Blizzard recently took the covers off most everything that is coming to World of Warcraft Midnight, when it arrives in 2026. While the alpha release is happening now and players are experiencing some of the game, there is more to come.

We recently had the chance to chat a few of the folks from Blizzard who are working on Midnight and get some insights into the story, their favourite addition to the expansion and more.

We were lucky enough to speak with the following folks:

Ion Hazzikostas - Senior Game Director
Crash Reed, Lead User Experience (UX) Designer
Maria Hamilton, Design Director
Paul Kubit, Associate Game Director

So on with the interview.

Maxi-Geek: Being the middle chapter of a three part story. You have the challenge of continuing the story, but also getting people ready for the final chapter. How are you finding that challenge?

Ion Hazzikostas: I think yeah, that that's been something that we knew was a challenge for us to face coming into even just embarking on the World Soul Saga and building out a trilogy of expansions. Our goal with Midnight is on the one hand to tell a story that stands on its own and gives players the information they need to understand the threats that they're facing. Gets you into that story quickly and feels like just an epic arc of World of Warcraft, just like any other expansion.

Of course, at the same time, for people who've been playing The War Within, there's gonna be extra depth and nuance there as we finally confront Xal'atath full power after having kind of played a game of cat and mouse with her over the course in the last couple of years. We'll be revisiting and spending time with some characters that we've met and interacted with in War Within, who will take on new prominence in Midnight, but at the end of the day, you know, while continuing the trilogy, we need to make sure that this is a great point of entry or return for people who haven't played World of Warcraft before, or or who haven't played in a long time.

Maxi-Geek: Over the years that countless players have come up with their own ways of discovering how they want to play the game, have those outcomes impacted how you go about designing for the game or you just designing and letting players make up their own rules and procedures as they go?

Paul Kubit: Yeah, we do this all the time, this is one of the big things that we get excited about when we get into alpha, as we start getting feedback from folks on how they're playing, ‘What they like’, ‘What they would prefer.’ A great example I think when I think about pretty regularly actually is from our Role-Play community, where we have a pretty robust RP community who folks who like to role play in our game and and one of the common questions we get from them is, hey, can we get more empty spaces?

This is not something that actually occurs to a lot of devs who don't do a lot of RP, but in towns, for example, there's often requests for folks like, hey, we would like to role play as a bartender or as a shopkeeper or to have those spaces available for us and it's challenging to do so in a space which is completely filled with NPCs. We thought we were doing the right thing by filling our towns with NPCs and so as we build the game and as we have for the last several expansions now, we always do try to make sure that we leave some space for folks to create their own stories. That's just one example of many where we've heard this from the players and have done our best to accommodate.

Maria Hamilton: Yeah, I was going to say something similar with less good examples, but basically I was going to say that absolutely, we love to watch you guys play, especially when you're streaming it. We learn all sorts of things about what you like, and then we try to remember when we're designing to give you those nooks and crannies, like like Paul comments on or make sure there's a way for you to do the things that you're enjoying doing and maybe give you more more capability in those areas, so absolutely.

Maxi-Geek: Game expansions can be big and small depending on the content you're putting in there and there's a lot of things for players to discover. What's the one element that you are both excited for players to discover once they get their hands on Midnight?

Crash Reed: I mean, for me it's it's absolutely the story aside and all the epic things that are that are coming, it's housing, housing is amazing. You're gonna spend so much time organising and collecting and doing the décor of your house. I think that is something that me personally, I'm going to sink many hours into.

I make the joke internally often, after we have all these years of content and all these cultures and all these kits coming together, I'm a huge goblin player, so I cannot wait to lower the property value of my neighbourhood by scattering goblin bits all throughout my yard, burning trash cans, rockets, you know, all the goblin stuff. So, I'm really, really excited for housing.

Ion Hazzikostas: Uh Crash, stole my answer, but I do think that, you know, as big as housing is and how seemingly obvious it is, I think there it's gonna be a little bit of a sleeper feature for a tonne of players. I think there a tonne of players who maybe aren't huge cosmetic oriented folks or who are focused on combat and progression, who will be pleasantly surprised by just the feel of housing and how it kind of pulls you in. We've seen that across the team internally, honestly, as people who didn't think that they would like it or didn't think that they would really bother with it and are just like “no, I'm good running with my friends, I don't really care about this.” They quickly changed their minds once, just once, spending some time with the system.

The other thing I'll throw out there is an extra layer of of depth to the outdoor world. I think that Prey is going to be a really fun additional twist for players, you know, for a lot of the same audience that was well served by delves over the course of War Within. I think we want to continue to do what we can for those players, for players whose time is often spent solo in our game, for players who like just exploring and immersing themselves in the vast world of our zones rather than, you know, going into dungeons, raids or delves and we want to make sure there's more depth there, more challenge for those who want it and more reward for those who are up to that challenge.

Maria Hamilton: I'm very excited about some of the activities that we've built out in each of the zones to help provide some depth and help you understand sort of what's going on in those places. They're they're they're not huge features, they're not huge events, but they're very tailored to the different zones and the different cultures of those zones. So for example, in Haradar we have a thing called Legends of the Haranir and it's an opportunity for you to learn about the past and experience memories that have been painted onto the the walls of a of a a sacred place and play through those memories and learn more about that culture. I usually love those kinds of deeper dives, like with the blood elves you you can participate in some fairly political parties that they enjoy and have a good time and socialise and and align with the sub-faction and and you know, do a little backstabbing in the best blood elf fashion.

In the in the Zul’Aman area there's a couple different opportunities, but one of them involves a new Loa that we will not have experienced yet, which should be super fun participating in that. Then Voidstorm is just full of all sorts of things that are happening all the time, big interesting PvP area there, and I think it'll just be really fun to see people find these activities and dive in and enjoy them based on what they like to do.

Paul Kubit: For me, one of my most excited about it's gotta be housing. We've talked about so much about housing that I'll give a little bit more of a deeper cut for this one and it's training grounds. This is a new PvP feature which is coming in Midnight, and this is an opportunity for folks to try out PvP which against game controlled opponents as opposed to fighting against real human opponents, which can be intimidating for a couple of reasons. If you're not used to playing PvP, if you haven't played in a while or if you've never played and you wanna learn, it can be challenging to hop into that space where people will have better PvP gear than you because they've been playing this mode for a while and they have more well honed skill set than you.

So, this should be a cool opportunity for folks who are interested in PvP style gameplay or PvP fantasy to get into that world and have a fun feeling win rate for those runs and maybe you stick around there, maybe continue playing training grounds as your mode, or maybe you graduate out of that into true player versus player content.

My thanks to the developers from Blizzard who took the time to answer my questions. World of Warcraft: Midnight is expected to launch in 2026, but there is no exact date beyond that at this time.