The Queue: Underbelly cupcakes

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!

As a result of the Diablo anniversary event, I’ve spent considerably more time in the Underbelly than usual the past few days. And man, I can’t help but notice how downright…odd it is down there. Take the above image, for example. Who are those children? What’s with the cupcakes? Why is this all next to a giant pile of snoozing rats? The world may never know.

That’s actually something we’ve pondered more than once over in the Lore Watch podcast, and in KYL as well. The Burning Legion is all about fighting the Void. Sargeras feels the best way to accomplish this is to simply wipe out…everything. Azeroth happens to be one of those everythings out there. Right now it’s kind of up in the air whether getting rid of the Burning Legion is going to have disastrous consequences — but hey, the Old Gods aren’t going to stop us from trying it out.

It’s pretty much a game mechanic — you have gold, silver, and copper. Standard enough commerce system, pretty generic fantasy catch-all as far as currency goes. All those random badges and points and unseeing eyes and tokens are all pretty much game mechanics, too. I don’t think currency has really been referenced in detail in any of the written novels — if anything’s been mentioned, it’s just been your standard gold, silver, and copper.

Once per character, but the Twelve-String Guitar is a guaranteed loot drop — which means you get the toy pretty much immediately, and because it goes in your Toy Box, it’s available for every character on your account. Note that the Treasure Goblins you kill for the Cow King portal also drop loot — they drop the items needed to create the Tome of Town Portal toy. The Treasure Goblins spawn fairly regularly down in the Underbelly, as well as the end of dungeons, so you’ve got plenty of time to get your 10 Scrolls of Town Portal and a Blank Diabolic Tome. The guitar is really the only thing of note on the Cow King. Yes, he also drops a weapon, but it shares a model with a couple other weapons already in-game, so it’s not what I’d call an absolutely necessity to pick up.

It’s an action RPG. You fight a lot of stuff, and grab a lot of loot. There’s a solo story campaign to play, and that story has a standard beginning/middle/end format — it’s not a perpetual story like WoW. You can group up and play with other players if you like, or you can play by yourself — but the game does require you to be online, you can’t play it offline even if you’re just trucking through that single-player story.

The game is fairly simple, concept-wise. You smush demons into a fine paste to collect loot to gear yourself up to smush demons into a fine paste with even more efficiency. That said, it’s also a ridiculous amount of fun. I find it terribly soothing when I’ve had a bad day — there’s something awfully soothing about tearing your way through demonic hordes and picking up shinies. If you got it as a freebie, you might as well fire it up and see how you like it — start on easy mode so nothing is too terrible overwhelming, and see what you think!

It hasn’t been mentioned just yet, no. Sooner or later, we’re going to hear about it — obviously as one of the Pillars of Creation, not to mention the magic doodad that helped create the Nightwell, it’s got a lot of story significance. I’m sure we’ll hear plenty about it once Nighthold is released.

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!