The Queue: I never could get the hang of Thursdays

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!

Hooray, the S.E.L.F.I.E. camera has been fixed! This means I can spend the next leg of my Nightborne’s journey curating a visual diary along with, you know, doing quests. Not everyone is happy about my decision. Luckily the satyr pictured above has been restrained, and he can’t glare me to death, although he’s certainly giving it his best shot.

But let’s take a break from this breathtaking image and answer your questions, shall we?

Short answer — yes, I think it’d be a good idea.

Longer answer — you know, I don’t know why they haven’t adopted something like this already. Sylvanas may be good at the military side of things, but she’s not exactly the world’s best diplomat. Someone like Baine would be better served in that kind of position. Something like this would have also solved the Garrosh issue nicely. In The Shattering, he made it a point to tell Thrall that he was used to leading armies, not so much the political kind of thing. If Thrall had taken that into consideration, left Garrosh in charge of the military, and put…oh I don’t know, Cairne in as more of a policy/domestic/diplomatic leader, I wonder where the Horde would be now? I’m guessing Cairne would still be alive, for one thing — and probably Vol’jin as well.

I am also guessing this is something that Thrall thinks about every now and again. I think half of his anger at Garrosh was due to what Garrosh did to the Horde, but the other half was very much anger at himself, for not making better choices. Cairne tried to warn Thrall about making Garrosh Warchief, Thrall essentially told him hey, my decision’s final, deal with it — and Cairne ended up dead as a result. That can’t feel very good.

Either way, I think the Horde would be better served by having separate military/diplomatic leaders. I mean, it’s a collective of several different races. Why does it need a singular figurehead?

Usually raids aren’t immediately open when a new expansion starts — there’s a delay of a week or two, to give people time to level. Keep in mind that you can level your Allied Race alts right now, and have them ready to go when Battle for Azeroth is released. Other Allied Races will be unlocked over time. I think it’s incredibly unlikely that anybody’s going to have a max-level Zandalari Troll, for example, on day one.

I think, given everything we’ve seen in Legion — and everything we’ve fought — that it is incredibly unlikely we’d be getting playable Eredar anytime soon. This isn’t to say it’ll never happen — that’s up to Blizzard, after all. But when you take into account everything we’ve seen, experienced, and lost this expansion, I don’t know how keen any of Azeroth’s races would be on having former members of the Burning Legion just casually hanging out. Being an ally requires a certain amount of trust, and I don’t think anyone on Azeroth trusts anything anyone associated with the Burning Legion has to say. The wounds are way too fresh. Maybe somewhere further down the road, after everyone’s had time to recuperate and move on, it might be a possibility — but for now, it would make very little sense.

I’m not going to talk spoiler material here — datamined material isn’t finalized material, it might change between now and release. But I will say that I think Blizzard has traditionally tried to take the stance of a morally grey world rather than “Here’s your good guys, here’s your bad guys.” Warcraft 3 showed us a different side of the Horde, and WoW’s been running with that since day one. The Cataclysm revamp made that distinction even clearer — if you play through South Barrens on the Alliance side, it looks very much like the Horde are absolutely the worst. If you play through South Barrens on the Horde side, it looks like the Alliance are absolutely horrible.

The story doesn’t change — it’s the perception of the story that changes. Both sides do things that are morally questionable. Both sides have what they think are reasonable justifications for doing those things. Neither side is fully in the right, but neither side is necessarily wrong, either — not according to what they believe.

It’s something that World of Warcraft has tried to illustrate throughout its lifetime. Some stories are more successful than others. I’m looking forward to Battle for Azeroth, and how they handle the story in the expansion. Given how long they’ve been taking care not to dip into that one-dimensional well of good guys/bad guys, I don’t really expect them to start rolling around in it here.

If you play through the Shaman Class Hall, you’ll see more of Thrall — he ends up losing the Doomhammer, and you have to go retrieve it. At the end of that quest chain, he leaves — presumably to go hang out with his family and all that. Players can see him in one other spot; if you PVP and hit Prestige Rank 2, he shows up in the Undercity with all the other Horde leaders for a nice little ceremony in honor of your exploits.

Other than that, he’s been largely absent. I’m guessing he’s still dealing with that whole losing favor with the elements thing, and trying to get his life sorted out. I haven’t seen him anywhere on the Battle for Azeroth alpha, but inter-factional war was never really Thrall’s thing. He might be keeping a low profile and just keeping his nose out of this one.

Let’s be clear here: Nothing on the alpha/beta is guaranteed to make it to live servers. The purpose of the alpha/beta isn’t to give players a sneak peek at storylines and lore. The purpose is to test all the technical elements that make the game come together. When you go into a scenario, you’re testing the game mechanics that make up that scenario. Does it phase correctly? Are you with the correct number of players? Are the mobs in the scenario too tough to beat? Too easy? Does the game crash if you perform a specific ability? The same applies to quests — can you interact with quest elements? Can the quest be completed? If the quest includes a cutscene, does the cutscene trigger at the appropriate moment?

What you are not there to test is the story. Blizzard’s team of writers have a tale to tell, and they, as the authors, are in their rights to tell it however they wish. If they want to give us blank-slate story moments that don’t even remotely resemble what we’ll see when the expansion is released, it’s fine — we aren’t there to test that story, we’re there to test gameplay elements. The story shouldn’t be the focus of beta testing, because that’s not what testing is about. So I really don’t have an issue with any red herrings they want to throw out there. Heck, if they wanted to just give NPCs with major, impactful, lore-filled speeches a bunch of loreum ipsum up until release day, I’m cool with that. There’s nothing wrong with keeping the story a surprise — surprises are fun! You know what’s not so fun? Reading a book after somebody’s already told you all major plot elements and the twist ending.

There’s nothing “unfair” about this. As a beta tester, you’re not there to tell Blizzard how to write their story, you’re there to make sure the game can be played without bugs. In return, you get an early look at what zones you’ll be playing in, what mobs you’ll see, what kinds of quests you’ll be experiencing along the way. If that doesn’t interest you, then don’t play the beta — you’re under no obligation to test things, after all. You can just wait until release day and experience everything fresh and new when the game comes out.

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!