Project Camelot and Other Crazy Blizzard Leaks

About a week ago, the Classic WoW-o-sphere was getting all excited about dataminers finding information about a new WoW project called "Camelot", which was largely thought to be a code name for whatever Classic Plus type thing Blizzard is cooking up right now. I did briefly consider writing about that, but to be honest there wasn't that much to say; it's not really telling us anything new if we already take the mere existence of such a project for granted.

The most meaningful thing I could think of saying about the name "Camelot" is that it's an excellent choice in so far as there are many different things you can read into it based on your own hopes and expectations. For me personally, the word association went something like this: Camelot → medieval low fantasy setting → something similar to Turtle WoW, which stays more grounded in the world of Azeroth without all the interplanterary shenanigans. That said, I also saw someone say that it reminded them of Dark Age of Camelot (another classic MMO), so maybe it was a sign that Classic Plus would have three factions. I'm sure you, dear reader, can come up with plenty of dramatically different interpretations of your own.

However, today things got more interesting! Due to a disruption on my commute I found myself on trains for three hours in the morning, and as I was browsing reddit I found that apparently someone had gone trawling through old leaks tied to the Camelot name and found one from over a year ago that at the time, was likely dismissed by most as just another attention-seeking fake, but which has now suddenly gained a lot of credibility with hindsight. 

This is your cue to stop reading by the way, if you're worried about potentially being spoiled for Blizzard's future plans for the Warcraft franchise (there's nothing about specific expansions or anything like that though). The leak could still be fake, or even if true, outdated - after all, plans change all the time - but if not, we've got some interesting things to look forward to in the coming years beyond WoW itself.

You can enlarge the above image by clicking on it, but regardless, I'll also describe it in detail below:

It's a photo of a screen showing most of a slide labelled "Franchise Slate - World of Warcraft", tagged with the word "confidential" and a Blizzard logo in the corner. At the top it has a timeline going from Q3 2024 to at least Q3 2030 (there might be more that's cut off).

The first row under the timeline is labelled "modern/mainline expansions" and shows War Within coming out in Q3 2024, Midnight in Q1 2026, The Last Titan in Q3 2027 and the next two expansions labelled as "TBD" but scheduled for Q1 2029 and Q3 2030 respectively.

The second row is labelled "Classic/Camelot" and contains two separate lines, one called "Progression (expansions)" and one called "Era/Camelot". The first line has a lot of entries that we already knew about: Cataclysm just before Q3 2024, Classic Fresh in Q4 2024, MoP in Q2 2025, TBC in Q4 2025... and then WoTLK in Q4 2026, Classic Fresh again in Q2 2028 and TBC again in Q3 2029.

The Era/Camelot line only has one highlighted dot, Camelot in Q3 2026, followed by a little text box that just says "Live ops".

The third row on the slide is labelled "RTS" and indicates plans for a new real-time strategy game called Warcraft Chronicles, set to launch in Q3 2028 and meant to be accompanied by an anime series.

The fourth row promises an Arthas ARPG (I assume the A stands for "action" here, not "augmented"), slated to launch in Q3 2029 and meant to coincide with the release of a live action series.

Finally, there are two more rows called "CN mobile" and "Arcade", which are both just labelled TBD.

Reddit has additionally dug into the credibility of the now deleted account that originally posted this, and apparently the person claimed that the source of the picture was an ex-girlfriend that used to work for Blizzard but was laid off and had been exposed to these slides by accident - which, you know... "I know someone who works at Blizzard" is an age-old preamble to all kinds of BS, but at the same time it is also how this kind of stuff really can get leaked.

The biggest strike against the person's credibility in my eyes is that they also left a comment in another thread saying that "[t]he next expac will return to Black Blood/Worldsoul with Azeroth being final Titan and coming to life to cleanse the planet (including players) - last expac will wrap up with us having to kill Azeroth to restore her. Then off to WoW 2.0" which does very much sound like nonsense to me, but to be fair, that comment was in another, unrelated thread and has no actual connection to the screenshot so may just be an unrelated, unsourced opinion.

