World of Warcraft: The War Within Review

World of Warcraft: The War Within, the 10th expansion in the famed MMORPG franchise, and the 20th anniversary of the game itself, is a weird mish-mash of ideas coming off the very solo-centric expansions Shadowlands and Dragonflight. As some people might remember, I turned my back on “Retail WoW” after the horrible Shadowlands expansion, only to return to the digital crack with Blizzard bringing back my favorite expansion Wrath of the Lich King Classic (I’ve dropped it again since the Classic line has moved onto Cataclysm, my most hated expansion) after I spent time praising Final Fantasy XIV at length.

Well, it’s time to spend another 20 Australian Dollars on a subscription, $80 on the expansion itself, and see if World of Warcraft has redeemed itself enough to fuel my MMO addiction for another few years with The War Within… I’d also ask you to read Josh’s beta preview here for additional thoughts on the game.

Name: World of Warcraft: The War Within
Platform(s): PC
Developer: Blizzard Entertainment
Publisher: Activision-Blizzard
Game Type: MMORPG
Mode(s): Online
Release Date: Out Now

The War Within… Without Your Character (Story)

The War Within (From here on out called TWW) sees the return of Warcraft creator and lore scribe Chris Metzen to the helm after his retirement in 2016 in hopes of correcting the mistakes of the past (*cough*Shadowlands*cough*) and returning the World of Warcraft to the forefront of a story-driven MMORPG that it once was… and in that, he gets partial credit.

The opening of TWW sets the tone for the things to come. The player gets summoned to Dalaran, the floating city slash home of the Mages, where Xal’atath, a God-like being that predates the Old Gods, helps the Nerubians (A bunch of bugs and spiders essentially, last seen serving The Lich King in Wrath of the Lich King) bring down Dalaran from the skies and crashing into the new found lands of Khaz Algar.

From here, with the help of the Earthen, a bunch of stone Dwarfs, the Arathi, a bunch of humans who have been trapped underground for a few generations, and a group of renegade Nerubians, the player goes through a few different storylines about the corruption of those in power and the people who are wanting to restore the balance that once was the status quo in the area.

There are other stories interwoven into the game of course, with one of the highlights being the problem with Anduin, who suffered from being corrupted by The jailer in Shadowlands, losing his connection with “The Light” that most Priests and Paladins call upon in battle, by the way of the devotion of a new character Faerin Lothar, who lost an eye and arm in battle but still stays true to the Lamplighter ways (Lamplighter’s are similar to Paladins). She shows Anduin that faith in the light can be restored no matter if you have been corrupted or seen as impure by the light or the ways of the light.

Other storylines revolve around Alleria Windrunner, one of the three famous Windrunner sisters (Long-time fans will know of Vereesa Windrunner, the youngest Windrunner who hunted down her sister Sylvanas Windrunner, the former leader of The Horde and the Banshee Queen), and her having some grudge/connection to TWW main bad guy character Xal’atath (Something, something void elves), who is trying to corrupt the eldest Windrunner sister into doing her bidding… Can someone say “incoming heel turn”?

There is a bit more to TWW than I’m willing to add at this time, as some details need to be experienced to understand, others might take a trip to WoW Wiki to understand. But overall, the stories that are told in this game are many with a lot of room to be expanded upon with future patches.

If it ain’t Broke, Why Bother? (Graphics)

If there is one area where World of Warcraft has both progressed and regressed, it’s the graphics involved in the game. Since World of Warcraft is 20 years old, the graphics (Which can be run on a potato these days) look and feel very dated. Yes, there was an “update” to the game during Shadowlands which improved the graphics slightly so that it didn’t look so dated on 1080p monitors, but with 4K becoming the standard in gaming, seeing 20-year-old graphics with a slight upscale into HD just isn’t enough anymore.

To put this in contrast with the “main competition”, Final Fantasy XIV, which is a LOT more graphic intensive from a design and image standpoint, World of Warcraft just looks dated. Not to mention that for some unknown reason, this game also seems to be one of the most under-optimised games out there.

Going into dungeons where the Tank would pull 10+ mobs together and I’d hit one of my more light-intensive spells, I’d see my FPS drop from over 150fps to 5fps for about 20-30 seconds before I’d get a chance to do something else, usually resulting in me getting kicked from the dungeons due to not doing anything. It’s not my fault, it was the unoptimized game.

