World of Warcraft: The War Within review

A Tauren paladin rattled up on his robot mount right in the middle of one of World of Warcraft: The War Within's final quests. It would've been nice to see a sweet conversation between two major characters who were exchanging apologies after being separated for years, but instead I was staring at Commander Digbickers' set of high-level gear as he took a break from his daily routine. I couldn't even see the speech bubbles over his massive form, which normally wouldn't bother me, but there are glimmers of an older WoW here, one where I actually care what two important characters are saying to each other, and one I thought we'd left behind.

World of Warcraft: The War Within is an expansion that thrives off of its characters and their tender interactions. Missing even a second of a conversation to another player passing by reminded me that, oh right, I'm playing a 20-year-old old MMO, and the other half of it is all about funneling you into a routine that makes numbers go up. No matter how much WoW has revitalized its storytelling, it's still a game mired by the perpetual grind it's become.

I've only dabbled in WoW since spending most of my teenage years going on 25-player raids when I should've been studying, and The War Within is Blizzard's call for people like me to return, to «come home», and it only took me a few hours of readjusting to see why. Actual storytelling, not a series of Marvel movie catastrophes, is important again; characters are important again; worldbuilding is important again. The effort started by the last expansion, Dragonflight, has paid off: The War Within is easily WoW's best campaign. The catch, however, is that the moment you finish it, you're kicked back out into the morass of all the things that pushed me away from WoW in the first place.

My first hint was the barrage of quests and notifications that flashed across my screen when I logged in. Years of systems begging for attention all at once. I thought gacha games were bad at overwhelming