The image itself does look very credible to me personally, with the information we have now, over a year after it was originally posted. Blizzard wanting to milk people's nostalgia with repeat releases of the first three expansions sounds very on brand, and the fact that there's nothing after MoP would back up the notion that they themselves weren't sure how far that particular classic train should feasibly go.

A new RTS and an Arthas RPG would make parts of the fan base very happy for sure, and plans for multiple new TV series to go with them are also believable to me. Holly Longdale has been very consistent in her messaging about how she wants Warcraft to be more than it currently is, and it was always a bit strange to me how easily Blizzard seemingly just gave up and rolled over as far as multimedia goes when the Warcraft Movie wasn't a smash hit. Plus they've been doing a lot of experimentation with traditional 2D animation lately, such as with the animated shorts about Alleria, Liadrin and Arator or the A Place to Call Home music video - a lot of the comments on these also expressed the sentiment that people would like to see a full animated show in the same style.

Without taking anything shown in the image as gospel, it does fill me with hope and excitement that Blizzard's plans for the Warcraft franchise are ambitious in a good way - how well any of that will work out is a different question of course, but I'm curious to find out now.

My Raiding History, Part 5: WoW Classic

When I updated something on my about page the other day, it occurred to me that the series about my raiding history that I have linked on there and which I wrote in 2020 is actually missing a fifth installment about what happened after that point. There's no time like the present, so let's get on it now!

Everything I said in part four about how I realised that I mainly raid for social reasons and how that's why I still I raid in SWTOR is still true, but something else happened in the meantime: WoW Classic.

I started playing Classic at its launch in 2019, but I once again had no interest in raiding there initially. I just rolled up some Horde characters on the EU's biggest PvE server with a couple of friends from back in the day, hoping to revel in a bit of nostalgia. Unfortunately said friends all dropped out pretty quickly, which left me feeling somewhat lonely on a server that at the same time felt unpleasantly crowded to me personally.

I ended up re-rolling a night elf hunter on an RP server, where I was happier - while I still played by myself, the medium population and general vibes felt noticeably nicer to me. However, my interest started to falter again when I approached max level for the second time and started to run out of things I wanted to do - until I ended up joining an explicitly casual pug for Zul'Gurub one weekend, a raid I knew very little about at the time. It went so well that I returned the next week when the opportunity arose and won lots of loot.

Soon afterwards, a random paladin ended up chatting me up in Ironforge (which I still think was because of that raid gear) and I found myself invited to a raiding guild, where I quickly became swept up in the manic scramble to get someone the Scarab Lord title. I had an insane amount of fun taking part in the server's gate opening event, and my new guild just generally made me feel extremely engaged with the game again. Soon I started to join their raids as a social member and even though I was extremely reluctant at first, they eventually convinced me to become a proper progression raider as well. (It seems a bit strange in hindsight, but they really wanted more hunters at the time for some reason.)

I learned that I really loved 40-man raids and was very motivated to contribute as much to the good vibes as possible, even if what was required of everyone was very little. I spent several months primarily raiding AQ40, yet it felt like barely any time had passed when Naxxramas was released. I also geared up my paladin alt to serve as back-up healer for some bosses there that were more healing-intensive than others. Overall, Naxxramas was more challenging than expected for a bunch of casuals like us, and we ultimately ended up killing Kel'Thuzad only once, in the week before the Burning Crusade pre-patch, though in a way that ended up being a nice capstone to the experience. (I just felt bad for the people who had been on the bench that night and never got to take part in a kill.)

I was very excited to continue into the Burning Crusade, since that had been the golden height of my original WoW raiding, but boy, did I end up being disappointed on that front. The downsizing from 40-man to 25-man had wreaked havoc on many guilds when it happened the first time, and BC Classic was no different. As the roster was trimmed down, many more casual and less optimised members were no longer welcome, and others just drifted away on their own. Everyone who remained suddenly seemed a lot more hardcore and less interested in just hanging out, which left me feeling very frustrated.

