The Minor Agony of Not Playing In Early Access for Control Resonant

 I only became a Remedy fan three years ago, and as a relative newcomer, I've only played three of their games, but those three games, Alan Wake, Control, and Alan Wake II, left a huge impression on me, so I've been getting hyped up for Control Resonant, nervous about whether I'll actually enjoy the switch to fast-paced melee action gameplay.

I mean, I was nervous about Alan Wake II's switch to full-on survival horror, and even though I don't actually think that I loved the combat in it, the atmosphere and experience of the game and its story was superlative, almost instantly becoming probably my favorite narrative in all of gaming.

I had considered getting the super-duper deluxe edition, but I think the main reason to go for such deals is if they include free access to the DLC(s), which all three of the Remedy games I've played have had. But that means I have to wait a little bit longer.

And, stupidly, I scheduled a doctor's appointment for the middle of Thursday, the day it comes out. Stupid physical body requiring maintenance!

Anyway, I'm eager to get lost in the game. Remedy does game narrative like no one else, and their particular blend of horror, modern fantasy, and sci fi ideas (or rather, the blurring of the lines between said genres) speaks very directly to my own taste in genre fiction.

I know that there's only one ending to the game, but I'm slightly nervous about reports that certain quests/missions can go poorly if certain decisions are made or challenges failed, as I'm a real perfectionist with my games. I prefer a game to just let me keep trying if I didn't get the result I wanted.

I'm also a little nervous that reviews seem to suggest the game is on the difficult side. That might seem absurd coming from someone who plays FromSoft's games and loves them, but I think there's something about their style of difficulty that clicks with me - being generally slower-paced, it's often not hard to figure out what you did wrong, while fast-paced action games can sometimes be hard to parse.

But yeah, I mean, I died plenty of times in Alan Wake II (though I maintain that my struggles with the Cynthia fight were more due to glitches that probably got fixed in patches) and it didn't make me adore that game any less. So maybe I've got nothing to worry about.

It's notable that Sam Lake has been almost totally absent from the marketing of the game. I believe that he was not as directly involved in it as he was with the first Control or, of course, Alan Wake II. Given, well, the entire story of Alan Wake II, I imagine that he's somewhat uncomfortable being the "face" of Remedy (almost literally, given that he's the likeness for Max Payne) even if his creative vision has been the guiding one for the studio's games for the last quarter-century or so.

I'm sort of skeptical of the "auteur" theory, which arose in the 1960s as a somewhat subversive response/contrast with the institutional studio system of early Hollywood. It's interesting that this framing and philosophy around art (cinema in this case, but it applies to other media) began as a rebellion against stuffy, corporate institutions, but at some point, it started to justify a lot of egoism and erasure of the auteur's collaborators. I truly think that the central crux of Alan Wake II's themes was the need to release that drive to own the enire creative process and make your work all about you, specifically. Alan only succeeds by allowing others to put themselves into the art he began, and I for sure think that Sam Lake was thinking about how he needed co-writers and other people to contribute for Remedy to finally crack the Alan Wake sequel after thirteen years.

I'm very curious to see how Control Resonant carries on and elaborates on the themes of Control. Seven years is less time than thirteen, but it's still actually a pretty big gap between an original game and its sequel (though Alan Wake II lands nearly smack dab in the middle of that gap,) and obviously they're changing quite a bit with the second game.

But I don't think I'll have the chance to read into the subtext, or perhaps meta-text is a more precise term, of how the game relates to its own creation until I get to play through it.

I've heard that there are fewer findable lore documents than there were in the first game, which is a shame. It might sound insane to someone who hasn't experienced the original game, but truly one of the most fun things about Control was finding some office memo to read. Still, it might simply be that they wish to explore alternate vehicles for conveying that background lore.

Speaking of vehicles, apparently there are shops that you can find that are ice cream trucks with a discordant melody playing from them. I'm so profoundly into that Control aesthetic.

What New Specs Would Make Sense?

 The Devourer Demon Hunter filled a gap.

When Demon Hunters were introduced in Legion, they were quite unusual in that they had only two specs - one tank, one melee dps. Blizzard had said that they avoided giving the class a ranged dps spec for fear that they would be forced to water down Havoc, such as removing Eye Beam to give it to them.

Obviously, that philosophical choice changed, and Void Ray, while similar to Eye Beam, has a somewhat different feel in Devourer's quite different rotation.

Only two prior times did we get a spec added to the game.

I would guess that Evokers were meant to ship with all three of their current specs, but the weirdness of Augmentation, a dps spec more concerned with boosting others' damage than their own (I have no idea where they currently land in the overall meta - it's hard to evaluate just how much they're adding to a group's damage) likely took them a bit longer to figure out, hence the wait for 10.1 to roll them out.

The other was a weird byproduct of the redesign of how talents worked in Mists of Pandaria. For youngsters and newer players (and you can just play Classic to get a sense of this,) the talent system in WoW initially worked by simply having three threes you could invest points into each time you leveled up starting at level 10. There was no limitation on how you spread the points, though you needed to spend 5 points in a row before the next row unlocked. The idea was that you would invest most of your points into one of the three trees, which thus established your specialization, but there "spec" was an informal thing, simply referring to how invested you were in a given tree (typically you'd hit the capstone of the tree about 20 levels before the level cap, so you would then invest later points into one or both of the other trees - like, boosting damage to Consecration was a Holy talent, so Protection and Retribution would want to pick that up).

Things changed a little in Cataclysm, where they now forced you to pick a talent tree to stick with as you leveled up until you had either gotten the capstone or at least invested the number of talent points you would need to get into that capstone before the other two trees would unlock. Also, with the rising level cap, Cataclysm also made it so that you would only get a talent point every other level, alternating with getting new abilities.

Mists of Pandaria threw the whole system out, and further formalized Specs as the main determinator of what spells and abilities you got as you leveled up (I think that you also no longer had to go to a class trainer and pay them to teach you new abilities) while Talents would be choices you made between three different options every fifteen levels, usually giving all three specs the same talent options to choose from.

That remained the system until Dragonflight, when they sort of re-constructed something reminiscent of the Classic/Cataclysm system, but retaining the formal definition of specs brought with Mists.

Ok, that history in mind, the first spec they ever added to the game outside of a new class (obviously, Blood, Frost, and Unholy were not in the game before there were Death Knights - well, not that version of Frost) was Guardian for Druids.

Prior to Mists of Pandaria, Druids who wanted to focus on either tanking in Bear form or doing dps in Cat form would both take the Feral talent tree. The talents you chose, though, strongly leaned toward one role or another, so the actually arrangement of talent points would look very different between characters who wanted to go one way or the other. (During Wrath of the Lich King, it was similar with all three Death Knight specs, which were designed to allow you to go as DPS or a Tank).

Thus, with the simplification of specializations, it was necessary to carve out a separate spec for Druid tanks, giving us their weird fourth spec.

    All that long preamble aside (sorry, sometimes I go into WoW historian mode,) one of the periodic speculations about upcoming expansions is the potential to add new specs to existing classes.

I'd argue that Devourer is really the only time that they've truly done this in the manner people imagine: Guardian was simply enabling an existing playstyle in a way that was compatible with a pretty enormous shake-up of a core game system, and Augmentation had to have been planned from the beginning of Dragonflight, with the entire class built with it in mind (there's no way that the spec was conceived of after the launch of Dragonflight, merely months before its debut).

So... what classes might get new specs?

First off, I think one of the early iterations of this form of speculation was the idea of ridding the game of pure DPS classes. WoW of course has the most room for DPS characters in group content, but the relative ease of playing this role also sees probably a disproportionate number of players gravitate toward that role. The notion of giving Rogues, Hunters, Warlocks, and Mages either a tank or healing spec was born, I think, out of a hope that by giving them that option, we'd see more people playing those roles.

I'm... skeptical that that is how that would work. I mean, plenty of people play Warriors who don't tank or Shamans who don't heal.

I started tanking very early on in my WoW career, and so I'm pretty comfortable with it as a role (I think it's basically just like melee dps but you have to be a little more careful about your positioning and can't ignore monsters when they go after the healer). But with very rare exceptions, I've basically never played as a healer (I did briefly level a Mistweaver Monk back when "Fistweaving" allowed you to pretty automatically heal the group while fighting in melee, but I don't think she ever hit the level cap).

Still, I think there's one example of this that bears exploration: the Warlock Tank. Now, I think in WoW Classic's Season of Discovery (which was basically their dry run for WoW Forever,) there was a way to unlock new abilities for Warlocks that allowed them to tank. Prior to the introduction of Demon Hunters, Demonology Warlocks were actually built around DH-like Metamorphosis (Legion saw a dramatic redesign of the spec, and I guess I was lucky that I liked both versions). This actually makes sense for Classic and Forever given that I don't believe either are expected to have playable Demon Hunters in them (I guess Legion Classic would). But for Mainline WoW, "retail," or just WoW, I don't know if this is the approach they could take.

Another perennial ask is Shaman Tanks. Here, I think you've got a lot more of the pieces that could work. Shamans are the only non-Tank class that can use Shields (which I think was primarily just so that Horde guilds had someone to give the Shields with Intellect on them back in Vanilla before there were any Horde Paladins - notably, WoW Forever is going to have Dwarf Shamans and Undead Paladins, giving each faction all the classes, because they realized that limiting the classes to a single faction in Vanilla was a mistake.) Still, I actually think there's some logic here: Shaman specs often focus on certain elements, with actually both Elemental and Enhancement tending toward air and fire (lightning and lava,) and Restoration tending to focus on Water. A Shaman Tank could very much be one that focuses on Earth, creating stony bulwarks to defend themselves.

There are currently no Mail-wearing tanks, which is funny given that half the tanks wear Leather armor, which is actually a less "heavy" armor type than Mail. But given that the only items you really need to make distinctly for tanks are Trinkets, and there are already plenty of Agility-based tanks, it would be pretty simple from an itemization point of view to just make a Shaman tank spec. You'd have to put Agility on shields, but that doesn't seem that difficulty (it would make them the one gear type that would always have all three primary stats on it, but who cares?)

Now, I'm... less convinced that we could make a Healing Mage. Maybe, maybe, possibly you could do some kind of time-magic thing where they're able to reverse time and heal wounds that way, but I don't really see it on a thematic level.

What about Hunters? Well, there's a vague notion that you could have a Hunter's pet tank, but given how imprecise it is to control your pets, this seems like a disastrous way of doing things (likewise Warlock minions).

