World of Warcraft has been around since 2004, and it doesn’t seem to end as their next expansion, “Midnight,” creeps around the corner. With its 11th expansion on the horizon, it’s pretty clear to me that the franchise still hasn’t drawn its last breath, as Midnight ( the 2nd phase of the WorldSoul Saga) has a lot in store for the new and veteran players. Let’s jump into the beta experience…
Midnight introduces 4 new zones to get our adventure on. It’s great to see that Blizzard takes a step back into its development process and grasps one of the features that made World of Warcraft great: experiencing the storyline while being introduced into new zones. Normally, you would choose a zone and start leveling there. You would also experience a part of the main storyline in a specific zone, and so it becomes a bit more difficult to comprehend the main storyline due to these shattered storylines. It fills my heart with joy to experience a more classical way of leveling. Building up to a certain ending where the different zones complement the lore of this exact storytelling seems more fitting to me. Glad to see this change coming in the Midnight expansion.
“It goes without hesitation to say that the development team did a tremendous job in making the different zones unique.”
The storyline starts in Eversong Woods, which introduces you to the 3 story arcs from the main story. Without spoiling too much, it’s all about the battle against Xal’atath that takes place at the Sunwell. The storytelling of these 3 different arcs will give you enough experience to max level a character,r and that’ll help build up the excitement towards the main story’s plot. It goes without hesitation to say that the development team did a tremendous job in making the different zones unique. There’s Harandar that feels like you’re Dora’s little explorer into a jungle that’s deep below water level and filled with gigantic mushroom trees, waterfalls descending into small riverbeds, and different plants & animals. There is also a region called Blooming Lattice, which will warp you back to Zalandar because of the vibe its emitting due to the dinosaurs walking around and the aesthetics of the environment. One of the other zones is a big swamp that’s called Zul’Aman, the home of the Amani tribe. Each zone feels vivid and interesting enough to go exploring. The final zone is the Voidstorm and as the name suggests, the team did a great job in making the landscape shadowy and chaotic. You’ll see these different wormholes around you, and they will seem like they’re sucking up the void.
A new zone also means a new NPC race that might help us out during the story. We’re of course talking about the race Domanaar, and we’re being introduced by Decimus, an intellectual void monster. He tells us that the Void is a place where only the strong will survive, so we’ll need to be careful of our surroundings and especially the forces of Xal’atath. He will help us out with Xal’atath for his own personal goals, of which we do not know. Will he turn against us? Who knows, we’ll have to see as the story progresses. Anyways, the conflict between light and dark drives the story forward.
“Even though, the Silvermoon City is being modernized due to the beta version, it still hasn’t reached its full potential as there’s a lot of vividness missing.”
We’re talking a lot about the main story, and just like any epic story, it begins with an attack on the Sunwell, the fount of mystical power in the Sunwell Plateau on the Isle of Quel’Danas. Together with these warriors of light ( not FFXIV related), we’ll have to fight against Xal’ataths’ forces. While paladins and priests are praying to the light, your character is running around trying to do his/ her part in this desperate battle, but all seems lost until the prayers of the High Elves are answered. The Sunwell fuels itself with The Light and therefore becomes an unstoppable force to push back the enemies of Xal’ataths’ army. After the battle, we’re being transported to a revamped version of Silvermoon City, one of the starter zones of the Blood Elves, which is being pushed to a more up-to-date version of the original Silvermoon City.
Even though, the Silvermoon City is being modernized due to the beta version, it still hasn’t reached its full potential as there’s a lot of vividness missing. There are still some blank spots that need to be filled in with NPC’s to create that living, breathing city, full of activities. There’s also no background music in the city, which kind of messes up the vibe. Don’t get me wrong, you can still interact with NPCs to do most of the important stuff of collecting items, starting quests, shopping, bidding, … Everything you need to start your adventure is there.
“It’s fun to go on an adventure with a different kind of class, because it opens up a lot more play space…”
Just like any expansion, Blizzard still invests in making the Delves (mini- dungeons for solo progression with small storylines and objectives) even better than before. They are still adding a decent amount of 11 delves with this expansion, and even though the main concept of this feature doesn’t really change, they’re trying to make it newer by introducing new environments. The War Within introduces us to Delves by doing the mini- dungeons in a cave or even underground,d but with Midnight, the Delves can also take place in a more “above” kind of playground. This time, we’re doing the delves with a rogue called Valeera Sanguinar. Being a rogue means a lot of things, such as killing off single targets and pulling the kind-of-mobs that we don’t want to pull. Either way, it’s fun to go on an adventure with a different kind of class, because it opens up a lot more play space. The Delves will drop champion gear with a max. level of 263, which is almost as strong as the gear that can drop in heroic raids.
Jumping from mini- dungeons to the normal dungeons. With the release of Midnight, eight extra dungeons will be available to us. Each dungeon is definitely designed with “passing time” in the background as you’ll quickly notice that there are a lot of trash mobs to clear before you can get to the mini- boss or even the big boss,s for that matter. Each dungeon has a great atmosphere and is linked to the story. This gives you a reason to really play the dungeons as they’re closing out a part of a small story within one of the 3 story arcs. Each boss plays with different mechanics, so clearing a boss is more fun than taking out the trash. There will also be a couple of new raids in the final version of the game. At this point, the raids are available, but important aspects of the raids, such as mini-bosses, aren’t available yet, so this means clearing a raid is less interesting. Each dungeon also has loot for every role, so you’ll definitely have a reason to play the dungeons. Hopefully, the new feature “prey” will introduce us to a more interesting part of World of Warcraft. Prey is a new feature within World of Warcraft that allows you to hunt unique enemies throughout the open- world section of the game. This new feature opens up once you hit max level. The feature will be introduced by a quest and will have different rewards available to us.
