WoW: Midnight's new Prey mechanic is the coolest system the MMO's added in a while, but it needs to be meaner—even on lower difficulties

One of World of Warcraft: Midnight's biggest flagship features, Prey, is now fully in the game alongside the release of the expansion—it's one I've been looking forward to for a while, since the prospect of getting ambushed in the open world while trying to get my dailies ticked off seemed just the ticket to keep me engaged.

Now that I've had a bit of time to play around with it, beating hunts on both normal and hard difficulties, I can confirm that it is very cool—I've already had one pull where I got a little too cocky and got struck down by a well-aimed pyroblast from my Prey target.

But I've only had that one pull. See, Prey has three difficulties to it—normal, hard, and nightmare. I haven't had the chance to wrangle with nightmare yet (no-one has; it's not out until March 17) and while I don't doubt it'll scratch my itch for difficulty, I can't help but feel a little underwhelmed by both normal and hard mode.

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Here's how Prey works writ large: While you're out in the open world, your target for that zone has a chance of ambushing you. Get them to half health, and they'll bugger off. Complete world quests and successfully fend off ambushes, and you'll eventually get a quest to go and challenge them directly.

Normal mode feels appropriate. It's the tutorial difficulty to the entire system, and likely the one that casual players not interested in crapping themselves every other quest pull will be engaging with. But I just beat my first hard hunt, and… eh.

For the record, I only hit max level recently. I'm still halfway in questing greens and adventurer track gear, and while the additions to the system were neat—I like that if you die your progress gets reset, and the stacking damage taken debuff is a good layer of complication—I wasn't sweating bullets or anything.

I did have to utilise the traps, which you can snag in a special Prey-themed world quest in each zone, to get myself out of a bind every now and then. But when it came time to face my Prey, I walked into a cave and I… just kind of killed them. I pushed my buttons, interrupted a cast or two, and they died. It didn't necessarily feel "hard."

Part of this is also because both normal and hard mode Prey targets' mechanics are very slim. I can imagine Nightmare might bump these up a bit, but almost all targets you can find have some form of AoE, an interrupt or two, and that's basically it. The system wants to build up these ambushing antagonists as their own characters, but the way they're implemented just doesn't support it.

At the moment, this really isn't selling me on the fantasy: In the ideal form of this system, each target ought to mess with you in unique and infuriating ways, to help really pitch their character to you and make you feel like you've got a nemesis stalking you during your dailies.

Right now, it's mostly just an extra mob that pops up to mog you before you slap them down. It doesn't help that the world quest you get—disabling some sort of empowering object while dodging their roving guards—is mechanically copy-pasted for each target with a different skin.

And yes, nightmare mode will likely change things—the affixes seen on the beta, shared here by WoWHead, seem cool. Having to run away from a spectre or kill a monster now or suffer punishment are both great spanners to throw into the works of my daily grind. But also, in nightmare mode, I can get ambushed while I'm AFK. And I'm not entirely sure I'm there for that? I like a challenge, not getting whomped while I'm on the loo.

Overall, the feeling here is "room to grow", which is a bit sad for a mainline expansion feature, but it is promising. The War Within's delves added nemesis battles later down the line, and those were great—and, I confess, a little more what I was expecting.