World of Warcraft’s Midnight expansion is coming early next year, and it’s reimagining an often forgotten part of old Azeroth to look and feel brand new–the Blood Elf lands of Quel’thalas.
Blizzard threw back the veil on WoW’s 11th expansion, the second in its three-expansion-long Worldsoul Saga trilogy, at Gamescom 2025. It revealed that two of the expansion’s four new zones are actually old ones rebuilt from the ground up, with a reimagined Silvermoon City serving as the expansion’s main hub. Blizzard also detailed other new features coming with Midnight, like a new opt-in open-world system called Prey, another playable Allied Race, a third Demon Hunter specialization, and the full arrival of player housing.
GameSpot spoke with a few different developers at Blizzard, including WoW senior game director Ion Hazzikostas, associate design director Maria Hamilton, and associate game director Paul Kubit, to learn more about Midnight, including how Blizzard approached revisiting older zones, what players can expect from Midnight’s story, how the new Demon Hunter spec plays, and much more.
Quel’thalas Reborn
Two of the expansion’s new zones are ones that anyone who has ever created a Blood Elf character in WoW will already be familiar with. In Midnight, Eversong Woods, the area formerly known as the Ghostlands, and the former raid Zul’Aman have all been reimagined as modern questing zones, complete with all-new assets.
When Silvermoon City and its surrounding areas were added back in 2007 as part of The Burning Crusade expansion, a pesky loading screen separated the new zones from the rest of Azeroth. It was a trend that would continue in future expansions, which would go on to add numerous new landmasses for players to explore, but always felt weird in this instance since the Blood Elf lands of Quel’thalas were directly connected to the Eastern Kingdoms via the Eastern Plaguelands zone.
In Midnight, Eversong Woods, Zul’Aman and Silvermoon City will finally be a part of the Eastern Kingdoms proper–no loading screen required. Players will be able to fly, walk, or ride directly to the new zones from anywhere in the Eastern Kingdoms. Hamilton explained how Blizzard approached rebuilding Quel’thalas and the surrounding areas.
“Most of the scars of the Scourge invasion have been healed,” Hamilton said. “Time has passed. Blood Elves like their gardens tidy and their magical trees beautiful, so a lot of those scars have faded. Because we needed to do a transition from the forest into Zul’Aman proper, into an actual zone of Zul’Aman, we needed to expand there a little bit as well, because we needed room for the mountains to become mountainous without just suddenly being sheer, ‘okay, now it’s tall.’ There was some size adjustment there, but the intent was to make the zone feel as recognizable as possible. Things are generally, relatively, proportionally in the places you expect them to be. It should be familiar to the players that are quite familiar with the zone, it should feel just like home. It’s just a little bit prettier looking, a little bit nicer graphics and graphical upgrades for the assets. We pretty much said, “If we could reimagine it in a modern setting and connect it appropriately to the rest of the world and now allow access to Zul’Aman, how would we do that, what would we need to do?'”
Silvermoon City itself is larger, Hamilton said, but will still include all the iconic parts of the city players know and love. There are also new additions, like the Sanctum of Light and a Memorial Garden. That all being said, it’s also still very much a Horde city. While it will serve as the hub city for both the Horde and Alliance during Midnight, Alliance players will only be able to access certain parts of the city, with the rest of Silvermoon off-limits. Some of the most iconic areas in Quel’thalas, like Windrunner Spire, Magisters’ Terrace (a dungeon first added back in TBC), and Murder Row will now be dungeons.
Into The Void
The remaining two zones for the expansion, Harandar and the Voidstorm, are new. Many players thought Harandar, a primordial forest where the roots of the World Trees converge, was set to appear as part of The War Within expansion, but it will instead play a key role in Midnight. It’s there that players will learn more about the Haranir, a new playable Allied Race that was first introduced during The War Within.
In a shake-up from WoW’s more recent expansions, how players experience Midnight’s story will be a little different this time around. Every player will kick off the story campaign in Eversong Woods shortly after the events depicted in Midnight’s opening cinematic, but will choose whether to tackle Harandar or Zul’Aman next. Whatever zone they don’t pick can then be played through after that, before players head to the mysterious Voidstorm for the story’s finale.
While Blizzard didn’t reveal too much about the mysterious final zone, Hamilton said part of Midnight’s story revolves around the heroes of Azeroth attempting to figure out how to access the Voidstorm, which serves as main villain Xal’atath’s base of operations. Hamilton said the zone is unlike others players have seen before, a world drenched in Void energies where even its native creatures battle to constantly consume one another. There are low-gravity areas of the zone that will change up WoW’s normal gameplay as well.
A New DPS Option
Fitting with the expansion’s Void theme, a third Demon Hunter specialization is officially coming with Midnight that sees the class harness the power of that which they fight against. Called Devourer, the spec is a “mid-ranged” DPS that uses Void energy to decimate foes.
Kubit made clear that Devourer players wouldn’t be sitting at max-range casting spells, but did say that in a lot of cases, the spec’s rotation can be done at range. The core loop of the spec is for players to enter Void Metamorphosis and then try to stay in the form for as long as possible to maximize damage.
