The Queue: Too real for me

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!

Not that I’ve noticed, but I’ll admit I haven’t been looking for them, either. (I’m assuming you mean the models.) The garrison buildings, generally speaking, are heavily themed on human and orc architecture. In Legion, there isn’t much of either of those things. We, as factions, don’t have many established outposts. We move among vrykul, highmountain tauren, various sorts of elves, blue dragons … not so much Horde/Alliance. In places where we are specifically working with the Worgen or the Forsaken, they’ve either set up camp in some abandoned ruins or cobbled together a refuge from scrap.

No. My characters only represent me in the sense I’m the player controlling them. They’re their own people. They have their own lives and stories which don’t represent mine. Granted, I haven’t done any WoW roleplaying in ages, but back when I did — when you create a character, they inevitably contain aspects of you. You write from what you know, from your personal experiences. There are undoubtedly aspects of me in all of my characters, but I still don’t identify with them. I don’t see those characters as me. And I might not even be aware of which parts of me end up where.

I didn’t say yes to the question, but I’ll answer the bonus, anyway. I’m a man IRL. Almost all of my characters are women.

I don’t tend to have that reaction to WoW — not in the sense of nervousness or anything like that, anyway. However, playing through Azsuna on the Legion alpha last night, things got a little too real for me. I found the overarching story quite depressing, but also the Withered — Legion‘s version of Burning Crusade‘s Wretched — have animations which really humanize the mana addiction.

Simply put, they display many of the behaviors and physical tics of meth addicts. They’ve look like they’ve dried up and lost body mass. They hold themselves. They twitch. They scratch at their faces. Their dialogue is heartbreaking. The Wretched came across as mana zombies — the Withered are something more real, more desperate, more troubled. They’re in pain and they’re suffering. It made slaughtering them wholesale much more difficult to swallow. Using them for kill quests and boiling the whole thing down to they gotta die was so very unsatisfying. The quests made me physically uncomfortable. I did not feel heroic at all. I felt a bit sick, frankly.

More t-shirts than you think you’ll need. That’s always my suggestion, especially if you’re traveling to California from a colder climate. You’ll sweat. You might sweat a lot. Convention halls can get stuffy when you’re crowded in with hundreds of other people at a panel. You’ll feel better, and stink less, if you swap shirts when you’re feeling uncomfortable. Speaking as someone who sweats more than the average person, I change shirts at least twice per day. Nobody traveled to BlizzCon to smell me.

We haven’t commented much on the entire Nostalrius situation because honestly — what is there to say which hasn’t already been said? They aren’t allowed. Blizzard is entirely within their right to shut it down. Those surprised by its closure simply weren’t paying attention. These servers always get shuttered. That doesn’t mean I’m happy people lost out on their fun or their community. It’s just that it always pans out the same way.

Do I think Blizzard should re-evalute legacy servers? Yes. Will they? I don’t know. They’ve opposed it in the past. We don’t know if they’ll ever change their mind. Certainly, I think they should have legacy servers. Maybe that means only vanilla servers. Maybe that means Burning Crusade, or Wrath of the Lich King. I don’t know. But I understand the desire for them, and even if I wouldn’t play on one full time, it would be fun to have the option to play on one when I choose to do so. Sometimes you really want to play your old favorite game or watch your old favorite movie, but the downside of everything being online these days is your old favorites go away forever. You can’t play your favorite FPS anymore because the servers were taken down. You can’t visit virtual worlds you spent years exploring because the game patched and changed it all.

I see it like movies. Take Star Wars, for example. The Force Awakens just released. You loved it! But you love A New Hope, too. So you watched A New Hope and Empire Strikes Back and all of that because you still love them in addition to the new film. If you could never, ever watch those originals ever again… that sucks. That’s not fun. It leaves a hole in you.

For the sake of the analogy, let’s ignore that whole thing with George Lucas making changes to the original trilogy.