WoW Midnight is good – but there are problems. Especially three of them need to be fixed for the expansion to be a success.
World of Warcraft Midnight has been live for a few weeks now and the first impressions of most players are quite good. Even though the expansion still has to prove how good the endgame really is in the coming days, the signs are positive. However, there are also some criticisms and shortcomings that have been revealed in the last days and weeks. These problems need to be addressed by the developers promptly, as they can spoil the gaming experience in certain areas or even entirely.
We take a look at the three biggest criticisms currently leveled at World of Warcraft Midnight.
The open world endgame events are underdeveloped
To put it quite bluntly: The 4 major endgame events in World of Warcraft Midnight range somewhere between “fairly okay” and “extremely boring”.
Saltheril’s Soiree is definitely part of the “fairly okay” group. Here, you can choose each week which faction you want to support, complete a handful of world quests for that faction, and ultimately a larger mission that can be completed with a group in just moments. It’s not particularly exciting, but solid and classic WoW gameplay and big hurdles.
The Legends from Harandar are also solid. Every week, there’s a new story about an artifact and more background knowledge about the Haranir. This is interesting for lore fans – those who aren’t interested can simply rush through the quests and finish without reading the “boring” stuff that story enthusiasts like.
Significantly worse is the Stormarion event in the Empty Storm. In theory, a cool event with elements from tower defense games, it turns out to be quite boring. Not only do you need 5 minutes to activate the defenses – which are usually set up in just 30 seconds – but even after that, not much happens. You simply fight for 10 minutes against relentless waves of enemies, against which you are either helpless due to too few player characters, or you steamroll them so relentlessly that there’s no real danger of anything going wrong.
Particularly annoying is that you must be present at the start of the event. If you join in at wave 2 or 3, you won’t receive any quest progress and are just wasting your time. This makes this event even more frustrating.
Particularly negatively noteworthy is the Abundance event. It simply feels like it needed a few more weeks of development time. Because the first days after the launch, the event was an absolute grind fest, where it was best to go out with a group to achieve absurd scores of several million points.
Blizzard apparently didn’t like that and nerfed the event into the ground. Now, it’s just a very tedious mob grind that you have to perform for 24 minutes every week. It lacks fun and no matter how you look at it: It’s just boring. Abundance in its current form offers neither interesting gameplay nor exciting rewards; it’s just a “mandatory grind” that you have to complete for good profession gear.
Not affected by this criticism is the Prey system, or “Loot”. It feels good and coherent, makes playing in the open world more interesting, and resembles a “Hard Mode” for the open game world. This can stay just like that and be expanded further, as it feels like a real enhancement.
