With the final wing of the final raid of War Within now available on LFR, the expansion itself has more or less come to a conclusion. We're now in the year-ish-long wait until the release of Midnight, which was actually announced back in 2023, but we got significantly more details at this year's Gamescom (a venue that some have said was not really best-suited to introducing a new expansion. I remember how Legion was also announced there, to a near-silent crowd, which might have been a mix of how much ill-will Warlords of Draenor had generated and also just the big distinction between German and American audiences, but Legion wound up being counted as a top contender for best expansion ever).
Naturally, we won't know how history views the expansion until it's been a few years. But I'll tell you my general sense:
War Within followed Dragonflight, an expansion that I think really demonstrated a huge philosophical shift in WoW's design after the frustrations of Shadowlands (the latter of which I think suffered from things outside the team's control, namely the pandemic and the breaking of the scandals surrounding many longstanding Blizzard higher-ups). Indeed, much of that philosophical transformation occurred even in Shadowlands' last patch, but the general sense of "hey, listen to what the players want and give them that" became a guiding philosophy that really shaped Dragonflight.
As such, I think War Within represented an opportunity to discover what the staying power of that philosophy was. I think WoW is in a fairly healthy place, but largely because of what changes came in the previous expansion, though we saw some iteration on these philosophies in War Within.
As I see it, we should mark two things in particular when it comes to what War Within really innovated with on a system level:
First, Warbands as a framework foregrounding player progression rather than character progression is really nice. I love that I don't have to worry about grinding reputation on all of my alts, and now, it's pretty easy to hit all the world quests that earn reputation weekly because I'll naturally want to do different ones on different characters.
Warbands are honestly just an expansion of other things that the game had already started to trend toward, like unlocking all your collected pets and mounts on every character (it was always ironic that I had gotten the Headless Horseman's Mount on my Druid, when I really wanted it on my Undead Rogue). But expanding this out to allow us to, for example, share profession resources between characters on different realms and in different factions has just been, well, great and good. I don't think there's a single player out there who ever felt that it would take away from their alt experience to not have to spend weeks grinding from Honored to Revered on their fifth character.
The other huge systems change is the introduction of Delves.
Arguably since Mists of Pandaria's Scenarios, they've always been trying to build some kind of more informal content that can have significant rewards without requiring you to get a tank and healer. I'll always have a soft spot in my heart for the structure of the 5-man dungeon, and later experiments, like the Deaths of Chromie, the Horrific Visions, and Torghast, always promised this rewarding truly solo-able experience that never quite clicked.
Delves finally solved it: they truly feel like dungeons, but they've figured out a way to balance it so that it is both a challenge but also doable as a single player. And I think they've had some really great, creative ideas: I love that each Delve has several different scenarios that can change up what the objectives are, sometimes reversing the direction through which you clear it, or otherwise changing it up. Blizzard has shown a willingness to continue adding scenarios to these delves or even altering core elements to them (such as how The Sinkhole and Tak'rethan Abyss are both now drained of water in 11.2 - which arguably robs them of some of their distinctiveness, though it does make me more willing to run them on characters who aren't my Undead or Warlock who can breath underwater).
Interestingly, I do think that Delves also draw some attention to some of the challenges of class balance. For whatever reason, my Enhancement Shaman feels very squishy in Delves, whereas even my cloth-wearing Frost Mage and Shadow Priest feel quite capable of tanking swarms of enemies relying only on the periodic Dwarven Potions that Brann tosses out to them.
I will say that Delves do create the following: it really lets you tune out a lot of the rest of the game. It's so, so much easier to just solo some high-tier delves to get heroic-raid-level gear than it is to, say, be part of a heroic raiding guild (when my guild wasn't a total ghost town, we struggled to just do Normal raids.) Thanks to the item upgrade system and some lucky drops, I was able to get a full set of the Mythic Death Knight set appearance in the previous patch (by upgrading heroic pieces to 5/6). Now, this is kind of working as intended - they want you to be able to play the way you want. I will say, I really applaud the introduction of Dark Souls-style records of other players' deaths in delves added in this patch. This is a kind of hands-off multiplayer that takes advantage of WoW's offline nature while still letting you play alone if that's the style you prefer (I especially like how you can get a buff for slaying the creature that slayed another character - a buff I think they also get if they're still working on the delve).
War Within also did something very bold - though I'll note that this boldness was kind of pulled back on. With Zaralek Caverns as a clear test-run for this kind of thing, War Within's four initial zones were 3/4 underground. Even if the Ringing Deeps, Hallowfall, and Azj-Kahet are ultimately also spaced out horizontally, there's a sense of progression over the course of the default leveling campaign, where you descend deeper and deeper into the earth with each zone.
Unfortunately, I think Blizzard got a little gunshy here, and if there's one major criticism I have for War Within's story, it's that it doesn't really commit to anything. The promise, when we arrive on the Isle of Dorn, is that we're going to follow the Coreway down toward the World Soul of Azeroth. The Nerubians are blocking that path, and so we need to make our way down there to get past them, but once Ansurek is defeated, our downward momentum is halted and we don't ever actually go deeper.
11.1's Undermine patch does remain on theme, at least, keeping us in a subterranean environment, and I think constant readers of this blog who recall my love of modernity in fantasy will not be surprised that I loved Undermine: it's one of my favorite environments I've ever seen in World of Warcraft. And yet, as much as I adored it, the story felt kind of tangential to the one that I thought this expansion was about.
K'aresh's introduction in 11.2 is even more of a swerve. Once again, an expansion's final boss is not even barely hinted at in the patches leading up to it, and also, the K'aresh story was one that in the past I'd always assumed would be something we'd get an entire expansion about: though admittedly, I might have said the same about Argus (are they really so hesitant to do a full science-fantasy alien world expansion? The only one we really got of that was Burning Crusade).
Now, don't get me wrong: on an aesthetic level, I love K'aresh (next to my love of modernity in fantasy is my love of science-fantasy that really leans into the sci-fi aesthetic). And I'm happy to see the Brokers again (even if I feel like Ve'nari's reveal as just an altruistic hero feels like it undercuts the delightfully shady vibes we got when we met her in the Maw). But the biggest issue I have with K'aresh is the way that it comes out of freaking nowhere (I mean, it was clearly always planned, given Ky'veza in Nerub'ar Palace) and doesn't fit into the "deep underground" theme of the expansion. If they wanted to have Dimensius as a big bad but not center an entire expansion around K'aresh, wouldn't this have worked better as a middle patch, like Yogg-Saron?
The War Within was conceived as the first part of the three-expansion Worldsoul Saga, and I think one of the hazards you run into with something like that (especially when this isn't the first expansion, but the tenth) is that you need to tell a complete story while still leaving room for the rest of the saga.
And I think War Within's biggest failing is that I don't feel like I really experienced an expansion story with it. Instead, this has felt like three patches in what I presume will be kind of a nine-patch expansion. Will all these threads come together by the end of The Last Titan? In, like, four years?
Again, I think a lot of WoW's trending has been to smarter and more player-friendly design. And I think there's been a lot of intriguing story stuff going on here, even if I don't really have a sense of its cohesion.
Oh wow, I didn't even talk about Hero Talents. I guess what I'm hoping is that they'll work very hard to balance them. Granted, I guess you'll always see some level of optimization pushing you one way or another, but I'd really like my Undead Subtlety Rogue to go Deathstalker instead of Trickster.
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