Comparing TWW with Final Fantasy XIV again, I would go into dungeons or raids with a lot of people, have the same thing happen, cast the same type of graphics-intensive spells, and my FPS wouldn’t dip one single frame. This leaves me wondering how something that is 20 years old and can run on a potato has a worse graphical optimization than something half its age and 100 times more impressive with design and function.

Maybe I need to wait and see if NVidia brings out a patch for their GeForce RTX 4070 line that stabilizes the game so that I can go back to playing it on the Ultra setting I’ve been using for the last few years rather than the Normal mid-tier graphics setting I’m being forced to use at the moment.

World of Warcraft: Minimal Effort Edition (Gameplay)

World of Warcraft is a very simple beast, with gameplay that has not changed in its base form in 20 years. The War Within does nothing to change that fact.

As the player, you are going to be spending many hours doing the same thing over and over: Watching numbers on a screen go up. From your levels to your gear, your damage, healing, etc; all the numbers are going to go up so you feel like you are doing something interesting with your time.

However, what has changed… Kind of… are the methods in which you will be making those numbers go up.

Pre-Patch

Before The War Within, we were given something that I have been wanting for a long time: A mode or event where we go back into past expansions and defeat bosses all over again. This pre-patch event, called “The Radiant Echoes”, saw all the players go back to three zones and defeat “memories of Azaroth” that had been appearing after the end of Dragonflight.

For the main part, you would fly around Dustwallow Marsh, Searing Gorge, and Dragonblight defeating the big bad bosses of the time and location (Onyxia, Firelord Ragnaros, and The Lich King respectively). You also have smaller “Elites” scattered around each zone like Hogger that you also could take down to advance the event.

This small celebration of 20 years of World of Warcraft was a great time and a great way to level your alts as they had huge experience gains active for this event. I would love to see more events like this happen throughout the year to celebrate the history of this game.

Warbands

The first addition to the gameplay of The War Within is Warbands, the new grouping for your characters on the character selection screen. As a Warband, your characters get access to a shared bank tab where you can store gold, gear, and other things that will be shared between the members of your Warband. Over time, there will be Warband-exclusive gear that will be added to the game that you can use among the members of your Warband.

The other thing that Warbands bring to the table is an experience buff where each member (up to five members) of the Warband that you level to maximum level will contribute 5% to the buff, eventually, you will have a 25% experience buff to future characters that you level, decreasing the time it will take to level alts. Also, the renown system (the reformatted reputation system) is shared between all characters this time, giving you a quicker way to gain renown levels.

Delves

Ok, I’m going to call this one out… Delves are nothing more than Torghast under a new name.

Delves are “solo content” dungeons where you team up with Brann Bronzebeard (A legendary explorer character in Warcraft) and accomplish tasks associated with that Delve as you make your way through to the treasure room at the end while getting randomly produced enemies, conditions, and extra one-time talents from rare spawns.

Many people are praising Delves as a great innovation for World of Warcraft, but the truth is that they are just one of the WORST things about the Shadowland expansion renamed to make people think this is a whole new thing. At the same time, don’t get me wrong, Delves are more enjoyable than Torghast ever was, but I’m still going to say what I said.

Follower Dungeons & Story Raids

Follower Dungeons were added to World of Warcraft late in Dragonflight, but this is where they are going to be implemented more into the core of the game. This isn’t good or bad, it gives choice to people who want to do the dungeon content without having to deal with the toxic nature of the community that inhabits dungeon running, replacing actual players with a group of AI-driven characters to do the roles required to run a dungeon. However, this comes at the cost of the gear drops being of a lower level than the normal dungeons.

If you want to just play the dungeons and do not care about gearing up for raiding or anything that the endgame community will require, then Follower Dungeons will be for you. The same goes with the upcoming release of “Story Raids”, where the same mechanics will be applied to the “group” and the content will be less challenging so people who choose to do this will be able to experience the story without having to do anything like raid gearing and all that junk.

Hero Talents

The last thing that was added in The War Within was Hero talents. Instead of messing with the talent trees that were added in Dragonflight, Blizzard just added another section called “Hero Talents”, which are 10 extra talents that you choose from two tree options and add those talents as you level up. There really isn’t much to this as it doesn’t really give you a choice since the community would create the “meta” of which choice is better for your spec and that’s all people would follow.

