During Gamescom 2025 Opening Night Live, Blizzard Entertainment presented the official cinematic trailer for World of Warcraft: Midnight. Just as usual with the company’s cinematic trailers, it looks stunning, but the millions of players who are still captivated by the 21-year-old MMORPG want to know more about the actual expansion (the eleventh to grace the game since its launch, as well as the second in the Worldsoul Saga trilogy after The War Within).
Thankfully, while in Cologne, we were able to interview Blizzard’s Paul Kubit (Associate Game Director) and Jade Martin (Lead Combat Systems Designer), who kindly answered our questions on the key features and content that players can look forward to when World of Warcraft: Midnight ships next year.
Let’s start with how World of Warcraft: Midnight, the middle expansion in this trilogy of the Worldsoul Saga, differs from The War Within.
Paul Kubit: I would say that one of the biggest differences is the addition of a major feature like housing. Folks who come in with World of Warcraft: Midnight will see that there’s a huge new way for players to express themselves and interact with one another socially, start building up collections of décor and really build up communities in their neighborhood. That’s going to be the biggest way that these expansions differ. Of course, there are plenty of other ones, like the new Prey system. Unlike The War Within, which focused entirely on new areas for players to explore, we’re going to be doing a little bit of revisiting in this one, which I’m particularly excited about, as we return to Zul’Aman. It will play like a new zone with brand new quests and areas to explore, but you’ll also have the narrative sort of nostalgia, especially if you’ve got to play back during the Burning Crusade, to see what all these trolls have been up to and how their story continues twenty years after that.
Jade Martin: I think the Prey system is really cool. It’s going to be a big departure from The War Within in terms of how you navigate questing. Before, questing was kind of cruise control; sometimes it may become a little bit too easy, but now we have a system where you can dictate the level of your hunt and create a unique challenge for yourself, if that’s something you’re willing to take on.
What kind of rewards can World of Warcraft players expect from this Prey system?
Paul Kubit: A bunch. There will be cosmetic rewards that come with it. There’s really cool mounts and other cosmetics, but you’ll also be able to expect some power rewards; it’s just not purely a cosmetic feature. Details in terms of the power level of the rewards are still something the team is working on. But I can say that as you advance into the harder difficulties of Prey, if you get into Hard Mode or Nightmare Mode, the level of challenge will be close to what you see at high-level Delves, so I would expect the rewards level to be adequate to that.
Is the Prey system meant to be engaged solo or as a group?
Paul Kubit: In Normal mode, there are no restrictions. It is built on the questing system, so because of that, you’re accepting the ‘quest’ by yourself, but you can join other players. It is in the outdoor world, so you’ll be alongside other folks. And in Normal mode, when you finally corner your prey and are able to take them, if you have friends nearby or there’s other players nearby, they can hop in and enjoy the fight with you. However, once you get to Hard Mode or Nightmare Mode, when you get to that final bit where you corner your prey and you’re ready to attack them, that is a one-on-one fight where it’s just you and them and whoever is better comes out alive. And so that it’s kind of piece of things away,
Jade Martin: Another thing I’m looking forward to in World of Warcraft: Midnight is the Devourer Demon Hunter, who uses Void magic instead of Fel magic to defeat enemies. This will be the first midrange spec we’ve added in a while. Their gameplay is all about building up Void Fragments and getting into Void Metamorphosis as soon as possible. When that happens, you’re continuously fighting for the ability to stay in Metamorphosis for as long as you can, ripping souls from your enemies.
Is this a DPS class?
Jade Martin: Yes, a ranged DPS class.
Can you make some choices to customize the Devourer differently?
