// PC GAMER — GAMING
WoW developers reflect on Midnight's first season—a world without AddOns, task overload, and Prey
Curse of Ul'atek comes out next week, but how has Midnight's first season gone in the eyes of its devs?
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This is Terminally Online: PC Gamer's very own MMO column. Every other week, I'll be sharing my thoughts on the genre, interviewing fellow MMO-heads like me, taking a deep-dive into mechanics we've all taken for granted, and, occasionally, bringing in guest writers to talk about their MMO of choice.
World of Warcraft: Midnight's first season has been… well, a bit of a mixed bag. While the launch-day offerings impressed me, patch content—the major thing that gets remembered in the expansion pack history books—has ranged from rather quite good to downright confusing (I still do not like the Folio).
And, to be fair, Midnight had a ton riding on it. It's the middle child of WoW's ambitious Worldsoul Saga and the first expansion where combat AddOns have been heavily hamstrung. As a consequence, every spec in the game was redesigned in some way. After 20 years of waiting, we even got player housing.
I have not envied Blizzard's position as much as I've raised my eyebrows at its choices, on occasion, and I think it's a marvel that things have pretty much gone fine. I like Prey, I've missed AddOns less than I expected, the remade Silvermoon is downright beautiful, and player housing has knocked it out of the park, bar some microtransaction nonsense.
I recently sat down with several developers from WoW, including lead encounter designers Taylor Sanders and Andrew De Sousa, as well as associate game director Paul Kubit and lead quest designer Rachel Vought, to ask them how they thought Midnight's first season had gone.
Broadly positive, is the answer—with the devs citing Mythic+, solo content such as delves, and Prey as bright spots. Kubit says: "I'm having a great time with season one. I am still this last week rounding out some of my own personal Mythic+ goals, trying to get my numbers as high as possible. But things that have been just a joy for me this first season have been—playing through Delves again, having another season of Delves to explore with a new follower Valeera … and also the addition of Prey alongside it.
"I think that the new feature of Prey, while not technically part of the traditional season, does have some seasonal elements to it, and it sort of played nicely hand-in-hand with how progress went through through delve."
That's something Vought echoes, too: "Having the Prey overlay, just doing outdoor activities, has been like such a delight—because we talk about optimizing the fun out of it, but it's like no, actually, I kind of do want the extra challenge while I'm doing my world quests, and it's a lot of fun."