The Queue: Mondays is short days
@AlexZiebart
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!
This got briefly mentioned, but not fully confirmed, by a commenter the other day and I’m cautiously curious as it would be, literally, a game changer for me and my Overwatch hype.
We know that a group of players can play against AI. What’s now “hanging in the balance” for me is whether or not I, by myself, can start a game with me being the only live player, pitted against and grouped with the AI. My comfort in HotS was made possible by this feature, and I see it as a necessity for the “ownership” of a game like Overwatch for new, “burden-conscious” players, as well as any player that would like to antisocially enjoy the Overwatch world for whatever reason.
I don’t recall an official mention of the “Vs *and* alongside AI” mode, but one person saying that it was a lock already demands I ask for clarity from the beta-enabled community at large!
You can do this via the Custom Game option. You do not earn XP in this game mode, but you can either invite your friends or add AI players. Here’s a screenshot of a game I threw together:
Currently only Soldier 76, Reaper, Bastion, and Zenyatta are available options for AI players, but you can set them as Easy, Medium, or Hard difficulty. You can’t set AI spectators because that just doesn’t make any sense.
Okay, so the obvious question is: WHY has Blizzard never done a rep grind in the style of the 5.1 patch again?
My guess is that it just took too much development time; much more than other methods of rep grind (or other patch content). In particular, writing, developing and testing those non-daily quests takes a lot of time for the Quests and Story team; and that team is needed quite early on the development of the next expansion, so they can’t be spared for patch content.
What do you think? Some other reason I’m missing? Did Blizzard think 5.1 was a failure for some reason?
I think the developers saw the Garrison Campaign as Draenor’s version of the patch 5.1 quests. I can understand why — with the patch 5.1 quests, you earned X amount of reputation per day, and every Y number of days (or weeks), you received a new story quest. With the Garrison Campaign, the eliminated the reputation grind element and simply gave you a quest each week. Given players have historically opposed reputation grinds, I can see why they’d want to eliminate the reputation requirement, given you were already required to build up your garrison. The Garrison Campaign is precisely the patch 5.1 quests — players just didn’t view it that way. Why? I’m not really sure.
Maybe the reputation grind, despite players’ complaints, was the thing which kept players engaged in the story being told.
With regards to the world events that have dungeon fights, like we have with the Crown Chem Co. Should they convert them to timewalking style mechanics, so that players of all dungeoneering levels are able to queue in for the event, and walk out with a level appropriate reward? Maybe have a couple of bracket ranges to account for the difference in the number of abilites available to a level 15 vs a level 100, but would still allow players of all levels access to the fights
I expected they’d do something like this with holidays as soon as they’d announced Timewalking and began implementing level scaling. The dungeon bosses are a big part of the holiday events which have them and I find it strange they’re level locked — in many cases, the only other activity in these holidays is either running around the world to get XP or grinding mobs for tokens. That XP is great for alts, but it would be cool if they could fight a boss and get a cool piece of loot, too.
Which Warcraft monster would you most like to hug?
Yetis seem particularly huggable.
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