, I can see how much effort went into the build. The facade. The snow. (Snow!) The covered firewood storage. Towels on their pegs in the hallway. Creating the wood panels and benches in the sauna. The added platforms and beams in the room (e.g. as molding in the kitchen area). The kitchen backsplash.

What I don’t get is how the snow outside is achieved. I wish CottageWizard had included a little more detail; I’ll have to ponder that a bit.

But the sauna is absolutely perfect! The heater (kiuas) is protected with railings, as it should. Wood paneling throuhgout, ditto. Buckets (barrels) of water and ladles. A couple of levels of seating to adjust your bathing experience when it gets too hot or cool. A window is a bonus. (But HOW does it look snowy outside?!?! HOW?!?) There even is a sauna whisk (vihta or vasta, depending where you’re from) and a thermometer on the wall!

LOVE. IT!!! 😀

Images: screencaps from World of Warcraft: Midnight beta release by CottageWizard via Wowhead, mashup by Eppu Jensen

This post has been edited to correct a typo.

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Something Different: A Silver-Toned Earthen Pally Transmog

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We’ve played The War Within: Legion Remix since finding out that some player housing decor items will be released through it. I made myself a female Dwarf paladin—always a favorite combo—but decided to try something a little different (for me, that is).

So, saved for posterity, here’s my silver-toned Earthen retribution pally.

I’ve hidden the helmet, wrist, belt, and boot slots, and I’m not using a shirt or tabard for this look either. The Dueler’s Snowy Shoulder Cape and Aspiring Aspirant’s Drape make a fantastic combo for the shoulder and back slots. The Overlord’s Chestplate is an older design, but its relatively smooth front makes up for the clunky pixels, and the chain mail underlayer in the model does not detract from the look I had in mind.

WoW TWW Legion Remix Pally1

Dauntless Handguards plus Long Snowy War Skirt and Leg Wraps finish off the outfit. Since she’s a paladin and mostly covered in armor, I kept her gems to a minimum, just a knuckle cluster on one hand. Her white mohawk hairdo and white-grey eyes form a large part of the striking look. I assume because she’s an Earthen, there’s a prismatic sheen to her hair that’s just amazing. Her weapon is one version of The Ashbringer.

WoW TWW Legion Remix Pally2

If interested, you can have a look at the set in Wowhead’s Dressing Room.

Images: World of Warcraft screencaps

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Darude: A Finn Immortalized in World of Warcraft

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Lately Erik and I have been preparing for the new player housing in World of Warcraft, to be released before the upcoming Midnight expansion. Before that arrives, though, there’s a little detail in the current expansion, The War Within, that I want to save for posterity. (Even if it’s just myself. 🙂 )

Blizzard is known for using references to pop culture personages or phenomena in WoW. What comes immediately to mind is Rio Duran (a Duran Duran reference) in Mount Hyjal, Harrison Jones (Harrison Ford / Indiana Jones), the Very Light Sabre swords (Star Wars lightsabers), and Haris Pilton (Paris Hilton) in Shattrath City, for example.

Now there is also a compatriot of mine! The Finnish artist Darude has been immortalized as D’rude, a randomly appearing NPC found in delves. One of the mob’s abilities is Sandstorm, which confirms it. “Sandstorm” was Darude’s big hit single in 1999, and still pops up here and there.

WoW TWW Nightfall Sanctum Drude
Wowhead Krionix Drude

Incidentally, the “Sandstorm” music video with parkour and running (so much running!) around southern Helsinki was directed by Juuso Syrjä and has become a bit of a hit, too, with over 300 million views.

Darude – Sandstorm by Darude on YouTube

To celebrate the 25th anniversary of Darude’s career, a Sandstorm Run event was held in Helsinki, Finland, at the end of this August. We were not in town for it, but we did save a map of the route and walked it later for our own enjoyment.

Anyway, Finland was mentioned! Torille! 🙂

Reddit Finland Mentioned Torilla tavataan

Images: Screencaps of D’rude by Eppu Jensen and by Krionix via Wowhead. Finland Mentioned by moerkoet via Reddit Finnishmemes.

