The Queue: Hearthstone PSA, Garona’s movie heritage, and more

Welcome back to The Queue, our daily Q&A feature for all of Blizzard’s games! Have a question for the Blizzard Watch staff? Leave it in the comments and we may choose it for tomorrow’s edition!

This isn’t a question, but I wanted to include it as a quick PSA. I chose not to post about this yesterday because it seemed liked something Blizzard would fix with the whole Tuesday-restart-everything process they do. The cause, I believe, is the availability of The Grand Tournament preorder or somesuch. However, they did not fix it — so here’s a warning: be cautious when opening Hearthstone on Android. It will lock you out of all other platforms until further notice.

Garona’s heritage is an interesting thing. The character was created before the draenei were created. She was originally written as half orc, half human, because those were the only relevant races. When Blizzard expanded on the story of Warcraft, that no longer made sense — Garona couldn’t have been an orc/human halfbreed because the two races had never met before she was an adult. Then the draenei were introduced and Garona was retconned to be half orc and half draenei, but via the comics, they justified the retcon by saying she didn’t actually know her true heritage and assumptions were made. All she knew was she wasn’t pure orc. With that in mind, Garona would still be at the point where she doesn’t know her heritage — and everyone assumes she’s orc/human. They also never changed Garona’s base design when this happened — she has no draenei features. She has softened orcish features.

Of course, the movie is not adhering exactly to the story of the games. It has its own version of Warcraft which is similar, but different. In the movie’s version of Warcraft history, it could be entirely possible for orc/human hybrids to exist at this point. The draenei might truly not exist in that version of Warcraft. We don’t know yet.

I’ve never fished up one of those hats, but I do still get them regularly through a level 3 fishing shack in my garrison. I’m not sure what the Horde version of the fish is called, but in the Alliance garrison, you can fish up Lunarfall Carp. When you use the carp, it summons a Lunarfall Cavedweller. When you kill it, it can drop those hats or an assortment of other fishing items, such as the Ephemeral Fishing Pole.

I had a blast with the Grand Summoner brawl. That’s the one where, each time you cast a spell, you got a minion of the same mana cost. Building a deck of 30 spells and letting RNG run its course was a blast. Crossroads Encounter was a fun one, too. Totally random deck? Sometimes you got lucky, sometimes you didn’t, but the joy was in discovery.

Sorry, but I don’t see the Rangari as rogues. They’re rangers. They’re Lone Wolf Hunters who make liberal use of camoflague. Still, I do think they’re really cool — I love their aesthetic and what they bring to the Draenei. I’d love to see them stick around — and one of my favorite moments in the entire expansion is when a woman from the Ragnari and a woman from SI:7 are competing in Nagrand, arguing their organization is superior. I’d love to see both the Rangari and SI:7 working in service to the Alliance in future expansions. Such a cool dynamic.

You know, I really hope it isn’t. World of Warcraft and the Warcraft movie are two different things. If the movie gets people playing World of Warcraft, great — but there’s no way you can ease one group of people into the other activity and not leave them confused. Any attempts to do so, I feel, will alienate someone. We already know the Warcraft movie doesn’t stick precisely to the lore of the games its based on — Gul’dan serves “the Fel” with an upper-case F rather than the Burning Legion and so forth. Terminology changes, timeline changes, new characters, altered roles. And all of that is fine for a movie. World of Warcraft is a totally different beast. The timeline is decades later. We’ve visited alternate universes. The plot is different. The canon is different.

Trying to bring people into the game before the movie releases on the premise of a preview or teaser, they end up going into the film expecting something different. Trying to tease the movie for the existing playerbase with a movie-themed expansion, you’re going to piss them off by completely rewriting the story (again) and turning your game into a year-long advertisement.

Want to include easter eggs? Hey, go wild. Trying to merge these two groups of people? That’s something you can’t force.

If they wanted games to tie-in with the movies, I feel the best thing they could’ve done is release HD remakes of the original RTS games using the StarCraft 2/Heroes of the Storm game engine.