Midnight!

 Out of a combination of peer pressure and a D&D session getting cancelled, I caved and got early access to Midnight. Yeah, I don't love it, philosophically, though I also do wonder if it also staggers people getting into the game. While things were pretty good yesterday, I've been having crazy lag today. It's also insanely hot in LA today, which might have something to do with it.

Tonally, the expansion launches in a state of desperation. Xal'atath's invasion of Quel'thalas is in full swing, and our fight to secure the Isle of Quel'danas is a desperate one.

Let's talk big plot elements:

Liadrin prays to the Light to send defenders to the Sunwell, and we, along with the Army of the Light, answer that call. We do manage to secure things, but it's tenuous: basically most of the most powerful light-aligned NPCs are spending every waking hour channeling into the Sunwell to hold off the Void. Quel'danas is effectively under Army of the Light control, and decidedly not the control of the Blood Elf government in Silvermoon. While Lor'themar remains a somewhat even-handed and pragmatic leader, tension abounds: Many of the Blood Elves are not happy about having a ton of Alliance folks in their city, to start (there are parts of the city Alliance players are forbidden to enter) but on top of that, both the Army of the Light and Grand Magister Rommath are adamant that the Void Elves are not allowed anywhere near the Sunwell (I'm curious to take a Void Elf character into this, though that will probably not be for a long time,) so Magister Umbric has been forced to do his research into the Void in Tranquillien.

In War Within, we touched a bit on the less flattering side of the Titans, and there's a bit of that as well (especially a pretty big deal when we get to Harandar) but we're seeing a lot of zealotry on the side of the Light, especially in Turalyon, who is not coming off, you know, great in this.

While it's not nearly as extensive as a whole zone's worth of story quests, we do get an extended questline with Arator, where he learns a little more about what made his dad the way he is, and also different perspectives on what it means to be a paladin. This is kind of cool: the sort of quest line you'd expect to get as a kind of side-thing in a .x.5 or .x.7 patch, but in this case it's key to setting up Arator's story.

There's an interesting question being raised: is the Light really no better than the Void? Or is there something strange going on with the Light on a cosmic level?

Certainly, WoW has always been about balance, where taking anything to an extreme can lead to pain and suffering (even Life as a force can get too powerful, as we saw on Draenor). It's interesting to me that we're seeing negative sides of the Titans and the Light, which for so long were mainly thought of as positive forces in the Warcraft cosmos (though to be fair, we had the Scarlet Crusade in Vanilla, and also the Mogu showing us that the Titanforged weren't always so nice).

I'm currently level 87 and questing through the Voidstorm. Unless it's a very long zone, I suspect that I'll have to do some sidequests to actually hit 90.

It's interesting: we have some choice on the order in which we do our quests, but everyone starts in Eversong Woods (which now includes the former Ghostlands as well) and then you can choose the order in which you do Zul'aman, Harandar, and Arator's Journey (that's the order I did them in) before you get the quest to go into the Voidstorm.