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World of Warcraft Gets Cozy with a New Housing System

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For a while, there have been rumblings that World of Warcraft characters will get a new home base of sorts, perhaps a little like garrisons in the Warlords of Draenor expansion. This new system has been dubbed housing.

In a news article “A First Look at Housing” from February 2025, Blizzard describes some of their design priorities: customization (adjusting the widest possible range of features in your house), ability to socialize (unlike garrisons, player housing is supposed to encourage interacting), and longevity (like pet battling or transmog, it is here to stay).

In addition, it’s designed to scale with the player’s interest, namely spending as little or as much time as you want on housing. However, they didn’t yet say whether it’s possible to skip entirely. If, as it’s likely, there will be introductory quests to unlock housing, it should be a simple matter to just not do anything house-related.

I mean, I am one of those geeks who will want to dive in right away and fine-tune things to my heart’s content. But not everyone cares about the same kinds of gaming. (I’m still miffed at Blizzard trying to force pvp on all players. Nope, that won’t happen; I refuse, and if it means I won’t see some of the story or get certain rewards, then I won’t. Anyway.)

To begin with, Alliance will apparently have one housing zone (inspired mainly by Elwynn Forest, with some Westfall and Duskwood sprinkled in) and Horde another one (inspired by Durotar, its coastline, and Azshara), with “more possible places to live in the future”.

It’s still unclear how the system will work exactly. For example, how players will access their zones and the houses within has not yet been revealed. What we do know is that “[y]our houses are also shared amongst your Warband with your different characters being able to come and go” regardless of faction, and that “[h]ousing rewards are also shared across your Warband”. But does that mean we can have, say, multiple Horde houses and no Alliance ones at all? They do use a plural in your houses. Or are players limited at launch to one on the Horde and another on the Alliance side?

It seems there are also two decoration themes, one dubbed folk (which looks a little more Alliance-flavored) and the other rugged (more Horde style). Whether we’ll be able to mix and match items between the themes is still unclear, though. It’s reportedly been confirmed that players will be allowed to mix and match aesthetics.

Blizzard Azeroth Beautiful Sample Bedroom

The ability to visit your friends’ or guildmates’ houses sounds fabulous. But in addition to housing zones, there are also neighborhoods, which are instanced and can be either public or private, with room for 50 houses. That raises more questions—what about houses within a public neighborhood? (Or private, for that matter.) Is just anyone able to walk right in, or will there be some limits at the plot boundary (like in a real-life town)? Will we be able to name our private neighborhoods? Or houses? What will happen to cities—will everyone just decamp to housing zones when not conducting, say, auction house business, visiting a barbershop, or training? Can we pull out mounts in housing zones? Will there even be a reason to visit an auction house in a city, if your mount can provide for you?

Currently decoration edits are divided into two modes, basic and advanced. While the basic mode allows you to quickly place items in a, well, basic order, the advanced mode barely restricts you: the post “A Look at Housing Interior Design” from March 2025 says that “[i]nternally using this, [Blizzard] employees have taken bushes and made them into garland [sic] for their fireplaces, constructed a boat’s prow from a bed, or made paint buckets into small spice racks for their kitchens.”

There’s a short compilation video of some work-in-progress customization options:

A place in Azeroth of your very own by World of Warcraft on YouTube

Looks absolutely fantastic! Even if all of the assets might not work exactly like this in the final version, it looks like there will, indeed, be a massive amount of details you can tweak, from floorplan to moving windows to placing objects on top of others to adjusting some of the colors, and more.

Another fantastic (literally!) feature is that the house interiors will not be limited by the exterior footprint. (Think of the mage tower in Stormwind.) Apparently the inside can also follow a different style than the outside, but more than that we do not yet know.

I find this concept of player housing very exciting! I’m tracking the release info, so I’ll know when to block time off in my calendar and what real-life events I might have to work around. At the moment there’s only speculation, though. The most specific I’ve seen so far is prior to the next expansion (WoW: Midnight) maybe around mid-December, while “winter 2025” is confirmed but still aggravatingly unspecific.

