It’s been 90 days since the launch of the most recent World of Warcraft Expansion, “The War Within”.  I thought I’d talk about it.

While I’ve technically – TECHNICALLY – been playing WoW since very shortly after the launch back in 2004, I have skipped huge chunks of the story.  I played for two or three months in 2004, picked it up again in 2016 for the Legion expansion and because I wanted to surprise my wife by making a pocket healer for her, then dropped it again until late 2020 when for some reason everyone had a lot of time on their hands and couldn’t go out very much.

Since 2020, I’ve been playing it more often than not, though I still take breaks for two or three months at a time during content droughts.  WoW has a lot of those, though they try very hard to have SOMETHING for people to do in-between major patches.

The War Within, or “TWW”, or “Warthin” is apparently a huge expansion in terms of fleshing out lore tidbits that have been hinted at over the course of the game, and unfortunately most of them are completely lost on me.  It’s still been fun, though!  The thing that keeps drawing me back to WoW is that they do group and raid content better than their competitors, and this expansion has been a joy in that regard.

I even took a few days to go through all of the side quests in the expansion for the “Loremaster” achievement.  It was an awful lot of flying back and forth through underground caverns running errands for… people? and I can’t say that there were any real highlights, but at least I can open up the world map and not see a bunch of yellow exclamation marks all over the place saying that someone has chores for me.

I said “people?” in the last sentence, because Warthin has an interesting premise and cast of characters.  See, back in the Legion expansion (2016), you could get this presumably-cursed dagger that would talk to you occasionally.  In the next expansion (Battle for Azeroth, 2018), they revealed that there was a creepy evil – if hot – chick in the dagger and she breaks out and tries to sell your soul to an evil god or something.

Anyway, while the creepy evil hot chick didn’t show up for a couple of expansions, she’s back and she has an evil plan which I… actually don’t know what her evil plan is, come to think of it.

I’m not sure if I don’t know what she really wants to do because it hasn’t been explained yet, or because I haven’t paid enough attention.

ANYWAY SHE’S EVIL so you gotta stop her, and whatever evil thing she’s doing is underground so you gotta pack up your stuff and head down there.

Along the way you need to help a bunch of different factions out with their personal problems.  You have a race of …robot dwarves?, a bunch of kobolds and goblins which we’ve seen before in WoW, some spider people which I think were enemies in a previous expansion but you’re all buddy buddy with them now, and some borderline zealots who are part of an empire that everyone thought died out a long time ago but has just been underground, or something?  I really feel like not playing the earlier expansions is impacting my enjoyment of interacting with all of these factions, but at the same time I can always ask my wife if I want to know what’s going on with them.

One of the best things about the spider people, by the way, is that Blizzard had the foresight to consider that some people are not very good with spiders and thus implemented an “Arachnophobia filter” which turns them all into lobsters and crabs.  It’s very funny to see lobsters hanging from the ceiling in exactly the way you would not expect to see lobsters hanging from the ceiling, and in short I strongly recommend the Arachnophobia filter.

I also strongly recommend playing the expansion, in general, because they absolutely nailed it in terms of having stuff to do to advance your character, by which I mean you have a bunch of numbers on your character sheet and there are almost always things you can do to make those numbers bigger.  Numbers get bigger, lizard brain get happy.

Impressively, they’ve even made avenues for antisocial or socially-anxious people to make the numbers bigger in ways that don’t involve other people.  You can play through all of the expansion’s dungeons with NPC companions, there’s a whole system of solo instances of scaling difficulty, and for – I think the first time? – you can even fight the final boss of the raid zone without involving 9 or more of your closest friends.

I mean, that last one doesn’t give you any items.  Blizzard’s not that generous.  But it does have a quest reward tied to it.

Also, Warthin added a system called “Warbands”, where certain actions on any character make numbers go up for ALL of your characters and adds a shared bank where you can pass certain special items back and forth between your virtual selves.  So, even if you’ve played the heck out of one character and are suffering a little burnout, you can just swap over into a new skin without feeling like you’re hampering yourself too much.

In short, if you have a lot of free time and are desperately looking for something to do with it, this WoW expansion is an excellent way to make it disappear.  Would recommend.  Turn on lobster mode for best results.