The War Within Recap

I have seven characters at the Midnight level cap right now, and I've hit that point where I feel the itch to do some more levelling again but at the same time don't really want to do it in Midnight. While Blizzard have made improvements over the years to make levelling alts less repetitive, I still think it's a weakness of the modern game that the last ten levels always have to be done in the current expansion (or in timewalking dungeons).

Therefore, I was quite delighted when I logged into my level 70 Worgen rogue the other day, still stationed in Dornogal, and was prompted to do the War Within recap. Something different to do! I was very curious how much XP it would give me, as well as what it would look like gameplay-wise.

I don't know about you, but when I hear the word "recap", I tend to think of those brief snippets at the start of a new episode of a TV show, where they say something like "previously on [show]" and then cycle through a few clips from previous episodes that will be relevant to the current episode. I knew that an expansion recap in an MMO was bound to be more meaty than that, but I couldn't really wrap my head around how it was going to work.

It quickly became clear that a perhaps more appropriate title for the experience would've been something like "The War Within abridged", as the "recap" is basically the expansion's main storyline with a good chunk of gameplay chopped out of it, while still leaving you with a pretty considerable amount of content to go through. I didn't time myself, but it still took me several hours (which included watching a lot of cut scenes; it's probably quicker if you skip them) and my rogue gained two levels throughout the whole thing.

In terms of gameplay, the conceit is similar to lorewalking in that a narrator tells you the gist of what's going on but you are given some of the old quests to play through certain events yourself as well. Instead of Lorewalker Cho (or now Li-Li), it's just a magical flying book, which also serves as a taxi between locations sometimes. Where parts of a longer story are skipped, the book just gives you a brief narration along the lines of "then this thing happened" and off you go to the next step.

The first section on the Isle of Dorn is pretty lengthy and includes the destruction of Dalaran, meeting the Earthen, learning about the Unbound and the big fight at the Meadery. I was wondering just how long this whole thing was going to be if they only took so (relatively) little of the storyline out, but in subsequent zones things sped up considerably.

In the Ringing Deeps we are briefly introduced to High Speaker Eirich , get the cut scene where Magni becomes fleshy again while saving the Awakening Machine from corruption, fight Eirich and that's largely it. Nothing about kobolds or anything like that.

In Hallowfall we are introduced to Faerin and the Arathi but then move on to fighting the Order of the Night very quickly, passing through the zone without really engaging with the Arathi's background and culture at all. I also found it noteworthy that the whole bit with Faerin helping Anduin find his connection to the light again was not included either.

Azj-Kahet is again glossed over pretty quickly, and you mainly just play through the section where Alleria, Anduin and you disrupt Ansurek's speech, and then the final confrontation with Xal'atath at the end of the main campaign. As far as the Haranir go, you get to play through the quest where you first meet Orweyna and then they are never mentioned again.

The major patch zones are included in the recap as well but are even quicker affairs, with Undermine being reduced to the few quests where you try to get the Dark Heart from the goblins, and the story on K'aresh basically just telling you that you have to work with Xal'atath for the Reshii wraps before throwing you into the single-player version of the Dimensius fight.

It felt like all the focus was on Alleria and Xal'atath, with everything else taking a backseat. I guess in some way that makes sense, especially if the goal of this recap is to prepare players for the start of Midnight, but I've got to admit it also felt a bit weird, because to me at least, the dynamic between these two was possibly the least interesting thing about the War Within and I cared much more about the parts of the story that told us about the cultures and different societal developments in each zone.

Also, while the argument can be made that a lot of the stuff they cut out was "fluff" or grindy quests, I've got to admit that being left with gameplay that's mostly just listening to narration and watching cut scenes is a bit dull in WoW; it's not really optimised for that kind of experience.

When I first read about the recap on reddit, word was that it was decidedly not good, mainly because of how buggy it was. I'm happy to say that I didn't encounter any major stumbling blocks myself at this point, though it still wasn't exactly a smooth experience. I think I had to relog once to unbug a phase, and while I did get confused a few times because quests disappeared from my quest tracker and I was unsure whether I'd lost the plot, that's a bug that I've also encountered in the regular game several times and which is not limited to the recap experience.

The thing that did disappoint me at the end was when I found out that the recap is a lot more like lorewalking than I expected, in the sense that it's completely self-contained and not connected to the actual War Within campaign at all. So while the game makes you feel like you're getting a speed run through the story, the open world isn't actually updated as it would be if you had done the campaign properly. You may have been to K'aresh to do quests there, but the K'aresh portal will not be unlocked when you finish for example, and you'll still have to go through the proper K'aresh starter experience to unlock it, which is just... why?

The most comical example of this for me was that Dimensius dropped a quest item which the game said I wasn't eligible to use. It turned out that in order to be allowed to turn it in, I had to go back to K'aresh the normal way and do the Dimensius quest again outside of the recap, which just felt bizarre and nonsensical.

I guess I could see the recap experience being okay for players who just want to understand the very basics of what happened in the story, but to me personally it was pretty unsatisfying. At the very least it should count as a proper campaign skip and unlock all War Within content/portals etc. in the open world. As it stands, it left me with the feeling that I'd rather have redone the campaign "properly".