With that rager of a negative title hanging over this column today, I want to start by saying that overall I generally like World of Warcraft: The War Within. I like it a lot, actually. Since last fall’s release, I’ve been playing it daily and appreciating its many virtues and slick design. It’s yet another step toward WoW’s much-needed recovery from a franchise low point in Shadowlands.
Yet I’m going to push praise to the side for the next several paragraphs to offer up some honest criticism about what isn’t working out as well as hoped. These could be touted features that fell flat, personal gripes, or ongoing issues. Here are six things I don’t like that much about The War Within and hope that it improves in the coming expansions.
The Earthen
Is it me, or are the Earthen as a whole kind of a dud? They are, right? We didn’t get any new class with this expansion, but Blizzard did throw some new class combos our way as well as this allied race. And I felt that put too much pressure on the Earthen to deliver excitement — when the irony is that their race is the least excitable in all of Azeroth.
I simply don’t like the Earthen. I don’t like their monochromatic looks, their monotone voices, their weird pseudo-robotic language, and the fact that they’re all over the first two zones. In fact, the only thing that I do like about them is their capital city and general architecture.
Delves still need a lot of work
Here’s where I have to split hairs a bit and specify that I am a fan of delves and what the studio is doing with this system. I think it’s a great way to include the casual or solo-oriented player into endgame progression, and some of the delves have been a lot of fun to do. But for what might be considered the cornerstone feature of this expansion (along with warbands), delves continue to feel like they’re in a beta state.
Some of them are too much of a slog to get through, and that wears when you’re supposed to repeatedly run them. Blizzard still hasn’t made good on its promise to have a second companion character, as Brann took forever to fine-tune. And I don’t consider the effort of a 20-30-minute delve at a higher tier worth the actual rewards we’re given. I’ve only very rarely seen cosmetics or pets, and a shot at hero gear is something you only get about once or maybe twice (with the vault) a week.
It’s an evergreen system with a lot of promise — but that promise has yet to be fully realized.
Two of the five zones are forgettable
Blizzard hoped that it could create a tapestry of interesting underground regions, bucking a trend of MMO subterranean zones feeling claustrophobic. It only partially accomplished this, in my opinion. Undermine and Hallowfall are astonishingly good regions, ones for the history books, but I can’t say the same about Ringing Deeps and The Spider Zone.
I find it hilarious that Blizzard continues to push skyriding on us so hard while giving us a couple areas where we’re bound to be slamming into tight columns and rock formations at 90 mph all over the place.
Hero talents are a dud
Remember how much Blizzard was talking about the hero talent system before the expansion went live? And then how all of our attention on this system dropped completely off our radar the second we hit level 80, picked the best hero spec for our build, and never thought about it ever again?
World of Warcraft really struggles to provide us with meaningful, long-term character growth and progression outside of gear, and hero talents didn’t change that. The only good thing there is that this is a potential evergreen system where new talent trees can be introduced every expansion for a future where you have a lot of them to choose, but right now it’s a nothingburger.
The leveling journey is still missing
And to piggyback off of that, World of Warcraft as it exists in retail has abandoned almost everything that once made its leveling journey special, interesting, and the meat of the experience. Blizzard continues to try to shove us to the highest level in the most recent expansion where all of the “real” content takes place, so whole expansions and zones are completely dead outside of that.
It’s truly regrettable how streamlined and diluted the leveling journey is these days, and that’s given us a game that’s only the most recent expansion with no reason to venture elsewhere. I have ideas of how this could be fixed, but that’s best left for another column.
The War Within feels like a mere prologue
The whole “Worldsoul Saga” experiment is quite interesting to behold from the starting months, and we will have to reserve full judgment of this three-expansion cycle until it’s complete. But the problem with unloading the first part of a full pre-planned trilogy is that there’s too much setting up stuff and making us look forward to stuff in the first installment that it’s shortchanging us on being a satisfying experience in and of itself.
It really does feel like The War Within is a prologue rather than Chapter 1 of 3, and so there’s this collective antsiness to move onto the Real Stuff. It also doesn’t help right now that we know and can see housing on the horizon but are in a holding pattern for that. I suppose the silver lining here is that Blizzard is rolling out these expansions faster than normal, so our wait won’t be too much longer.
War never changes, but World of Warcraft does, with almost two decades of history and a huge footprint in the MMORPG industry. Join Eliot Lefebvre and Justin Olivetti for new installments of WoW Factor as they examine the enormous MMO, how it interacts with the larger world of online gaming, and what’s new in the worlds of Azeroth and Draenor.