The truth is, there's probably a way to conceive of any melee class acting as a tank - if you can fight in melee, maybe you can fight in a way that make it hard for them to kill you? And thus, a Hunter tank might be a bit more similar to Survival, with a pet that just supplements you rather than taking the hits for you.

A Rogue Tank, though, feels a bit like a contradiction in terms, simply because the whole vibe of a Rogue is that they stab you in the back while you're distracted by some seemingly bigger threat. Now, I do think Outlaw is a bit of an exception here, living less in that "sneaky backstabber" space and more in that "charming scoundrel" swashbuckler vibe. I wouldn't advocate turning Outlaw into a tank spec, but a tank Rogue would probably have to lean into that vibe a bit more, which I don't love given that Outlaw already feels like the exception rather than the rule.

One thing I never hear anyone talk about is a new Priest DPS spec. Priests are the only class that has two healing specs, and so if you want to play as DPS, you have to take a pretty dramatic shift in flavor and vibe by going Shadow.

What we don't have is a ranged Holy-damage-focused spec.

I honestly wonder, if they were building the class today, if Discipline would have been this. With Holy as the straightforward healer, you could have Shadow with its dark and insidious damage-over-time focus and Discipline focus on bursting foes down with holy fire.

But obviously, 22 years of Discipline being a healing spec would mean that changing it now would have people up in arms.

However, I do think there's very much a niche open for this archetype: a Fire and Brimstone Inquisitor, who smites foes with Holy Light, maybe mixing Holy damage spells with Fire. (Frankly, I always wanted my Blood Elf Priest to have a bit more of this vibe, but I just don't like playing a healer. And actually, both the introduction of Void Elves and everyone in Silvermoon making mean remarks to him in Midnight makes me really wish this was an option).

Devourer did sort of introduce the idea of a kind of off-brand version of the class - Demon Hunters are tied to Fel magic, but Devourer allows them to focus instead on Void magic.

Would giving Warlocks a Necromancer spec make sense, allowing them to raise undead minions? My answer is that it would, except that Unholy Death Knights exist, and especially with their Midnight re-work, Unholy DKs are the necromancer spec, and I just cannot conceive of a Necromancer class or spec that doesn't inherently have to utterly dismantle Unholy as it exists currently to appropriate its kit.

But what if, instead of a Necromancer, Warlocks got something a bit more Witchy? WoW's attitude as to what class is strictly a Witch is pretty ambiguous, but in Battle for Azeroth, we got the Heartsbane Coven, the most direct and straightforward Folk Horror Witches WoW has ever seen. (While I didn't like BFA much overall, I freaking adored almost every moment of Drustvar).

Now, maybe you could argue that Witches ought to be their own class (I wouldn't complain. Give them a healing spec). But I could also see Warlocks studying the Drusts' use of Death Magic and going that route rather than that of the Fel. Mechanically, I have no clue what this would look like (arguably, Affliction feels a little less demonic in vibe and a bit more death-magic focused) but I do think it could potentially be cool. Hell, call the spec "Witchcraft," and I think you'd have a lot of people super on-board. (Maybe tie in other woodsy spookiness, like the magic of Satyrs.)

I guess my last idea would be some kind of spec that combines arcane magic with martial prowess to give us a sort of Battlemage (or to use D&D terms, an Eldritch Knight). I had thought perhaps of a kind of arcane paladin, though it might also make sense as a Warrior spec. I think that there's less clear lore precedence here, though, so this is more pie-in-the-sky.

I'm skeptical that WoW would be likely to drop a whole lot of "fourth specs" in a single go, and it might be more exciting for players and hype around a new expansion just to launch a new class. This does have the benefit of not being tied to existing class mechanics (though given how distinct some specs play these days, I don't know if that's as much of a design constraint as it used to be).

Still, some of these ideas would be fun to see.

I think the ones that currently feel most appealing in my opinion would be the Shaman Tank, "Inquisitor" Priest, and Witchcraft Warlock.

Level Ranges of the WoW D&D Dungeons

 I don't know how big the WoW D&D book is, but it sounds like it might be pretty hefty, given that it details seven different dungeons along with various player options and other stuff.

One of the complaints we often got during the 5.0 era was that very few published adventures actually took people all the way to the level cap. Indeed, many adventure books would only take players to level 10, cutting things off before hitting tier 3, or sometimes going about halfway in, like Descent Into Avernus, which wrapped up around level 13.

This, combined with a relative dearth of high-level monsters (not that there weren't any, but the balance certainly skewed more to CRs below 5) led a fair number of DMs to feeling like they didn't have the tools or examples of how to build high-level adventures.

At this stage, I think I've run more D&D at high (11+) levels than low level simply because of the epic length of my ongoing Ravnica campaign, in which I (foolishly, in retrospect,) really sped players through levels 1-10 building on the very generous Adventurer's League rules from 2019 (I also imagined the game as a more rotating cast kind of thing).

This party doesn't have a Wizard in it, and I think that a surprising number of shenanigans that high-level characters can pull are not quite as difficult to build around (read: preserve challenge) if you don't have someone who can, for instance, Scry-and-Fry. It's not that there haven't been any challenges - with a Bard who has expertise in all four Charisma skills and also has Glibness, it ironically makes social challenges involving attempts to influence NPCs sort of dull, because he can't roll below a 27 (all the character at some point or another got the equivalent of Tomes and Manuals that raise their primary ability score and max for that score by 2. The Artificer has an Ioun Stone of Mastery, so between that and Tool Expertise, any tool-based Investigation or Arcana check gives them a +20 and advantage).

Still, I've found that at the end of the day, a crapton of damage will challenge even a high-level party, or at least put the fear of God in them.

Also, as a note here, WotC has actually for quite a while tried to address this, adding a lot of high-CR monsters in Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes and then releasing Dungeon of the Mad Mage (the epic mega-dungeon crawl that goes from 5-20) and Vecna: Eve of Ruin (which goes from 10-20) and most recently, Arcana Unleashed: Deadfall, which goes 11-20. While some of the issues of how vastly capable PCs can get at those high levels does sort of remain an issue, you at least have a lot of creatures to choose from to send their way, and I think the 5.5 Monster Manual helps a fair bit with high-CR humanoid monsters and souped-up versions of lower-CR monsters.

But this is all preamble!

The WoW D&D book (it's going to be awkward to just call it "WoW" given that this blog is also pretty heavily dedicated to World of Warcraft) is meant to be pretty comprehensive and cover potentially any era in WoW's 22-year history (though it won't have the "filling in the gaps" stuff from the just-announced WoW Forever - a game that I somewhat reluctantly feel like I should try out even if I wouldn't want to swap to it at the expense of the mainline version of the game). That being said, the dungeons presented in the book are all, with a single exception, from WoW's "Vanilla" era, prior to any of its expansions, which ran from 2004 to the very beginning of 2007 (I think The Burning Crusade came out on like January 7th of 2007. Hang on, Googling... Damn, Jan. 16th. Off by 9 days. Still pretty close).

Now, D&D broadly has some notions about how different tiers should reflect different stakes in a campaign. Tier 1, meaning levels 1-4, is when your characters are regional heroes, dealing with issues that are pretty local - the kind of classic "small town with a bounty board" in which you face bandits or the kind of monsters that create problems for the local farmers. Tier 2 steps things up to more serious threats, where an entire kingdom might be under threat by some more organized and serious villain. Tier 3 is when you really get into super-hero mode (though I guess that's imprecise given that sometimes Spider-Man and Batman are just dealing with bank robbers while other times they're dealing with reality-warping threats) but more precisely, you're dealing with global threats. Tier 4 is then when you're dealing with stuff that could affect multiple planes of reality.

In practice, of course, this doesn't necessarily play out that way. For example, Deadfall sees the party trying to thwart the plans of Szass Tam in trying to wrest full control of Thay away from the rest of the Zulkirs and reduce most of the country to his own mindless undead servants. As epic as that is, technically that counts as a tier 2, or "nation-wide" threat, though it's not much of a stretch of the imagination to think that that could then become a big problem for the whole of the Forgotten Realms. But Deadfall instead goes to level 20, and I think it's mainly because they want it to feel truly epic.

By these metrics, different WoW expansions would, I think, qualify at different tier levels. Legion and Shadowlands are unquestionably tier 4 expansions, while Wrath of the Lich King, as epic and beloved as that is, would by this metric be considered a tier 3 plot (though given how important Azeroth is to the overall Warcraft cosmos, you could argue that any global threat is inherently a cosmic threat).

But we know that the Icecrown Citadel dungeon is presented as a tier 4 adventure (it's also sold separately, which is a bit annoying, though perhaps it just wouldn't have fit in the book. ICC in WoW is a raid, which is both built for a larger group of players and is also just larger than a standard dungeon, with more bosses. I'm not going to get into all the complexities of dungeons versus raids here, but it's a fairly distinct thing even if they operate on similar principles).

Ok, sorry, getting to the actual point of this post:

GameMasters, a D&D channel that often sneaks a little preview of upcoming D&D books, has... snuck us a little preview of the new D&D book. Evidently constrained by some sort of NDA (he apparently wasn't supposed to tell us that Arthas got a stat block in the book, but I mean, the dude's on the cover and is WoW's most popular and iconic villain, so I'd only have been shocked if he didn't have a stat block), he was nevertheless able to show off some of the dungeon maps and their level ranges.

Deadmines: 1-4

Deadmines, the vast mine complex that serves as the headquarters for the Defias Brotherhood, a group of bandits founded by (rightfully) disgruntled Stonemasons after they were stiffed on the reconstruction of Stormwind, is the first dungeon that Alliance players are likely to run (well, Horde too given that you can access it via the Dungeon Finder these days, but it's more part of the questing path for human characters). The Defias have an interesting story with some real nuance (I mean, again, their grievances are very much real) they are, ultimately, a group of bandits, colored in by a sort of political edge, and thus they make perfect sense as a tier 1 challenge.

In the Cataclysm expansion, Deadmines was updated with some new characters. After players killed Edwin VanCleef, the leader of the Defias (and former head of the Stonemason's Guild) in the original version of the dungeon, his orphaned daughter Vanessa hatched a plot to revive the Defias and take over as its new leader. The general vibes of the dungeon were similar, though it was updated with more modern design philosophies. (We also fight Vanessa, though it's revealed later in the Legion expansion that she survives our encounter, and even winds up reluctantly teaming up with Rogue players as part of their class storyline).

