The War Within’s Early Access Controversy

The War Within marks Blizzard’s first time trying something new with the release of a World of Warcraft expansion since they moved to simultaneous global release – an Early Access window. This has, predictably, been a bit of a mixed bag as an announcement.

While early access as a thing is not new to games or even MMOs, it is, in this case, somewhat conspicuous because WoW doing it marks an interesting change. WoW is, also, quite a time-sensitive game, and thus a 3-day headstart on expansion content seems like it could create a state of relative imbalance, where the people who start early get a big headstart into endgame and being prepared for what comes in Season 1 of The War Within. Coupled with it being tied to the most expensive edition of the game, and yeah – there’s a recipe for some discontent. Because I’m going to reference it a lot during this post, we need to start by contextualizing this with one of WoW’s competitors – Final Fantasy XIV, and how that game has handled early access to expansions for nearly a decade now.

The FFXIV Approach To Early Access

In FFXIV, early access works on a basic formula. Any preorder from any participating retailer gets an early access code, regardless of version or expense. The early access code functions as a limited-use license that upgrades your account to the new expansion for a week, starting from the Friday before official launch. During this window, you can play expansion content and the only caveat is that you have to, prior to the end of the 7-day window, put a full license of the expansion onto your account (since you can get EA from brick-and-mortar preorder, the idea is to prevent someone from doing a $5 Gamestop special and never buying the expansion). During the first month or so of an FFXIV expansion, the raid series is not active, so the only endgame content available is the Expert dungeons roulette consisting of 3 endgame dungeons, an uncapped tomestone special to the new level cap that can be used to buy gear that is 10 item levels higher than your artifact armor set for the expansion, and the first two story trials of the new expansion in Extreme difficulty for 8-player raids, one of which has weapons and the other of which has accessories, both rewards which match the item level of the (at that time) unreleased Normal raid to come.

Given that the average expansion MSQ time for a full experience (watching all cutscenes and carefully reading all dialogue) is around 40-50 hours, most players won’t even finish the MSQ in the early access window unless they no-life it very hard (and if we assume no server issues kick them out or bar their access for prolonged periods of time!), and far fewer will be in any position to farm up excessive amounts of pre-raid gear. Crafting recipes for raid gear don’t become available until the raid drop patch, so the only real advantage one can get in EA for FFXIV is to level a job to max, be done with MSQ, and to maybe squeeze in a few Expert roulettes or EX trial runs for some small amount of gear. Does it matter to the endgame of FFXIV? Not too much so, since everything is on a deterministic track – the EX trial weapon requires 10 clears for enough totems to buy it, and the EX that rewards accessories is easy enough to farm in a similar way. At worst, you might need to run the Expert dungeon roulette enough times to ensure you get the tomestones you need to buy your uncapped tome gear for left side and the second ring you’ll need to finish out accessories, and then you’re basically waiting for raid drop patch so you can get crafting recipes for the raid prep gear and on you go.

The 3 day window, in this design, is elegantly min-maxed by the dev team to be enough time to enjoy the story and take it at a good pace (provided the servers and lobby/queue code don’t shit the bed, gosh Endwalker launch was awful eh), but not much else, and the other things that would let you get a substantive lead over any other player are simply locked behind the raid tier patch, which, since datamining of pre-release content is impossible until Square Enix puts the patch up for download, means that there’s no prefarming of materials, and even the things you can prefarm are only a part of the puzzle since you need timed gathering nodes and tomestone materials that you can’t just buy until the patch anyways.

So, the TL;DR – early access is for all pre-orders, is tuned to be enough time to do the MSQ fully but not much more, is engineered so that cutscene skippers and speed runners still cannot build a big advantage, and so it ends up being a pretty non-controversial part of the FFXIV ecosystem. For all intents and purposes, to a majority of the community, early access day is launch day and most community concern is around early spoilers since the player power side is so buttoned down.

Why The WoW Controversy?

WoW’s gain of an early access window is quite obviously controversial for a few reasons. Firstly, in WoW, story and leveling are just not that big of a thing and so a 3-day window to play is largely, or entirely, going to be endgame enjoyment. Leveling takes about 10-12 hours if you’re taking it slow and pacing yourself, and most players will likely finish in 8-9 hours (without alpha being live, obviously this is just a guess, but given the past couple of expansions, this seems largely like it will remain the case). That leaves a pretty substantial window in which a player could do almost anything they want, and there are a few WoW-obvious answers about what players might do.

The major concern is that player power is on the table in this window, and while Blizzard has said that they won’t allow player power to be a thing you can get (in order to avoid the EA window being mandatory for progression-minded players), the truth is a lot murkier. Blizzard’s official footnotes when Early Access is mentioned state that “Certain endgame features, including Mythic dungeons and weekly quests, not available during Early Access.” So case closed, yeah? Well, no. If we take this footnote at face value and assume it covers the full breadth of what early access won’t allow, that leaves both level-capped Normal dungeons and Heroic dungeons as on the table, and ironically, yesterday’s news about the increased item level rewards of Heroic dungeons puts forward the idea that players will actually be able to get a pretty comparable level of power compared to what Mythic Dungeons offered at launch in Dragonflight. Will it be the maximum possible power available prior to the start of TWW Season 1? Eh, no. But you will still, unquestionably, have a leg up on gear alone.

