Pet Battles in the wild are no more in Midnight

As we started digging into the Midnight alpha, players started noticing something curious about wild battle pets — namely, in the new zones, they don’t really battle anymore. Alpha testers just walk up to a wild pet, click it, and bang, it’s in their bags as a soulbound item. In the journal after they’re learned, these pets have no stats or levels or other information. At first people thought it might be a bug or a placeholder. Random critters have been roaming zones since WoW released, more or less as props back in the day, so maybe they were just set in place to set the scene, with the stats to follow. But we have confirmation via a reported interview with Ion Hazzikostas that this is just how pet collection is, now.

The video below shows the exact process for taming a pet in Midnight. There’s not a lot to it.

The creator who asked the question during the group interview, Bears_Adventures, said that she asked specifically about challenging pet battle content, namely Dungeons. Those will not be developed going forward, either, though it seems Ion was careful to say “for Midnight.”

The reason cited is low interaction with the feature, and wanting to maximize their development time. This makes sense, and for me, especially within the context of collection. While the idea of slogging through distant deserts and jungles in search of rare pets was cool in theory, in practice — especially now that we have thousands of pets — it got tedious to deal with. Even the most hardcore battlers wouldn’t really bother min-maxing all their tames for stats at this point. Plus, considering the breadth of our collections, there aren’t many other ways to expand on the system. Even just raising the level cap by one level would be a hugely insurmountable task considering the thousands of pets collectors have. But I’m a little surprised that even the low-hanging fruit of daily quest tamers is getting the ol’ heave ho.

And yet, even if this change is somewhat understandable, for people who enjoyed the minigame (like me!) it’s the end of an era, especially as it seems that so many older features are being streamlined in the name of efficiency.