Jade Martin: Yeah. Currently, internally, we have kind of two ways that you can play the Devourer. You can play it purely as a mid-range caster and decimate your enemies from there, but another cool playstyle is actually dashing in and out of melee to take advantage of all the movement skills that are available to the base Demon Hunter. One of the key differences in gameplay styles is that generally, when you’re playing the mid-range Devourer, it’s all about staying in Void Metamorphosis as long as possible to build up as many Collapsing Stars as you can. In contrast, the dash-in, dash-out gameplay is about getting in and out of melee as quickly as possible. Something like playing in a Mythic Plus, that’s a really nice way to play it because you’re not so reliant on staying in Void Metamorphosis for a long time. So there are a couple of ways to play, and I think both are really fun.
Paul Kubit: You’ll have new hero talents through the Annihilator tree, which is going to be shared between the Devourer and Vengeance. Devourers will also have access to the Fel-Scarred tree, which is now just going to be called Scarred, since you’re not necessarily scarred by the Fel.
Are these two ways to play the Devourer meant to be equally efficient in PvE and PvP, or do you think they will lean more to one or the other?
Jade Martin: Generally speaking, I think they should be on even ground when you talk about output. Dashing in and out obviously has its own advantages when you talk about PvP, so it may naturally lend itself to that style of gameplay.
You mentioned that there are some revisited areas in World of Warcraft: Midnight. How did you approach this kind of challenge? Some of the regions were dear to players.
Paul Kubit: It was a big challenge, for sure. Eversong Woods is a beloved zone; it has been since 2006, when it first came out in Burning Crusade. A big part of it was just delivering the fantasy of what we remember that zone to be, but with modern fidelity and level design. A lot of our work was building those familiar landmarks, the city itself, and many of the quest hubs and adventure areas in that zone, but building them in a way that looks modern. It should look like what I sort of remember this zone looking like, but it looks beautiful. It looks like what our artists are capable of these days. There’s also been the story changes in this space. You may remember from 2006 the Dead Scar; this huge dead area symbolized where Arthas marched his undead army up to the gates of Silvermoon. That’s been healed over now.
The Dead Scar isn’t there anymore. In fact, most traces of the Scourge are gone by this point. The Blood Elves have perfectly manicured their front lawn and grown some nice trees, bushes, and fences over it so that it looks nice. But also the entirety of the Ghostlands, which was an entirely different zone in the Burning Crusade era, has been folded into Eversong Woods now.
I understand Silvermoon City will still have a part exclusive to Horde players, right?
Paul Kubit: That’s correct. The Eastern quadrant, about a third of the zone, is a Horde district. It will have all the amenities that players are familiar with. A good two-thirds of Silvermoon City will be a shared space, and because of that, the city’s boundaries have been increased significantly. It’s gorgeous. We got to show a couple of shots. The Sanctum of Light in particular looks like a painting or a piece of concept art, but it is actually like what it looks like in the game.
Can you tell us something about the new Allied race?
Paul Kubit: For sure. We met the Haranir in The War Within through Orweyna, the leader of their scouts. She has a close tie to the goddess that their people revere. That’s what led her to explore outside of Harandar, where people come from. Normally, the Haranir are very insular. They don’t like to leave their home, and they look down on those who do.
In Midnight, we’re going to go into Harandar. They don’t like to mix as much with outside cultures, but our cultures will come to them, and as part of that story, we will eventually convince them that Xal’atath is knocking on our front door with a big Voidstorm. It’s a fight that’s worth joining.
There is also some new PvP content coming in World of Warcraft: Midnight, correct?
Jade Martin: We have a new Voidstorm, which is technically the fourth zone of the expansion, and inside it there will be world PvP. There will be a lot of cool points to contend over for each of the factions, some really cool terrain obstacles. There’s a gravity well that will pull people up, and you can actually do some damage inside there and then attack and do some very clever things, push people out a little bit with the knockback and kill them. Also taking place in the Voidstorm, but as a separate instance, there will be Slayer’s Rise, the new Battleground. It is really cool. It takes a little bit of inspiration from things like Alterac Valley. It’s a four-stage fight.
