Following in the footsteps of the Dragonflight expansion, World of Warcraft: The War Within has attempted to uplift a variety of side-activities in order to prevent the endgame from being exclusively focused on hardcore content like raids and Mythic+ dungeons. In some ways this has been a success as there is a lot of different things to do for max-leveled characters, though unfortunately some of the solo-focused additions like the Delve mini-dungeons have failed to impress and don't feel like they'll be a true alternative to the usual endgame gear grind.

If you're curious about what exactly makes these Delves so messy, as well as how the rest of The War Within fares, allow me to share with you my thoughts after playing it all rather religiously throughout the past week. Without further ado, let us begin!

Video version of this review (~14 minutes)

Exploring the underground

The best example of how much The War Within has been inspired by Dragonflight is the world design. Instead of every zone being a relatively flat plane walled off from each other by mountains like in the older expansions, the zones in The War Within are not only massive and highly vertical, but they're all stacked on top of each other to boot! This not only looks impressive, but it's also very fun to navigate, so much so that I pretty much never used flight paths since diving straight down at top speed for a full kilometer is an exciting way of crossing between zones!

However, since three out of four new zones are caves I was genuinely worried that they would get very samey very quickly, but thankfully my concerns ended up being unfounded. Despite them playing off of similar ideas, they each took the concept of an underground civilization in a notably different direction so only one zone felt like a 'cave' cave, which you obviously need given the setting.

Blizzard's art team never disappoints

My favorite zone out of the four is easily Hallowfall which is an absurdly huge cavern with an equally gigantic crystal lodged into its ceiling. This crystal alternates between a light and dark state, which means that Hallowfall can very quickly transform from being bright and welcoming to gloomy and unsettling. It's an awesome effect and, unsurprisingly, it makes for some interesting storytelling as the people that live there have acquired some... unusual habits when it comes to dealing with sudden outbursts of darkness and the monsters that follow it.

Add to that a variety of small secrets, side quests and other knick-knacks to discover, and you've got yourself a world that's just begging to be explored. And that's exactly what I did! I spent a good chunk of my first few days with The War Within just flying around and seeing what sort of strange things I could discover, and for me that is very high praise.

Day or night, Hallowfall is always gorgeous

The story that never changes

As for the story, that is a bit of a mixed bag. This is mostly because the main plot just feels old and tired at this point. It's always the exact same thing, expansion after expansion, and if you've played World of Warcraft before I bet you know exactly how it goes. Bad guy monologues about how bad they are, they beat us up in a cinematic, a Windrunner sister does something monumentally stupid, and then we inevitably ruin the bad guy's plans without breaking a sweat - all for a grand total of 30 gold and a pair of old shoes.

By now we've been through so many world-ending catastrophes that a plot centered around the void wanting to destroy all life in the universe is about as exciting to me as vanilla ice cream. So as much as this hurts to say given how many decades I've dedicated to the Warcraft universe, I just don't care about the main storyline anymore. Not even a tiny, little bit.

Nothing better than a bad guy monologuing to themselves

However, for as bland and predictable as the main story was, a good chunk of the side content was phenomenal. I loved learning about the various cultures that inhabit the Isle of Dorn and its underground. Even the Earthern, a race I expected would be incredibly boring since they're effectively robot Dwarves, ended up being complex and interesting without ruining or ignoring either aspect of them.

One of my favorite little quests explored what death means to someone that lives for thousands of years, as well as how those around them handle watching their loved ones slowly crumble and lose parts of themselves as the end comes closer. The quest draws many parallels to Alzheimer's disease without ever going too overboard, and the whole is just very sweet and emotional.

That one quest alone made a bigger impact on me than the entire main story and all of its bombastic cinematics, and all it took was a little bit of clever writing and an interesting idea to dissect. I can only hope the main story will ditch the clichés and try to be a bit more inspired in the future because The War Within clearly has talented writers on board. All Blizzard needs to do is actually let them ply their trade without forcing them to retread the same ground over and over again.

RIP Korgran. You were awesome!

Dungeons for all

Continuing with the Dragonflight comparison, the Follower Dungeons have made a return in The War Within, and they're still just as great of an idea as they were in the previous expansion! Basically, you can do the starter dungeons with an NPC party, thus giving you plenty of time to enjoy the story and scenery without having to feel like you're dragging your team down. The NPCs aren't too bad at their roles either. The tanks tank, the healers heal, and the hunters do an exemplary job of emulating real people by pulling every enemy in existence, regardless if you're ready for them or not!

That said, if you prefer real people the option is also there. The follower dungeons are purely an extra, and a pretty dang handy one at that, especially once the expansion gets long in the tooth and the pool of players doing early dungeons diminishes.

As for the actual experience of playing through these dungeons, I don't have much new to say. This is because both their visual and gameplay design is just as solid as most of the dungeons from the past decade. Blizzard has clearly found a winning formula and they have wisely decided to not mess with it in The War Within. So if your favorite way of playing WoW is chaining Mythic+ dungeons, I think you'll be quite happy with the new batch as well.

That wasn't a joke by the way. The hunter AI immediately face-pulled everything he could!

