So I used to be an avid player of various Massively Multiplayer Online RolePlaying Games (MMORPGs), starting with “Anarchy Online in 2004, and encompassing dozens of other games over the next 15 years or so. But a lot of that fell by the wayside with my heart surgery in 2020, although my love for this genre of games has never died.
One of the games I played the most was “World of Warcraft”. It was the one I most deeply delved into, including significant amounts of time and effort placed into competitive Player vs Player arenas, Progression Raiding, and so forth. I was a guild officer, the primary Raid Healer and back-up Tank Healer, and while I only progressed somewhat in PvP, being a Healer, my services were often very appreciated by whatever random team I got added into.
Anyway, I left the game officially with the very start of the expansion “Battle for Azeroth”, with no intention of ever returning to the game. But you know how these things go, eventually the pull to return to WoW becomes too great, and most players eventually come back, even if only for a short while. Now that I have my rather awesome little gaming computer, I find myself asking “Should I take the plunge back into WoW”?
What drives this is mostly the fact that Blizzard has finally added player housing into the game, something I was appealing for back as early as 2007. They didn’t add it in, although this is a standard feature of most MMORPGs, because of course Blizzard knows best, right? So how did that go with “Diablo Immortal”?
Anyway, they finally listened, and have added in more content for more casual players, like myself, as I gave up on PvP and Raiding a long time before I left MMORPGs. Is that enough to return to WoW, though?
I really, really enjoyed the “Legion” expansion, and hoped that they stuck with that style of play, being scaling content. Never outleveling your quests is a huge boon to MMORPG play, and I would love to see more MMOs adopt it for their games. But Blizzard has a way of adding in features to WoW for one expansion, then completely dropping it in future content (see ‘Garrisons’ from “Warlords of Draenor”). So has the scaling content of Legion remained in the expansions that followed it?
If not, I really don’t see a reason to even try WoW again, even on just a trial basis. Without it, we’re back to just standard MMORPG leveling, and frankly, I can just load “Guild Wars 2” onto my computer, instead. Hell, I might just do that anyway.
So is WoW worth returning to in 2026? What makes it a compelling MMORPG, if anything, especially for casual players like myself?
