Microsoft has pushed hard lately to tack on an extra fee to its big releases for fans to start a game a couple of days before launch. World of Warcraft and its latest expansion Midnight are no exception. Paying $90 for the Epic Edition, instead of the $50 Base or $70 Heroic Editions, would have let you start the eleventh expansion four days early.
Paying $40 more than the base edition, you could have started your journey through the revamped Blood Elven lands of Quel’Thalas before those who could not or refused to pay more for four extra days of an expansion can get going too. Since playing through every storyline, hitting level 90, and clearing every dungeon on Heroic difficulty, the whole early access period hasn’t been bad. It’s felt sloppy.
Get BWT in your inbox!
Get BWT in your inbox!
But let’s be honest. The real launch is now Early Access. The full launch is more viewed as a late start for such a popular MMO as WoW. Not paying more for the Epic Edition means you’re behind on gold earned, as well as having less time to get your professions ready, and you will be caught up in a swell of many more players at expansion launch.
This all happens regardless of how adamant Blizzard is that playing Early Access is not a leg-up on other players in terms of player power. But even those, including my guildmates, the entire early access period feels rushed and not ready for primetime.
World of Warcraft Mightnight Early Access period does not feel ready for primetime
Let’s start with the most important thing to cover. Are any players experiencing game-breaking issues? No, not really. The entire levelling campaign can be played through with minor intermittent issues that vary player by player. The biggest complaints for the levelling campaign are slow spawn rates at common bottlenecks, like Fairbreeze Village, scaring Hawkstriders, and catching lynxes.
Everything else below is not personal anecdotes of one player’s experiences to date with Midnight, but rather an effort made by myself and my guild to catalogue these issues during our playthrough of the expansion over the past weekend. Regardless, your issues may vary, and these all could magically disappear once the expansion fully launches.
Yet as you pay closer and closer attention to quests and items collected, some parts that you’d never expect to be present in the full release of an expansion are present. Specifically, placeholder text and images. These items would be expected in Alpha and Beta as those are unfinished products, with final assets expected to be added over time as we get closer to launch. But in the official release of an expansion? That’s basically inexcusable. Why request that players pay $90 for “early access” and deliver an unfinished, unpolished product?
Still, during early access, quest and item text, some quests in the questlog, even abilities for professions and specs, still show placeholder notes for developers to remove before launch. Similarly are spelling mistakes in quests and items. Finding every little spelling mistake in thousands and thousands of pages and blurbs of text is difficult. But we should expect that at least spell check and a search-and-remove function would be run by a company as large as Blizzard. But that’s not all.
But also, the main launch of an expansion is the time that every player, including alpha and beta testers, experiences a story in full. Cinematics and in-game cutscenes are normally implemented in full at expansion launch so as to avoid story spoilers or big moments. Even voice acting can be missing until launch. But for some reason, there are a lot of inconsistencies in how the sound itself coordinates with WoW’s own systems.
Turning off sound effects while normally questing and going into a cinematic causes them to play oddly. Tracks tied to sound effects are muted while everything else plays normally. I don’t think I’ve ever experienced something like this until Midnight. Even with music and sound muted beforehand, the cutscene audio played normally, with no audio parts missing.
Similarly, for normal quests, some cues are repeated for everybody, regardless of whether they’re on the quest or not. Like in Fairbreeze Village, Arator will be present bandaging up a Blood Elf who got hurt in the chaos. Every time a player walked up to Arator to trigger the bandaging, the audio of him soothing the person plays for everyone in the vicinity. So, at launch, you may hear Arator constantly until you escape Fairbreeze.
Some audio cues are repeated for everybody, regardless of whether they’re on the quest or not in WoW Midnight.
Even during a quest that takes you back to the Scarlet Monastery, one person completing a quest will deposit a sword in everyone’s bag. You’d quickly stack up numerous of these swords that can only be deleted if you stay around long enough or get caught up in a busy period. You could even have already completed the quest and still get the quest-related item stuck in your bags.
With how beautiful the new loading screen images have been for every dungeon, delve, and zone, the appearance of the Dwarf flying a gryphon placeholder loading screen is jarring. This happens when you spawn into the new Harandar dungeon, The Blinding Vale. The dungeon itself is beautiful, yet not seeing what art Blizzard’s art team has worked hard on producing for it is sad, to say the least.
Alternatively, there are just weird visual bugs happening consistently in delves. For the most part, the new delves work and can be run through (beyond the occasional disconnect when spawning into one). However, the new Delve Companion, Valeera Sanguinar, is quite messy.
Firstly, her harvesting materials in delves occasionally has the prompt that Brann Bronzebeard, The War Within Delve companion, did the harvesting (This has since been fixed). Upon finishing a delve and obtaining one of the new curios, Brann’s companion interface pops up, with the only way to fix this being to reset the delve. For how consistent this issue has been, it’s pretty surprising that the implementation of the new companion is this poorly done. Since the full launch of Midnight, Brann still pops up at the end of one when changing out curios.
Next are professions. Profession skill point collection really feels like it’s happening on a player-by-player basis. One player could be getting skinning skill items, while another hasn’t gotten any to drop, even when their skinning journal says they can still possibly get some this week. Even for players who can get skill drops from one farming profession may not get them for another.
Personally, I’ve maxed out my Skinning skill points for the week and haven’t received any herbalism skill point drops. For a close friend, they haven’t gotten any skinning skill item drops. Then, for crafting professions, they may just have completely glitched-out crafts. Like inscripters, unable to get any Treatise for other professions until early on the fourth day of early access.
The Abundance tutorial is completable, but the normal event is completely broken in World of Warcraft Midnight.
Finally, there are the end-game activities. These are so inconsistently implemented across the board. Blizzard originally commented that end-game activities will give their full rewards, and many will be available only at the full launch of Midnight. But the choice of which end-game events are playable during early access is so inconsistent. The same can be said for renown rewards, too.
For instance, the Voidstorm event, Stormarion Assault, is available in-full. You can even unlock and get a 246-item level trinket from The Singularity that’s tied to the assault event. But the Zul’Aman event, Abundance, is possible to complete the tutorial for, but completely broken if you do the normal Abundance events. So, is Abundance NOT meant to be done during this period, or is it?
Then, there are the events in Harandar and Eversong Woods that are just not up at all, even though you can get a quest that takes you to each of their event locations to complete them. You can even accept the Harandar mural renown quest for a 246 item level item, but it’s just not possible to be completed right now.
World of Warcraft: Midnight is overall a great expansion. It tells a compelling story of faith and zealotry, family ties, and how past conflicts can lead to modern misunderstandings. The expansion itself isn’t completely unplayable. It’s just full of inconsistencies and bugs that make the entire Early Access experience feel sloppy. Like Blizzard is fine with taking their players’ money but giving them an unfinished product under an ‘Early Access’ label, even when, for all intents and purposes, the expansion has and is being advertised as having been launched in all its glory.
Again, many of these issues may be resolved at any time, or even when the expansion launches in full on March 2nd. But with how open Blizzard has been about what Early Access players could expect in the four-day period, why not mention these things too? Or delay the expansion a week to make sure that we don’t see these bugs or dev notes that are meant to be removed before launch.
These are all things 99.9% of players may forget about even within a week or two. It’s just going to leave a sour taste in my mouth as they ramp up the advertising cycle and ask for at least $90 once again when The Last Titan rolls around.
