A Tauren paladin rattled up on his robot mount right in the middle of one of World of Warcraft: The War Within’s final quests. It would’ve been nice to see a sweet conversation between two major characters who were exchanging apologies after being separated for years, but instead I was staring at Commander Digbickers’ set of high-level gear as he took a break from his daily routine. I couldn’t even see the speech bubbles over his massive form, which normally wouldn’t bother me, but there are glimmers of an older WoW here, one where I actually care what two important characters are saying to each other, and one I thought we’d left behind.

World of Warcraft: The War Within is an expansion that thrives off of its characters and their tender interactions. Missing even a second of a conversation to another player passing by reminded me that, oh right, I’m playing a 20-year-old old MMO, and the other half of it is all about funneling you into a routine that makes numbers go up. No matter how much WoW has revitalized its storytelling, it’s still a game mired by the perpetual grind it’s become.

I’ve only dabbled in WoW since spending most of my teenage years going on 25-player raids when I should’ve been studying, and The War Within is Blizzard’s call for people like me to return, to “come home”, and it only took me a few hours of readjusting to see why. Actual storytelling, not a series of Marvel movie catastrophes, is important again; characters are important again; worldbuilding is important again. The effort started by the last expansion, Dragonflight, has paid off: The War Within is easily WoW’s best campaign. The catch, however, is that the moment you finish it, you’re kicked back out into the morass of all the things that pushed me away from WoW in the first place.

My first hint was the barrage of quests and notifications that flashed across my screen when I logged in. Years of systems begging for attention all at once. I thought gacha games were bad at overwhelming you with menus to click through, but trying to start The War Within had me wondering if WoW needs an adblocker. Eventually I made it to Dalaran, the floating city where the story begins. No, wait, I was in the other Dalaran, the floating city that looks like the one where the story begins but is actually from a different era of WoW. The mirror version exists for leveling reasons, and for wasting my time reasons, it felt like, as I searched for the start of the campaign that kicks off by blowing the new one up.

The War Within is the start of the Worldsoul Saga, a story that will take three expansions to tell—which is the first time Blizzard has ever planned that far ahead. The writers know where they’re starting and ending and the result is a campaign that doesn’t need to wrap itself around a villain like the Lich King. Other than a few ominous cameos by evil elf Xal’atath, The War Within focuses on the people of Khaz Algar, an ancient landmass with four beautiful new zones to visit.

While you start in the bucolic home of the Earthen, a race of stone dwarves handmade by the Titan gods of Warcraft, it’s the areas underneath the planet Azeroth’s surface that might actually compete with some of the MMO’s most iconic locations. Each one is deeper into the earth than the one before it, a nesting doll of colossal environments that never once felt dulled by the lack of sunlight. It’s been a long time since WoW has stunned me by sheer scale, but The War Within pulls it off repeatedly.

A quest at the end of the storyline in the campaign’s second zone, the Ringing Deeps, sent me flying through a twisting ravine. I expected to find a camp or nest of enemies to kill, but it just kept going and going while the music faded out. I rounded a corner and realized I had just stumbled into an entirely separate area like I was playing Elden Ring. The ravine gave way to a cliff lit by the golden rays of a massive crystal jutting out of the ceiling. In Hallowfall, the crystal (or alien creature?) is the only source of light and when it goes dark so does everything else.

Time and an abundance of lore has robbed the magic from WoW’s most mysterious zones, but very little is explained about the nature of Hallowfall’s crystal as you help the local Arathi soldiers fend off Xal’atath’s army of bugs. And I hope it stays that way because the crystal also acts as a symbol for new character Faerin’s allegiance to the Light, one of Warcraft’s cosmic-forces-turned-religion. I kept waiting for a big reveal to eclipse the series of quests that let you listen as her resolve starts to heal Anduin, the leader of the Alliance who was broken by the events of the Shadowlands expansion. Just two expansions ago, the crystal would’ve been a raid boss, and it’s the best example of how the War Within centers its story around characters rather than cosmic forces for us to defeat.

