The Queue: Good priorities

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!

Jemma Wilson has her priorities straight. Giant glass, good wine, cheese tray, giant ubiquitous whale meat painting…who cares about the Legion? Life is good.

In other news, I still want a print of that painting for my office.

I’m thinking that Lord Godfrey could make an entertaining addition, but he’d have to have some pretty cool tricks up his sleeve to compete with the other ranged/shooter heroes already available. I also wouldn’t mind seeing Lilian Voss, but that’s just because I like Lilian. Grand Apothecary Putress would be an awfully fun addition, though — or Professor Putricide, but honestly I’d prefer Putress just for the voice acting alone. David Lodge voices a lot of notable characters (Nazgrim, Tichondrius, Hamuul Runetotem, among many others), but I really loved his take on Putress the best. The Wrathgate cinematic still creeps me out every time I see it.

Uber Town was first seen in the quest Welcome to the Machine, as the guild that notable Azeroth citizen Johnny Awesome belongs to. You can even see Johnny in the raid — he’s in the back. AFK. If you look closely at the other raid members, you’ll see some other notable names hidden away in there as well, including a couple of Scarab Lords. Weirdly enough, although Uber Town is a Horde raid, there’s a Night Elf in it.

I think that it’s extraordinarily difficult to make a movie that both manages to satisfy fans of the game, and also appeal to people that don’t play the game. I also think that the majority of film critics fall squarely into that second category — they don’t play the game, they’ve never played the game, they don’t particularly want to play the game, and they might just be the teensiest bit grumpy that they have to watch a film about a game they’ll never play. The problem with these kinds of movies is that you’re trying to appeal to both of those audiences, and in doing so, you kind of alienate them both, to a degree. Warcraft is a gigantic franchise, with an equally gigantic amount of involved story. For those of us that have been playing for years and years, that story isn’t too difficult to follow. For people who have never played the game before, it’s a monumental amount of story to wrap your head around, particularly in a two-hour film.

I think that Warcraft did a pretty great job taking a chunk of that story and making it manageable. Was it the world’s best piece of cinema? No — but uh, it doesn’t really have to be Oscar-winning material, really. It just has to be entertaining. Did it follow the Warcraft story exactly? No — it had its own interpretation of the events, and I liked that interpretation. It was cleaner, it had some different characters in it, it hit all the important notes it needed to hit. I will say that the film was slightly confusing on first viewing. On second viewing, it improved dramatically.

I think that at the moment, video game films are sitting in the same place comic book films were sitting at before we started getting a ton of really good comic book films. People don’t really go out of their way to see them, they’re viewed with a certain amount of disdain. I think if we start getting a bunch of good video game movies out in a row, the genre could go where comic book films are now sitting, raking in all kinds of money. It’s just that nobody seems to have hit that perfect balance between satisfying video game fans, and telling a story evocative enough to interest everyone else just yet.

That said, I think the Mass Effect series would make a really killer set of movies.

It was stated at BlizzCon that the WoW Tokens were intended to be used with a variety of services. They were released with just gametime only in order to see if they’d work smoothly, is all. In other words, Blizzard fully intends to implement that at some point in the future, but other than that, we’ve got no new information. If you want that race change done sooner rather than later, you’re going to have to pay real money for it. Otherwise, sit tight, and hopefully we’ll see it soon!

I’ve always liked the idea of a Bard class, myself — a class built around buffing and debuffing, enhancement, and just being spoony as all get out. But I could also see some kind of Runemaster class as well, given how many mobs we’ve seen effectively using runes over the years. The problem with creating another ranged class is how exactly do you make a ranged class, without it feeling like the ones we already have in game? We’ve got several different kinds of spellcasters already. Ranged melee attacks are pretty well covered by the Hunter class. So what’s left? I do like the idea of a Tinker class with turret and robot damage, though. We haven’t really seen anything like that before — sure, Engineering is a thing, but it’s never really been used just for combat.

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!