Midnight Releases March 2nd, 2026

 Oh hey! I'll still be in my 30s when Midnight releases!

Yes, we've got an official release date for Midnight, WoW's eleventh expansion, and part two of the Worldsoul Sage trilogy of expansions. It's March 2nd (you saw the title, right?)

This does mean that I get about two months in my 30s to play the expansion. The reason I find that particularly interesting is that I started playing WoW when I was 20, so some time around the end of 2026 (maybe just over into 2027, because I was a few months past 20 when I started playing) I'll have been playing this game for half my freaking life, which is insane.

Also of note, this March release will make The War Within the shortest WoW expansion ever, at just 18 Months (approximately). The previous record-holder was a tie between Warlords and Cataclysm, which both felt longer, I think, especially Warlords, which had an enormous content drought.

With War Within only lasting about a year and a half, we might have to reconsider the general cadence of expansion launches.

Generally, starting in full force with Wrath of the Lich King, we've tended to get an expansion launch in late summer or fall of even-numbered years and we get the next expansion announcement around the same time in odd-numbered years.

But unless Midnight is by far our longest expansion (previous record holder was BFA with 26 months, though Shadowlands had been intended to launch earlier, but you might remember this somewhat disruptive virus going around in 2020, which delayed it. Runner-up is split between Wrath, Mists, and Vanilla - if you count it as, well, not an "expansion" but a phase of the game's life - with 25 months) we can probably expect the Last Titan to launch either around two years later in late winter/early spring of 2028, or, if Midnight has a similar lifespan to War Within, as early as Summer/Fall of 2027. As a note, if that were the case, it would be the first expansion since Burning Crusade to launch in an odd-numbered year, 20 years later.

Anyway, the upshot of all of this is that, while we still have a couple months to do what we wanted to do in War Within, there's not going to be a super-long tail to this expansion. They already skipped the "season four" we got in Shadowlands and Dragonflight.