World of Warcraft’s next expansion, The War Within, is right around the corner, and it’s looking to build on the success of Blizzard’s back-to-basics approach for 2022’s Dragonflight. That means a focus on evergreen features that will persist for years to come in The War Within, the first chapter in a three-expansion trilogy Blizzard has dubbed The Worldsoul Saga.
Two of The War Within’s biggest additions, Warbands and Hero Talents, are great examples of Blizzard’s current approach. Rather than entirely new features, each system is instead building on what came before. Warbands is the full realization of all the alt-character-friendly changes and account-wide unlocks that have slowly made their way into the game over the past few years and that became even more of a focus in Dragonflight. Hero Talents, meanwhile, are an expansion of the well-received class Talent tree revamp introduced in Dragonflight, which itself was a throwback to the Talent trees from the game’s earliest days.
On paper, iterations on existing WoW features don’t quite sound like game-changing, back-of-the-box additions that sell expansions, much less the expansion that will kick off a storyline that is intended to serve as the culmination of WoW’s first two decades. But any WoW player with multiple characters will tell you how exciting, and transformative, a feature like Warbands will be to the long-running MMORPG. That enthusiasm applies to Hero Talents as well, as the feature will finally allow players to live out class fantasies like becoming a Dark Ranger as a Hunter or engaging in mounted combat as a Rider of the Apocalypse Death Knight.