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If I didn’t have years of prior experience playing World of Warcraft, I imagine my first hour in The War Within alpha would’ve gone much worse. WoW immediately buries you in buckets of spells and items and quests that even had me gasping for air trying to make sense of it all. The new and […]

Blizzard is leveraging pure nostalgia with WoW Remix: Mists of Pandaria, a limited-time opportunity to rewind time and play through a modernized version of the 2011 expansion. When it goes live on May 16, you’ll be able to quickly level up a character who will transfer over to the regular servers when it’s over, presumably […]

World of Warcraft recently began a series of what it calls experiments in the industry’s pre-eminent MMO, aiming to give players a wider range of ways to engage with Azeroth and each other. First was Plunderstorm, a piratical battle royale that encourages bitesize PvP encounters, with a Mists of Pandaria remix also on the horizon. […]

When Blizzard first conceived of The War Within, the next World of Warcraft expansion that would literally take players inside the planet of Azeroth, there was one big worry. “The concerns about claustrophobia were a major aspect coming into this, from the very earliest planning,” game director Ion Hazzikostas said in a recent group interview […]

One of the defining themes of The War Within, World of Warcraft’s next expansion, is revisiting the past. Even the visual approach was carefully considered with Warcraft’s long history in mind, lead visual development artist Gabriel Gonzalez said. The War Within, the first expansion in a three-expansion story arc announced last fall at BlizzCon, will […]

World of Warcraft: The War Within will be taking players deep, deep underground to do battle with the Nerubian empire—which, inevitably, means spiders. A lot of spiders. Dungeons full of ’em. Raids, even. Which is a nightmare for the arachnophobes among us. Luckily, The War Within will have an arachnophobia filter that’s as comprehensive as […]

If you’ve been paying any attention to World of Warcraft in the past year or so, you’ll have noticed that things are getting a little weird. Not in a bad way—in fact, while other MMORPGs would struggle with a content lull before their next big expansion, we’re only a few months out from The War […]

Blizzard quietly had World of Warcraft Dragonflight players test run an upcoming The War Within feature without telling them. Zaralek Cavern, which arrived last May in patch 10.1, lets you explore the zone underneath Dragonflight’s main landmass at a scale never done before in the MMO. It works sort of like Elden Ring’s underground areas […]

I’ve always wanted to love the setting of World of Warcraft—but its storytelling, gnarled up in confusing timelines, optional quests, raid cutscenes, and books,has always kept me at arm’s length. Despite that, I’ve always been rooting for it to get better. That’s mostly out of nostalgia, sure, but I also have a love for the […]

World of Warcraft’s newest expansion, The War Within, starts off as Identity Crisis Theater. Characters old and new are attempting to redefine themselves, and it lends a melancholy air to its first gorgeous island zone. A specific release date hasn’t been announced yet for WoW’s 10th expansion, but it’s expected later this year. Members of […]

World of Warcraft’s limited-time event, Plunderstorm, is nearly over—but there’s going to be one last chance to swipe your bag of pirate-themed swag from its many reputation rewards. Once this week’s maintenance is complete (around 4 pm UTC April 16 for US servers, 4 am UTC April 17 for EU servers), all reputation gains will […]

World of Warcraft: Classic’s Season of Discovery has been a success so far, outperforming most of Blizzard’s metrics—but its experimental nature has also caused no shortage of problems. Most recently, those problems have surrounded an unassuming orb. But first, some context: Season of Discovery (SoD) proceeds in ‘phases’, which are sort of like seasons in […]

World of Warcraft Classic has officially looped all the way back around to the very expansion that, in many ways, sparked the desire for it to exist in the first place. On May 20, Cataclysm Classic will release and move WoW Classic into a new era that is ironically similar to the live version of […]

WoW Classic’s Season of Discovery has been a chaotic, but overall impressive experiment, all told. While it’s had its speed bumps when it comes to grappling with older server tech and designing its world PvP, it’s also got that harebrained vibe usually reserved for private servers and the like. Tanking rogues, healing mages—spaghetti is meeting […]

Generative AI in gaming has been a gnarled, thorny subject for the past few years. Recent experiments have raised the hackles of artists and writers alike—though thus far said experiments have mostly proved that it does a bad job of replicating the human touch.  As I mentioned last week, I feel like tech like Ubisoft’s […]