The Zones of The War Within

This is a post that I've kind of been meaning to write ever since the expansion launched, but I wanted to take all the quests into consideration as well, and it took the husband and me some time to actually get through all the side quests, one weekend play session at a time. Then other things came up that caused me to delay publishing this... but with the expansion's first new patch zone on the horizon, I figured it was way past time for me to actually get this out.

In Dragonflight, Blizzard decided to mix things up with their zone design compared to previous expansions, designing the environment and content with flight in mind from the beginning. This was something they had never done before, but in terms of the zones' general feel, they were relatively conservative. Personally, I kind of got the impression that they were trying to earn player goodwill by creating zones that were reminiscent of a "best of" of some of the most popular zones. The rolling green hills of the Ohn'aran Plains reminded me of Nagrand, and the Azure Span definitely had some Grizzly Hills vibes. The Waking Shores were somewhat unique in their particular combination of biomes I guess, but in general, I'd describe the overall vibe of the Dragon Isles as "Remember all the places in WoW you loved in the past? This is similar, just bigger."

In War Within with its underground theme, the zone designers had to be a bit more daring, and it shows.

Isle of Dorn

First off, am I the only one who keeps wanting to call this place "Khaz Algar"? I know that's the name of all the zones combined, but in my head I keep wanting to use that name and Isle of Dorn the other way round. Anyway...

This is probably the most conservative of TWW's four launch zones, as it's basically a bunch of green hills. I don't want to downplay the designers' efforts and how they tried to add distinction to different sub-zones (the forest with the giant elite bees is definitely one to remember and navigate carefully), but at its heart this zone recalls other dwarven settlements such as pre-Cataclysm Loch Modan and the non-destroyed parts of Twilight Highlands, just with more of a titanic twist in the architecture.

It also houses the expansion's main hub, the Earthen city of Dornogal, which is very open and inviting. (My only problem is that with all the buildings looking kind of blocky and similar, I often forget where I am when I log in and need to open the map to orientate myself.) I think this was an intentional choice as the other zones have us descending into increasingly uninviting territory underground, so there's always an aspect of "coming up for air" to returning to Dornogal.

Story-wise, the zone is all about the Earthen, which I thought were going to be very boring but actually turned out to be quite interesting in my opinion. They have this theme of being machine-like and mostly speak in kind of robotic voices, but the ones that have broken free of their programming/"directives" talk in a more animated way. Also, for being this robotic people strictly bound by ancient traditions, they also have a surprisingly... twee side. There's this village called Rumbleshire whose vibe somewhat reminded me of a hobbit town, what with being sent out to look for lost rock-sheep and the like.

The Ringing Deeps

The first zone you enter as you descend down the Coreway is the Ringing Deeps, and I think this is probably my least favourite zone so far. It's still solid, but I don't consider the scenery particularly pleasant and it doesn't really have a strong unique vibe either. Of all of the underground zones this one's probably the closest to feeling like "Zeralek Caverns 2.0", just with more browns and greens instead of blues.

The dominant theme of the zone is more Earthen, who are even more robotic than their cousins upstairs and look after the ancient titanic machinery, but at this point I was just kind of like... "okay, whatever". The devs did what they could with that theme but it just didn't grab me. All the areas are more mines or ruins, and tend to feature different types of annoying wildlife including "that one area with the elites where nobody goes unless the big world quest is up", which is another thing that feels very Zeralek 2.0.

Hallowfall

This is the zone that everybody's been talking about even since before launch and I can see why. Despite being underground, it kind of pretends to be an overground zone by having a sea shore and a fake "sun" in the sky in the form of the giant crystal Beledar, which alternates between glowing with friendly yellow light and taking on a voidy, dark purple hue. I've got to admit I initially didn't get what all the hype was about because I originally only witnessed this change during the storyline, so I genuinely thought it was just a one-time event for that... but no, once I spent more time in the zone, I realised it happens on the regular and it's always awe-inspiring to hear the bells ring and the music change as the sudden darkness descends - or the relief when Beledar lights up again. It's kind of funny actually because even in its "dark" state the zone doesn't really get that dark... but all the other environmental changes combined can really send a chill up your spine.

Aside from that, I think a lot of the zone's appeal comes from its resident faction, the Hallowfall Arathi. When I first heard about these guys being a long-lost expedition, I thought they were from the Arathi Highlands... but no, apparently they're from the Arathi Empire somewhere else on Azeroth where we haven't been. An interesting example of how the game can actually make up wild new lore after twenty years but people won't mind as long as it superficially looks and sounds like something they think they already know. I can recommend this Platinum WoW video on the subject if you want to learn more.