It’s currently also unclear whether players will be required to purchase Midnight in order to access housing.

Ohwell. As long as it’s actually a good system, I can wait. But it would be a treat to get to play in new housing over the Christmas break, wouldn’t it?

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A Radiant Paladin Transmog

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My human paladin is sporting a particularly radiant transmog these days. It uses several pieces from the Shadowlands covenants mixed with some old armor that matches the blue and gold color scheme, with the Legion artifact for a weapon.

All put together, it makes a satisfying look for righteously smiting evil.

Here’s a link to the items in the set.

Images: World of Warcraft screencaps

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First Impressions of WoW: The War Within

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The newest expansion of World of Warcraft, The War Within, has been out for a few months now. Time for a first impressions post.

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The environments are really impressive, both visually and geographically (for the lack of a better term). The landscapes look more like they could’ve developed according to natural processes. (Check out, for instance, the Ruptured Lake and the descent into Azj-Kahet from Hallowfall!) And into all that, they’ve squeezed an incredible amount of distinctive questing areas, some above or below others or just down a cliff, hidden behind a hump in the hill, or the like. The flora is imaginative and unusual—we are largely underground, after all.

There are also a lot of fun details. To mention only a few: The tents that look like books are neat, and kinda remind me of the upside down ship houses in Boralus. The masses of candles in the Kobold areas look amazing, as does the darkness effect in e.g. Kriegval’s Rest. The Steam Vent in Dornogal has these heated beds for the Earthen to relax on. Looks very cozy!

WoW TWW Dornogal The Steam Vent

The only zone I don’t care for is Azj-Kahet; it’s too dark overall, even if some areas have really cool and interesting details. (The exception here is the Wildcamp Or’lay area, where the Beneath the Roots quest ends; I really could’ve gone on adventuring there much longer. Fabulous, I love it!)

Most of the music is lovely, nicely varying, and thought-out. On the other hand, almost all of the nerubian characters have too deep voices; they’re incomprehensible. Bad directing leads to wasted voice acting.

This time, Blizzard opted to hoist hero talents on top of the talents introduced in Dragonflight. (With tweaks to the talents, because you have to tweak talents for a new expansion, otherwise the world would implode, right?) That works really well, I think; no need to re-learn absolutely everything. With professions, it’s possible to craft something useful for your toons from the beginning; that’s really nice.

There are lots of creature comforts I wish Blizzard had included years ago. For example, more options to skip certain story quests on alts, the Warband bank and Deposit All button (even if it deposited also all applicable Dragonflight items, so I had to go prune them out afterwards), the Leave-O-Bot at the end of delves, or quartermasters in cities marked on the map. And speaking of maps, the functionality of clicking anywhere on the map and have that point become a tracking caret on your screen (much like it’s been possible for quests).

Also the fact that flight points are opened to alts once one of your toons has discovered them (and reached 80?) is fantastic. As a visual person, I deeply appreciate the difference in the map boot graphics: yellow boot with wings = a discovered flight point, green boot without wings = an undiscovered one.

WoW TWW Flight Points on Map

I LOVE that there now are a few dragonriding mounts that can carry a second character! As Erik doesn’t like dragonriding at all and I love it, when playing together we get to take advantage of the higher speed of dragonriding if I steer and Erik travels as a passenger. 🙂

Delves are a lot of fun, but they could also use some improvement. Like Torghast in Shadowlands, I really love the flexibility of delves—except this time, we do get loot at the end! (Something we wished had been a feature of Dragonflight.) On the other hand, we don’t get many interesting game effects like the anima powers in Torghast. Also, delves are set apart from dungeons and raids in that travel to their location is required and simply queueing (like for follower dungeons, which offer a similar type of flexibility) isn’t possible. Love the Leave-O-Bot, though, plus an easy exit at the end of a dungeon. I also like follower dungeons a lot, they make playing dungeon content easier. They could use some fine tuning, but the concept works.