An early side quest in Isle of Dorn has you helping out an Earthen who is preparing for his final days but is starting to lose his memory. The quest begins with a little bit of combat as you clear out a cemetery of vandalizing kobolds, but slows down as you learn about Earthen traditions and why, after decades of isolation, some might want to peek at the world they never got to see. There are countless tragic quests in WoW’s history, but few of them are as well written and paced as this one, setting your character to the side as you do your best to help fulfill someone’s last wish.

My hope is that this is what the future of WoW’s storytelling will be when it doesn’t have to contend with planet-sized villains and can instead focus on little stories that give the world character. And after finishing the campaign and several other sidequests, I’m pretty confident it will be.

Looking for more

That reduction in scope extends less successfully to The War Within’s newest dungeon alternative: Delves. Instead of a big multi-boss adventure, Delves are 20 minute mini dungeons that you can do solo or with a small group. I was surprised when I finished the campaign without ever being directed to them, but after trying several of them out, that might’ve been a good thing.

Delves are Diablo-like dungeons full of enemies and tedious objectives in a game with combat that isn’t anywhere as satisfying for a solo player as it is in an action RPG. I took my warlock into an Earthen forge where I had to break open vents to cool down from the heat burning my life away. I crawled through hallway after hallway pulling enemies one at a time to avoid losing too many stacks of the protective buff before I could replenish it at another vent. It was a grueling experience that rewarded some forgettable loot that I could’ve earned much faster from a quest.

Later on, I pushed the difficulty up a few tiers and tried a Delve with creeping darkness that turned out to be almost the exact same mechanic as the one in the forge. I fought even harder enemies—and therefore slower to kill—with Brann Bronzebeard by my side, casting heals on me and refusing to move out of explosions. I’m sure things would go faster with a proper group of players, but nothing about Delves convinced me that the time wouldn’t be better spent doing literally anything else, like a normal dungeon.

The intent is for Delves to serve as a way for solo players to earn powerful gear without having to run dungeons. On paper, that’s a compelling idea that could at least add variety to how you gear up in WoW’s endgame. But Delves, when compared to the relative ease of WoW’s modern dungeons, are a chore I’d rather skip. That said, with some boosts to the pacing and rewards, I think Blizzard could massage them into a fun side activity in future patches.

Endgame troubles

Delves live in the staggering gap between The War Within’s campaign and WoW’s modern endgame, the treadmill of progression that opens up once you’ve finished the story quests. The first season and its raid aren’t available yet, but I can already tell grinding through daily world quests and dungeons isn’t for me.

After playing through the campaign where quest objectives would vary from defending a base or helping to heal wounded Earthen, world quests have reminded me how empty WoW can be if you’re a seasonal player chasing after better loot. The old joke about killing seven wolves for a quest is the entire point of world quests: mostly contextless objectives that feed you loot or currency to upgrade your gear. Maybe if gear actually felt like it had an impact on my damage in a game where every enemy scales with you, I’d enjoy climbing the ladder toward harder dungeons and raids. But world quests just made me miss playing hide and seek with children and walking with an Arathi commander as she told me about life in Hallowfall during the campaign, where my character’s power really didn’t matter at all.

I spent 20 hours on a warlock who specializes in spells that deal damage over time and nothing I faced ever challenged me enough to think about how I could improve, whether it was through better gear or better play. Combat was mindless even in dungeons where you’d think there’d be more demand to pull your weight. WoW really isn’t that game anymore unless you’re the kind of player who builds their character up to take on challenges like Mythic+ dungeons or raids—which are fully unlocking when season 1 begins on September 10.

All I wanted to do is go right back to questing in the pretty new areas without having to think about what stat is best for me and what my opening spell rotation should be. And thanks to the way WoW separates its main story quests from its side quests, I absolutely can. They may not be as consistently good as the ones in the campaign, but the side quests are a great excuse to spend more time just living in The War Within’s excellent new zones.

Even if I can’t see myself logging into WoW every day, The War Within’s campaign satisfied the urge to get lost in Blizzard’s big fantasy world again. The story will continue as major updates happen and that might be enough to keep me hanging on until the end of the trilogy. But anything past that is a bottomless chasm that I’m happy to skip over, unless Blizzard finds a way to blend its powerful storytelling with a grind that doesn’t drain the joy out of its world.