Terminally Online
This is Terminally Online: PC Gamer’s very own MMO column. Every other week, I’ll be sharing my thoughts on the genre, interviewing fellow MMO-heads like me, taking a deep-dive into mechanics we’ve all taken for granted, and, occasionally, bringing in guest writers to talk about their MMO of choice.
World of Warcraft: Midnight (and, indeed, The Last Titan) are doing some interesting things. Rather than the usual MMO shtick of a new and exciting continent to explore, they’re revamping old zones. By all means, they’re still “new”—the rebuilt Silvermoon is completely different, as are the questing zones outside, but Blizzard’s really digging into its old world in a way it hasn’t done since the old world overhaul in Cataclysm.
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Murder Row, previously just a street, is now a sprawling district filled with hidden bars and noble dens of degeneracy. The Sunwell is placed at the end of a long, ocean-stretching bridge that looks like it was peeled straight out of the concept art. There are these little floating terraces with blood elves drinking wine.
It’s one of the best-looking cities Blizzard’s ever put together—but it’s not just Silvermoon I’m impressed by. The surrounding Ghostlands are equally lovely, especially now there’s not a great bloomin’ scar running through it. Zul’aman has been fleshed out from a raid into its own fully-fledged zone.
It’s so good, in fact, that I’m in a bit of an existential crisis. See, conventional wisdom suggests that an MMO’s lifespan should include expansions, and that those expansions should take you to new exciting locales. If your expansion doesn’t have a new continent (or planet, or alternate reality, whatever) to explore—are you really trying?
But MMOs are also meant to be these living, breathing things, and no game knows the price of abandoned zones more than World of Warcraft. As of 2026, there are now nine major continents on Azeroth alone, each split up into their own zones. There are two versions of Draenor. You can pop along to the realm of death.
Part of me wonders if Shadowlands was a symptom of this problem, the need to always go somewhere else. There’s a term called “spectacle creep” that’s applicable here, and I propose a cousin: MMOs have a problem with continent creep. If you keep a game running for 20 years you’re just gonna have too many of them.
Midnight, meanwhile, feels like this one big magic trick. Functionally these are still “new” areas with new quests, endgame activities, and so on. But they don’t feel like they’re adding to the cognitive load of remembering how many bits of Azeroth there actually are. Haranar and the Voidstorm are allowed to be tangential areas for side-plots, rather than bulky additions to the worldbuilding of the aged MMO.
Rather than wrestling with new lore, Blizzard could have been building on old stories—and the benefit of that history shows. Silvermoon feels far more textured and sprawling than Dornogal ever did. Which begs the question: Why has it taken WoW over two decades to start really turning its gaze to the past? Beyond Cataclysm, which mostly only revamped anything for levelling purposes.
Why has it taken WoW over two decades to start really turning its gaze to the past?
And sure, it’s all smoke and mirrors. Functionally-speaking, Silvermoon 2.0 is a new city, as is the Eversong Forest, as is Zul’Aman. But how exploring an MMO world feels is more important than the actual mechanical guts of it. And for a while, WoW has felt sprawling but somehow small. All these bits and pieces silo’d off from each other in their own little corners.
I have to wonder what WoW would look like if Blizzard had spent one or two more expansions as justification to flesh out older zones, rather than tacking on new ones—perhaps alternating between expansions where an ancient continent rises out of the mists (again) and ones that look like Midnight, where a story gets woven through some old zones that can get shuffled into Chromie time.
What does a WoW with a Stormwind or Orgrimmar that was upgraded every five years, not 10+ look like? What does the default levelling experience (which currently sends you to a mysterious dragon island as your first introduction to Azeroth) look like if we hadn’t gone gallivanting around the realms of death?
Maybe I’m just pushing the issue elsewhere. At this point, WoW is a mess of interconnected areas tethered together by portals, boats, and in some cases, a time-travelling gnome/dragon. We’d just be giving Chromie a bigger workload.
Instead of having this great big map with a bunch of islands tacked onto the side, you’d have one cohesive world sat on top of an interdimensional lasagne of older versions of Azeroth. Is that inherently better? Well, judging by how spoiled-rotten with nostalgia Silvermoon 2.0 makes me feel, it certainly isn’t worse.
