The Queue: Would you like to join my guild?

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!

Yancey Grillsen would like you to sign up with the Bloodsail. Yancey Grillsen is very excited about the idea of you, yes you, joining the ranks. Yancey Grillsen appreciates all the Bloodsail have to offer, the loot, the fame, the excitement of sailing the open seas on a quest for adventure. Yancey Grillsen can hardly contain his overwhelming joy and enthusiasm at the thought of all the swashbuckling adventures you’re going to have. Really.

Usually it’s an alpha that is under an NDA (which means you don’t hear about it, because nobody is allowed to talk about it), closed alpha, closed beta, open beta (where everyone is invited), and then release. I don’t know if we’ll see an open beta for Legion — if we do, it likely won’t be until near the tail end of testing, when everything is largely hammered out. We did put together a column about system requirements for the new expansion, though, maybe that’ll help you out?

I find that highly doubtful, for the reason you just stated — they haven’t added Death Knight or Monk, I doubt they’d jump the line and add Demon Hunters. I believe the developers have said already that they feel there are enough classes with just the originals at this point. I don’t think they’d add any more classes until they really thought they could work them into the system and balance them with everyone else. I’m pretty sure that’s not high on the priority list right now — people are enjoying the game plenty with the new adventures and expansions they’re releasing.

I don’t think there’s any I would die for, but I’d like to see Draenei Rogues. We saw the introduction of the Rangari in Warlords, and they seem pretty stealthy — I don’t think implementing a Rogue would be too far of a stretch.

I’m going to go way back and say Azshara — not the Azshara we’ve got today, the Azshara pre-Cataclysm, which had a handful of tantalizing quests that never really felt like they went anywhere significant. The place was loaded with potential, because it was sort of implied that this was the edge of ancient kaldorei civilization — the part of Zin-Azshari that didn’t quite crumble into the sea with the Sundering. I sort of wish we’d gotten more Night Elf history out of the place, it always felt like it was ripe with opportunity for that.

Don’t get me wrong, I like the Goblin-centric feel of the zone right now, and I think the quests flow really well through the zone, it’s just…the zone had an otherwordly, mysterious and quiet feel back in vanilla, and now…well, now it’s Goblin central, and nowhere near as quiet. Or lovely. I miss it. I wish it’d gotten more.

Yeah I think I’m okay.

I don’t know if I’d call it the “perfect” zone, because that’s kind of a subjective label. But here’s what I’d like to see: The creep factor. Eastern and Western Plaguelands used to be deliciously creepy, just because it was undead territory, plague territory, and crazy scary ghost territory. We don’t really have that anymore — there’s a few zones that are a little unnerving, but nothing that gives me the same “there is something lurking around every corner and it’s going to jump out and scare me I just know it” fun feeling of chills up my spine. I know, Warcraft isn’t a horror game, but part of the fun of Warcraft has always been how it incorporates aspects of all kinds of games — at least for me.

So I’d love a sub-zone that is environment heavy. One in which the environment itself is out to get you. The point of the zone isn’t just traveling from hub to hub, it’s running from hub to hub. Running as fast as you can, because if you slow down, if you stop, the world itself will devour you. No pausing, no alt tabbing out of the game, because if you do either of those things the environment will catch up to you and you’ll die….sort of. Rather than the traditional flop over and die screen, it’s just a slow fade to black, and then you reappear at the only spirit healer — back at the beginning of the subzone.

I feel like something like this would fit within the context of the Emerald Nightmare — the Nightmare will consume you if you pause to think about it too long. Or something like a long-forgotten city of the Old Gods, that kind of thing. The reason I keep calling it a subzone is because ideally, I don’t think it should take too long to get through. The point isn’t to take your time getting through it, the point is simply to run and plow through the thing as fast as you can. Screaming, if you like!

It would be hard to pull together a lot of story from a subzone like that, however. But I think it’d be an interesting kind of challenge we haven’t really seen before.

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!