World of Warcraft: Midnight's new intro cinematic is overflowing with elves and their abnormally long eyebrows
What's the maintenance like on those things?
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World of Warcraft's next expansion is right around the corner, which means it was about time for Blizzard to drop a new cinematic.
Sure enough, we got our first look at what's going on in WoW: Midnight during the Gamescom Opening Night Live show, and it's a lot of elves with abnormally long eyebrows.
The basic setup for Midnight is that an evil purple elf named Xal'atath wants to get rid of the one thing elves cherish most: the golden pool of energy that lets them use magic. You might remember the Sunwell being a major focus of Warcraft 3.
Now it's under attack by void monsters, and there's a whole army of realistically rendered elves (and their eyebrows) to defend it.
I've only somewhat kept up with what's going on in WoW and even I'm not exactly sure what Xal'atath's end goal is, but that also seems to be what this middle chapter in a trilogy of WoW expansions is going to dig into.
As someone who has played quite a lot of WoW over the years, even I think the eyebrows don't exactly match the realistically-proportioned cinematic elves compared to the ones in-game. But I also kind of like how weird it looks anyway. Anything is better than the Halloween costume elves we saw in the live action film.
Blizzard dropped another video on the WoW YouTube channel that details what's coming in Midnight, including:
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- An updated version of the Quel'Thalas zone
- New zones Zul'Aman, Harandar, and The Voidstorm
- 8 new dungeons
- 7 new delves
- New "Prey" feature where you hunt down targets in the open world
- Player housing!
- New Haranir playable race
- New demon hunter devourer specialization (I was right)
Blizzard didn't narrow down the 2026 release window for Midnight, but we also know the latest 11.2 patch will be the last major update of The War Within. I'd expect to see it out earlier rather than later next year.
Midnight pre-orders are up now and everyone who grabs one will get to try out the player housing early. The three days of early access to the expansion, however, only comes with the $90 Epic Edition.

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Tyler has covered videogames and PC hardware for 15 years. He regularly spends time playing and reporting on games like Diablo 4, Elden Ring, Overwatch 2, and Final Fantasy 14. While his specialty is in action RPGs and MMOs, he's driven to cover all sorts of games whether they're broken, beautiful, or bizarre.
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