In Stage 1, you basically all emerge into the middle and fight over the middle point to try and take control of it, but if you’re not into PvP and you want to explore the PvE resources, you can actually go towards the north and collect resources to funnel in allies to the middle or potentially put more materials for later in the fight that you may choose to take on the next point, which is the Stage 2, where you will take on various lieutenants. Then you continue your march onward until you get to Stage 3, which has multiple entry points. Based on your earlier decisions in the map, you are able to attack it at different points and potentially have an advantage over your enemy. And then the final one is Stage 4, where you actually fight the enemy’s Dominar.
Alterac Valley has always been my favorite World of Warcraft Battleground.
Jade Martin: I think there’s a lot of fond memories about Alterac Valley and I know that our PvP designers, when they were looking for inspiration, they definitely looked there.
Paul Kubit: We love seeing the passion from our PvP community. We also want to grow the PvP community, which is important to us as developers, so one of the things we’re also adding is Training Grounds, a new mode where you can play alongside human players against game-controlled opponents. It is similar to the Comp Stomp brawl that comes up every couple of weeks, but now this will be an always available mode for three of our Battlegrounds: Arathi Basin, Silvershard Mines, and the Battle for Gilneas. PvP can be a little intimidating, especially if you’re playing later in the season. This will be a way safer place for folks to go into these Battlegrounds, to understand the mechanics and eventually become the diehard PvPers they want to be.
Are there going to be any rewards for doing Training Grounds, or is it just the player experience that you obtain while doing it?
Paul Kubit: There will be rewards for it. These are still being worked out. One of the things that is important to us is making sure that players who are playing the more direct Player versus Player versions of these Battlegrounds still have their unique rewards available, but we should also make sure that players who are jumping into Training Grounds aren’t just throwing their time away.
Can you queue into Training Grounds as a group, or is it just solo matchmaking?
Paul Kubit: You can queue as a group.
Cool. Well, let’s switch to what you pointed out as the most significant innovation of World of Warcraft: Midnight – housing. World of Warcraft players have waited a long time for this, and many other MMOs have their own version of housing. What’s your approach for your community?
Paul Kubit: Yeah, we’ve always heard that and it is something we’ve been working on for several years now. It started with a couple of goals: boundless self-expression, so the players may express themselves in tremendous ways. This is also uniquely social; it’s deeply social, so that you’re not always just locked in your own home and not interacting with anyone else, but you’ll have reasons to meet with other players and you should be happy to see other players in your neighborhood. And lastly, that this is something which is going to be around for the long term. This is a feature that we can grow over time.
Based on that, we’ve built, in terms of self-expression, a huge library of décor that the players can collect from the new Midnight zones, but also looking back to all the previous expansions and all the cultures that we discovered there, there should be lots of really cool stuff that players can collect and express themselves. Then there are the tools players use, which is another way we let them express themselves. There’s a basic mode tool, which is very much a snap-to-grid mode where stuff goes where you expect it to go.
We’ve also added an advanced mode, which adds the ability to scale things, tilt them, and pitch them. You turn gravity off if you want to move things up into the air and have them floating, and we’ve already seen people here at the Hall interacting with these tools and things. Earlier, some people made upside-down rooms with chandeliers on the floor and chairs on the ceiling, and it looked like you were walking down the ceiling of a room. I can’t wait to see how players unleash their creativity.
Some games let you unlock a bust, for example, of a boss you defeated and put it in your home, so can you put a bust of Onyxia (or any boss) in your house?
Paul Kubit: I’m glad you asked about Onyxia. Yes, you can kill Onyxia, get her head and put it on the wall. In addition, you are not limited to hanging one. We want to make sure that players are able to have as many of like. There is a vendor in Mudsprocket, a goblin vendor who sells Onyxia heads. The vendor guarantees that they’re real, but we don’t really think that they are real. We believe he pieced them together from something else, but after you legitimately get your first kill, removing it from the body of Onyxia, you can get additional ones. If, for whatever reason, you want to have a whole wall covered with Onyxia heads, that will be possible.
