World of Warcraft: Midnight offers a tonne of new content for longtime players of Blizzard’s iconic MMO. Alongside a brand-new story, the expansion comes with the introduction of player housing, new raids, an increase to level 90, and much, much more.

One of the most exciting additions to the expansion is the arrival of brand-new Delves for players to enjoy. Originally added in The War Within, these activities are shorter endgame adventures that can be tackled alone or with a group, and they’ve proven massively popular since their introduction.

Speaking in a recent interview, design director Maria Hamilton and associate game director Paul Kubit explained that the strong reception to Delves let the team at Blizzard know players wanted more. Sometimes in World of Warcraft, new features get introduced and quickly abandoned, but the popularity of Delves meant that the team had to make more.

Hamilton explained that Delves are created with more casual players in mind, players who can’t dedicate hours to constant raids.

“I think that with Delves we were looking at a way to provide content that was relatively predictable in terms of how long it would take, and what the challenges would be,” they told IGN. “We were looking at sort of that, slightly more casual folks who want to not be worried about a timer or worried about people waiting on them. They need to go walk the dog real fast. They got to deal with a baby or a kid or something. And they should be able to stand up and walk away and go do that and not leave their group upset or wondering what happened.”

Players have fallen in love with the new feature with near-constant praise on social media, alongside a few detractors. Hamilton explains that the feature is designed to offer a “different pace” for more casual players, and it’s worked well, saying: “they really enjoyed it and we wanted to make sure that we expanded more in those areas to make sure those players are having a good time.”

Associate game director Paul Kubit explained that the success of Delves is also tied to other features the team has built in the past, specifically noting the scaling difficulty of Horrific Visions and the procedural generation of Island Expeditions.

“No feature in World of Warcraft stands on its own,” they said. “We’re all standing on the shoulders of previous features which have come before them. And so we’ve learned all sorts of lessons about dynamic spawning and having creatures spawn in interesting in different ways each time from features like Torghast. The ability for creatures, the enemies to scale not just by the size of your group, but also the composition of your group because a group of five DPS plays very differently than a group with three DPS, a healer and a tank.”

Blizzard has been quite open about this style of design in the past with the MMO’s recent addition of drifting goblin cars in Undermined coming after the major issues of Dragon Riding. Technically, under the hood, WoW’s driving feature is built on the same dynamic movement system made for that feature, but the team learned a lot from the mistakes of flying.

World of Warcraft Midnight is set to release in early 2026 with some unverified rumours pointing to the end of February.