Blizzard devs talk about going back to WoW's beloved expansion continent, Northrend, and rebuilding it for The Last Titan: 'We wanna make sure we're doing justice to those memories'

World of Warcraft: Midnight's just around the corner, with the pre-patch releasing this week. But Blizzard's already got eyes on the ball for its next expansion, as part of the three-expansion plan it revealed back in 2023 that we'll soon be coming up on halfway through.

The Last Titan, as it was announced back then, is gonna be taking players back to Northrend—and, per a recent interview by Game Informer, Midnight's reimagining of Silvermoon and the Ghostlands has been part of the process in sticking that landing.

Director Ion Hazzikostas tells the publication that Silvermoon is "going to inform our approach to Northrend or to other places we may revisit down the line. I think it's about striking a balance between nostalgia and freshness, having those familiar anchors the players are looking for and can't wait to see in fully modern fidelity.

"But also having expanded areas, clearly transformed areas, in a way that makes it abundantly clear that a lot of time has passed."

Hazzikostas is relatively thin on details for the time being (which is fair, they've an entire expansion to get through before we're heading up north) but he explains that "we definitely need to be very mindful of borders, continuous land masses and transitions.

"We would never want a situation where a player is standing in one spot and then they walk 20 yards in that direction or 200 yards in that direction, and suddenly they're in the middle of stuff that was built 20 years ago." That's part of the reason they went for Silvermoon and the Ghostlands, Hazzikostas explains—being two relatively self-contained zones, it was easier to recreate them without having to worry about said lines being blurred.

Principal artist Gabriel Gonzalez is a touch nervous about the prospect: "The special consideration for Northrend is just how universally beloved the expansion that took us there is … Players that have been playing World of Warcraft for a very long time, for a lot of them that was their introduction to World of Warcraft, and also the culmination to some of the stories that they saw of Warcraft 3."

Design director Maria Hamilton is also feeling the weight: "I think it's an iconic place, and it's not just a zone or two—it's the whole content, and that is, as Gabe said, a little scary. It's paying or doing justice to people's memories of those places … There are memories there.

"We wanna make sure we're doing justice to those memories but also telling the story that we're telling right now. Northrend—we're going back there, and you're gonna see what has changed … We're gonna do our best to hit the right notes there and make people really happy to come back to Northrend."

That's all in the future, though. For now, it's time to see the rebuilt Silvermoon in Midnight—and really show Xal'atath what-for—come March 2.