WoW: Forever Shines While Midnight Stumbles Through Bugs

Two versions of World of Warcraft are living through the same week right now, and only one of them is having a good time. You can feel it in how Blizzard talks about each one. WoW: Forever gets weekly podcasts, forum posts, patient explanations of balance tweaks, the kind of attention that makes a player feel heard. Midnight gets a patch, a wave of bug reports, and silence.

Here is the little pile of good things patch 12.1.5 actually tried to give you: fresh story quests pushing Midnight's narrative forward, a tight single-boss raid, and the long-promised Kindo'jan labyrinth, officially a mega delve, built to give solo players something close to a raid night on their own schedule. That last one is the quiet bite in the pile. Players fell through the floor of the final boss arena and simply could not finish it. Some got no credit for kills they absolutely earned. Valeera, your delve companion, has reportedly been dying too fast to do her job, or skipping the mechanics she is supposed to handle. A hotfix on October 16 patched the floor, which is good, because the floor should hold.

What the hotfix did not fix is the part Blizzard itself promised: the ability to tackle a labyrinth piece by piece, at your own pace, over more than one sitting, in the developer's own words. There are no checkpoints. None. An hour-plus dungeon with no save point and a track record of bugs eating your progress is not a cozy little side activity, it is a trap with good lighting, as GameSpot reports.

Then there is Liadrin. She has been one of Midnight's steady presences, a blood elf paladin you have fought alongside for an entire expansion, and her ending is a whisper rather than a shout: she burns herself out defeating the raid's Old God general, says one line, and falls over. Compare that to Varian Wrynn's death at the start of Legion, a moment built to matter, and you can feel the difference in craft. Her death is also doing quiet work elsewhere, nudging blood elves and Amani trolls toward peace, the same reconciliation move WoW's writers keep reaching for even as Blizzard insists it is putting the war back in Warcraft.

None of this is new, either. Patch 12.0.5 shipped broken back in April, drew enough anger that Blizzard issued a public apology promising lessons learned and doing better. Six months on, a .5 patch shipped broken again. Meanwhile Blizzard barely discussed Midnight at BlizzCon this year, teasing a final confrontation with Xal'atath and staying quiet on The Last Titan, while pouring its attention into the nostalgia project launching November 4.

A live game earns trust by fixing the small things before they curdle into a pattern, and right now Blizzard is spending all its warmth on the version of Azeroth that does not need defending.