I'm excited for Midnight, but I think it's fair to criticize that the information we've been given feels underwhelming for an EXPANSION announcement, regardless of the poor quality information drip-feed.

I know that they have direction and that direction is easier to see, but admittedly -- and this is coming from someone who's really looking forward to Midnight -- I absolutely understand why some people are saying this feels like this is less of an expac and more of a larger-than-average content patch being billed as a USD$40-USD$90 expac.

The *only* major expansion feature they're announced so far is housing, which itself is an extremely massive undertaking that I think is going to carry this expac on its shoulders like the digital world's most capable Atlas, but that's *all* they seem to be offering.

* While some people are excited for the Haranir, their inclusion as a playable species and the attempt to hype them up feels extremely disjointed from their actual position within the story. They were an extremely unexplored species with less than an hour of total play time between their appearances in one zone, with one of their members having minor appearances in another zone, but with their entire history being extremely unexplored. I think this lends credence to the theory that Harandar was meant to be the 11.2 zone, but Metzen coming in to redirect the story towards his 'World Soul Saga' using the foundations left behind by Danuser and Afrasiabi during the early development of 11.0 and maybe 11.1 forced them to shift focus to K'aresh for narrative reasons, which itself very much now looks to have been made mostly of repurposed assets from the Voidstorm zone appearing in 12.0. The Haranir and Harandar just seem very disconnected from the story and narrative so far, and it feels more like their inclusion as a zone and playable species in 12.0 is less because they were *meant* to be there, and more because Blizzard already had the assets ready and it was more cost-effective and efficient to hamfist them into Midnight than let them go to waste and make an entirely new zone with more narrative connections to the story at hand. * This is also just a personal gripe, but Voidstorm being advertised as our 'fourth zone' seems really disingenuous so far, as it's being described as similar to Ashran, or Wintergrasp, in that it's less of a "zone" in the traditional sense, and more of a massive zone-sized battleground. * One species getting one new class (which itself is just a tit-for-tat reskin of a species that already has that class), which is getting one new spec, is not an expansion feature. It's a patch feature. Billing it as a whole expansion selling point feels like an extreme exaggeration of its importance. Imagine if in TWW they made a massive sell about Augmentation Evokers as a reason that you need to give them $40-$90 USD. * There is no major shakeup of the talent system or how classes function being announced, as of current. They are adding a grand total of *one* new hero talent tree, with instead the existing trees just getting 3 new talents (which is going to range from ineffectual to very powerful depending on the tree), the class talents now allowing for three additional choices (which is good), and the spec talents are getting four new points which it sounds like you're expected to shove into a single 4-tier talent anyway. Combat and playstyles, as of current, seem like they're going to be effectively unchanged going into Midnight from TWW. Numbers may change, of course, but fundamentally nothing will change playstyle-wise. * Prey has the potential to be cool, but it also doesn't seem like much of an expansion feature that you'd be shoving forward as a reason for why we need to give you $40. It feels more like something we'd get in a specific zone in a content patch. It's literally just "Every now and again while you're doing world content a powerful mob will come and harass you, and if you survive the harassment you can get some cosmetics."

Comparing this to TWW, where we were given:

* The effective addition of a species that many players had wanted for a very, very long time. I've seen people asking for Earthen options since Vanilla, and while some people aren't satisfied with "Oh we got taller robot Dwarves", I think their lore as it was presented in TWW, compounded with the over 2 decades of prior lore we had on them, made them a very fascinating addition worth advertising as a selling point of the expac. The Haranir do not have that same history and love put into them. * The entire Delve system, which is a fascinating form of solo content progress reminiscent of a hybrid between Scenarios and Dungeons, of which many were added, each having several unique variants for completion. While some felt a little lazier than others, especially the Archival Assault that literally just re-uses a pre-existing dungeon room as its interior, they were still rather impressive with most having entirely unique layouts that would function perfectly as dungeons if converted into such. Obviously it wasn't *executed* flawlessly, but the amount of effort in the system itself is very impressive as an expansion selling point. * The Hero Talent system itself, which varies in its effect on the gameplay depending on what spec or class you are, but does often fundamentally alter the rotational playstyle of your spec in a way that I would say shakes up the gameplay enough to be noticeable, though your results may vary between whether or not it's a noticeable improvement or downgrade. * Four completely made, from the ground-up, full-sized zones with a bevy of quests that all narratively connect to one another.

TL;DR I don't know if it was a direct consequence of the narrative/outline shift to the World Soul Saga as Metzen envisions it away from the apparent original grand cosmic conflict story that was originally being pitched by the old writing team, including Danuser and Afrasiabi, but it absolutely feels like the content being put on offer for Midnight 12.0 is not nearly as much as one would expect from a full expansion launch, consisting of only a single spec for a single class getting added to a single race, random-encounter rare mobs, a species we know nothing about being made playable out of financial obligation less so than community desire or narrative cohesion with a zone being hamfisted in as it was likely not meant to be in Midnight to begin with, and a second zone that seems to be less of a zone and more of a battleground you can visit uninstanced if you so choose.

By all means, feel free to give me your opinions or insights on this.

Again, I'm still looking forward to Midnight and think housing alone is enough to justify the $40 price tag given the sheer passion and effort that's gone into it, and what we're told is likely 4+ years of manpower to make it happen in such an amazing and expectation-exceeding state (likely to redefine how MMOs handle player housing going forward), but I do feel like the expac as a whole seems to be lacking in genuine new content in comparison to older ones.