Apparently a single month of alpha testing was enough for Blizzard to transition World of Warcraft’s next expansion into a beta. Starting next month, WoW: Midnight will enter its next phase of testing as it nears its suspected release date early next year.
Midnight alpha testing started at the beginning of October and brought with it sweeping changes to its combat and classes, as well as an entire player housing system. Blizzard surprised everyone by completely disabling the functionality of the most popular mods that help players fight bosses and track their abilities, prompting some mod makers to cease development of their mods entirely.
As a result of Blizzard’s move to simplify the game so people don’t have to rely on third-party mods, it also went through and reduced the amount of buttons you need to press for its most complicated classes. Unsurprisingly, these changes didn’t go over well with everyone, and many high-level players are worried about the state of class design going into the full release.
Today, Blizzard announced that the beta for Midnight will begin on November 11, which I’m sure doesn’t assuage concerns over the current state of the game. For comparison: The last expansion—which had arguably far less substantial changes as Midnight—had an alpha that lasted a little over a month, and the same goes for the expansion before that. Blizzard has a lot more packed into Midnight, and only having a month of testing is cutting it close to the final release.
Blizzard seems to be working on a tighter schedule than ever before. Wowhead recently datamined a splash screen that puts a date on the usual pre-expansion patch, suggesting Midnight might be out near the end of January. Blizzard hasn’t officially given a date, but a similar datamined screen before the last expansion ended up lining up with its launch day correctly.
Blizzard cycled through weekly phases in the alpha and plans to do the same with the beta. Each update came with new zones to explore, an increased level cap, and balance changes to address feedback. The Midnight beta will start with everything unlocked from the start and anyone who preordered the Epic Edition will have access as soon as it starts.
If you didn’t preorder the expansion, you can sign up for beta access by following the instructions on the announcement blog post.