What makes the Arathi appealing (in my opinion) is that they subtly recall beloved parts of the original game. The theme of helping farmers on the frontiers reminded me of the original Westfall even if the context was quite different, and the fact that the Arathi are basically an army of paladins wielding the light and have constructed all these grandiose buildings kind of portrays them as what the Scarlet Crusade could've been if they hadn't gone evil. I get why people dig that!

I also do like this zone both for gathering purposes as well as its general look and feel, though I've got to say that for me it really suffers from its positioning, in the sense that it's the zone that's effectively the furthest away from the capital (while Azj-Kahet is another level down, you immediately get a direct portal to Dornogal when you arrive there in the story, making it much more convenient to travel to and from than Hallowfall).

Azj-Kahet

And yes, Azj-Kahet! The best way to describe this zone in my opinion is that this is the Azjol-Nerub zone that was cut from Wrath of the Lich King, fourteen years later at last. It's big and creepy and yet has surprised me by not feeling all that hostile for being the classic endgame zone occupied by the baddies. Mob density isn't that high in these new, bigger zones, at least when compared to classic endgame zones like the Plaguelands, Shadowmoon Valley or Icecrown (something I actually consider a positive) and the Nerubians are also characterised as not universally evil, but rather as suffering from leadership that has been corrupted by Xal'atath. You immediately make contact with a bunch of rebels that want to work with you to overthrow said leadership, so it's made clear that there is a lot of nuance going on with the different factions instead of all of them just being a race of baddies.

You even get to freely walk around their capital, the City of Threads... which I've seen some people compare unfavourably to Suramar, something I don't know how to rate as I didn't play during Legion and I assume that questing through Suramar in Chromie time doesn't have quite the same level of threat to it. The City of Threads isn't that bad to traverse, largely thanks to flight, but even if a disapproving guard does catch you and throws you out, it's mostly just kind of amusing. Personally I'm happy with that though - I appreciate that this endgame zone isn't overwhelmingly dark and hostile, but still a place where you can quest without feeling like you'll have to fight for your life at every given moment.

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I'm not sure how I'd rank these four zones, other than that Ringing Deeps would be last. All the others each have their own unique appeal that I appreciate, despite not being a huge fan of the underground theme. In general, Blizz have tried hard to make things fit the themes of verticality and being underground as much as possible while at the same time really downplaying those very same features, if that makes sense. All three underground zones are huge and well-lit so never feel that oppressive, and there are "slipstreams" that easily allow your flying mount to ascend from a deeper zone to a higher-up one without having to worry about vigour. (Something I totally didn't manage to figure out by myself and hadn't even noticed until someone else told me.) It's an interesting design and just about works for me right now, though I do wonder how I'll feel about it after spending the next twelve months mostly underground...

Early Musings on The War Within

The War Within's official launch happened less than a week ago, and as usual with new WoW content like this, the husband has been binging hard while kind of dragging me along for the ride, meaning that I've spent most of my limited free time last week exploring the new expansion with him.

So far I've hit level 80 on one character and started levelling a second. I'd heard in a dev interview prior to launch that they'd trimmed down the main storyline to only events they felt were absolutely necessary for players to take part in to understand what was going on, while moving a lot more optional story content into side quests. This sounded reasonable enough to me, but seeing it in action was still kind of weird.

The husband and I started with our usual modus operandi of just doing all the things, which meant that we were level 75 by the time we'd finished the first zone, and keeping in mind that access to a lot of endgame activities is tied to campaign completion, I suggested that we should just push through the main story for the remaining three zones to not delay unlocking this additional content for too long. This resulted in us gaining access to endgame at level 79, meaning that the main storyline plus all side quests in the first zone did more for our levelling than the entire rest of the storyline spread out across the remaining three zones. That was more than a little surprising, though I don't mind having to do more than just the campaign to level up.

It's not as if there is a lack of fun things to do. If anything, I'd argue that the number of indicators for things to do on your map gets a bit overwhelming, especially once you unlock world quests and all that jazz at the end of the campaign. At one point the husband and I touched down in the third zone near some farms where it looked like there were a few world quests right next to each other... but then it turned out that there were more than just a few, plus there were also bonus objectives, and rares kept spawning in, and if you lit a fire in front of any of the many farm houses an NPC would come out and offer you a daily quest - something that was only visible to the original clicker and not to other members of the group and which caused us quite an amount of confusion. We just ran in circles killing and clicking things for what felt like ages and the whole thing just made my head swim.

