Midnight

This is the expansion I'm standing in right now, and I have to be honest with you about it in a way that's a little uncomfortable. I've barely played it. Not because Midnight did anything wrong. Because life did. So consider this less a review and more a dispatch from a guy watching the current expansion through a keyhole, catching what he can in the minutes he's got.

Let me give you the number, because the number tells the whole story. My playtime is down to something like 3 to 5 hours a month right now. Not a typo. I used to put in 40 to 60 hours a month without thinking about it, and these days I'm lucky to scrape together an evening's worth across four weeks. The move ate my time whole. Between selling the house, living out of rentals, and everything else a cross-country relocation drags behind it, WoW has become the thing I do in the cracks, when there are cracks, which lately there mostly aren't.

Which brings me to the housing, and to the most honest thing in this post. I love it. Twenty years I waited for player housing in this game, and Midnight finally delivered it, and it's every bit as good as I hoped. I have a house. It's decorated. I got in there early and made it mine. And here's the gut-punch. It's not where my hours go. When you've got 3 to 5 hours a month, you do not spend them arranging furniture, no matter how much you love the room. I built the thing I'd been asking for since 2005 and now I mostly wave at it on my way to somewhere more urgent.

So where does the scarce time actually go? Staying somewhat current. That's the whole game plan right now, just not falling hopelessly behind in the base game. And the wins are small and I'll take them. I finished Midnight Loremaster on Joar yesterday, which means I've at least seen the story of Quel'Thalas, walked the blood elf homeland, done the questing that matters to me most. For a guy playing on fumes, getting Loremaster done felt like a real accomplishment, the kind of thing I'd have knocked out in a weekend once and now stretched across a month of stolen half-hours.

I'll admit what I skipped, too, because the skipping is part of the honest picture. I never really touched the Void Ritual Site stuff from the last patch. Just didn't have the hours for it, and it quietly passed me by. The new patch dropped this week, though, and I've managed the first week's worth of the new zone and the new vault feature they added, and both of those seem like genuine fun. Enough that I wish I had the time to actually sink into them.

And the altoholic in me is still twitching, even now, even at 3 to 5 hours a month. Joar's at max, obviously. My hunter's at max too. And I've started dragging a druid up the levels, sitting at 87 the last time I looked, because apparently no amount of time scarcity can fully cure me of the urge to have one more character in progress. The warlock plan holds most of the time. The druid is the 20% that never quite does.

So that's my Midnight, and it's a strange one to report. A house I love and never visit. A story I finished in stolen minutes. A new patch I've tasted just enough of to want more. I'm not going to hand you a verdict, partly because it's early and partly because I've barely been here. But what I've seen, in the cracks, I like. And the game will still be here when life loosens its grip, which it will, eventually.

For now, I log in when I can, do the one thing that matters that day, and log back out. It's the least I've ever played this game. It's also, somehow, still the one I come back to.

Cheers,

Joar