A random observation to end with: Something about how the story in TWW unfolds reminds me a lot of Battle for Azeroth. Perhaps it has to do with the character-focused approach? Just about every plot point refers to its effects on people, and many quests literally focus on the personal, instead of running around fetching bucket handles or grinding through endlessly respawning faceless enemy mooks. Also, children aren’t entirely forgotten.

Erik

Almost everything I have to say about The War Within is good. This expansion delivered a lot for me to enjoy.

When the new expansion was announced as an underground experience, I was nervous. I’ve never much liked WoW‘s underground zones. I found Deepholm dull and Zaralek Cavern claustrophobic. Still, I was willing to wait and see what the design team would do, and I have been pleasantly surprised. The Ringing Deeps and Hallowfall are both beautiful zones that feel very distinct. You know you’re underground, but they don’t feel dull or oppressive. And when you need fresh air and sky above you, you can always go up to the Isle of Dorn. I don’t care for Azj-Kahet, but three out of four zones is more than enough for me to have a fulfilling game experience.

Within those zones, there is lots of attention to detail in both environment and storytelling to fill out our sense of the new peoples we meet there. The culture of the Earthen is fascinating to explore, as they find their way between the dictates of order and the pull to free will. Our kooky, scrappy, candle-wearing Kobold friends make excellent comic foils to the serious Earthen. The Arathi of Hallowfall introduce fascinating possibilities in the larger lore of WoW. I’m not interested in the Nerubians, but as with the zones, there is more than enough in the rest of the expansion for me to discover and enjoy.

WoW TWW Torchsnarls Cave2

Turning to aspects of gameplay, delves and follower dungeons bring a welcome new range of possibilities to the game for people like us who don’t like to do group content. Delves are short enough to fit a casual play schedule, challenging enough to be a satisfying test of skill, and rewarding enough to be worth doing repeatedly. Follower dungeons make it easy to enjoy dungeon content at the appropriate level without worrying about bad groups and grouchy strangers. Delves, follower dungeons, world quests, and weekly quests offer great flexibility in how to play and advance my characters. This expansions gives players like me more to do than ever before.

The most fundamental mechanical change of the expansion, of course, is the introduction of Warbands. The ability to share everything from renown progress to crafting materials seamlessly across all my characters is liberating and refreshing. Combined with the changes to transmog that let you learn any appearance you pick up, whether the character you’re playing can use it or not, these changes mark a significant shift in Blizzard’s attitude toward players. We finally have an expansion that welcomes me to play as many alts as I feel like without making it feel as though I am missing out on something important.

With all of these positives, the things that I don’t like about the expansion seem minor and unimportant. I don’t like Azj-Kahet and have no interest in the Nerubians. My dislike for the zone is not because it is badly done, though, and I hope that everyone who is into dark spidery stuff has a blast there. It is completely okay for Blizzard to make parts of the game that aren’t for me.

Dornogal feels a bit bland as a capital, less thriving and alive than Valdrakken, less magical than Dalaran, less characterful than Boralus or Zul’dazar. Still, it does have a sense of place and its own kind of beauty. I’d much rather spend an expansion in Dornogal than in Oribos.

Hero talents have turned out to be less interesting than I hoped. On most of my characters, the choice is made for me because of the two options available, one revolves around a talent I don’t use or serves a playstyle I’m not interested in. Few of the individual hero talents feel like they make much of a difference to how I play. On the other hand, I don’t really want a big shake-up to how I play my characters, so on balance, I’m fine with the system.

I find the main story of Smug Floating Shadow Elf Doing Vaguely Evil Stuff to be boring, but the truth is that in every expansion, I’m usually bored by the main story. I find my joy in the small stories we experience along the way, and The War Within has not disappointed with its side stories. From wacky Kobold bedtime stories to sensitive reflections on aging and the loss of treasured memories, this expansion has plenty to offer. Just like Azj-Kahet and the Nerubians, I can completely ignore the Smug Elf, Traumatized Prince, and Angry Ranger Show and still have more than enough to do.

Overall, my reaction to this expansion is: There are things I don’t care for and am not interested in, but there are so many things for me to enjoy that I hardly even notice the rest.

Images: World of Warcraft screencaps

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