There's just no good reason why WoW's story mode raids aren't available right away—and I'm saying that as someone who cleared normal just fine last month

Harvey Randall, Staff Writer

World of Warcraft's generally made a few great choices when it comes to its raid and rewards structure in the past few years—one of these solid ideas has been the inclusion of story mode, a soloable version of its endgame raids that lets casual players bop their big bads on the head so they can see the cutscenes everyone at Blizzard worked very hard on.

Well, sort of. The issue is, story mode—much like the casual Looking For Raid (LFR) version—keeps getting time-gated. The patch drops, the raid comes out, and both LFR and story mode versions are locked behind a seven-day wait, with LFR in particular releasing its wings piecemeal.

I can somewhat understand the LFR thing—releasing a new raid is a big deal for Blizzard, and fine-tuning a version where difficulty matters slightly less (but still matters!) is something I can see a savvy developer putting off for a while under the guise of making organised raiders feel a little more special having seen all of it.

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But story mode's current implementation feels completely counter to what Blizzard's trying to do with The Worldsoul Saga—that is, having a more accessible and easily-appreciated story. I'm mixed on my overall story feelings of Midnight, but I can at least tell that Blizzard's trying to spin an interesting yarn.

I've even enjoyed some character arcs and plot twists, even if I'm still quietly wondering where the heck the Horde is in all of this—the end of the Voidspire raid, in particular, is a really enjoyable knife-twist. I also like that Blizzard is splitting up its raids, into multiple, smaller ones—allowing for a broader, more episodic story over the course of a patch.

And yet, as it stands, experiencing that story for the first time as a casual player involves playing a bunch of neat lead-up quests to the raid itself, building momentum and then—just as the climax reaches its peak—you get hit with a seven-day wait. Why?

You can make the argument that it, as mentioned, is to make players feel rewarded for organising with their buddies and clearing the raids themselves. But that feels like a load of old tripe for me—because I did it.

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When the Voidspire raid came out, I brushed off my old raid instincts (I've cleared a Savage tier of FF14 before, so I'm at least baseline confident) and decided to give Normal a try for myself.

And I mean, it was fine. I don't want to dunk on WoW players, because it's not their fault, but compared to a game that essentially makes you play a 500-hour tutorial over several expansions, the overall mechanical literacy of your average WoW player is… let's just call it "not as thoroughly prepared".

I'm mostly talking about the dragons and that goddamn fear cone. Blizzard basically holds up a giant, blaring sign in front of you—early warning that you're going to get targeted with the breath—and still, the groups I played with couldn't manage it. It's alright, though, my dumb arse died on the final boss and I was thoroughly carried, so the cosmic balance is preserved.

My point is, while I broadly enjoyed the raid, I didn't enjoy the sense of pressure to get it done before I was spoiled by the cinematics being uploaded to YouTube—and I certainly didn't feel like my story experience was particularly improved by doing it with strangers whose inter-party politics rival Game of Thrones in their bloody pettiness.

We're long past the point where seeing a raid actually carries any prestige, and as such I just can't fathom why story mode is being held behind the gate—you can make the same LFR argument that Blizzard's just spreading out developer time to balance it, but story mode's explicitly the "mechanics don't matter, have fun" version.

Nothing's ever easy in game development, sure, but I can make the safe assumption that the balance team doesn't have to work overtime on this one. Until then, Blizzard will continue mandating that its story and solo players—the ones it's ostensibly trying to appeal to with the mode in the first place, as well as Delves and Prey—have to wait a full week while playing spoiler dodgeball before experiencing the story as-intended. For what reason? Who's to say.