The Queue: To-do lists

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!

BlizzCon is rapidly approaching and I’ve got a crazy long to-do list with all kinds of boxes to check off. I don’t think it’s quite as ambitious as Winston’s to-do list in Overwatch, however. Hey, at least I don’t need any peanut butter from the store though. Maybe. You know what, I should probably check the cupboards on that one. But first, why don’t we get some of your questions out of the way?

Finding time! My days are pretty packed right now, so I haven’t had many opportunities to knock down the fairly lengthy to-do list I have. I’m driving out there again this year, so I leave here on Tuesday — which doesn’t exactly leave me a ton of time for planning/gathering things/making sure I’ve got all the equipment I need/anything else. I got the major things out of the way last weekend, but I still have loads and loads to do. I’m…pretty sure most of the attending staff are probably in the same boat!

The delightful holiday vendor is there to stay — if you don’t want any decorations up, you can politely ask her to take them down. Or you can have her leave them up. Make it Hallow’s End year round if you’d like!

As far as the ghostly pets go, quick tip: The pets in your garrison respawn almost instantaneously when they are killed. I got rare versions of all three pets fairly quickly just by picking a location and picking off the pet until a rare version spawned.

I wrote a really short little piece to give Left and Right a backstory, just for fun, does that count? Honestly I think rather than writing an already defined and fleshed-out lore character, I’d rather do that — fill out the characters that haven’t quite gotten their due. There is an entire cast of side-characters out there, and I bet a lot of them have really interesting stories to tell. To me, the big lore figures are the heroes we aspire to be — the side cast? They’re reflections of who our characters are. It’s fun to read about the trials and tribulations of major heroes, but it’s just as fun (and slightly more relatable) to read about the lives of the people who are quietly working in the background, and how they react to the increasingly impossible situations Azeroth seems to be thrown into on a regular basis.

I’m not sure what you mean by point, exactly — on the point capture maps, if you capture the first point, you move on to capture the second point. If you don’t capture that first point, I believe you lose the game (although I’ve yet to participate in a match where that first capture point wasn’t taken, so that might not be accurate!). There aren’t really any bonuses involved, but the more people you kill, more damage you take or shield yourself from, or the more healing you do, the better your score seems to be at the end.

I don’t think there’s any point in being able to queue for attack or defend, because once you’re done attacking, the next match tosses you on defense, and vice versa. So you get to do both, but it’s random as to which one you get to do first. Payload missions seem to be a little more challenging than point capture, mostly because you have to escort the payload, which means you need to be near the thing, which means you don’t quite have as much wiggle room in terms of how far away you can get from the objective point. I haven’t played a hybrid map in matchmaking yet, but I imagine it’s much the same.

I believe — and I think this was at the announcement at last year’s BlizzCon — that they said that they were simply starting out with payload, point capture, and hybrid objectives for now, and they weren’t really thinking about other styles of objectives just yet, and weren’t even sure they really needed them. Honestly with the amount of variety in heroes and the ability to swap between them mid-match, I don’t know if they do, either. I could change my mind on that given enough time playing the game, but for now I’m pretty satisfied with what I’m seeing so far.

It plays really smoothly! But there aren’t a lot of people playing it just yet. We have experienced a few “whoops the server experienced an error” moments while streaming, but nothing that seems to be game-breaking so far. It honestly feels really polished for what’s there right now. There’s a few UI hiccups, mostly with the overlays — the chat window likes to obscure text at the most inopportune moments. But voice chat is solid, maps seem to be pretty complete, no holes in the world that I can see, and it plays without hiccups other than the occasional server restarts. It feels solid.

Okay so for people that aren’t aware, Winston the super-smart gorilla has an ultimate ability that looks kind of like what you see in the Overwatch trailer — he gets big, and he forgoes the gun in favor of just jumping and punching the heck out of things. His punches have a knockback, which means if you aim correctly, you can punch people right off the map and into oblivion. And to answer your question, it is every bit as hysterically, absolutely completely amazing as it sounds. Winston’s kind of become my favorite hero just for that reason alone.

That’s it for today’s Queue — if you have any questions you’d like to see answered, be sure to leave them in the comments below!