As someone who has played World of Warcraft on and off for what now qualifies as a significant portion of my life over the last 21 years, I’ve come to learn that there are two things that I deeply appreciate about Blizzard’s long-running fantasy MMO. The first is the way Warcraft has sat with, and handled, the evolution of its world and characters over those two decades as an ongoing entity.
Well, that’s not really the first. Because the actual first is that I just really love Warcraft‘s elves. I do appreciate World of Warcraft‘s approach to the passage of time, but really, I’m here for the elves.
And at Gamescom this week, Blizzard provided elves by the bucketload with the unveiling of World of Warcraft‘s next expansion, Midnight. The middle chapter of what the developer is calling a three-part “Worldsoul Saga,” Midnight is World of Warcraft‘s 11th expansion and opens with the forces of the Alliance and the Horde alike teaming to hold back an invasion of void creatures engineered by the sinister ancient entity Xal’atath, who has been menacing the game’s narrative actively and passively for a while now. The invasion will center on the region of Quel’Thalas, the kingdom of the Blood Elves first introduced into World of Warcraft with the arrival of its first expansion pack, The Burning Crusade, back in 2006.
Naturally, that meant Midnight‘s traditional opening cinematic reveal to kick things off was Elf City, population me and a bunch of elves. We got to see important Blood Elf characters like Lor’themar Theron and Lady Liadrin fighting back against Xal’atath’s forces right on the walls of the Blood Elf capital, Silvermoon City. We got Xal’atah herself, who takes an elven form, being all mean and ominous.
After War Within put a focus on Azeroth’s underground regions and dwarven legacy, among other things, Midnight is shaping up to be a very elven-forward narrative, focusing on characters like the Blood Elves or Alleria Windrunner’s quest for vengeance against Xal’atath. Quel’Thalas is being revitalized and reworked as one of the four major zones that will be part of the expansion’s campaign experience. Void Elves, a sub-race of former Blood Elves who were shunned for experimenting with the void and joined the Alliance, will become the third race that can play as Demon Hunters (an elven-specific class for narrative reasons, with only Night Elves and Blood Elves previously able to play), who will get a new void-themed class specialization for the first time since they were introduced in Legion in 2016.
As someone who ended up largely skipping War Within, all this pricked my would-be-pointy ears with intrigue. I loved the tragic story of the High Elves and their transformation into the Blood Elves in Warcraft 3, watching it play out over my older brother’s shoulder as a child. My very first World of Warcraft character was a Night Elf Druid—in part why I mourned Battle for Azeroth‘s sundering of their own home of Teldrassil—but only because the game didn’t have Blood Elves as a playable race when it launched in 2004. Burning Crusade’s addition of the Blood Elves and their lands was the real start of my love affair with the game. I have played many, many characters over the last two decades of World of Warcraft, and the overwhelming majority of them have been one flavor or another of elf. If you’re one of the World of Warcraft fans that has complained when a new race has been added to the game over the years and it’s “just another elf,” sorry! They did that for me.
But refocusing Warcraft‘s current story on elven settings and characters is only part of my renewed interest. A lot of that interest is wrapped up in the aforementioned focus on Quel’Thalas itself as an overhauled region for Midnight‘s campaign. The versions of Quel’Thalas—actually three zones in current World of Warcraft, in the form of Eversong Woods, the Ghostlands, and the Isle of Quel’Danas, transformed into one singular, massive zone encompassing them all in Midnight—and Silvermoon City that currently exist in World of Warcraft have largely been untouched since they were added in The Burning Crusade 20 years prior to Midnight‘s release next year. After Cataclysm overhauled vanilla World of Warcraft‘s zones in 2010, these areas remained some of the oldest in the entire game (that dubious honor will, after next year, fall to the Dranei starting area of Azuremyst Isle and its capital—my apologies to the goat alien players among us).
This doesn’t just mean that they don’t look as graphically detailed as modern World of Warcraft zones or that they are littered with the kind of charmingly obtuse quest designs that Warcraft has distanced itself from over the years. This means that the lands of the Blood Elves have been narratively frozen in time to the point they were when they were first introduced in 2006. The Burning Crusade was set just a couple of years after the events of Warcraft 3, which saw the fallen prince Arthas Menethil lead an undead scourge to ravage the then-High Elf kingdom of Quel’Thalas, killing untold numbers of them, laying waste to Silvermoon, and corrupting the Sunwell, the High Elves’ font of magical power.
Much of the Burning Crusade‘s narrative for the Blood Elves was about their reclamation and recovery from this horrifying trauma—their reliance on demonic powers to sustain their hunger for magic (and the eventual healing of the Sunwell), the scope of the damage done to their once-beautiful lands, and the rebuilding of Silvermoon City—but while they were eventually allowed a moment of peace and to move on, those zones in the game have remained locked in that state of time for two whole decades. There are still workers futilely, almost memetically at this point, working on reconstructing Silvermoon’s walls. There’s still a massive, unhealed scar of dead and decaying land that marks Arthas’ road into the heart of High Elf civilization. For a world that is defined and celebrated as a living entity, that has used its longevity to let major changes impact upon it and to let characters grow old with it, Quel’Thalas and the Blood Elves felt like they were trapped in amber.
Until now, that is. Midnight‘s revamp doesn’t just give these regions a new coat of paint; it wrenches them forward in time in the blink of an eye. From what little we know, there will still be conflict in these lands—Xal’atath and her void armies are quite literally at the gates—but Midnight will give us a version of these lands that have actually healed in the time since we last saw them. Silvermoon hasn’t just been rebuilt in Midnight; as the epicenter of the current grand threat to Azeroth, it will become the primary player hub of Midnight, a space where members of the Horde and the Alliance can coexist (some areas will, at least, remain Horde-only). But for the most part, we will be able to see Silvermoon, and Eversong, and the Ghostlands, and Quel’Danas as we should’ve been able to see them for 20 years.
And that’s even before we consider the implications of what will come after Midnight for these lands. Presumably when Xal’atath’s threat is answered, Silvermoon will once again become a Horde capital, if it’s still standing, that is (it would be very rude of Blizzard to destroy it after waiting to see it rebuilt this long!). What will Quel’Thalas look like going forward? World of Warcraft has previously answered the mechanical issue of players needing to access older versions of certain locations after set narrative events in a phased process, a metanarrative explained to players as them being transported back in time by a member of the timeline-guarding Bronze Dragonflight. Will three versions of Quel’Thalas simultaneously exist in the game—the Burning Crusade original, Midnight‘s overhaul, and a potential version afterwards—or will we have to wait another 20 years before the region is allowed to technically “move on” from Midnight?
Before we get to that question, for now, I’m just happy to care about World of Warcraft again for a bit. I’m already leveling a new character now (an elf, of course—a Void Elf mage, this time), with plans to have a Blood Elf Demon Hunter ready to play Midnight with when it releases sometime next year. Blizzard knows the way to my heart is an endless sea of pointy-eared heroes and villains, but the thing that has kept me coming back time and time again for these past few decades is the chance to see just what will change and grow about the world of Warcraft next and add to its living history in the process.
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