We did clear tier four pretty quickly, but I was just not happy raiding anymore and stepped down. I took a break for a couple of months, but then ended up returning during tier five, when a lot of the initial excitement had worn off and people seemed to have chilled out a little.

Unfortunately then Blizzard decided to inject some drama from their end instead by axing the RP server we were on, which resulted in a huge emotional rollercoaster for me. I eventually rejoined my guild on its new regular PvE server home, but a couple of months later, early into tier six, the guild suffered a sudden death anyway. I continued playing for a few months, but once I found out that everyone would be forced to transition into Wrath of the Lich King (which I really did not want to replay), I lost all interest in that version of Classic.

However, after a few months away I felt the itch again and decided to start exploring the vanilla Classic era servers instead, which were considered very dead at the time. (I had paid to clone my entire stable of characters during the BC transition.)

I quickly found myself invited into a guild on Horde side, and almost immediately hopped right back into 40-man raiding there, again as a hunter. I ended up raiding with them for a little over a year and it was a lovely time, though I made a point after the emotional intensity of my BC Classic adventures to not get quite as emotionally entangled. Progress was really hard and slow at times, largely due to a lack of numbers, and I never actually got to fully clear Naxx with them (though they did go on to do so without me later). I still check in on their Discord every so often and am happy to see that the guild is still going strong years later.

The main reason I stepped down from raiding on era was simply a lack of time. When I first started raiding in Classic, it was the height of the pandemic and my employer had everyone working from home full time, which meant that I had a lot of extra free time from not having to commute to London. Even so, I was still working, so I'm honestly not sure in hindsight how I mustered the energy to raid almost every single day of the week (as I was still playing SWTOR as well).

My job kept us working from home longer than most, but by late 2023 I did have to return to the office at least twice a week, and those days coincided with my Classic era raiding days, which was one of the main reasons I stepped down.

That said, I still miss it sometimes, because those chill 40-man raid vibes are just something else. I know why many people hate the format, and I certainly wouldn't want to be one of the poor officers who have to organise it all, but as a mere participant it's a unique experience that I've loved more than once now. A friend in retail keeps asking me whether I want to come along to some raids with the guild he's in there, but the mere question always makes me recoil a little because while I've come to enjoy many parts of modern WoW too, raiding is still not one of them and I don't think it has anything to offer me on that front. Those impeccable Classic vibes though... the memories still make me sigh wistfully and just re-reading some of the posts I linked about the subject here hit me right in the feels. I just don't think that I have enough time for it now. Maybe one day if circumstances change again.

The Zones of Midnight

Back in November 2024, I wrote a post called "The Zones of The War Within", in which I shared my thoughts about the previous expansion's environments. It didn't get any comments, but it was one of those posts that felt really good to write because my sentiments about those zones were very strong and it was nice to get them out of my head. Unsurprisingly, I have the urge to do the same for Midnight.

Like last time, it took a bit to get here largely because the husband and I were very slow to complete the last few side quests (which I also wanted to include in my assessment). We breezed through the first three zones in what felt like no time, but then we got all caught up in gear and achievement grinding, so it took us a very long time to go back and finish up Voidstorm. (We LOLed when we found out that we really should've clicked the research console there months ago. Why did that quest not have a purple triangle?)

Anyway, it's done now, so here are my thoughts:

Eversong Woods / Quel'Thalas

This zone and the expansion's capital, the revamped Silvermoon, are without a doubt the crown jewels of Midnight. Look, I don't even feel particularly nostalgic about the original Eversong Woods and Ghostlands (they are alright, but not among my favourites), but this zone was updated with so much love and to such gorgeous results, it makes me really excited to see what the environmental artists will end up doing with Northrend for The Last Titan.

There's a video on the official WoW channel about what happened behind the scenes for this update to happen and I can only recommend it. It also taught me how I can tell while flying whether I'm accidentally entering the Horde area!

Quest-wise, I like how the side quests give us a glimpse into what life in Quel'Thalas is like nowadays and how the blood elves have evolved over the years. There's still a bit of that old arrogance but there's also a genuine desire for a fresh start and appreciation for the fact that a ravaged land that was thought to be destroyed forever has slowly been healing after all.