You talked about being able to visit other players’ houses. How is it going to work? Can you give permissions to people on your friends list or your Guild?
Paul Kubit: That’s exactly it. We have a pretty robust set of permissions that players can use to say, I am not gonna allow anyone inside my house, that is a perfectly valid thing. Or you could say, hey, my friends can come in, my guildmates can come in, or anyone at all can come in.
What can you share about the World of Warcraft: Midnight dungeons at this point?
Paul Kubit: We have eight dungeons coming in with the expansion. Some of my favorites are Murder Row, which was previously a smallish district inside Silvermoon City. It has now been expanded into a whole dungeon. Within the context of this dungeon, you are investigating a mystery. You hear rumors that someone is practicing fel magic inside the city, and that investigation leads to a grand conspiracy, which has you chasing down the warlock and the demons he’s summoning along the way. It’s really cool. On the other side, we have the Den of Nalorakk, which is actually one of the dungeons that you play through as part of the campaign. You enter Den of Nalorakk in Zul’Aman to pass the trials of the Bear of God Loa himself and earn his favor in the fight against the Void.
What about any new Delves?
Paul Kubit: Delves are indeed coming back; they weren’t simply a The War Within feature. We’re happy to announce that some of the Delves are going to be located outdoors. Typically, in The War Within, most of our Delves are set in caves. That’s not the case for all the new Delves. Some of them will be outdoors and you will be able to use mounts to move more quickly in those particular spaces. We’ve also changed up our follower again. She’s going to have access to all three different roles; in the tank role, she’s got some really cool tank mechanics around evasion to keep her alive for a while.
Any tidbits you can tell us about the PvE raids?
Paul Kubit: We’re adding three raids in the first season. We’ve got the Voidspire, which has six bosses, the Dreamrift, which has one boss, and the March on Quel’Danas, which has two bosses. The first reason for the changes is just feedback from players. We’ve done raids with eight bosses for a while now, and it’s interesting to break things up differently, so you should have a different profile of the raid boss, but also it’ll give you a little more flexibility if maybe you have an evening where a lot of folks are on for a shorter amount of time and you can only take one or two bosses out. In that case, you can knock out one of those smaller raids. But the other reason we did it this way is because of the story; we haven’t always had our raids as part of our story campaign.
This is because raiding isn’t for everyone, especially since it can be a challenge to get 10 people together. Before we added Story Mode, it was impossible for us to include everybody in the raids’ story, so we’re leaning into that with Midnight. There will be a story mode version of the Voidspire, but the story continues afterward.
Do you expect the raids to be about the same difficulty level as The War Within raids were at launch?
Paul Kubit: I think so. One of the things to note is that we’ve changed our approach to encounter design, not only to raids but also to dungeons, with approachability in mind. The Eco-Dome Al’dani dungeon from patch 11.2 is a pretty good success case here, where it’s one major mechanic. When you understand that mechanic, you know the boss. You might have to interact with that mechanic in different ways, depending on different contexts, but they’re easy to understand. There’s not a list of nine completely different mechanics that you need to respond to.
Finally, why don’t we discuss the quality of life updates planned for World of Warcraft: Midnight? What improvements are you making in this regard?
Paul Kubit: One of the changes I’m most excited about is that we are changing how the transmog works, so instead of transmogrifying the item, you transmog a slot. What that means is, if you want your helmet to look like a Murloc, even if you are levelling and get a replacement helmet, it’ll still look like that; you don’t have to reapply that transmog.
This is going to save a lot of players’ money in terms of keeping their looks up-to-date. It’s also going to make your character look a lot cooler as you level through the game, including how you look in those cinematics. We are also adding something called Situations. You can basically program your character to look certain ways, for example, whenever you switch specs. Or maybe you want to look different ways when you’re out adventuring compared to when you’re at home in your house or in your neighborhood. This should give players a lot more flexibility to express themselves.
That is pretty cool. Thank you for your time.
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