The Queue: Special mystery guest

Hi everyone. It’s the Queue. I’m listening to Kings and Creatures a lot this week, especially the song ‘Time-Lapse‘. A friend of mine describes them as ‘trailer music’ and it’s pretty apt, but I like them anyway.

Let us go forth and talk about Blizzard and the games they make.

I tend to think it’s so they can actually have diverse zones and environments within those zones. There are demons invading Val’Sharah, a big demonic front in Azsuna, obvious signs of Fel corruption in Highmountain and a Vrykul who has joined the Legion in Stormheim, but the only place in the Broken Isles that’s gone full-on demons everywhere is the Broken Front, south of the Temple of Sargeras, and that helps keep the zones distinctive. You don’t want it feeling like it’s too late to stop the Legion, after all.

Plus let’s face it, he’s right, Tanaan got eyebiting after a while. All that green just becomes astonishingly monotonous.

People have been arguing why we should get off Azeroth and explore the universe for a long time now. I think I first argued for an off-Azeroth expansion (specifically one to Argus) back after Wrath. It doesn’t seem to be happening any time soon and I really have no idea if we’re going to get one next after Legion or not. I guess it depends on if you count Burning Crusade and Warlords of Draenor as off-world or not. Technically they don’t occur on Azeroth, but both are on Draenor (two different versions of it, admittedly) and so I feel like that’s a bit of a cheat. Draenor/Outland was the only word we ever saw in pre-WoW Warcraft, after all.

I would love to get to see worlds like Argus or Xoroth, but I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting.

Well, even if someone goes out and buys the game right now, they don’t have to start at level 1 — they’ll get a level 90 boost with purchase of Warlords of Draenor. But for the sake of argument, I actually roll new, heirloomless, chaufferless characters all the time. Not just for the leveling stream, either.

I like to know how hard the game is for people who don’t have heirlooms. And it is harder. You can even die if you’re not paying attention, especially in the teens and twenties when you can end up in really weak gear if your quests haven’t been giving you what yo need to keep up. Even on servers where I have no characters to help them, I usually don’t find it that hard to get riding at level 20 but I’ve been playing this game since 2004. I’m not a new player and I don’t think it’s really possible for someone like me to get that new player feel, where you really just have no idea past the tutorials what you’re doing.

I do think a lot of the structure of World of Warcraft at lower levels is extremely disjointed right now. A new player will be dunked into the Cataclysm leveling content which is entirely too slated towards the threat of Deathwing, a monster they’re never even going to see, and I’ve complained before about how abilities accrue at lower levels. But it’s hard for me to judge how it’ll feel for a completely new player.

It’s not that the Void Lords are stronger or weaker than Titans (or even Old Gods, which they created) as much as they are utterly inimical to our reality, and vice versa. The Void Lords hail from Void, a complete and utter nothingness, more empty than even the Great Dark Beyond. A place where nothing exists, as we understand it, anyway. They seek to corrupt our universe and break it down into something they can endure, hence the Old Gods being used to try and corrupt a Titan.

The Titans are essentially the most powerful entities that can exist in our cosmos. They’re the souls of entire worlds. Somewhere out there, there’s a world which once housed Aman’Thul, Eonar, even Sargeras. (Was that world Draenor? No, it probably wasn’t.) The Void Lords can’t contend directly with the Titans in our reality, so they use proxies. Likewise, nonexistence is inimical to the Titans, who can’t directly fight the Void Lords. Could Azeroth do so if it ever woke up? Some of the Titans thought so. We’ll find out if it happens, I guess.

It should be pointed out that even the Old Gods don’t compare to the Titans. Aman’Thul reached down and ripped Y’Shaarj from Azeroth and destroyed it with one hand. And we know that Y’Shaarj was massive, easily as big as C’thun or Yogg-Saron, each of which stretch across whole continents.

As for the Naaru, they do seem to manifest in our reality, but you’ll note that they have a Light/Darkness life cycle that ties them to both Light and Shadow. Is this the cost of their manifesting in our reality? I don’t know, but it seems possible.

Dalaran stayed in Northrend after Wrath of the Lich King until Jaina ordered the Kirin Tor to mobilize to support the Alliance in Mists of Pandaria. The city was seen to be over the water at that time, but it never reached Orgrimmar (because they couldn’t get it to work in game) and it was never stated to be above Kalimdor.

So the answer to ‘where did it go’ is ‘we don’t know’ — they never stated where it was. We know it’s over the Broken Isles in Legion, which is south of Northrend, so maybe it got stuck there or something.

Okay, that’s the Queue for today. See y’all Friday.