Blizzard Watch

Blizzard Watch Weekly: The Midnight alpha begins!

Added 2025-10-04 02:20:36 +0000 UTC

With Midnight news everywhere, it's a big week in Warcraft... and while that's the biggest news, the Midnight alpha is far from the only thing that happened this week. So let's stop dawdling in this introduction and get to it!

What happened this week?

Another Midnight reveal gave us a good overview of the expansion after the scattered announcements and interviews at Gamescom last month. The video overview of expansion zones and features provides lots of great visuals and was followed by an hour-long Q&A — both are worth watching.
The Midnight alpha test started on October 2, so you can look forward to a lot of news about the new expansion in the coming days (assuming I can stop customizing my house for long enough to look around). We'll be covering the highlights on the site, but you'll find quite a few creator interviews on YouTube and datamining is in full swing on Wowhead.
Pre-orders for the Midnight Collector's Edition are now available. The Collector's Edition includes a replica of the Dark Heart, which just doesn't seem safe to keep at home.
The October WoW Trading Post launched and it's a great one with a snazzy Headless Horseman recolor and other great looks for the season.
Hearthstone announces Across the Timeways expansion, in which we're helping Chromie fight Murozond alongside a few other heroes she's plucked out of time with new Fabled cards. The expansion is due out on November 4.
WoW Classic Anniversary realms launched phase 6 this week with Naxxramas. It's the final phase of the Classic era, so players should be heading to The Burning Crusade after this.
Diablo 2 Resurrected Ladder Season 12 started on October 3. Another song, another dance.
WoW Lil’ Coalee Pit Lord pet is now available as a Twitch Drop (see above). To get it, you just need to watch four hours of World of Warcraft on Twitch before October 29.
WoW Brewfest continues through October 9, so there's still time to do the new event and collect all of the new transmog (if you're willing to work at it).
WoW Harvest Festival continues through October 9 in modern and Classic WoW, though there's considerably less to do in this holiday than there is in Brewfest.
This week’s Hearthstone Tavern Brawl: Valeera’s Bag of Burgled Spells Tavern Brawl (Wild)

Midnight is the week's big news, as details begin to flood in about the expansion. Not everything is available to test — we have an alpha roadmap with details — but early quests and zones are available as well as core features of housing. So far we've found out that there will be no more pet battling (though there will be cosmetic pets to collect), that WeakAuras (and other addons) are probably going away, and that Valorstones are gone for good (or at least until Blizzard decides to bring back another valor-themed currency), and more details on how to collect multiple copies of decor (which is already a housing pain point). Also there's an Arcantina! I did not expect that.

The alpha test is invite only, and we don't expect a large portion of the player base will get invited. However, there will be a lot of news about the expansion we can all glean along the way, and the coming beta test should be a lot more open. We have some tips on what to do if you get invited to the alpha (or beta) test.

You can keep up with all of our Midnight coverage right here.

What’s happening next week (and beyond)

Legion Remix launches October 7
Player Housing comes to WoW in patch 11.2.7 before the end of the year

Midnight may be this week's big news, but Legion is will be next week's big news. We have do's and don'ts for playing the latest version of Remix, as well as a walkthrough on unlocking the game mode's Heroic World Tier for increased difficulty (and increased rewards).

Other things we're playing, watching, and more

Epic Games Store free game of the week: Nightingale
The Steam Autumn Sale is underway (through October 6), but we're just thinking about Bear & Breakfast.
Critical Role Campaign 4 started this week, and it is magnificent. You can read the predictions I made on everyone's classes (some of them are even right!), which I'll be updating with final details next week after everyone's had a chance to watch the first episode themselves. If you missed the episode, look for the VOD on YouTube Monday.
DMsGuild is hosting a game jam for D&D supplements themed around Baldur's Gate, and I don't know, I sure am thinking about it. But even if you don't participate, we'll have lots of neat Baldur's Gate content at the end.

There's also been some big game news this week that may affect our future playtime. EA has been bought out for $55 billion and will be going private, taking on $20 billion in debt in a leveraged buyout. There's a good chance this means layoffs, more aggressive microtransactions, and possibly more AI-powered game dev as the company's new owners try to maximize profit. No one knows where this will go, but the general assumption is nowhere good.

And in more bad news, Microsoft increased the price of Game Pass Ultimate by 50% to $30 per month. This is now the only subscription at includes day one access to Microsoft-published games, but at $30 per month the value is becoming questionable. If you play a brand new game every two months, you're breaking even. If you play a brand new game less than that, you're paying Microsoft more than you would to just buy games outright. Of course there's still value in the big library of games, but the latest price increase shifts it from a great deal to maybe I can live without it.

But it's okay. Even without EA and Game Pass there are a lot of great games out there, and we're living in a golden age of indie games. Just in the past month we've gotten both Hades 2 and Silksong!

This week’s podcasts

We'll be back next week with more podcasts and more news.

Thank you all for your support, and if you have any questions, please leave them in the comments or send a message! I'll try to answer them here or on the podcast.

— Liz