“This is not going to be playing like a 100% classic ranged class,” Kubit said. “You have the DH [Demon Hunter] mobility ,which is going to encourage you to move around, to be jumping into the fracas and melee, and then jumping back out again, moving around to collect soul shards and the like.”
Some of the Devourer’s key abilities are Void Ray, a line attack similar to Demon Hunter’s existing Eye Beams ability, as well as powerful finisher abilities like Collapsing Star and Reap, which consume soul fragments on use. In an unsurprising bit of synergy, Void Elves will be able to become Demon Hunters come Midnight.
Hunt Or Be Hunted
Whereas The War Within introduced a new form of instance solo content in the form of Delves, Midnight will spice up the game’s open world with a new opt-in system called Prey that will see players hunting down targets and being hunted themselves.
There are three different difficulties for players to choose from: normal, hard, and nightmare. Kubit said the normal difficulty is for players who want to see the story associated with the system, which sees players working with Astalor Bloodsworn to hunt down “shady” characters. On normal difficulty, the challenge of the hunts won’t be out of line with what players normally experience from WoW’s open-world content.
Those looking for more of a challenge, playing on hard or nightmare, will contend with enemies sporting more affixes and mechanics, including a secluded final showdown with their target that sounds similar to what players have seen from Delve pinnacle bosses in The War Within.
Progressing through hunts will grant players additional cosmetics like mounts, titles, and housing decor items, but crucially won’t grant more raw power to those who opt-in to the system.
“We’re not looking to force people into content that they’re not interested in, but we’ve heard from many of our players who really enjoy spending time in the world and exploring and questing there, that the experience can sometimes feel flatter than they’d prefer,” Hazzikostas said. “This is a really flavorful, engaging way to add an extra layer for people who want that.”
Putting Approachability Front And Center
Midnight is also another opportunity for Blizzard to continue improving and refining the game’s user interface, something it has put a much bigger focus on since the game’s UI overhaul that was part of 2022’s Dragonflight. Many tools players currently use external add-ons for, like damage meters and boss timers, will be baked into the game itself come Midnight.
Players have been using add-ons to solve various problems or encounters for nearly two decades, Hazzikostas said, prompting the team to integrate some of those key tools into the baseline experience. Giving players those additional tools is just one part of the equation, however, and Hazzikostas said the other is for Blizzard to take a harder look at the game’s mechanics and their visual clarity to make sure it never feels like players have to resort to using external add-ons to be successful.
“Whereas we started to shift in our philosophy over the course of The War Within, I think Midnight is going to be our first expansion that really puts approachability front and center in all aspects of its encounter and class design,” Hazzikostas said.
The recent addition of an in-game rotation assistant tool, and even a single-button rotation option, are great examples of Blizzard’s newfound philosophy. Blizzard is looking to make improvements to both features in the future, and said the single-button assistant in particular has been a major success, despite the initial negative reaction from some in the WoW community.
“Honestly, it’s been awesome,” Hazzikostas said. “It’s really met, and in some ways exceeded, our expectations. The idea of the single-button assistant was definitely controversial in the community leading up to it. There were some players saying ‘Well, this is just dumbing down the game, what’s the point of skill?’ And what we’ve seen is no, WoW still has a very high skill cap. The people pushing themselves and challenging themselves to the limits of their performance are not looking at this tool at all. Whereas there are tens of thousands, if not more, of players who, from an accessibility perspective, have had their game experience transformed, where they can now engage in content that previously felt off-limits to them because of the ability to make combat work this way.”
Make It Faster, Do It Better
All of the above is just the tip of the iceberg for the expansion. Despite Midnight poised to arrive earlier than WoW’s typical two-year expansion cycle (something Warcraft executive creative director Chris Metzen said was a goal back at BlizzCon 2023), Blizzard looks set to deliver just as much content as players have come to expect, with four zones, seven Delves, eight dungeons, a new PvP battleground, and for the first time in a long time, three different raids at launch. One raid, The Voidspire, will house six bosses, while The Dreamrift will include a single boss, and March on Quel’Danas packing two.
Hazzikostas and Kubit said there were a number of factors at play in how the team was able to deliver content faster (and more consistently) than ever before, including better planning and having a longer roadmap as to where the game is going next.
“We’re not necessarily pursuing speed for the sake of speed,” Hazzikostas said. “More [content] faster isn’t always better, but when we’ve had lulls, we know nobody likes content draughts. Our focus has always been on trying to eliminate those, and if we can flow seamlessly from a series of strong patches into the next expansion, that seems ideal. Another piece of this is also just a lot of pre-planning. That’s one of the really exciting things from a narrative, world-building perspective about the Worldsoul Saga. We knew we were headed here with much more detail than we usually do before The War Within even came out. All of those things help.”
For more on Midnight, be sure to read up on how early access to player housing in the game’s 11.2.7 patch will work, the big changes coming to transmog to make it cheaper and more convenient, and how its opening cinematic sets the stage for the expansion’s story. WoW: Midnight is slated to arrive in early 2026.
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