I'm writing this review after 19 years of playing World of Warcraft, to give my honest thoughts about the expansion after playing all the preceding expansions and vanilla.
I have through the years of playing World of Warcraft learned not to take reviews of expansions seriously when they are published at the time of the expansion's release. This is because Blizzard's strategy when they develop an expansion is to make it look appealing at first glance for professional reviewers from gaming sites and on YouTube, mostly when leveling up to max level through the various new zones because that's what the reviewers are going to experience at launch. You'd think that an honest professional review would be one that was published some time after the release, to give a realistic and summarized picture of how the expansion actually turned out: Such as the quality and state of max level content, both for PvE and PvP- where the expansion's real content is.
To start with the expansion had a pre-order strategy with different editions like many other game publishers do, which is never a good idea for us who are enjoying the game, nor for any other game with the same marketing strategy. That's because many people will buy the expansion in advance without knowing how it will turn out, which go hand in hand with that ActivisionBlizzard already have the money for the new expansion and thus can develop it however they like. But for this expansion the most expensive edition was a giant step too far by giving those who purchased it several days of early access. In short nothing less than a forced cash grab for people who play World of Warcraft competitively- compelling them to buy the most expensive edition. This meant that they could "develop" an expansion that turns out to be in fact underdeveloped with recycled ideas from previous expansions such as mostly Dragonflight. What a shocker.
As of writing this review I have played The War Within almost every day of the week since the official launch, and the most obvious issue with the expansion is the recycled general content that has turned out to be severely lacking in terms of gameplay design. In other words people don't want to do the previous expansion(s) again. This has led to a noticeable decline in the amount of active players, something which is very obvious if you do any max level content: Queue times are extremely long for any activity, and attempting to list a group in search for more players for any content usually takes anywhere from 30 minutes up to an hour in average to find good players- even during the hours of the day which is popular for people to play. In comparison most previous expansions there have usually always been an abundance of players.
Summarized this expansion is not worth it to play with its underdeveloped core game design and reused ideas, which in turn has led to that not as many people play WoW anymore. Which is why my advice is to not get engaged in this expansion, because you will most likely be very disappointed.
