This November, I will have been playing World of Warcraft for 20 years, which is hard to even comprehend. And while I’ve certainly had a bit of a love-hate relationship with it, I think I can confidently say that The War Within represents the best it’s ever been. From the story, to the environments, to the music, to the new features, this is WoW firing on all cylinders.
The biggest improvement, philosophically, is that Blizzard seems to actually want everyone to get to see the whole expansion this time around. As someone who began my journey with this series in Warcraft II and is very invested in the story, but doesn’t really like to interact with randos and doesn’t have any friends left who still play this game from the group I started out with in 2004, this has never previously been the case.
All the juicy plot stuff was locked behind either joining an endgame guild, which can be like a part-time job, or queueing for pick-up-groups which, let’s be honest, has almost always been a terrible experience, and I don’t even know if it’s fixable. Random groups always want to finish a dungeon as fast as possible. If there’s a dumb shortcut where you have to jump across a one-pixel ledge to skip one pull, they expect you to do it. And they assume everyone should have already studied every mechanic in every boss fight before even attempting it, ruining any surprises if it’s your first time through. It’s kind of a rancid culture, and WoW’s game design has unintentionally encouraged it.
In contrast, the first time I ran through one of The War Within’s follower dungeons, which let you take in the story solo at your own pace with a group of NPC helpers, I am not playing it up to say I almost cried. As a type of player who feels like they’ve been left behind for twenty years, this is the most listened to I’ve ever felt by these devs. It’s not just the repeatable follower dungeons, either. Some of the five-man instances even have a separate, tailored story version with tweaked mechanics and bosses that you play through with important lore characters at your side, and you might even be treated to a well-produced cutscene at the end.
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