Overall I've been having a lot of fun though. Not that that's saying a lot - the first few weeks of a WoW expansion are always fun; the discontent with this or that feature usually follows a few months later. Still, considering I had a lot of reservations about what I'd seen and heard about the War Within pre-launch, it's not doing too badly so far. I wouldn't say that all my concerns have been dispelled - while the zones are big and beautiful for example, I'm definitely feeling that difference between overground and underground in my head, with an urge to always return to the one overground zone at the end of each session. We'll just have to see how things feel a few months into the expansion.

I looked back at my first impressions of Dragonflight for comparison, and Blizzard did sadly ditch some of the things that charmed me about that expansion from day one. I loved the boat ride to the Dragon Isles for example, but this time we're back to having to go through an auto-granted scenario, which I can already tell will either be a nuisance in the future (I think of every alt that's been auto-granted the quest telling them to go to the Shadowlands while levelling up) or make it confusing how to actually start the expansion later down the line (to this day, I don't know how you start the Legion story outside of Chromie time).

Dragonflight's sense of hope and optimism coupled with whimsical exploration is once again replaced by a sudden, potentially world-ending threat that overrides everything else. I remember last expansion I saw some lore discussion about just how the Dragon Isles "awakened" so they could be found after being hidden for so long, but this time around there's remarkably little excitement surrounding the fact that we're going to a place that seemingly hasn't had any contact with the outside world in forever. Magni just has a vision of where to go I guess, and Jaina and Thrall know where to point the boats later on in the story. The Earthen reject us as trespassers for about five seconds before we're actually all welcome and wander about as if we owned the place. It's a bit odd in my opinion how much is just taken for granted here.

The "story regression" I was worried about hasn't really been in evidence yet, exactly... a lot of the main levelling storyline actually had a similar vibe to Dragonflight, with conflicts between factions needing to be resolved and people talking about their feelings. The intro scenario though was chock-full of throwbacks to tropes I can't say I've missed, such as having a bunch of death and destruction for shock value, our characters being dumb and accidentally helping the baddie do something awful, and a well-established, powerful character suddenly being completely useless in the face of the newest villain to show how cool the latter is.

Still, overall I enjoyed what I've seen of the story content so far, though I can kind of see at this point why some of it may be a bit too touchy-feely for people's tastes. In Dragonflight, the storyline for the black dragonflight was one of my favourites, as I thought it painted an interesting picture of the messy nature of people trying to change and improve, and the dynamic of Wrathion and Sabellian as both allies and rivals was really interesting. But there was still a plot beyond that, such as the question of who should become the new leader of the black dragonflight, and just what Deathwing had been up to in Aberrus.

In War Within so far, both Alleria and Anduin have an emotional journey in the early questing, but there's very little meat to that part of the story beyond their feelings (if that makes sense) which did feel a bit weird to me. I much preferred spending time with Moira and Dagran, because while they also had a few emotional moments, they were also curious and engaged with the world around them, actually doing stuff and driving the plot forward.

I have been kind of surprised to see a lot of content creators and people on reddit praise the new story to the heavens because while I think it's been engaging and fun enough so far, it doesn't feel dramatically different to me from anything that came before. I've been rather bemused to see Preach for example talk about how this expansion is going to be different and the story is so worth it if you can only prevent yourself from skipping everything... like, are you saying you've been skipping those previous expansion stories that you've done so much complaining about? No wonder you're not enjoying what you're not actually paying attention to; any story is better if you actually engage with it...

I'm very curious to see how reception of The War Within is going to evolve over the coming weeks and months. In some parts I'm seeing huge hype, but I'm also seeing some pushback against it, and anecdotal reports of people's friends lists remaining empty as fewer people have decided to come back for this expansion than for the last one. In the week or so leading up to launch, I was getting absolutely bombarded with marketing for the expac, with every other reddit ad encouraging me to "play The War Within now", and I'm still seeing those ads a week later, while we haven't heard any proud announcements from Blizzard about what a great launch the expansion had.

I thought the call of Chris Metzen would surely bring a lot of old-timers back (and maybe it has; I just don't know), plus Dragonflight's overall good reputation should've gotten the word out that retail WoW has been in a solid place gameplay-wise for a couple of years now. But maybe there's just too much of a divide now between entrenched players loving their new Warbands and those who cynically left during BfA and Shadowlands? The people who are actually playing mostly seem to be having a blast, but is that good enough at this point?