Shadowfang Keep: 1-4

This also makes a fair amount of sense: Shadowfang Keep is found in Silverpine Forest, the second zone Undead characters are likely to quest through much as Deadmines is in Westfall, the secondary human zone. The real question, though, is which version is presented here. In Vanilla, SFK was "the Worgen dungeon," where the Archmage Arugal retreated after going mad, the source of his madness being his disastrous summoning of the Worgen to combat the undead Scourge. Worgen - WoW's version of werewolves - had initially been created through the efforts of Night Elf Druids trying to create a Druidic shapeshift form based on Goldrinn, the wolf god, but his ferocity proved overwhelming. Arugal had stumbled upon fragmented records telling of powerful wolf-creatures who were immune to diseases like the Plague of Undeath, and figured these would be ideal defenders of his home nation of Gilneas in fending off the undead threat. But the Worgen overran Gilneas, turning most of the population.

However, Shadowfang Keep became a vastly different dungeon in subject matter in the Cataclysm revamp of the original two WoW continents. In the plot there, the Forsaken invaded Gilneas in an effort to expand their territory. While the Gilneans had found alchemical means to restore the human minds to those who had been turned into Worgen, there were some of the high-ranking nobility who refused to bow down to a society that was now trying to incorporate these "mongrels" into it. Turning traitor and welcoming in the Forsaken, the three treasonous lords were killed, but then raised by the Forsaken as undead in their own right. However, the three were equally unhappy about being forced to serve the Forsaken, and betrayed Sylvanas (the Banshee Queen of the Forsaken) and even straight-up murdered her (she got better - turns out having the means to raise people into undeath can be useful if you're targeted for assassination) before fleeing to Arugal's old stronghold.

There's certainly more plot to the newer (like, 2010, but still newer than 2004) Shadowfang Keep, with tons of motivation for both Alliance and Horde players to want to take Lord Godfrey and his co-conspirators down. But I do sort of regret that the one real "Worgen" dungeon ceased to be that with this change.

Either way, it's a story of local threats, and I think makes sense as a tier 1 dungeon.

Blackfathom Deeps: Levels 5-10

Blackfathom Deeps is in the zone of Ashenvale, where the ancient forests of the Night Elves begin to butt up against the expanding territories of the Horde, who seek its lumber to fuel the construction of the new Orcish nation of Durotar. This dungeon, though, has nothing to do with that conflict.

Instead, this is an ancient Night Elf temple that at some point became a hotbed of worship of the Eldritch Old Gods (WoW's Great Old Ones/source for its Aberrations - continent-sized, mostly-underground flesh-monsters trying to corrupt the planet).

I'll be honest, this is one of the more nondescript dungeons from the old Vanilla days. It got a revamp at some point, but unlike Shadowfang Keep and Deadmines, it didn't then have a max-level Heroic version to play through at the time. I believe they may have shifted some of the focus between the factions involved here, but I don't really remember how it changed.

Elements at play here are the Naga (ancient Night Elves who were transformed into serpentine sea-monsters that honestly look a lot like Merrow, but think Merrow with the culture and broad power of Menzoberranzan Drow, who are associated with but not strictly loyal to the Old Gods) and Twilight's Hammer (a vast cult seeking apocalyptic destruction, and the closest thing the Old Gods have to a mortal cult dedicated to them). The final boss here is a massive Hydra who is an ancient "pet" of the Old Gods.

Scarlet Monastery: 5-10 and 11-16

Scarlet Monastery was one of the most popular dungeons in Vanilla, or rather, four of the most popular dungeons, as it pioneered the notion of a "winged" dungeon, with bite-sized pieces you could complete quickly (winged dungeons sort of stopped being a thing by Cataclysm, actually, but in BC and Wrath, they were the rule rather than the exception, though each wing in those were actually quite filled-out dungeons). In Mists of Pandaria, extensive revamps of these dungeons consolidated them into two: Scarlet Monastery and Scarlet Halls, effectively combining the old Graveyard and Cathedral into the former and the old Library and Armory into the latter.

While the dungeons are in the Undead starting zone of Tirisfal Glades, players would have to adventure a little bit beyond to hit the level they'd want to be before running these.

Scarlet Monastery is one of the main bastions of the Scarlet Crusade, a group of zealous religious fundamentalists who went a bit crazy in the face of the Undead Scourge. Primarily dangerous for the Forsaken, as they make no distinction between the dominated wills of the Scourge and the free-willed, sapient undead of the Forsaken, they're also just generally evil religious zealots who became deluded into thinking that all of Azeroth was infected with the Plague, and so would slaughter everyone if unchecked. (Later, in the Stratholme dungeon, we find that its leader is actually a corpse possessed by a Dreadlord, the most insidious and manipulative of demons, which explains all the evil, torture, and burning people at the stake).

Given that the natural progression of the story of the dungeon has us eventually confront High Inquisitor Whitemane in the Cathedral, I suspect that it's this half that is saved for tier 3, while the Halls half is probably our tier 2 half.

(In its 2012 revamp, most of the existing bosses from the original four wings were replaced with similar characters, but with different names, the deaths of the olds bosses evidently being canonical. The exception were Whitemane and the undead Thalnos the Soulrender, but while Whitemane's champion, Renault Mograine, in the Vanilla version of Cathedral was a fairly important lore character, overall the dungeon feels basically the same).

I have a great deal of nostalgia for this dungeon, as it's where I learned to tank on my Paladin way back in the day, and the Scarlet Crusade is a villainous faction that's a lot of fun to hate.

Dire Maul: 11-16

Dire Maul is an ancient, ruined Night Elf city. (It was this dungeon that the video gets to go into a lot of detail about.) In ancient times, it was a place of arcane scholarship among the Highborne Night Elves (the ancestors of the High Elves/Blood Elves/Void Elves) and home to Prince Tortheldrin and his Shed'ralar scholars. After the loss of the Well of Eternity (the enormous font of arcane power that was destroyed 10,000 years ago at the conclusion of the War of the Ancients,) the arcane-addicted Highborne began to struggle with deadly withdrawal, and so Tortheldrin summoned a demon called Immothar to have his people feed off of its energies. This corrupted them over time, and they began sacrificing non-Shen'dralar citizens to the demon to maintain it as a source of arcane nourishment.

The dungeon is sort of divided into three areas, with one involving the ghosts of the dead citizens and the Shen'dralar (who are, interestingly enough, actually a faction you can gain reputation with, even if Tortheldrin is clearly a villain and can be fought as a boss) but as the city has fallen into ruins, it has also become host to a clan of ogres as well as some Satyrs seeking to corrupt the local wildlife.

Quick important sidenote: Satyrs in WoW are very different than those from both D&D and Greek Myth. Far from whimsical fey beings, Satyrs are actually former Night Elves who became demons, and are closely tied with an eldritch corruption to the Emerald Dream (an alternate plane of a pristine, pre-civilization Azeroth that is core to the practice of Druidsm and the function of the natural world - very vaguely akin to its Feywild) called The Nightmare. Satyrs are thus tied to both the demonic Burning Legion and the eldritch madness of the Old Gods (two forces that are usually quite vehemently opposed to one another), and are seriously bad news.

I'm actually a bit surprised that this is a tier 3 dungeon, as it feels like it could fit pretty safely in tier 2, but I guess the presence of ancient arcane practices and the binding of a powerful demon make it sufficiently big for a tier 3 adventure.

Azjol-Nerub: Levels 17-20

When this dungeon came out in Wrath of the Lich King, it was considered almost scandalous, because it featured the Scarab King Anub'arak as a mere dungeon boss, and the dungeon itself was fairly quick and small. (Anub'arak later reappeared, resurrected, as the final boss of Trial of the Crusader, itself a sort of weird and underwhelming raid that probably could have been happily skipped).

Anyway, there's a lot of history here:

The Nerubians are one of the arthropodal peoples descended from the Aqir, the bug-people created by the Old Gods to populate their Black Empire some profound eons ago. After the Black Empire was dismantled by the Titans, the Nerubians began to develop their own distinct and necessarily culture (though they are spider-people, so it's not what we'd consider to most lovely society to live in. Yes, I realize that their king is a Scarab-Lord, which is very different from a spider. But just roll with it. Nerubians are spider-folk that also have giant scarab things that are somehow the same species).

Anyway, Azjol-Nerub was the Nerubian kingdom beneath the continent of Northrend, which meant that when the Undead Scourge got its start there on the frigid northern continent, the Nerubians came under attack, and ultimately the kingdom fell and got absorbed into the Scourge, its king, Anub'arak, becoming one of the Lich King's fiercest lieutenants.

Notably, this is the only dungeon in the book set outside of the Vanilla WoW continents, but it's a pretty distinctive look and feel. The Nerubians live in what is essentially WoW's Underdark equivalent (in The War Within, the expansion that ran from 2024 to 2026, we spent a lot of time in another Nerubian kingdom, Ahj'Kahet, and got to know their culture and even ally with a resistance movement there).

It's a little funny to me that the level range is the same here as it is for Icecrown Citadel, given that Anub'arak is unquesitonably subordinate to the Lich King, but perhaps they are making it up to the people who claimed the Scarab King didn't get his due back in 2008.

Onyxia's Lair: 17-20

My only real question here is how you'd have enough content here to span four levels. Onyxia is a pretty epic character - the daughter of Deathwing, the mad Black Dragon Aspect, Onyxia lurked in disguise within the court of Stormwind under the guise of a human named Lady Katrana Prestor (Deathwing had taken over the human kingdom of Alterac under the identity of Lord Daval Prestor, and betrayed the Alliance during the Second War). Leading Stormwind's House of Nobles, she arranged for the Stonemason's Guild to go unpaid, effectively spurring the creation of the Defias Brotherhood (see the Deadmines, way up above) and also orchestrated the kidnapping of King Varian Wrynn in an effort to undermine Stormwind and sow chaos.

Once her ruse in Stormwind was discovered, she fled across the Great Sea to Kalimdor, and the remote wilderness of Dustwallow Marsh, where she had her vast volcanic lair.

Onyxia's Lair was popular back in Vanilla, as it was a very simple one-boss instance with just a few "trash" enemies to fight through before getting to the big boss fight. While Onyxia's brother Nefarian served as the final boss of Blackwing Lair, a more extensive and full raid instance, both black dragons made for pretty cool and epic fights. (Both were somehow resurrected in Cataclsym, featuring in the final fight of the Blackwing Descent raid.) (Also, in 2009, for WoW's 5th anniversary, a level 80 version of the raid was opened up for players during Wrath of the Lich King, and I believe the current version of it is that version, though between the Shadowlands level-squish and level scaling, I don't know if you could tell the difference, really).

