With patch 12.1 imminent, what are your parting thoughts on the opening chapter of Midnight?

It’s just about time to turn the pages of World of Warcraft once again with the Curse of Ula’tek update going live Tuesday. That means it’s the perfect time to sit around the Circular Silvermoon Table and share our feelings on Midnight’s first phase as it comes to a close.

My first impressions of WoW’s twelfth chapter were very positive, and that feeling carried through as I explored the initial four zones and got into the 12.0 end game. Player Housing was, depending on how you look at it, an extremely fulfilling way to connect my Warband or a very successful ploy to distract me from actually playing the game. Either way, collecting decor and messing around on my riverside plot definitely sparked joy for me in the initial months of Midnight.

There were a lot of specific things I liked about the first few patches of the expansion. Revisiting Eversong Woods hit me with just as much nostaliga as I’m sure the developers intended. Decor Duels were a surprising bright spot, and I’m glad I earned my awesome glaive-y sword before the game mode apparently goes away for an unknown but possibly infinite amount of time. I won’t claim that the lore developments were a flawless masterpiece, but I approve of the narrative as the action-packed middle third of a trilogy that I want answers from.

One of the main criticisms that I have does not come from me alone: the content pace and delivery has been hard to keep up with from both sides of the login screen. I’m far from the only player who has felt that stepping away from the game for even a little bit results in entire game modes or features running their course, being halfway through grinds that suddenly become unnecessary, or feeling so overwhelmed with things to do that other games or hobbies start to call. I’ve had Abyss Anglers highlighted in red on my to-do list for almost four months and I still haven’t so much as rented my first harpoon gun.

On the flip side, we’ve seen the unstoppable boulder that is the eight-week patch cadence put significant strain on the relationship between player and game, as less-than-smooth patch days have led to uncertainty if bugs will eat your house and even recognition from the team that they need to do better. Let the record show that this era of World of Warcraft is where I started worrying that fast-paced content drops might be great for shareholders but are starting to crack the game from the edges in.

With all that being said, I’m still on board the Worldsoul Saga train. I finally spent some quality time with Zul’jan last week and brought a crate of dusty Elixirs of Poison Resistance down from my Player Housing attic in preparation for flying across the Straight of Hexx’alor when patch 12.1 goes live. So what are your overarching thoughts on Midnight’s opening chapter?