Second, professions matter a lot in the new landscape of retail WoW, and a few days head-start means that you can skill up early and get early knowledge points. Sure, if weekly quests are locked, you won’t be able to do the weekly knowledge quests, and I assume launch will be dated such that EA does not coincide with Darkmoon Faire profession quests being available, but first craft bonus knowledge and any equivalent to the world treasures for knowledge from DF are likely going to be available, and for the early part of the first season, this knowledge gap could mint some new goblins who can max-craft the best raid prep gear. In the current state of the profession system, this isn’t a permanent or insurmountable advantage, but it is an advantage all the same.

Third, tied into the prior point, gathering is unlikely to be disabled during early access, and a stockpile of materials flowing before the expansion is officially out could cause a lot of weird and unpredictable market effects. While materials have generally held value in Dragonflight better than before, the supply of mats always leads to a glut of stuff languishing on the AH in a race to the bottom. I fully expect that in TWW, given this window, that it will happen earlier than it did in DF, especially since we now know more about the new profession systems added in 10.0.

Fourth, alt leveling and rest experience cycling are going to lead some players to a higher state of preparedness for whatever the meta may yield. If you just focus on using early access to level characters, it’s not inconceivable to have 5-8 max level characters by the time the servers are officially opened on (presumably) the following Monday. More prepared characters means a better start for season 1 and it also means you’ll benefit from the gold income, item level increases, and profession skillups account-wide, especially given the Warband system.

Fifth, learning the new expansion content early is always somewhat controversial, but this will be, perhaps, the most early-played WoW expansion since Mists of Pandaria. MoP had the annual pass promotion which offered players beta access to MoP, an advantage a great many players took part in, and the same is true of high-value TWW preorders. Epic Edition preorders get beta access and early access, which means that leveling routes, gathering paths, and general gameplay learning can happen much, much earlier for those players, and that is a difficult-to-quantify value-add, but also something that we know will be good – skipping a fair chunk of fumbling through new expansion content when it is live is a time save.

But all of these talk about things with early access that are distinct to it and not what I think is the real root of the controversy…

Pay To Play

WoW’s early access is limited to players who purchase the most-expensive version of The War Within – the Epic Edition, at a cool $90 USD. This is, I think, the center of the issue in actuality. Early access for preorders is, under appropriate context, fine in and of itself (while I generally dislike preorders, for an MMO where you know you’re going to play and the game is more a hobby and less a passing interest, sure, fine, okay). If we had a specific set of parameters as to what will and won’t be allowed, fine enough. Blizzard, however, is trying to walk a line that only really leads to consternation – early access being tied to the most expensive edition inherently limits the audience for it to a minority of WoW players, the preorder only being available through Blizzard and only at full cost feels kind of bad, and by saying “early access won’t grant player power” it also ends up feeling disingenuous, because obviously early access is going to grant some power by virtue of being able to play early – the only way you could possibly guarantee zero power gain would be to wall off huge chunks of content, and then it wouldn’t be that worthwhile, save for leveling alts. If you pull all dungeons during this window, that limits some quests, main story, and overall content completeness. If you limit crafting and gathering or remove the knowledge rewards, that risks a design failing of players in early access not having a way to gain those designed knowledge points for first crafts or just makes things incomplete and weird. If you put up enough walls on what players can do that are considered a part of the box experience, are you actually offering real early access or a limited slice of content, and if the latter is the case, then why the fuck are you charging $90 minimum for access to it?

I feel confident to say this – if you removed the paywall on early access, almost everyone would be okay with it. Listen, it’s the MMO space – preorder debate is less of a thing and most people are locked into the games they love and play regularly, so tying it to any preorder of any version of the expansion would alleviate so much of the handwringing and debate about early access. Right now, the debate is caused by two things – progression-level players feeling boxed in on needing the most expensive version of the expansion to ensure their season 1 plans are smooth and a portion of the audience that sits below that, who worries less about needing the edge and more that the edge being available is going to push them into a permanent underclass for the duration of the expansion or at very least the first season of it. Honestly, does the advantage at the start mean much of anything? Likely not. You might be able to push higher in Mythic Plus slightly faster, level an alt before someone has finished leveling a main, or be ahead of the curve on profession knowledge for a handful of days, but in the long-term, all of that washes out with time. Everyone who spent the entire DF pre-season window farming super rares at launch got very little back for that time investment short of maybe a more comfy start on their seasonal content of choice, since all of that super-rare gear was made to be replaceable. In fact, the modern WoW model is predicated on the idea that you’re going to replace essentially everything every single season anyways!

That’s not to say it doesn’t matter or feel bad to not have it, and I think the majority of competitive WoW players will absolutely splurge on the Epic Edition, even if they traditionally would not have. I do think that Blizzard using a nebulous idea of what constitutes a player power gain feels bad and I wish they’d use more direct language that skews closer to their own footnote on the preorder about what specifically they intend that to mean. More than anything, though, I just wish they’d make it a preorder bonus for any and all preorders instead of tying it to the most expensive edition solely so they can rake in more cash. I honestly believe that most of the fuss about early access would be dead in the water if it was just a preorder bonus at all tiers.

But the world we live in is one where Blizzard has given early access a rough cash value and for most of us, the question we have to ask is if that price is worth it to us.