Anyway, as cool as that was, in WoW, Onyxia's Lair is really just a single boss fight in a big volcanic cave. The build-up to that fight, of course, was pretty cool, with an extensive quest chain to reveal Lady Prestor's duplicity, but I'm very curious to see how the book actually approaches this to give us something between being level 17 when we start it and then fighting Onyxia presumably at level 20.

Icecrown Citadel (not appearing in the book itself, but as a separate and I believe digital-only product): Levels 17-20

The final (well, there's a weird asterisk there because of the single-boss Ruby Sanctum raid, but we don't need to count that, as it was more of a prologue for Cataclysm) raid of Wrath of the Lich King, this is a massive fortress built around the Frozen Throne, the magical shard of ice containing the cursed armor of the Lich King that unleashed the Undead Scourge upon Azeroth.

Just in case you didn't know, the history of the Lich King is complex: Originally, the Orc Shaman Ner'zhul, attempting to flee the secret demonic masters of the Old Horde after their loss in the Second War, tore the Orcish homeworld of Draenor apart, and was immediately captured by the demon Kil'jaeden. Kil'jaeden bound his soul to a suit of armor (the origin of which got expanded upon/retconned in Shadowlands, but it's just so much to cover) and sealed him in an ice-like crystal to hurl down to Azeroth.

As a disembodied spirit, Ner'zhul, as the Lich King, reached out and empowered necromancers to begin raising the dead and bringing about a plague of undeath that could spread his influence and bind their wills to the Lich King. The most prominent of these necromancers, Kel'thuzad, came to the human kingdom of Lordaeron and began spreading the plague, before he was defeated by the Crown Prince and novice Paladin, Arthas Menethil. Arthas, a hero initially, began to lose perspective and his humanity in his zealous efforts to stop the Scourge, including slaughtering an entire city to contain the infection. Eventually, in an effort to defeat the demon he believed to be the head of the Scourge, Arthas took the soul-entrapping cursed sword Frostmourne (though he had done a lot of bad things even before his soul was taken).

Frostmourne turned Arthas into a Death Knight, and when he returned, seemingly triumphant, to Lordaeron, he shocked everyone by murdering his father, King Terenas, and then unleashing his undead minions upon the capital. Via the disemboided spirit of Kel'thuzad, Arthas learned that it was the Lich King who had created Frostmourne, and that the Scourge needed him to help break them free of the control of the demons. Arthas thus became the Scourge's greatest champions, eventually defending the Frozen Throne from forces (led by Illidan Stormrage, but we can't get into why that was who he was up against) that sought to destroy it. In victory, Arthas ascended the Frozen Throne, smashing the ice and freeing the armor. Placing the Helm of Domination upon his head, he merged with the Lich King, and eventually overcame Ner'zhul's will to truly become the master of the Scourge.

Icecrown Citadel, thus, is a massive complex with some of the Scourge's most powerful monstrous servants, between the Frankensteinan creations known as Abominations created by Professor Putricide, to the vampire-like San'layn led by Blood Queen Lana'thel (the San'layn created through the corruption of the blood elves who had fought for Illidan) and the undead dragons led by Sindragosa (basically a Dracolich).

Like Scarlet Monastery, I have immense nostalgia for this raid, as it was the time when I was most consistently raiding with my guild (which is now more or less defunct,) and Arthas is both mine and I'd guess a huge portion of WoW players' favorite villain.

I wish that we simply got this in the book, but I also sort of get it. Let's talk about Dungeons versus Raids.

In WoW, most of the world is shared by those on your server - if you're playing on the same "realm" as another player, if they show up at a location, you can find them there (there are exceptions I won't get into here). But "instances" are separate areas that have a fresh version of them for each group that enters. That way, you don't have to worry about some other group of players having killed the boss you want to fight and having to wait for them to respawn.

The most common form of instance is a dungeon, which is built for five players, and typically has 3-5 boss fights, with less powerful enemies ("trash") between them, and typically can be cleared in a single sitting in roughly half an hour (notably, back in Vanilla, there were far larger dungeons, but very early on they decided to make dungeons more digestible bits of content). Dungeons have a hard limit of 5 players, with one player in the tank role, one in the healer role, and three "DPS" or "damage" players who are there to just make sure the enemies go down efficiently.

Raids, on the other hand, are for larger groups. In vanilla, raids would be for groups of 20 or 40 players (the more epic and plot-centric ones being for the huge groups,) but in the first expansion, much as they standardized the shorter dungeons, they also shrunk raids to have some be for 10 players and some for 25. In the second expansion, Wrath of the Lich King, they instead made multiple versions of each raid, with a 10-player version and a 25-player version. Eventually, they would create "flex" raiding, where the instance itself would scale for groups of 10-25 players, the exception being the hardest difficulty mode, Mythic, which was designed solely for 20-player groups.

Unlike dungeons, raids are not designed to be completed in a single sitting (at least not until you get good enough at the fights and have good enough gear to consistently beat early bosses in a single attempt). They can have far more bosses (I believe the largest is Naxxramas, which has 15. Icecrown Citadel has 12).

Working your way through a raid is the sort of thing that players will take several weeks to do - the race to Mythic World Firsts - beating the final boss of the latest raid on Mythic difficulty - is something WoW fans will follow like a season of sports, with famous guilds racing to get that boss down as quickly as possible, which usually doesn't happen until after the raid has been out for a week or two (or sometimes longer, depending on how hard it is).

Thus:

It sort of makes sense to me that Icecrown Citadel wouldn't fit in this book: just the map alone is far larger than the dungeons portrayed in the book (and Onyxia's Lair, while a raid, is a very simple and small raid).

I do have a few questions, though:

First off, there's far more to WoW than its dungeons - you do a lot of stuff out in the world, and dungeons often serve as the sort of climactic conclusion of an ongoing story that you've done mostly out on your own in the open world.

The maps of the dungeons look pretty faithful to their WoW equivalents, and so I really have to wonder if something like Onyxia's Lair will involve us slowly pushing through it before exiting to do other things.

The other possibility that just occurred to me, and makes me feel very silly for not thinking of it sooner, is that these level ranges might not be a guarantee of the levels that these dungeons will cover, but might instead simply be level ranges that are appropriate times for a party to visit said dungeons. Like, you might be capable of facing Onyxia by the time you hit level 17, but it'll remain a challenge through level 20.

Honestly, that might make far more sense, though I do think that puts a pretty serious onus on the tier 1 dungeons, given that the difference between a level 1 character and a level 3 character is a much bigger gulf than, say, a level 12 versus level 14 character.

One last note! (I know this post is getting insanely long):

Evidently, the book will suggest paths that a party can take if they want to focus on particular stories and antagonists, not just for these dungeons but also for the various zones of World of Warcraft. Peppering in these dungeons where appropriate could be a way to have various heightened periods in a campaign about certain things.

It seems that dungeons are designated as being associated with such recurring villains, like The Burning Legion (I think Dire Maul is considered a Burning Legion dungeon).

As I was telling my players tonight, I know Azeroth far more extensively than I do the Forgotten Realms, and I think that's what would excite me about running something there - that I would easily be able to pull in details I know about the world while also curating the story to focus on particular threads.

Ironically, while Warcraft tends toward high-stakes, epic tales, it would probably be relatively far easier for me to run a truly character-driven sandbox game focusing on players' individual stories because I have such a hard-wired sense of the moving parts of WoW's world and plot.

Speculating on the State of Northrend in Last Titan

 Blizzard is doing something a little on the risky side by having back-to-back expansions exploring existing, established parts of the world. Truly, there's no direct precedence here, though Warlords of Draenor (hardly a model for expansions that Blizzard would want to follow) did give us the alternate timeline/past version of many places we visited in Burning Crusade.

While Draenor was an alternate timeline, we can probably assume that this is what Outland looked like prior to the degradation of the planet at the hands of Fel magic and eventually its shattering from Ner'zhul's overzealous portal creation.

Midnight took advantage of the fact that Quel'thalas, then Eversong Woods, the Ghostlands, and The Isle of Quel'danas, were stowed away in a separate instance than the rest of the Eastern Kingdoms to simply place the modern, updated one into an updated Eastern Kingdoms map (allowing access to the old one via portals).

All in all, while Quel'thalas did exist in Burning Crusade, only three of its zones were directly translated into the Midnight versions, merging Eversong and Ghostlands thanks to the healing that has occurred (beyond the Ruins of Deatholme, the actual border between the two BC zones is far from obvious in the updated version). While the raid, later converted into a dungeon during Cataclysm, was called Zul'Aman, that has been kind of retconned into saying that what we were fighting through was actually Atal'Aman, the temple city at the center of the zone, which has been pretty faithfully recreated as part of that zone, but with the rest expanded out to give us a more conventionally sized WoW zone that was always implied to be there.

Midnight then has places like Harandar, Voidstorm, and the Coiled Isle, all of which are pretty much new to the lore of the game (while it was established that Mythrax was buried somewhere in Zul'Aman, I had previously assumed it was under Atal'Aman).

We don't really know precisely how The Last Titan will approach a return to Northrend. Unlike Quel'thalas, which was just a pair of starting zones for Blood Elf characters and then, at the end of the expansion, the setting for the final raid (I don't think Warcraft III ever implied that the Sunwell was on an island north of the capital,) Northrend was a full continent that we really spent basically all of Wrath on (if memory serves, the only things Wrath brought to the old world were Stormwind Harbor and the eastern coast of the Eastern Plaguelands, to serve as the area for the Death Knight starting experience).

When first announced way back in like 2023, back when the World Soul Saga was first revealed, there was mention of the expansion being centered around Ulduar.

Now, Midnight has done something interesting by not actually giving us a new "continent" but instead just expanding one of WoW's original continents (and then also adding two zones that are disconnected from any continent, which I'm assuming will also be the case for 12.2's zone). It's funny, actually, that at this point I think the subcontinent of Lordaeron is larger than the southern part of the Eastern Kingdoms (the Khaz Modan/Stormwind/Zul'Gurub part of it).

Thus, before we even get started: are we sure that Last Titan will even use all of Northrend?