Delving into Delves

In an effort to give solo players more stuff to do, The War Within has also introduced Delves as optional mini-dungeons that can be tackled alone or in small parties. The premise is quite simple. You and an NPC companion (that you can customize to suit your needs) have to push through hordes of enemies to complete a series of short objectives, with everything culminating in a big boss fight followed by, you guessed it, a giant pile of treasure! If all goes well, you're in and out within 15 to 20 minutes.

As a concept I absolutely love Delves since I always felt like World of Warcraft had a lack of challenging singleplayer content to engage with, and Delves with their numerous (and currently locked) difficulty options look like they'll provide exactly that. When it comes to how they have been executed, however, that I'm a bit more conflicted about.

Credit where credit is due - Delves are frequently gorgeous to look at

The main issue is that all of the Delves I've tried have been very repetitive. It doesn't matter if you're helping Kobolds pilfer treasure or rescuing soldiers from the bottom of the sea, you're always doing exactly the same thing - running through linear areas, fighting groups of enemies, and then clicking on objectives in order to unlock the boss room. So despite each individual Delve having a couple of different variants, I got tired of doing them very quickly despite genuinely liking the idea.

Now mind you, this could be because the difficulty is currently set to very low and thus the Delves aren't exactly... stimulating. Perhaps once the higher difficulties unlock we'll have more elaborate scenarios to fight through, or perhaps there will be more obstacles to play around. Naturally, I don't know if any of that is going to happen, but I really do hope it does as Delves have a lot of potential to be 'the' endgame content for solo players. As it stands right now, they mostly feel like filler and that is a true shame.

Delves desperately need to be more than just "fight & click" repeated endlessly

Hero talents and the lack of choice

In order to help you rise to all of these new challenges, The War Within has also brought with it Hero Talents which are essentially separate, miniature talent trees. While the idea is, once again, perfectly fine and I'm always happy to get more movement speed on my Demon Hunter, I do have to question why these Hero Talents weren't implemented as a part of the regular ol' talent trees.

I say this because each of the two Hero Talent trees you can specialize in have 10 nodes you can select, and you get 10 Hero Talents on your way from 70-80. So once you choose what flavor you want to go for, there is only a tiny bit of decision-making to do since only a couple of nodes offer a choice between two relatively similar passives. Other than that, you can get everything, which just feels like a wasted opportunity.

Imagine if these Hero Talents were a part of the regular talent trees. Now instead of simply getting a bunch of passive bonuses, players would have to make some really tough decisions on which new talents to include, which ones to skip, as well as analyze which older branches best synergize with some of the new stuff. So while the Hero Talents are by no means bad, much like the Delves I would've liked to see them spend a bit more time in the oven to get that lovely golden sheen.

While some Hero Talents are interesting, more are rather forgettable passive buffs

Technical troubles

And finally, I would like to mention some of The War Within's technical hiccups. While every expansion has had its fair share of problems, The War Within's issues have been far more annoying to me than any I've encountered in the past few expansions. This is due to a couple of small yet extremely pervasive bugs that kept popping up all throughout my journey.

These include NPCs refusing to talk to me unless I fly into the air and then back down, the voice acting cutting off completely and requiring a full game restart in order to resume, as well as a slight yet obnoxious bit of input lag when fighting in populated areas. The worst problem, however, is the almost completely non-functional Auction House. Even simply trying to buy a couple of pieces of ore is likely to drive you pants-on-head insane as you'll have to go through dozens upon dozens of "item not found" error messages before finally being allowed to purchase something.

Whether this is due to Blizzard making some kind of mistake or The War Within being more popular than anyone could've ever expected, I have no idea, but either way I would like to see these bugs fixed sooner rather than later. Neither of them are particularly devastating on their own, but when you're playing for a couple of hours in a row they can really start to wear on you, especially if you have to constantly restart the game to fix things.

But aside from these bugs, I've had no notable issues with how The War Within performed. I didn't run into any crashes, performance dips, broken quests or similar technical troubles. So once the aforementioned bugs get sorted out The War Within should be, in theory, in an excellent technical state.

That spinning wheel is going to haunt my dreams for months to come

Closing thoughts

World of Warcraft: The War Within takes most of Dragonflight's good ideas and expands upon them, though it does play it a bit too safe in my opinion as very few of its freshly added features feel like they're exploring new ground. That said, there is wisdom in not attempting to fix what isn't broken, so I can definitely understand why Blizzard might be hesitant to rock the boat.

As for whether I would recommend The War Within, that's thankfully a fairly simple question to answer. If you've enjoyed World of Warcraft thus far and you're looking for more of it, then The War Within will provide you with exactly that. On the other hand, if you've gotten tired of Dragonflight and you're now itching for something new and exciting, then I'm afraid you'll have to look elsewhere as The War Within is mostly more of the same.

Personally, I think I'll stick around for a month or two to finish up the new raid, try out some Mythic+ dungeons, and perhaps most importantly, see if the highest difficulty of Delves can provide that challenging solo content that I crave or if they're just going to be another Torghast - an excellent idea that just sadly kind of goes nowhere.