Pre-Expansion Doldrums

The War Within is less than a month away and I'm not at all hyped yet. If anything, it's kind of the opposite and I'm feeling rather down on the whole prospect of the expansion right now. I'm mostly just logging into Remix to finish up my last few goals for that mode but otherwise Classic has been a lot more fun recently than retail.

All my reservations about what we've seen of War Within so far are still in play, but more specifically, I'm looking at the expansion looming in the distance and I just don't know what I'm going to do with it, as in: what class I'm going to play. I miss having an undisputed main. I had one from Burning Crusade through Cata, but ever since I returned to retail properly at the end of BfA it's all felt a bit fuzzy. My monk was my main throughout Shadowlands, but with how little time it takes to level a character in retail nowadays and how little you actually see of the world during your adventures, I'm finding it hard to get as invested in new characters as I used to.

Changing to evoker in Dragonflight came kind of organically, and I only realised in hindsight how lucky I was in that regard, as I both liked the class's gameplay and it slotted into the expansion story really well. Like demon hunters in Legion, evokers were designed to transition straight from their starting area into the story of Dragonflight, and everything actually made sense.

But now we've got this new, supposedly story-heavy expansion looming, which is all about characters from older expansions that none of my own characters have any connection to and I can't quite wrap my head around it. It's funny because I don't think I was that fussed about the story in retail, but the thought of going into an expansion to do tasks for NPCs that my characters have technically never met in game while treating them as if they were old friends really puts me off.

When I logged in yesterday, I was surprised to be greeted by a new cinematic that Wowhead called "Previously in World of Warcraft", though I'm not sure if that's supposed to be the official name. Either way it tries to summarise the most important events from the last four expansions that are relevant to War Within over the course of three and a half minutes - something that I think is actually a really good idea, but at the same time also puts a spotlight on the problem I mentioned above, seeing how the video name-drops no fewer than eleven different characters throughout its runtime, while showing and featuring even more. If you weren't around for the introduction of those characters and/or aren't too well-versed in WoW lore in general, I'm not sure a bunch of disconnected one-liners about how "x did so-and-so" are really going to make things that much clearer for you.

I just really feel like I'm missing an in-game "hook" for War Within so far. A few days ago, the official WoW YouTube channel also dropped a second cinematic for War Within, and I was surprised to see that it currently has more dislikes than likes. I thought it looked very good visually, but after reading some of the comments it became clear to me that this is a sign of the expansion struggling to pull people other than me in as well. A lot of commenters noted that "it doesn't look like WoW", which I don't really agree with, but it certainly lacks a clear hook for you as the player. There are some cool characters and locations on display, sure, but what do any of them have to do with me? The only reason I know anything about who/what any of them are is because of watching content creators talk about beta content - the trailer itself certainly doesn't make it very clear. As it stands, I worry a bit that Blizzard's ambitious new story plans may be built on a foundation of sand.

(I've seen some comments about the new trailer being a throwback to the original WoW trailer, which didn't have an overarching narrative either, but I think that is missing something important: the original WoW trailer had narration setting the scene and showed you different roles you could play in that setting. The new War Within trailer has neither of those.)

Finally, the cherry on top of my cake of expansion uncertainty recently came while doing M+ with my guildies. A couple of them have been really hyped about WoW and the expansion recently, which you know... good for them, but my ears perked up when conversation about "what I personally want to do in the expansion" turned into "how we're all going to do M+ in the expansion". I've had a decent enough time getting to know the M+ system in Dragonflight, but the idea that this was supposed to automatically have locked me in for the entirety of the next expansion as well and that class choices should be made based on potential M+ comp set off massive alarms in my head, because it's something I hadn't even thought about. I tried to express this to the group but we were so far apart in terms of expectations that I think people didn't quite get what I was saying. (Me saying that I wasn't sure I even wanted to do M+ at the start of the new expansion somehow got turned into "of course we're not going to do it immediately, we've got to gear up and unlock it first").

All I know is that thanks to Remix, I'll be going into the War Within with close to a dozen level 70s, none of whom feel like a great fit for this new storyline as they have barely interacted with the relevant NPCs - if at all - and a burden of expectations from guildies who seem to picture us running M+ every weekend in the expansion with no consideration for how much a WoW expansion can change things... both in terms of gameplay as well as in terms of people's enjoyment of the game. I once again remember Kordac, the holy priest who was an absolute pillar of our raid team in Burning Crusade and quit the game a few weeks into WotLK because he hated the levelling. Never underestimate how dramatically a WoW expansion can change everything for people.