I think it would be a little awkward not to: Quel'thalas was partitioned off from the rest of the Eastern Kingdoms (I think it was technically on the Outland map, along with Azuermyst and Bloodmyst Isles). But if Last Titan were to only, say, update Storm Peaks, Crystalsong, Dragonblight, and Icecrown, it would be unclear how that should work: shouldn't the 2008 version of Northrend just be left in one intact piece and the Last Titan version stand on its own as something totally new?

Now, Northrend was the setting for WoW's second expansion, and as the years have gone on, Blizzard has tended toward somewhat different standards for an expansion's zones. Northrend has ten zones (eleven if you count the tiny Hrothgar's Landing off the coast of Icecrown). Now sure, Crystalsong had very little actually in it (a few quests that were part of the Icecrown quest chains, but mostly just Dalaran floating above it) and Wintergrasp was a novel experiment in world PvP, which they kept tinkering with with Tol Barad and Ashran, though they seem to have kind of given up on such projects.

Still, even if we cut out those two, there were eight zones with pretty fully-fleshed out questing experiences.

In contrast, recent expansions tend to launch with four zones that you'll level up in. Other zones will be added, but these come in major patches - again, apart from Hrothgar's Landing (a tiny island with I think just like one Vrykul you had to kill for an Argent Tournament daily quest), Wrath never added any zones over its patches. The game was far less focused on outdoor content - while the Argent Tournament added a lot of daily quests in both 3.1 and 3.2 (I think in 3.0 it was just an open bit of snowy tundra, but they were starting to build it when Ulduar came out) there wasn't really any outdoor content added to the game outside of it, with the focus being far more on running dungeons and raids.

The formula today is generally that you get a reputation faction (or rather, a Renown faction) in each of the major zones, and the zones then scale up with you to the level cap, with max-level content there, and sometimes some additional repeatable stuff like the Void Incursions.

Basically, in the old days, a zone like Grizzly Hills was truly "used up" after you hit a certain level, and you wouldn't go back there unless you wanted to farm materials for crafting or if you were heading into a dungeon nearby (like Drak'tharon Keep).

Today, the emphasis is on bigger zones that you have lots of reason to return to over the course of the expansion.

Ok, so, what would a 2027 version of Northrend look like?

Well, I think if we're using the whole continent, even if modern zones are bigger, it's still probably a larger area than we tend to get in an expansion, at least at launch. Admittedly, my memory of is size is based on the old version of flying mounts, which were far slower than the post-Dragonflight skyriding system. (Also the improvements to draw distance do shrink distances - I remember being stunned at the fact that I could see Dalaran while I was down in Azsuna.)

But might we see zone consolidation, like how Eversong Woods absorbed the Ghostlands in Midnight?

I think that's likely to happen given the structure of modern WoW. But how do you justify it? The only zones I could really imagine merging from Wrath would be perhaps dividing Grizzly Hills and distributing part of it to Zul'Drak and part of it to Howling Fjord.

However, perhaps the teaser we got at Blizzcon hints at ways in which the continent might be changed far more than a simple graphical upgrade. That Titan construct, towering over Dragonblight and making both Wyrmrest Temple and Icecrown Citadel look tiny in comparison, would almost inevitably destroy much of what it walked through.

Thus, I could really imagine some massive destruction re-shaping the face of Northrend. Being just south of the Storm Peaks probably doesn't bode well for Zul'Drak (nor does the fact that we've already gotten a fair amount of Troll content in Midnight - though that doesn't guarantee that they'll skip out on it in Last Titan). The Drakkari Empire was in a pretty rotten state during Wrath, of course, and while they did have some representation in Zandalar, I could imagine things falling apart in Zul'Drak even before whatever wrathful Titan stuff is going on.

Now, I think one thing that will be interesting about our return to Northrend is that, while Icecrown Citadel loomed over Wrath of the Lich King as the very obvious final raid and headquarters of the expansions main villain (part of what made ICC and the fight with Arthas so memorable was that it was clear from the word go that everything was building to it throughout the expansion,) it's likely that the Scourge will be a secondary issue in the Last Titan. Might the Titans even go so far as to wreck Icecrown?

After all, the black ramparts of Icecrown were forged from Saronite, a pretty clearly non-Titan-approved building material (while they never really explicitly got into this, it seemed obliquely implied that the undead were immune to the maddening whispers of the Old Gods, which is potentially a really cool bit of cosmic rock-paper-scissors if they ever wanted to expand upon that).

I love the Scourge, but post-Arthas, and especially post-Shadowlands, it just doesn't seem like they can really be justified as a major threat in Azeroth anymore. While I'd frankly be offended if we didn't get any undead threats in Last Titan, I do think that it's highly likely that our main focus will be on the Titans and their constructs. Much as Ulduar was the mid-patch side story in Wrath, I expect that the Scourge/Icecrown/the Undead will at best be the mid-patch side story for Last Titan.

And if we've got Titan constructs rampaging across the continent with what I'm sure is a directive to "re-establish order" there, that gives them license to change a lot of things.

So, wild speculation time: let's go zone-by-zone.

    Howling Fjord:

This was where we were first introduced to the Vrykul, which turned out to be pretty important as both the ancestors of humanity (and thus four of WoW's playable races) and also seemingly among the most common and widespread Titanforged races.

But the Vrykul of Howling Fjord are distinctly post-Curse-of-Flesh versions. They had also been in stasis for countless ages prior to the Scourge waking them up, so what do they look like A: after Ymiron died and B: potentially reconnected with other Vrukul cultures, such as the Stormheim Vrykul? (Also, can we confirm that the Drust were another group of Vrykul, and that the reason Kul Tirans are so burly is that they have far more recent Vrykul ancestry?)

    Borean Tundra:

This zone had something of a less focused theme. The Coldarra is probably a more friendly place with Kalecgos in charge of the Blue Flight (also, it was something of a surprise that Malygos turned out to be a villain in Wrath, as he had previously been seen as a largely benevolent figure). Weirdly, the pretty huge notion of the Curse of Flesh was first introduced in just one of the major quest lines here.

    Dragonblight:

I really think of this zone as being the heart of Northrend, and given its importance to dragons, it's a place we've revisited periodically, as swiftly as the Dragon Soul raid in Cataclysm, but also Wyrmrest Temple shares a fair bit of vibes with Valdrakken, and a newly-reunited draconic regime that is notably no longer loyal to the Titans feels like it could be a pretty major factor here. Add to that the likelihood that Iridikron is a major player in the Last Titan and even the fact that Vyranoth is the ice-based Primal Incarnate and you've got a lot of stuff to work with.

Also, how cool would it be if Naxxramas were crashed into the ground there after our victory against Kel'Thuzad back in the day?

    Grizzly Hills:

Among the most beloved WoW zones, I think in large part due to the memorable fiddle music. I think that this zone is really what they were trying to recapture with the Azure Span in Dragonflight. The odd thing is that there... wasn't actually much that went on here. There were some quests involving the Worgen, back when Worgen were universally hostile monsters (I have a screenshot of an NPC who reveals the fact that the villagers are secretly lycanthropes demanding to know if my Worgen Warrior was bitten. I mean, duh, right? Back in Gilneas City). The fallen, failed World Tree of Vordrassil is here, and I believe is the tree that allowed the Old Gods to infect the Emerald Dream with the Nightmare, though that plot seems pretty much resolved, so I'm not sure what you do with it.

    Zul'Drak:

As mentioned above, the Drakkari Trolls were in a rough spot. Not only were the lower parts of the zone taken by the Scourge, but the Trolls themselves had sacrificed their own Loa to gain power to fend off the Scourge.

If this place isn't in ruins, I think you have the potential to explore a civilization that has basically collapsed. The danger is that it might tread similar ground to what we got in Zul'Aman. Notably, back in Burning Crusade, it wasn't clear that the Amani had done anything out of step with their Loas' wishes (the bosses in that before Malacrass and Zul'jin were simply called "Nalorakk" and "Jan'Alai," etc., though later we discovered these were really troll priests who had stolen their Loas' essence).

    Sholazar Basin:

The weird outlier zone, which I think was there in part just to give us a break from all the cold and ice. Not a ton actually happened here, though it's also deeply tied to the Titans and their experiments on Azeroth (more evidently Titanic in nature than its counterpart of Un'Goro Crater in Kalimdor).

Given that we now know that Life is a separate cosmic force from the Titans' Order, might we see some tension between the Titans and their attitudes, as hinted at in lore books we got in Dragonflight?

    Crystalsong Forest:

A bizarre, small zone that I think mainly existed to have not a ton of stuff going on underneath Dalaran. Well, Dalaran sure isn't showing up in Northrend again, so what they actually do with this is up in the air. Night Elf ruins are not quite as prominent in Northrend as they are in other parts of the world, but we have a bit of those here.

    Wintergrasp:

Does Blizzard want to actually re-create the game's first dedicated PvP zone as a PvP zone? The place is also a Titan facility, so outside of that specific gameplay purpose, it could have other functions. Fun fact, Vault of Archavon was where Wrath's equivalent of World Bosses was, which they tied to PvP for some bizarre reason, doing so again in Cataclysm with Tol Barad. Mists of Pandaria brought World Bosses back into the world, but way, way later in 12.1, we got Lairs, which seem to be once again throwing world bosses into instances. They probably want to vary it up, but I wouldn't be shocked to see the Vault of Archavon function as the Lair for the 13.0 world boss.

    Storm Peaks:

Well, surely this is going to be the center of it all, right? With Ulduar as well as tons of other Titan facilities, this is going to be a very important location for the expansion, and I'd be shocked if the expansion's first raid weren't here (this is another example of how expansion design has shifted: back in the early days, you wouldn't expect to go into the big, scary, central-to-the-expansion's vibes structure until the end of the expansion, primarily with Black Temple and Icecrown Citadel. Catalcysm shifted things, with Bastion of Twilight being among the first raids, and since then, final raids have always shown up in new zones or repurposed old ones).

    Icecrown:

Again, given the shift in emphasis, we're going to likely see Icecrown playing second-fiddle to Storm Peaks in contrast to how it was in Wrath. But this is still a storied location, home to some of the most beloved stories out of WoW (and also some controversial ones, like the entrance to the Shadowlands).

I was actually really excited when, at the end of Sepulcher of the First Ones, the Jailer activated the Soul Forges under ICC, which were established in the 3.3 dungeons as part of the Lich King's vast array of sinister-looking tools, but whose purpose was ambiguous.