The only even slightly negative thing I have to say (if you want to take it that way) is that you can still tell that these zones weren't originally designed with flying in mind. This means that while flying over Eversong, the view largely consists of low forest canopy and not much else, and Silvermoon is still as awkward to navigate as it was back in the day. The new central plaza and its surroundings are alright because they are a lot more open, but in general it's not one of my favourite capitals in terms of ease of use.

Zul'Aman

What blew me away about this zone was just how big it is. I kinda figured that the original Zul'Aman by itself wouldn't cover enough ground to make for a proper modern WoW zone and that they might have to add to it, but even so the original area (now called Atal'Aman) is actually only a tiny part of the Midnight zone. It was awe-inspiring to me how much and how beautifully the zone designers expanded on that, with all those mountains and tall trees. I'm partial towards lush green zones, so this one's right up my alley in that regard. The music is catchy too. (Once while flying over Atal'Aman I started to sing along with the choral bit and the husband immediately told me off for my bad singing. "But you still recognised it!" I said.)

Story-wise, I was generally happy with the troll stuff, though they do seem to have an above-average number of severely dysfunctional families over there...

The only (again) slight downside to doing anything in this zone is that due to Harandar and Voidstorm having portals in the capital, business in Zul'Aman requires the biggest travel times in the expansion right now. I still like going there though because it's worth it.

Also, I was immediately intrigued by the mysterious island across the sea to the east that you currently can't access, and rumour has it that it will be the point one patch zone. I hope that's true. 

Harandar

Hardandar, weirdly, turned out to be the biggest letdown of the expansion for me so far. It's visually beautiful for sure, but the way they handled its introduction and story kind of diminished the experience in my opinion.

There was datamining back in War Within that revealed that apparently Harandar was originally meant to be a patch zone for that expansion and would've been accessed via the roots in Azj-Kahet - and honestly, I wish they had still introduced it like that in Midnight, because descending deep into the earth like that would've felt very cool. As it is, Orweyna just pops a portal out of the ground and off you go, which results in Harandar feeling like it's not a real place on or inside Azeroth. Sure, there's all these world tree roots coming from the ceiling, but without any real sense of place they don't feel "real" to me somehow.

There's also the fact that it doesn't really feel like an underground zone and everyone's really blasé about that. It's like the devs saw how much everyone loved Hallowfall (where the fact that there was a fake sun in the "sky" was a big source of wonder and a notable plot point) and decided that they could just repeat the same thing with any other underground zone without explanation. Why does the whole zone feel like it's just floating in space? Why is it so bright? Nobody seems to know or care. If you do the Haranir lore quests, there is one eventually that explains that it used to be dark after the goddess' departure and then one day light magically appeared, but that's a rather weak explanation in my book.

The Haranir in general feel like the opposite of the Earthen to me - I expected the latter to be quite boring but they actually ended up being interesting and charming. The Haranir I thought would be quite interesting based on what we saw of them in War Within - how extremely reclusive they were, to the point that Orweyna and Hannan made themselves outcasts by just venturing outside their home and talking to other people. But then in Midnight they are just a little unfriendly towards strangers for all of five minutes and then everyone gets along just fine anyway.

Aside from their adorable druid forms, everything about the Haranir just feels so generic. My husband, who's notoriously bad at remembering fantasy names, kept calling them "the other trolls" when we first worked our way through the zone because to him they were just a slight variation of what we'd just gone through in Zul'Aman, and he sadly had a point.

(Also, one more minor thing, but we had this whole emotional cut scene in War Within when Orweyna says goodbye to Hannan, and then we return to Harandar and they barely talk to each other and instead she seems to have an old crush on some other guy suddenly? What the heck was up with that?) 

Voidstorm

Midnight's (current) final zone is one I feel kind of "eh" about, I think largely because I'm a bit tired of purple environments. Maybe I would've liked it more if we hadn't just finished up War Within on K'aresh, which was also purple and rocky. The two zones are by no means identical, and the environmental designers clearly did their best to still give the Voidstorm a unique look - I do like the chasms with the red hues for example, they bring blood to mind and add to the eerie atmosphere. Still, overall I just don't find it that appealing.

