‘World of Warcraft’ Just Upgraded Its Best City for the First Time in 20 Years, and Now It’s Perfect

Gizmodo · Mar 2, 2026 · Collected from RSS

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World of Warcraft, when it’s not a game about collecting animal parts or fighting god, is a game about time. Whether that’s players reflecting on the now 22 years they’ve spent wandering the regions of Azeroth (and lands beyond it) and the lives they’ve lived during that adventuring or the makers of that world reckoning with what it takes to actually change it, time is one of World of Warcraft‘s greatest strengths and a testament to its endurance—and it’s on full display in its latest expansion, Midnight. When Midnight was already announced, I and my elf-pilled brain were already excited for what Blizzard was touting as one of the major features of the expansion: that one of the new zones being “added” to the game was, in fact, not an addition at all, but a revamp of the Blood Elf kingdom of Quel’Thalas, completely overhauling and updating an area of World of Warcraft not touched since it was added with the release of The Burning Crusade back in 2006 (the game’s first expansion; Midnight is its 11th). But now that Midnight is actually here and I’ve spent the past weekend adventuring through Quel’Thalas as part of its early access period, it’s one thing to have been excited. It’s completely another to come back to a place you’ve seen trapped in amber for almost two-thirds of your life and see it teeming with a life you could’ve only dreamt of stepping onto its virtual soil 20 years ago. © Blizzard Entertainment/Gizmodo It’s a huge undertaking, completely modernizing the region while still keeping it faithful to the memories players have built from the old zone. Quel’Thalas is now one region in Midnight, a reformatting of what were previously three major zones when they were introduced in The Burning Crusade: the Blood Elf capital Silvermoon City, the surrounding Eversong Woods, and the decayed Ghostlands, increasing it in size, scope, and verticality to make it suitable for World of Warcraft‘s modern style of flying mounts (flying at all was introduced in Burning Crusade, but only in the new region of Outland, leaving you grounded in these lands even after much of Azeroth was opened up to flight). Everything is bigger and prettier, with modern assets instead of leaning on strong art design but 2006 modeling. Silvermoon, now the main player hub regardless of whether you fight for the Alliance or Horde, has been tripled in size, with what were once ruins in its old form now a completely rebuilt city filled with nooks and crannies to explore among its glimmering spires. Areas you recognize from the old zones have been reworked to match that scope, even with changes to accommodate the narrative events of Midnight: Eversong Forest is now lush with autumnal golden trees, its undead decay largely healed over, but with still a few darker areas to recreate those Ghostlands vibes. While main story quests in the zone focus on the tasks at hand, side quests let you dig back into zones and even a few characters that have been hanging around for decades, seeing how their lives went on after you first trundled past them as a low-level character generations prior, eager to start your own adventure. © Blizzard Entertainment/Gizmodo It’s that, really, that stands out more about the redesign than the mechanical aspects: this is a land that is now bursting with life after years of literal and metaphorical decay and stagnation. What was once a reflection of where the Blood Elves had been after the events of Warcraft 3—which saw the kingdom ravaged by the undead armies of Arthas Menethil on his fallen path to become the new Lich King—and where they were at, still trying to grapple with that trauma coming into Burning Crusade, is now a reflection of a people that have healed, strong enough to stand tall in the face of the invasion that Midnight‘s initial story campaign revolves around. Silvermoon and its surrounding areas are now laden with people, wandering around and living their lives (even as the latest threat ominously looms over them, almost literally: a massive portal in the sky opened up by current Warcraft big bad Xal’atath to let in an invading army of cosmic creatures of shadow and void): painting lush vistas, partying with each other, tilling the freshly invigorated soil, and researching arcane tomes. Silvermoon itself is perhaps now the city in World of Warcraft that feels most like an actual city, a bustle generated not just by an army of player characters now settled there for the new expansion but by hundreds of NPCs who roam its now expanded towers and alleyways going about their own business, instead of simply being there to cater to the mechanical needs of the player base. © Blizzard Entertainment/Gizmodo It’s here that Blizzard has also crucially kept a little bit of the edge of the Blood Elves as they were defined in The Burning Crusade, a bitter people fresh from unfathomable slaughter and loss, willing to do anything to survive and feed their hunger for the arcane. Although broadly as a society the Blood Elves have replaced their momentary reliance on fel magics with light-worshipping religion and non-demonic sources of magic, several storylines in the new Silvermoon both explore that transition as well as the fact that such evolution has not entirely eroded the haughty elves’ belief in their superiority over others, a stratification of rich elites sipping fancy wines in their arcane academies while the have-nots are left to fend for themselves in the city’s darker alleyways. The fact that both factions now use the city as a temporary base of operations creates a fun friction too, from moments of both sides being at tense loggerheads in the story to the way that, depending on your player faction and race, some NPCs quietly react to you (as someone playing a Void Elf Demon Hunter, the guards are none too pleased to see me, but I’ve seen some kneel in the presence of Paladin players, grateful for the light’s assistance in this trying time). All these details, big and small, add up to create what is now the gold standard for World of Warcraft taking one of its old zones and revamping it for the modern game. While there have been many changes to Azeroth since World of Warcraft launched in 2004, there’s been little of this kind of scale outside of the wholesale revamp of the original game world in the 2010 expansion, Cataclysm. Blizzard has tried in fits and starts to show signs of change as the narrative has built in the years since, such as the losses of both the Undead capital of the Undercity and the Night Elf capital, Darnassus, during Battle for Azeroth, or the reclamation of the Worgen capital, Gilneas, in Dragonflight. But those pale in comparison to the undertaking done in rebuilding Quel’Thalas, not just as a thorough modernization of a land long neglected, but as a reflection of how far the world of WoW has come in the last 20 years. Want more io9 news? 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