Again, I don't know how much they want to really build out of the lore of Shadowlands given how unpopular it was (I will say that I actually found a lot to like in Shadowlands, but I think it fell short of its potential, not helped by both Covid and the breaking news of all the horrible scandals at Blizzard that had come to light,) but as the place most closely tied to another major cosmic force that contrasts with Order, I could imagine the Titans being none-too-pleased about this frozen land of the undead being so close to their central command station on Azeroth.

Even if the Last Titan doesn't focus on the Scourge or undead in general as much as Wrath did, I think it would be insane for us to come to Northrend and not at least touch on it. Icecrown is both less important with the end of the Lich King (not Bolvar individually, but the Helm of Domination) but also more important given its connection to the Shadowlands.

What the zone actually looks like? That I'm not sure about. All those Saronite ramparts would presumably be very difficult to actually destroy or dismantle, and there's a part of me that wonders if the resilience of the architecture there might actually wind up being an important asset in fending off the zealous Titanic enforcers.

Arthas is deader than dead, but the Scourge as a thing is notably still around, just leaderless and disorganized. Nowhere more appropriate to explore what that means than Icecrown.

    Anyway, we're still surely many months away from learning about the Last Titan's features and general scope.

I will say that while I did technically start playing in Vanilla, and I was there for all of Burning Crusade, Wrath was the expansion that I first felt that I really experienced nearly in its entirety at the time. We didn't actually get the Lich King down, but this was the expansion in which I first found a guild that did regular raiding, and I felt like I was truly getting all I could out of the game.

So I am full of Northrend nostalgia. Curious to see what they do with it.

Is The Last Titan Finally Time for Tinkers?

 WoW has had a pretty big influence on my taste in fantasy. Before I played WoW, I had no particular affinity for dark and gothic fantasy and the use of undead as monsters to fight, but I found myself so enamored with the Scourge and the Plaguelands as a setting (and the playable Undead) that it's now become pretty core to a lot of what I do in fantasy, like how I tend to use a lot of undead monsters in my D&D games (especially when a campaign is starting off).

But in a similar way, I don't know that I was all that into the idea of anachronistically advanced technology in an otherwise classic medieval fantasy world, but boy did WoW instill that in me.

WoW's approach to technology has never been realistic. In the real world, technology has generally gotten more powerful and more efficient over time. While it's debatable how much life has actually gotten better with technological progress (though I think we sometimes forget how miserable life was prior to innovations in agriculture and medicine) it's pretty clear that in a military sense (it is Warcraft after all) that a modern military unit with attack drones, automatic weapons, and guided missiles would fare quite well against a medieval unit of a bunch of peasants with (generously) pikes supported by longbowmen and armored knights.

But in World of Warcraft, we have people like the Draenei, with futuristic crystal technology like something out of a far-future sci-fi story, compared with the Tauren, who have stone-age (and I don't mean this in the pejorative way, but in the sense that much of their stuff is made of stone) tools, but it's all actually balanced out because of, well, the way that game balance works.

There is a conceit here in fantasy that you don't get with sci-fi, which is that the more "primitive" technology might be imbued with powerful magic. In a sense, magic can be a kind of alternative path or, depending on your perspective, just a different avenue of technological development.

The point, though, is that Warcraft as a franchise has never shied away from having modern and futuristic technology.

In Dungeons & Dragons, some were a little put off by the introduction of the Artificer class, fearing that it was injecting a steampunk aesthetic into a game that they preferred stick to the pre-industrial style of fantasy. I think there were some mitigating factors, though. First off, the class was initially introduced for the Eberron setting, which is explicitly meant to feel like 1930s pulp adventure stories, with a city full of skyscrapers, airships, and lightning rail trains, along with a playable species that are basically robots (though I'd argue, especially given the runes they each have on their foreheads, that they are more accurately sentient golems). On top of that, there are subclasses for the Artificer, like the Alchemist, that live very comfortably in a pure medieval world.

But I don't think you would have any trouble with an equivalent class in World of Warcraft, given the wide breadth of technology levels that we already have well-represented in-game. The Engineering profession has, since vanilla, always injected that Steampunk/Gearpunk look and feel into the game.

That profession does kind of inhabit similar spaces to where I'd expect a Tinker class to live, but such overlap is not a dealbreaker - I have a Blood Elf Shadow Priest I created right when Burning Crusade came out, and the introduction of the Void Elves does raise some interesting questions about what that actually means for him as a character (why is he tolerated in Silvermoon while his Ren'dorei cousins aren't? Though to be fair, he does get hostile comments from passers-by in Midnight-era Silvermoon).

I don't think there's quite the precedence we had for Death Knights and Demon Hunters in terms of the Tinker as a new class. Many WoW classes were built on the conceptual bones of Warcraft III heroes, with Arthas serving as the model for both the Paladin and Death Knight (his abilities being much more mirrored than the two classes are in 2026) and Illidan as the Demon Hunter. Chen Stormstout, who appeared in the Founding of Durotar campaign, which focused more on the RPG elements present in the game, gave us the Brewmaster, which would be expanded out into the Monk class (itself a fairly common RPG class archetype, though I think WoW's version is far more mystical/magical than they tend to be).

Lore-wise, there is a role of High Tinker as the elected leader of the Gnomes of Gnomeregan (though boy, how long has Gelbin's incumbency lasted? How long are the terms?) but there's no formal suite of abilities I think we could draw from as the starting point for the class.

The Evoker, however, was pretty much unprecedented in the lore. Warcraft III came out 24 years ago, so I don't think that WoW needs to remain beholden to it (and it certainly hasn't been that way - though I do find it interesting that the new WCIII campaign chapter apparently establishes Forsaken Paladins. If only I could get my old copy to install!) Basically, behind the Deep Breath ability, I don't think anything that the Evoker casts had any direct precedence other than the obvious presence of dragons across WoW's history.

In a similar way, I don't think this would be much of a problem for the Tinker as a class.

So, let's ask a couple questions: First, why now? Second, if we do get them, what kind of class might they be?

As to the "why now," the main thing I have to say is: giant robots. We got a tiny teaser for Last Titan, where a truly staggeringly enormous mech (bigger than Dimensius, possibly?) towers over Dragonblight. There is some speculation that this mech is Ulduar, animating like a transformer, though I don't know how compelling the arguments for that are.

The Last Titan is likely to feature the Titans and their creations quite heavily, and Titan stuff has always been technologically-themed, with the Titanforged creations acting as automatons, the creeping corruption of the Old Gods' Curse of Flesh being the only thing that would lead to fully sentient Humans, Dwarves, Gnomes, and such.

Titan technology is thus probably the most advanced technology that we've ever seen in the WoW universe (other than possibly the First Ones, though I don't know to what extent Blizzard is going to lean so much into the presence of the First Ones as they kind of feel like they're just the Titans, but... um... older, and they made the Titans, right? Feels a bit like lore one-upsmanship at the cost of narrative cohesion, even if I thought the aesthetic of Zereth Mortis was freaking incredible).

And so, it would make sense to have a class that really focuses on technology coming into the spotlight.

But what kind of class would it be?

Well, let's start with the basics at the beginning:

I think that in an ideal world, the Tinker would, like the Monk, be a "regular" class, rather than a Hero class that starts at higher levels. Granted, these days, Death Knights, Demon Hunters, and Evokers start at level 10, just a small boost compared to other characters, but the appeal for each was that you could get one started and immediately jump into the current content.

Frankly, I don't know that the leveling game is all that great right now - one of the problems is that you level up faster than your quests give you appropriate gear, and with level scaling, this winds up making you feel less powerful (it's still better than the pre-level-squish days when you'd level up without getting any sort of talent point or new ability and truly be worse off in every way when you hit a new level).

Notably, when introduced, Death Knights started at level 55 when the level cap had just raised to 80, so you were still expected to level up through Outland before heading to Northrend, where established characters could go at midnight right when the expansion came out (I think I actually hopped in to start my DK at the time. This was also when you had to go to the store at midnight to pick up the game with its discs to install it, which did sort of stagger when people were logging in. I think the first expansion I got purely digitally was Warlords of Draenor, which had an infamously rough launch).

Monks were the only class added to the game that started at level 1, and when you were going around Pandaria in the first few weeks of Mists, it was very funny to just not see anyone playing the new class because, well, they hadn't gotten to a high enough level to start yet! The first time I saw a Monk in one of my dungeon groups, like a week and a half in, I was astonished that they had leveled so quickly (this was also when leveling was a slower process).

Should the Tinker be released, I think it would make sense for it to be a "normal" class, but I think the appeal of getting them into the mix from the get-go might compel Blizzard to have them start off at a higher level, at least during The Last Titan. But that would also meant they probably need a unique starting experience.

That's actually probably fine. While "allied races" get a brief intro, it's not a fully starting zone or anything, and so the last time we truly got a fully-fledged starting zone for a new race was... The Pandaren on the Wandering Isle, 14 years ago. Now, I love the Worgen starting zone (can you guess what class I'd think of making a Tinker? In fairness, the last three times they released a new class, I had hoped to make a Worgen character, only to find out that they were not allowed. Worgen Monks are a thing now, but they weren't available during Mists, so my Monk is a Pandaren like I assume 90% of them are,) but it's not exactly "current" content up to all the modern standards.

Still, more like the Monk than WoW's three hero classes, Tinkers feel like they would be something that's just a learned discipline rather than some intrinsic alteration to one's physiology, which means in my mind that you could easily make them available to every playable race, and we probably don't need special cosmetic customizations and unique voice lines the way that Demon Hunters do (though note that Void Elf demon hunters use standard Void Elf voices).

In other words, I think the class can sit upon the existing races without much issue.

But what would the class actually... play like? What roles might it perform in a group?

I think that the safest bet is to just let it do all three: Tank, Damage, and Heal. I think each of these can easily be justified by the use of technology that is specialized for that role.

Then, the next question is armor type. This is, I guess, less of an issue in today's WoW where so much loot is just personal and you get all your relevant stats on any armor, but it can be a matter of aesthetics.

I think that, no matter what, they've got to have one of the heavier kinds of armor. Mail or Plate could both work. They should be wearing some kind of metallic armor. Between the two, I'd lean in more for Plate, but it does create some (admittedly easily-solved) issues based on where I go with this.

Plate armor, I think, works for the Tinker because of how you could imagine a Tinker building out their armor like a hull. There's precedence with Tanks, as all plate-wearing classes can perform the Tank role, and precedence for healers wearing Plate thanks to Paladins.