I'll say that I did enjoy the side quests and how they drove home that everyone in this zone basically becomes either vicious or depressed, including the back story of how it was once a thriving planet that was destroyed by one of its own people.

Also, like with Harandar. I feel like this zone might've benefitted from having a more connected introduction. Personally I think we should've just flown straight into the storm above the Sunwell during our first attack instead of all that faffing around with building a portal! I didn't think it detracted as much here though, because Voidstorm is on another planet so it was always going to involve teleporting at some point.

---

Overall WoW's team of environmental designers continues to deliver outstanding work as always, but I've got to admit that after the lengths Blizzard went to in Dragonflight and early War Within to make the world cohesive and avoid loading screens, it's felt a bit jarring to have two out of this expansion's four launch zones be hidden behind portals with no other way to access them. To me at least it makes the world of Midnight feel somewhat smaller than the last two expansions, even though I have no doubt that in terms of overall landmass built there's little to no difference.

WoW Classic BlizzCon Ponderings

The other day Google sent me an email to let me know that my most popular post recently has been the one about whether Warlords of Draenor Classic will be happening or not. Most people may not be that keen on the idea of playing WoD Classic, but a lot of them are at least curious to find out whether it's happening or not. 

I've also been thinking about this again recently, and as I've said previously, I expect to get some pretty big Classic news at BlizzCon in September. However, until then I think it's fun to speculate a bit about what else will happen. You see, at this point I'm actually not even that curious about the details of the next big Classic thing. It'll be whatever it'll be.

What I'm personally more interested in is Blizzard's general direction with Classic, by which I mean more or less the rest of it. If they do indeed release a "Classic Plus", will they want to funnel everyone into it? I'm sure there are plenty of players who would approve of this approach, especially as the modern mega server model has fostered a community that is very anxious to be where everyone else is, which is naturally easiest if people simply have nowhere else to go (if they want to play some flavour of WoW Classic on official servers).

If Blizzard were to go for this sort of focused or consolidation approach, I could see them shutting down basically every other version of Classic that isn't the new hotness or Classic era. Characters from MoP Classic and Season of Discovery would be transferred to Classic era or retail. Anniversary... actually, I can't see them shutting down the anniversary servers without at least letting people have another run at Wrath of the Lich King first, so I guess that would also be allowed to stick around (for a while at least).

The other option though would be to go in completely the opposite direction. More versions of Classic, more!

In this scenario, a Classic+ would be purely additive, with all previous versions of Classic also hanging around. MoP Classic would continue into WoD and then Legion. (I don't know why it took me so long to realise that an easy way to make a WoD Classic announcement more palatable would be to announce WoD and the fact that Legion will come afterwards at the same time, even if the latter is still some time away.) Anniversary Classic would still continue into Wrath of the Lich King, but maybe they'd also split off a Burning Crusade era this time for good measure.

I watched an interview with Ghostcrawler the other week, and when he gets asked about WoW Classic (handily that section is available as its own, shorter clip) he said that the big obstacle to overcome at its inception was the fact that WoW simply didn't have a versioning/branching system and that this had to be built from the ground up.

I'm not an engineer, but I reckon that now that Bizzard have the ability to run different versions of WoW (and Classic even) and are already quite happily doing so, it's probably considerably less effort to add one more variant to the pile. It's still extra work and presumably there's some sort of minimum level of player engagement that's required to make each version viable, but they might very well consider it a way of expanding their base.

From a player perspective, the main downside here is that it looks very confusing from the outside and new players often don't know where to start. But I guess any time they spend trying to figure out which mode they like is still subscription time paid.

I suspect the reality is likely to be somewhere between the two extremes I outlined. Burning Crusade Classic era is probably nothing more than a pipe dream, and I can see them shutting down the SoD servers eventually, but every version that retains a good population will likely be kept rolling until it doesn't anymore. We just don't know for sure! And that suspense of whether one's preferred mode has a future or not is definitely a bit of a weight on people's minds right now I suspect.

