What Is The Prey System In World of Warcraft: Midnight?
The Prey system is a new open world feature arriving with World of Warcraft: Midnight on March 2. It is Blizzard’s latest attempt to make outdoor content more exciting and genuinely challenging, especially for players who are tired of easy world quests but do not always want to queue for dungeons or raids.
Instead of just checking off simple objectives on a map, Prey turns you into both the hunter and the hunted. You pick a powerful boss to track down in the open world, but that boss will also stalk you and attack when you least expect it.
Blizzard designer Noah Smith describes Prey as an overlay system. That means it sits on top of anything else you are doing in the world. Whether you are tackling world quests, farming materials, or just roaming a zone, if you are in combat and have a Prey hunt active, your chosen target can show up and ruin your day in the best possible way.
The system is aimed at mid core players who enjoy a challenge in solo and small scale content, but it scales high enough that even mythic geared raiders will find the upper tiers demanding.
How Prey Hunts Work
To start a hunt, you visit an NPC in Silvermoon City. From there you can:
- Choose your difficulty
- Pick a zone to hunt in
- Select one of around 30 different boss targets
Once you lock in your hunt, special Prey world quests will appear in your chosen zone. The entire area also becomes more dangerous thanks to torments that buff enemies and make simple tasks riskier. It is somewhat like the Heroic outdoor difficulty used in the Legion Remix event, but this is its own system.
The twist is that your boss does not just wait around at a marked location. Any time you are in combat in that zone you are a valid target. The boss can swoop in while you are already fighting other mobs, catching you off guard. Smith even calls out gnome enemies with shrink rays who love stomping on shrunken heroes as an example of the kind of chaos you can expect.
Importantly, Blizzard does not want Prey to feel like a linear checklist where you grind through steps just to get to a final boss. You are free to mix it with whatever you already plan to do in the zone, making regular farming and questing more intense and unpredictable.
Difficulty Levels, Rewards, And Opting Out
Prey is totally optional, and Blizzard has tried to make sure no one feels forced into it. Engaging with the system contributes to the open world row of your weekly Great Vault options, which means it can replace some of your usual outdoor chores. However, hardcore raiders and PvP players are not required to do it to stay competitive.
You can drop out of a hunt at any time simply by abandoning the quest. You are also safe to step away from the keyboard in most difficulties. Aside from the Nightmare setting, which adds strict time limits and more brutal mechanics, you will not be constantly under threat while idle.
Prey is designed primarily as solo content. The torments and afflictions it applies are personal. That means things like:
- Enemies that fixate specifically on you
- Pools of seeping gore that only damage you when they drop
- Attacks visually aimed at you rather than bystanders
If a friend decides to help, they are not affected unless they directly tag into your hunt. You can stand on top of each other and your ally will be fine until they start attacking your target, at which point they become part of the encounter and share in the chaos.
Torments, Tricks, And The Player Journey
To keep hunts varied, a quest giver named Astalor Bloodsworn will periodically appear and make extra demands in the middle of your run. These challenges ramp up the pressure but also add personality and flavor to the system.
One of Astalor’s tasks is simply to kill a random enemy quickly. According to Smith, this is where a clever player can get an edge. Astalor never specifies how tough that enemy has to be. So if he appears while you are already struggling, you can just spin around and instantly delete a tiny level 1 critter. A squirrel still counts as a victim in Astalor’s eyes, and you move on without losing precious time against real threats.
As you complete hunts in Prey, you work through a progression track similar to the Delver’s Journey in the small dungeon like Delves system. Each step unlocks higher difficulties, better rewards, and finally the nastiest bosses the system has to offer.
At launch, Blizzard fully expects the top tier content to be brutally hard, especially for players who are not yet max geared. Smith hints that the team has some very mean surprises waiting in those early weeks. Over time, as you collect better gear, learn the mechanics, and push into higher tiers, the same encounters will feel more manageable.
Importantly, Prey does not scale endlessly with your power. If you are a mythic raider with strong gear, you should eventually be able to take on Nightmare mode targets fairly regularly and feel powerful doing it. The main barrier will be reaching those heights in the first place, not an invisible system that constantly inflates enemy stats to match you.
For players who enjoy World of Warcraft’s world but wish it put up more of a fight, Prey looks like a promising solution. It keeps the spontaneity of open world gameplay, adds real danger and surprise, and still respects your time by tying directly into weekly progression and offering full opt out control. Whether you are a casual adventurer with a taste for risk or a raid veteran looking for a fresh solo challenge, becoming the hunted in Midnight’s open world might be exactly the kind of tension you have been missing.
Original article and image: https://www.pcgamer.com/games/world-of-warcraft/world-of-warcraft-midnights-new-solo-friendly-prey-mode-will-have-bosses-attacking-you-out-of-nowhere-theres-going-to-be-some-really-mean-stuff-that-were-going-to-do-to-you/