Now, I'd like Tinkers to all use Intellect as their primary stat, but for Tanks, it would make more sense to go with Strength given that tank trinkets tend to have Strength and Agility on them. That's fine - these stats are nearly indistinguishable in modern WoW, as you get equal numbers of any piece of gear you're likely to actually use.

Here, though, is where my vision for the class makes itemization slightly awkward:

I think their DPS spec should be ranged, and use ranged weapons.

Back when we had a ranged weapon slot, Warriors and Rogues would wield bows, crossbows, and guns, even if they only used them as "stat sticks." But since the removal of said slot (I want to say in Mists? Monks never had a relic for that slot, did they?) these three weapon categories have been used by only a single class, and after Legion redefined Survival as a strictly melee spec, only two specs actually use these three kinds of weapons. The Demon Hunter-exclusive Warglaive weapon, thus, ironically, with the addition of the Devourer spec, is now used by more specs than these three weapon types that were once used by nine different specs.

I think Tinkers should use ranged weapons.

But that does, admittedly, create some itemization issues. If it's a Plate class, Tinkers would be using Intellect or Strength as their primary stat, and ranged weapons only have agility on them.

Now, one solution is profoundly simple: just add stats. They did this with Warglaives in Midnight, adding Intellect on top of Agility so that any Demon Hunter can use any Warglaive and have it function for their spec. Perhaps we could then add Strength or Intellect to ranged weapons as well.

We've put the cart before the horse a little, though, so let me back up:

Currently, every Tank class has a melee dps spec. It makes sense, as if you're a class that can fight in melee, it seems reasonable that you could focus those skills on survival or on damage output.

But I do think that the Tinker ought to be able to use guns (and by extension, bows and crossbows). In part, this is because the Engineering profession has always been the one that is used to make guns. But I also think that a weapon like that is, you know, a bit of advanced technology.

Also, from Vanilla up through Shadowlands, WoW had not added a single ranged dps spec to the game (even removing one by making Survival a melee spec in Legion). Since then, we have gotten three new ones with Devastation, Augmentation, and Devourer. Weirdly, all three of these have been "short range" ranged specs, so you could argue that we still haven't seen a single "full range" ranged spec added to the game in its 22 years.

Now, it would probably be simpler to just make a ranged Tinker DPS spec function as a spellcaster - you already have Intellect on Plate. But I really feel that making the class more generally weapon-based would be a better choice - a weapon, after all, is a type of tool.

The other alternative is to just make the class a Mail one - Agility could work for ranged weapons, and half of the existing tank classes use Agility anyway. Bizarrely, despite Mail actually giving more armor than Leather, we don't actually have any Mail tanks (though there's an evergreen rumor that Shaman tanks are right around the corner, which has been circulating for about 22 years). Itemization works out fine here, as tanks and dps would use agility trinkets while healers would use intellect.

I think this could work, but I do feel like the aesthetic of Plate makes more sense to me.

Next, another thing:

Let Tinkers use Shields.

It's kind of absurd that only three classes in WoW can use Shields, and one of them can't even tank! The fact that 4/6 tanks don't use shields is kind of crazy. I get why Death Knights went without them (though funnily enough, the D&D Death Knight monster stat block does use a shield) and it wouldn't really make sense for Monks or Demon Hunters. I'm not sure it really makes sense for Shamans, except that back in Vanilla when Paladins and Shamans were faction-exclusive, you had to have someone on the Horde who could make use of all the Intellect Shields.

But I think Shields make a lot of sense for Tinkers, and we even have a fair amount of precedence with various mech suits and such using shields.

Mechanically, I think Tinkers could just use Mana, though this resource has basically ceased to have any real meaning for specs that aren't Healers or Arcane Mages (and I think even for them, managing mana has gotten less central). I think instead I'd prefer some form of unique, original resource like Power.

This could act as a secondary resource like Essence does for Evokers or Runes for Death Knights (well, I'd argue that Runes are the primary resource and Runic Power is secondary, but whatever).

I don't really want to get into the weeds on this, though. Broadly speaking, I think tanks would probably have bursts of electricity and fire (maybe some arcane damage to distinguish it a bit from Shamans) and use force fields as damage absorption shields. Ranged dps would distinguish themselves from Hunters by focusing on charging their shots with various energies and possibly throwing bombs and missiles (I realize there's a bit of an overlap here with Survival Hunters). Healers, I figure, would channel healing energy into allies, maybe shielding them and possibly tossing down helpful pylons (though I get that the latter concept is a bit Shaman-like).

Aesthetically, here's what I'd want to avoid:

The Dracthyr problem.

I think part of why the Dracthyr are (I take it) unpopular is that you don't actually get to see your freaking gear on them when they're in their draconic true form. So much of the fun of a WoW character is building the perfect aesthetic for them, and while the Dracthyr customization options are broad and deep, they still pale in comparison with the sheer breadth of transmog options that any other WoW character can get their hands on.

Truly, I try to fill out the full tier sets for each class each season (ideally grabbing Heroic pieces in each slot and upgrading them to 6/6 to get the Mythic looks) but with Evokers I don't think I've ever actually done so because... well, why bother?

This is, admittedly, something of a problem for Druids, and while I love the spooky Wicker Man vibes of my Kul Tiran Druid (the only BFA Allied race who took over as a class main and had me putting my 2006 vintage Night Elf Druid in mothballs) I'm less motivated to grab all those transmog appearances given that when he's in combat, he always looks the same.

I do want Tinkers to have a signature, unusual look, but I don't want that to get in the way of letting their actual chosen gear appearances showing up.

Now, I don't think that's going to be much of a problem: the problem for Evokers is really more a problem of Dracthyr, and if this is available to every race, then I think we'll be fine.

But, that being said, I think we could do some fun things:

I think the tank spec should be in some kind of mech suit. The key is to make the suit unobtrusive enough that you can still show off your cool transmog. In fairness, maybe the solution is simply to have Tinker tier sets give off something of a mech suit vibe. Spells/abilities that manifest as big mechanical arms or antennae or the like might be enough to give off this feel.

Blizzard has gotten more creative with how class abilities manifest themselves, so maybe we can evoke the idea of being in a mech suit without messing too much with the overall silhouette of our character.

    So, as a big caveat: there's zero direct evidence that we're getting a Tinker class. It'll be probably a ways into 2027 before we get firm details on the actual expansion features of The Last Titan, and much as we never got Necromancers in Shadowlands, there's every possibility that the announcement will come and go with no new class announcement (though I think if not, there's a decent possibility we'll see new specs added, like the aforementioned Shaman tank).

I would very much like to get a Tinker like what I've described, but this is all just rampant speculation for now.

Faction Division and World of Warcraft D&D

 I've been following the WotC-produced "Dungeon Masters" series, which does short (like, less than ten episodes a pop) campaigns with a consistent group of players (including a couple of Baldur's Gate 3 cast members and also someone who is a friend of a friend), basically acting as promotion for the latest D&D book, with a series based in Ravenloft, then one themed around the arcane magic of Arcana Unleashed, and coming up, an Azeroth-based World of Warcraft adventure.

Now, WoW is a game that was built at least initially around a factional divide: the Alliance versus the Horde. While the world of Azeroth is threatened by villains that both Horde and Alliance are equally investing in stopping, the bad blood between these two groups created a perpetual engine of conflict, driving some of the drama and even taking center-stage with the Battle for Azeroth expansion (though that expansion was sort of half-invested in this divide and half in the machinations of the Old God N'zoth).

Starting with 2022's Dragonflight, the barriers between the factions have been loosened and made more permeable, with the resolution of 2018's Battle for Azeroth seeming to establish an enduring peace between the two sides (such that in the current expansion, Midnight, the central capital city is Silvermoon, which is the historical capital of the Blood Elves, a member race/nation of the Horde. The fact that there are still Alliance-aligned High Elves and Void Elves who are essentially the same people as the Blood Elves except for different politics and perhaps a bit of an infusion of different kinds of magic into their physiologies both stirs tension but also gives the Alliance a slightly more reasonable foothold to justify their presence here - something that the Blood Elf NPCs of Silvermoon have very conflicted feelings about).

Generally speaking, I'm a strong advocate of letting players play what they want to play. But I do think it's an interesting and worthwhile session zero discussion to have if you're going to play a Warcraft D&D campaign as to whether you want to make a party that is firmly affiliated with just one faction.

While there are some exceptions - the Pandaren, Dracthyr, Earthen, and Haranir - generally the race (or species, to use D&D's newly preferred term) determines your affiliation. When WoW first came out, the Alliance was Humans, Dwarves, Gnomes, and Night Elves, while the Horde was Orcs, Trolls, Tauren, and Undead (presented in the book as Forsaken, which is the term they use to distinguish themselves from mindless servants of the Lich King in the Scourge).

The first two games only had the Alliance and Horde as factions (actually, in the first game it was more accurately just Humans versus Orcs. While the Orcs had formed their Horde, the kingdom of Stormwind stood alone against them, with the Alliance not actually forming until the Second War, aka the second game). Thus, all conflict in those first two games was primarily through the clashing of these two factions (though I think there were opportunities to have Alliance vs. Alliance and Horde vs. Horde thanks to the traitorous human kingdom Alterac, secretly taken over by the black dragon Deathwing, and I believe the divide between the demon-worshipping forces loyal to Gul'dan in the Horde versus the more independence-minded faction under Warchief Orgrim Doomhammer).

While most of the world has always been available to both sides, there have always been territories where one side is welcome and the other is not, especially the major cities, where powerful elite NPCs are there to protect it, and player characters get flagged as valid targets for PvP even if you're on a non-PvP server (or, in more recent years, simply not in "war mode.")

Again, even though both factions are generally heroic (though I do feel that the Horde seems to slip into villainy a little easier) through much of the game's history, there has been a simmering hostility when there isn't outright warfare breaking out between them.

In a lot of ways, though, I think that the exciting possibility of a WoW D&D campaign would be to be able to do the things you can't usually do in WoW. That could as simple as having an Orc Druid (which is honestly probably the best way to realize the more spellcasting-focused Shaman specializations) but it could also mean having the party need to advocate for allowing their Forsaken party member to be allowed to enter Stormwind without being immediately cut down.

The faction conflict could be an interesting source of drama and tension within a party - rather than just assuming a total incompatibility, perhaps lean into the idea that we do, in fact, need to band together to face graver threats.