The whole talent tree system, which Blizzard said was a return to old-school talent trees from the early days of World of Warcraft is a bad experiment, as it is the community (or those hardcore simulation players) who decide what the “best” talent tree version is and people just copy that. Even Blizzard knows this as they have added the ability to just import talent trees from websites or directly from other players. The “play as you want” nature of talent trees is dead once again.

Level Those Alts! (Replayability)

Once you are done with the very short story campaign and unlock world quests, then there isn’t too much to do but the same old things you have done before: Grind for gear with World Quests, Events, Delves, Dungeons, and Raids. At the time of writing, you cannot start raiding just yet and Mythic+ dungeons are also not available. So this has been the best time to grind normal and Heroic dungeons, something that you would have done for the better part of the last 20 years.

The War Within promises to give you many ways to gear up once you hit max level, with everything giving you something that you can upgrade with tokens and points like you did in Dragonflight without needing to be forced to do the Mythic+ and raid grinds if you do not want to… However, since games like this are based around the community and the meta they create, once Season 1 unlocks in a week or so, Mythic+ dungeons and raiding will be the “best” way to gear up and the whole problem with the community focusing on things like RaiderIO score will return in droves and completely screw up what Blizzard planned to keep things fair and balanced.

The other thing you can do is level your Warband of alternative characters to maximum level and gear those up too. Before TWW launched, I went through my list of over 20 different characters on the server that I play on and culled them down to 10 more manageable characters to level when I get bored or have my main character geared up enough that I only touch that character on raid nights.

The good thing with Warbands, as I mentioned above, is that there is a stacking buff of 5% increased experience gain for each character you have at max level, with a total of 25% increased experience gain being available. So when I hit that 5-character maximum, the final 5 will be a breeze to level, and thanks to the changes with the alt leveling system allowing you to level through a variety of different measures, I’ll be back to that 20-character roster due to boredom in no time.

Early Access = Pay to Win

Speaking of leveling alts quickly, I want to address something that happened only 24 hours after the official launch of The War Within on August 26th.

Blizzard, for the first time, tried their hand at the “Early Access” pot of greed that many game companies have been doing over the last couple of years. People who bought the “Epic Edition” of the game got access to the beta, something that has happened for the last few expansions, as well as “early access” to the game in full on August 23rd, three days before those who didn’t want to cough up $40+ extra for access.

During this time, I was online with my guild, a few of them paid for the early access and not only did they have their mains to max level on the first day, but over the whole three-day period, most of them had up to 4 alts also leveled to the maximum. Blizzard saw this happening and decided, the day after the August 26th official launch, that people needed to be forced to slow down on leveling in general and instituted a bunch of nerfs to leveling, from the amount of experience people gained to the strength of characters during the leveling time hitting for less damage, and tuning dungeons so that Tanks couldn’t pull too many mobs without risking death.

To be honest, people saw through the bullshit quickly. Early Access was the “pay to win” period, where people who shelled out extra money got to gain the advantage over those people who could not afford the extra payment to get into the game “early”. As many of you know, I HATE practices like this as they are greedy and predatory. Blizzard should be ashamed of themselves for doing this. But what’s done is done and people will not forget the injustice thrust upon them by the management at Activision-Blizzard/Microsoft. Their time will come.

Was World of Warcraft: The War Within Worth It? (Closing)

One of my guildies said, “The measure of an expansion should be how fun the story is, not the number of alts you have already leveled.” This is very true. The War Within was hyped up as the first thrilling chapter of “The World Soul Saga”, a three-part trilogy of games that will be the biggest story that World of Warcraft has ever told… But when I was sitting there, two days after the official launch of the game, wondering what to do with my time in the game, I thought there had been a failure to live up to that hype.

The War Within tells many great stories within itself, but the time it took to tell those stories was just too short compared to the 9 other expansions that came before this. Yes, there will be more of the story to be told over time as more patches add more content for players to play, but when your main offering, the one you pay $80 for is so short and unfulfilling, then it is hard to want to stick around to do more content, and the first season of the expansion hasn’t even started yet.

This does not look good if people are bored only after a week of the game being available. Yes, I know with the beginning of Season 1 of the expansion starting on September 10th, adding a lot more content to the endgame of The War Within, I can’t help but wonder if there is less content here than there was previously. Help us, Chris Metzen, you’re our only hope.

Review Disclosure Statement: World of Warcraft: The War Within was purchased by the reviewer for review purposes. For more information on how we review video games and other media/technology, please go review our Review Guideline/Scoring Policy for more info.