“You can perform total clean- ups with the touch of a button…”
One of the new features that’s being added to World of Warcraft is housing. This has been a very highly requested feature throughout the WOW community, and with Midnight, it’s finally happening. The moment you log in, you’ll get a quest to a place where you can buy houses. This quest will be spread out into different quests and will give you a decent overview of how this housing will be implemented into your online life. You’ll get quests to get to know the different mechanics, as well as the places you’ll need to visit to get more housing supplies. Blizzard will give you all the tools you need to make your house incredible, as it will give us tools to enlarge objects, change the color or direction of a certain object… It will even give us a tool that will allow us to disable the clipping of objects. This allows us to make the house truly as we see fit, and ignore physics almost completely. Next to our tools, Blizzard made sure that quality of life options are also available to us… You’ll be able to insert your own keybinds and create macro buttons to make changes to your house or objects even simpler. For example, you can create macro- buttons that allow you to completely paint your house into one color of your choosing, you can perform total clean- ups with the touch of a button, …
A fun fact to mention is the fact that even your house system has a progression system. By collecting new furniture or household objects, you’ll gain experience. Even your reputation will allow you to gain access to race-specific household items. This is a great step forward to re- introduce new players to older zones. All of the completionists will have a reason to go back to older expansions and find unique furniture. There will also be vendors that will allow you to buy certain furniture. You can also loot different furniture objects by completing dungeons or raids. Anyhow, let the collection madness begin! The progression system will also offer different quests called “endeavors. These activities are kind of monthly quests that will allow you to gain more experience than the normal side of things. This can go from completing different delves to placing certain decorations. By completing these activities, you’ll gain Community Coupons, a new in-game currency, that will allow you to buy from unique vendors. The system doesn’t work perfectly at the moment, but it has a lot of potential.
“The new specialization is easy to learn due to its short length of its combo.”
Midnight is also coming with a new specialization for the Demon Hunters, and it is more of a mid- range class instead of the classic close- range. The biggest difference in lore is the fact that some Demon Hunters use Void as their main resource to power up their abilities instead of Fel. The Demon Hunters that use Void are called the Devourer. Not only do you get some new abilities, but the total aesthetics of the Demon Hunter change as well. Instead of being green, they’re totally blue as they are fully void-powered. Their body color changes into blue, and they have bigger wings with a more purple aesthetic. The biggest reasons to choose this specialization are probably the mid- range playstyle and the permanent debuff they cast onto their enemies. The new specialization is easy to learn due to its short length of its combo. The Devourer scores almost equally in damage numbers to the Havoc, but it’s just a beta, so these stats can change.
Next to the new specialization, you’ll also be able to gain access to a new race, namely the Haranir. This race is a neutral race, so they can join The Alliance or The Horde. To unlock them, you just have to complete the campaign, and once the completion is done, you’ll receive a notification that a new race is available to you. The race has a lot of different hairstyles to choose from,m and they have these unique spikes that make them stand out from the crowd. The Haranir also have some Elven DNA, so the eyebrows and ears can be adapted as well. They also have a bit of troll DNA, so they’ll have a beastlike skin that can also have an alternate patron and color scheme. They can almost play each class except for Paladin, Demon Hunter, Death Knight, and Evoker. A good thing to mention is the fact that the Haranir race can play a druid; every race has its own style when it comes to the druid’s transformations.
“We have returned to a much simpler age of WOW, and not in a good way.”
The race also has ( like any other race) access to some unique racial traits. There’s Thorn Bloom, which is a damage-over-time ability that can be spread out to a total of 8 enemies, but it is also a healing-over-time ability that can be divided among 8 allies. You have Lash out, which is a passive ability that will amp your damage and healing abilities as well, for a 1 percent chance of critical strike stat. These stats can still be changed after the first patch when the expansion releases.
What’s the most disappointing thing that this expansion has to offer? The disability of using our own add-ons that can give us the best information about our performance during a dungeon or raid. This means damage numbers, cooldowns, buffs, or debuffs. Blizzard announced they are getting rid of custom mods made by the community and that they’ll add their own mods. At this point, some basic mods like showing damage numbers are available to us, but there don’t seem to be a lot of customization options. Hopefully, this will change when the game officially launches. Customizing different nameplates to give us a better representation of the elements that are running in the background also seems like something from the past. We have returned to a much simpler age of WOW, and not in a good way. Blizzard still has a long way to go.
Conclusion:
The Midnight expansion for World of Warcraft marks a return to more traditional, narrative-focused leveling by guiding players through four interconnected zones instead of fragmented storylines. The adventure begins in Eversong Woods and builds toward a major conflict against Xal’atath at the Sunwell, with each zone contributing meaningfully to the overarching plot. The zones are highly distinct in atmosphere and design, ranging from jungle-like underground regions and dinosaur-filled landscapes to swamps and the chaotic Voidstorm, making exploration feel fresh and engaging.
The expansion modernizes key locations like Silvermoon City, though the current beta version still lacks liveliness and polish. Gameplay systems are expanded through improved Delves, eight new story-driven dungeons, upcoming raids, and the new “Prey” feature that encourages open-world hunting at max level. A major highlight is the long-awaited housing system, offering deep customization, progression, and collection mechanics that incentivize revisiting older content.
Midnight also introduces a new Demon Hunter specialization, the Void-powered Devourer, alongside a new neutral race, the Haranir, both offering strong visual identity and gameplay variety. While the expansion shows clear ambition and creativity, its biggest drawback is Blizzard’s decision to remove most community-made add-ons, resulting in limited UI customization and performance tracking that may frustrate experienced players if not improved before launch.