Why I Like Midnight Professions

Back in March I wrote about how after the initial levelling frenzy that followed Midnight's release, I ended up turning my attention towards professions. This is an interest that hasn't dropped off since then. Sure, I also do other content such as delves, but the first thing I do after each Wednesday's reset is log into my (currently) seven profession alts and do their weekly profession quests. I didn't think too much about that at first, but after a few months of doing it, it does seem like I'm rather in the minority in enjoying the profession system this much.

Flying across Eversong in search of copper, like I do every week 

I hesitate to put too much stock into the WoW subreddit because it's hardly representative of the player base as a whole, but it does tend to give at least vague insights into what a lot of players are happy or unhappy about at any given time. The profession system seems to be fairly solidly in the latter category, with threads decrying its terribleness receiving thousands of upvotes, while one I found that said it was great was sitting at a rating of zero, with over a hundred disagreeing comments.

After a bit of reflecting, I think the reasons I've come to like the current iteration of the profession system so much and why so many people on reddit seem to hate it are probably the same: it's honestly more reminiscent of the way a lot of things worked in Classic than modern retail's general design philosophy.

I suppose you could argue that the way the acquisition of knowledge points is time-gated is very un-Classic-like and you wouldn't be wrong about that, but I'm less talking about the nitty gritty details and more about the overall vibe of the system.

One part is that you are forced to make choices about what to prioritise that you can't take back. Sure, eventually you'll be able to fill out all the profession skill trees if you grind long enough, but if you pick one tree early on and then wish you'd chosen another one instead - tough luck, no resets. (Though I seem to remember that they are going to implement a once-per-expansion reset opportunity or something.)

On my tailor, I made a similar mistake as the guy who wrote the second post I linked above, specialising into profession equipment at first, only to find out that the epic pieces I wanted to craft all required me to have dozens and dozens of bolts of a special rare cloth that I couldn't even loot until I'd gone halfway down a completely different skill tree - that sucked, and is one of the reasons my tailoring is one of the professions on which I'm still more behind than some others.

However, I don't feel like I'm in a race and my error is something that will be rectified over time, which brings me to another big "Classic-like" positive about professions from my point of view: that the work you invest into them isn't tied to the whole seasonal cycle that constantly obsoletes your gear every major patch. (Let me knock on wood and hope that Blizzard has no plans to change this.) It's very grindy and you have to keep coming back to it week after week, but the benefits remain and accumulate over time.

Thanks to the spark system, crafted gear is relevant each new season without you necessarily needing to learn a lot of new recipes, so if you put the time into learning how to craft gear for every armour slot under the sun - that will still be useful as the expansion progresses! Same with gathering professions, where the benefits of grinding out those knowledge points are very noticeable - when I started on my blacksmithing in Midnight, I was constantly short on copper (another callback to Classic if I've ever seen one) and the output of each mining node felt absolutely anaemic, with many of them only yielding one piece at a time when I needed dozens to create a single alloy bar. But as I've filled out those skill trees and the yield of each type of node has increased, I could feel the pain easing, and now it actually feels like I'm already in a pretty good place in terms of raw materials, helped by the way the weekly knowledge point unlocks encourage me to keep gathering and not just stop the moment I have enough for my current project.

It's basically slow and grindy but rewards you in a way that is consistently useful throughout the expansion and to some degree even past it, now that housing exists and some decor items can only be crafted. A few months ago I levelled Cataclysm blacksmithing and now I can make pitchforks - not the most popular thing ever, and also only tangentially related to the new crafting system in particular, but it's something, and it's a big contrast to the way any gear you earn will be worse than a random world quest item by the time the point one patch hits.

I wonder if this old-school feel of the post-Dragonflight profession system was an intentional decision to bring a bit of classic flavour back to retail and appeal to different player types, or whether the devs will eventually decide that it was an accident that needs to be rectified and streamlined, considering how much pushback there has been against the way things work from more entrenched retail players.