{"id":514578,"date":"2026-03-02T21:12:08","date_gmt":"2026-03-02T21:12:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/514578\/"},"modified":"2026-03-02T21:12:08","modified_gmt":"2026-03-02T21:12:08","slug":"world-of-warcraft-just-upgraded-its-best-city-for-the-first-time-in-20-years-and-now-its-perfect","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/514578\/","title":{"rendered":"‘World of Warcraft’ Just Upgraded Its Best City for the First Time in 20 Years, and Now It’s Perfect"},"content":{"rendered":"

World of Warcraft, when it\u2019s not a game about collecting animal parts or fighting god, is a game about\u00a0time<\/a>. Whether that\u2019s players reflecting on<\/a> the now 22 years they\u2019ve spent wandering the regions of Azeroth (and lands beyond it) and the lives they\u2019ve lived<\/a> during that adventuring or the makers of that world reckoning with what it takes to actually change it, time is one of World of Warcraft\u2018s greatest strengths and a testament to its endurance\u2014and it\u2019s on full display in its latest expansion, Midnight.<\/p>\n

When\u00a0Midnight was already announced, I and my elf-pilled brain<\/a> were already excited for what Blizzard was touting as one of the major features of the expansion: that one of the new zones being \u201cadded\u201d to the game was, in fact, not an addition at all, but a revamp of the Blood Elf kingdom of Quel\u2019Thalas, completely overhauling and updating an area of World of Warcraft not touched since it was added with the release of The Burning Crusade back in 2006 (the game\u2019s first expansion; Midnight is its 11th). But now that\u00a0Midnight is actually here and I\u2019ve spent the past weekend adventuring through Quel\u2019Thalas as part of its early access period, it\u2019s one thing to have been excited. It\u2019s completely another to come back to a place you\u2019ve seen trapped in amber for almost two-thirds of your life and see it teeming with a life you could\u2019ve only dreamt of stepping onto its virtual soil 20 years ago.<\/p>\n

\"Wowscrnshot\u00a9 Blizzard Entertainment\/Gizmodo <\/p>\n

It\u2019s a huge undertaking, completely modernizing the region while still keeping it faithful to the memories players have built from the old zone. Quel\u2019Thalas is now one region in\u00a0Midnight, a reformatting of what were previously three major zones when they were introduced in The Burning Crusade: the Blood Elf capital Silvermoon City, the surrounding Eversong Woods, and the decayed Ghostlands, increasing it in size, scope, and verticality to make it suitable for World of Warcraft\u2018s modern style of flying mounts (flying at all was introduced in\u00a0Burning Crusade, but only in the new region of Outland, leaving you grounded in these lands even after much of Azeroth was opened up to flight).<\/p>\n

Everything is bigger and prettier, with modern assets instead of leaning on strong art design but 2006 modeling. Silvermoon, now the main player hub regardless of whether you fight for the Alliance or Horde<\/a>, has been tripled in size, with what were once ruins in its old form now a completely rebuilt city filled with nooks and crannies to explore among its glimmering spires. Areas you recognize from the old zones have been reworked to match that scope, even with changes to accommodate the narrative events of Midnight: Eversong Forest is now lush with autumnal golden trees, its undead decay largely healed over, but with still a few darker areas to recreate those Ghostlands vibes. While main story quests in the zone focus on the tasks at hand, side quests let you dig back into zones and even a few characters that have been hanging around for decades, seeing how their lives went on after you first trundled past them as a low-level character generations prior, eager to start your own adventure.<\/p>\n

\"Wowscrnshot\u00a9 Blizzard Entertainment\/Gizmodo <\/p>\n

It\u2019s that, really, that stands out more about the redesign than the mechanical aspects: this is a land that is now bursting with life after years of literal and metaphorical decay and stagnation. What was once a reflection of where the Blood Elves had been after the events of Warcraft 3\u2014which saw the kingdom ravaged by the undead armies of Arthas Menethil on his fallen path to become the new Lich King\u2014and where they were at, still trying to grapple with that trauma coming into Burning Crusade, is now a reflection of a people that have healed, strong enough to stand tall in the face of the invasion that Midnight\u2018s initial story campaign revolves around.<\/p>\n

Silvermoon and its surrounding areas are now laden with people, wandering around and living their lives (even as the latest threat ominously looms over them, almost literally: a massive portal in the sky opened up by current\u00a0Warcraft big bad Xal\u2019atath to let in an invading army of cosmic creatures of shadow and void): painting lush vistas, partying with each other, tilling the freshly invigorated soil, and researching arcane tomes. Silvermoon itself is perhaps now the city in World of Warcraft that feels most like an actual city, a bustle generated not just by an army of player characters now settled there for the new expansion but by hundreds of NPCs who roam its now expanded towers and alleyways going about their own business, instead of simply being there to cater to the mechanical needs of the player base.<\/p>\n

\"Wowscrnshot\u00a9 Blizzard Entertainment\/Gizmodo <\/p>\n

It\u2019s here that Blizzard has also crucially kept a little bit of the edge of the Blood Elves as they were defined in\u00a0The Burning Crusade, a bitter people fresh from unfathomable slaughter and loss, willing to do anything to survive and feed their hunger for the arcane. Although broadly as a society the Blood Elves have replaced their momentary reliance on fel magics with light-worshipping religion and non-demonic sources of magic, several storylines in the new Silvermoon both explore that transition as well as the fact that such evolution has not entirely eroded the haughty elves\u2019 belief in their superiority over others, a stratification of rich elites sipping fancy wines in their arcane academies while the have-nots are left to fend for themselves in the city\u2019s darker alleyways. The fact that both factions now use the city as a temporary base of operations creates a fun friction too, from moments of both sides being at tense loggerheads in the story to the way that, depending on your player faction and race, some NPCs quietly react to you (as someone playing a Void Elf Demon Hunter, the guards are none too pleased to see me, but I\u2019ve seen some kneel in the presence of Paladin players, grateful for the light\u2019s assistance in this trying time).<\/p>\n

All these details, big and small, add up to create what is now the gold standard for\u00a0World of Warcraft taking one of its old zones and revamping it for the modern game. While there have been many changes to Azeroth since\u00a0World of Warcraft launched in 2004, there\u2019s been little of this kind of scale outside of the wholesale revamp of the original game world in the 2010 expansion, Cataclysm. Blizzard has tried in fits and starts to show signs of change as the narrative has built in the years since, such as the losses of both the Undead capital of the Undercity and the Night Elf capital, Darnassus<\/a>, during Battle for Azeroth, or the reclamation of the Worgen capital, Gilneas, in\u00a0Dragonflight. But those pale in comparison to the undertaking done in rebuilding Quel\u2019Thalas, not just as a thorough modernization of a land long neglected, but as a reflection of how far the world of WoW has come in the last 20 years.<\/p>\n

Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel<\/a>, Star Wars<\/a>, and Star Trek<\/a> releases, what\u2019s next for the DC Universe on film and TV<\/a>, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"World of Warcraft, when it\u2019s not a game about collecting animal parts or fighting god, is a game…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":514579,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[64,63,257363,105,257364],"class_list":["post-514578","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-technology","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-blizzard-entertainment","tag-technology","tag-world-of-warcraft"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/514578","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=514578"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/514578\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/514579"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=514578"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=514578"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=514578"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}