To be clear, NPCs have often and frequently reached across the factional divide. In Cataclysm, we were introduced to a pair of young paladins, Tarenar Sunstrike and Gidwin Goldbraids, a Blood Elf and Dwarf, who traveled the Plaguelands hoping to join the Argent Crusade (a faction-neutral force dedicated to protecting the world from the Scourge). Or we have Tehd and Marius, a Forsaken Warlock and Night Elf Demon Hunter who go around looking for powerful demons to slay.

The freedom, I think, of running a WoW-based D&D game is that you can really mix things up. Sentinel Hill is the central "town" of the rural realm of Westfall, basically the Kansas of the kingdom of Stormwind, and is basically the second zone that human players are expected to go in the natural quest flow from the human starting area - back in the day, you'd head there around level 10 (remember that WoW originally had a max level of 60, so 10 was really just getting started - I'd say it's basically the equivalent of level 3 in D&D. You started to get talent points/pick your specialization at 10, much as in D&D you get your subclass at level 3). 

But there's nothing saying you can't have an adventure set in Westfall that is far higher-stakes than anything that we've seen in the zone before (ok, to be fair, during the Legion pre-launch event in 2016, there was a full-scale demon invasion, a tier 4 challenge if ever I heard of one).

In other words, if your party is a mixed-faction group, that doesn't mean that firmly Alliance or Horde areas are necessarily going to be safe for everyone, and even if you've got some in-narrative explanation for why that Worgen is allowed to walk around Thunder Bluff without issue, it doesn't mean that hostile factions in your campaign's story aren't going to make these "safe" territories a bit dangerous.

While I don't know that it tells it with profound nuance (it does have its moments,) the overall "message" or "theme" of WoW is that these divides leave lasting scars, but at the end of the day, we're all just people, and when we can recognize that, we can work together toward a common goal (is that goal usually fighting some different "other?" For sure. It is Warcraft, after all).

But also, conflict is where we get drama, and while you want a party that can ultimately find a way to work together, I think having inherent resentments and grievances in a mixed-faction party could make for some really interesting roleplay.

Why Is Jesse MIA in Control Resonant?

 In Control, Jesse's primary motivation entering the Oldest House is simply to find her brother. Nearly two decades earlier, the FBC abducted Dylan in a misguided attempt to groom him as the next Director, seeing his paranatural abilities and figuring that if they controlled (it's kind of a theme word) everything about his upbringing that he'd wind up an ideal successor to Trench.

This backfired like crazy. Not only did a young Dylan kill numerous FBC personnel, but he wound up resenting the Bureau so much that he welcomed the Hiss when it began infecting everyone there.

Dylan's unique resilience to his Hiss infection is notable - he retains a sort of intelligence and intelligibility. Is this because of the lingering presence of Polaris? Is it because of his own paranatural powers? Is it because he didn't resist?

The point is, Control doesn't end with much of a victory for Jesse. The Hiss are still rampant in the Oldest House, the lockdown can't be lifted. The only real point she manages to score is that Dylans is... not infected by the Hiss anymore, but it's something of a Pyrrhic victory, as Dylan is comatose. Not exactly the reunion she was aiming for, and now she's trapped in the building, performing a leadership role for a Bureau that she only vaguely understood before that fateful night, that same Bureau that abused her brother for the better part of his life.

The FBC as an entity occupies a strange space in the world: Clearly, it has done some really morally wrong things. But there are factors that make us (or at least made me) view them in a more positive light: first, that there truly are threats that need to be handled, and the clandestine secrecy might actually have some justification given that the rules of the paranormal/supernatural (my guess is the insistent use of "paranatural," which is not a term I'd ever heard before playing the game or anywhere else since, is meant to blur the lines between the more sci-fi term of paranormal and the more fantasy term of supernatural) mean that people simply believing things can shape reality.

It's honestly one of the most potent concepts in speculative fiction: the whole scientific, empirical manner of viewing and studying the world rests on the assumption that our observations reflect a concrete, objective universe underlying everything that is consistent and exists completely independent of our perception of it. But the only evidence we have of that objective universe are our very flawed perceptions, and the more we learn about psychology, the more fallible our perceptions prove to be, which raises the question: can we be so certain that there is an objective reality, or is reality malleable and shaped by perception?

Beyond that, there's also an adventurous spirit amongst people at the FBC, especially as embodied by Casper Darling, which makes it very easy to forget that what he did to Dylan was unconscionable.

Jesse, after what you'd assume would be a horrible trauma of walking into an office right after the man inside shot himself, and then being compelled to pick up the gun and hold it to your head while you go through some bizarre psychic evaluation, arrives back in her own body and says she's actually happy she's there - she's excited to be initiated into this world of the Weird.

In other words, even if the FBC has played an antagonistic role toward her through much of her life, the world it opens up to her is something she deems worth it.

Generally, I think we're meant to think of Jesse as a good person. She wants to save as many lives as she can, and she hopes to reform the FBC with whatever power she gets from being the Director. But it's such a weird idea, to find this secret government agency and to be in charge of it ten minutes after walking in the door before meeting any employees other than the mysterious janitor.

I haven't played FBC Firebreak, but I'm given to understand that in the documents found in that game, Jesse is not terribly popular with the Oldest House staff. I mean, who would be happy with things when you're stuck inside an office building filled with deadly threats for a full seven years?

Control Resonant, we know, will be inverting the story a bit - instead of Jesse looking for Dylan, Dylan is looking for Jesse. And instead of entering into this strange world of the Oldest House, Dylans is emerging out into the wide world that has been denied to him for most of his life (if memory serves, Dylan was born in 1992, so he's 34, and has spent 24 of those years inside that freaking building).

We know that Jesse is the one who drives the Aberrant, which will be his weapon as the Service Weapon is for her, into Dylan's abdomen while he's lying in his coma, and at least the way the trailers are edited, this seems to be what wakes him up.

But... does that make sense? I don't know if the timeline actually adds up if that's the case.

Because the last time we saw Dylan was not 2019, but 2023, when Kieran Estevez was investigating the Lake House out near Bright Falls, and was transported via the Oceanview Motel into the Containment Sector of the Oldest House, where she found Dylan in a containment unit.

Now, it's possible this was some kind of mental construct: I doubt that Jesse would have allowed him to be kept in such a bare-bones glass case. But here I need to break through the fourth wall and say that it's also possible that Remedy just didn't want to built all the assets to give Dylan a nice and comfortable cell.

I do think, though, that there's strong evidence to support the idea that Dylan wakes up before 2026 - not only can Kieran talk with him in that meeting (and again, could be a mental construct, could also be a connection across temporal distances) but there are also drawings found in the Lake House evidently made by Dylan.

Hm. But how would they have those if they weren't from before the lockdown...?

Ok, maybe that's not a valid line of reasoning.

The point is, Jesse drives the Aberrant into Dylan while he seems to still be in his coma, and that seems to initiate his bonding with what we can probably assume is an Object of Power (it may have even been described as one officially - though the name certainly elicits some curiosity.

If Dylan just wakes up right when that happens, surely he might have a moment to speak with Jesse. Might she give him some hint as to where he's going?

In clips of the game we've seen in previews, Dylan does seem to be able to interact with Jesse in the mind-place like "Gap" (the stunning instant-shift to the Mind Place and the Writer's Room from Alan Wake II will evidently also be how we access the Gap in Resonant) but she also seems to doubt that it's actually him that she's interacting with.

Jesse is missing - that seems to be the headline. And with her gone, the FBC turns to Dylan as the other incredibly powerful Parautilitarian to try to deal with some of the threats out there.

But why does she leave?

Ok, to be fair, that's probably the driving mystery of the game.

I guess there's a question, though, of the timeline:

It sounds like there is some signal detected days before the Oldest House lockdown fails, which I think Emily Pope describes as some unprecedented resonance.

The catalyst or source of that resonance is probably related to the Blessed Organization (I don't know about you, but I always read Blessed as the two-syllable version, like a "Blessèd Day!" Do we get any audio of FBC people reading it out loud? Or did I just conclude that on my own?) We know from emails with Barry that Chester Bless said something about it being good that Barry had gotten out of New York - a decidedly ominous remark that Barry doesn't seem to find nearly as concerning as he probably should.

But will Blessed be our main antagonists in Resonant? Or are they just the ones who tip over the first domino?

Bless cheekily seemed to imply he had some connection to the Board - his motivational speaking tour employed what was probably an Altered Item that was a Surf Board, but given the power behind the FBC, and Bless's well-informed understanding of the Bureau's inner workings (enough to, for example, send a deadly altered item to the America Overnight studio, a show that was not publicly known to be an FBC project,) it seems pretty clear that he knows about the Board.

But here's the question: Is Bless and his organization opposed to the Board? Or are they actually working for the Board behind the scenes?

Control's Foundation DLC sees tensions begin to form between Jesse and the Board. They, bizarrely, limit the powers that they are willing to grant her while down there, despite the fact that she clearly needs both to fix the problem there. And the Board also seems to sabotage Marshall's HRA in retaliation for her destruction of the Nail, an act she does to prevent the Hiss from infecting it. While the ensuing problems from this action are, of course, also quite dangerous, it shows both a ruthlessness and an evident misaligned set of priorities between the human FBC and the inhuman Board.

I think it's very possible that Jesse's awareness of the danger that the Board poses to her and to the entire world grew over her seven years stuck in the Oldest House. And I think the most obvious reason for her to go MIA is because she knows that the Board is ready to get rid of her, no longer convinced that she can be useful to them anymore. Trench, it would seem, after his infection by the Hiss, had proven to no longer be a suitable choice for Director, and I believe it was the Board that forced to blow his brains out with the Service Weapon.

I think there's a good chance, then, that if they retain control of that OOP, Jesse might not be carrying it with her anymore, because the Board might no longer feel they can control (there's that word again) her as Director.

It would explain a couple things: first, why Dylan doesn't get the Service Weapon (while we see it as a gun throughout the first game, it is implied that it has taken on other forms, including possible Mjolnir and Excalibur, both of which are melee weapons that would suit Dylan's playstyle). But it would also explain why Jesse has to leave in a hurry without telling anyone where she's going or why.

Much as Dylan has even less reason to trust the FBC than Jesse did, it also stands to reason that as someone who is unlikely to romanticize the world of the Weird, having steeped in it for nearly a quarter-century, we might see the Board go from creepy but ostensible ally in the first game to the ultimate threat that must be defeated in the second.