The Queue: Well that’s handy

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!

I didn’t know exactly how much fun it would be to be a giant ambulatory hand until presented with a World Quest that allowed me to do just that. Can we make these guys a new Allied Race? No? …drat. That’s okay, we still have a bunch of questions to answer!

I would be totally down for playing a lovely snake-person. I mean…have you seen their sleeping animation? They’re adorable. And scaly. Mind you, I like snakes in general so I might be just a little biased on that front.

However, the Alliance is working with a faction of the Sethrak in the Alliance war campaign, so it’s not entirely out of the realm of possibility. I mean, whether or not they’re appealing is kind of a matter of personal opinion anyway. Allied Races aren’t really required play or anything, they’re just…additional options. I’ll take a snake person as an additional option!

Yes. I know I edited your question, but it was…incredibly lengthy. However, you made some excellent points: What seemed new, fresh, and fun in Legion has by now gotten old. World Quests worked great in Legion. But like you, I am super tired of them now, and I would’ve loved to see some kind of alternative to them. I think one of my best days in Legion was the day I finally got the last of the paragon mounts from Emissary caches, because it meant I could completely ignore World Quests from then on.

I don’t mind the World Quest system, I think it worked really well for Legion. The problem is that up until a few short months before Battle for Azeroth’s launch, World Quests were pretty much all I was doing. Now, just a few weeks after Battle for Azeroth’s launch, I have…a mountain of World Quests to do all over again. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the system, it’s more that…it feels like more of the same thing.

That’s kind of a problem when you’re handing over a brand-new expansion. You expect new experiences, and right now the experiences are…kind of the same, just in a different location. It’s not the most fun I’ve ever had. It is far, far superior to what we got in endgame during Warlords though, so I’m not going to complain too much about it. And there are some pretty fun World Quests out there, too. The Tortollan quests are far more entertaining than the Kirin Tor ones were — although I’m pretty sure that yes, I’ll get tired of matching shells in due time. Penguin sledding in Tiragarde Sound? Yes please, I love that!

I think that’s the problem with any expansion, though — if you lean on something too heavily, players will eventually get bored/annoyed with the experience. The introduction of vehicles in Wrath was great. The fact that we were bombarded with vehicles to the point where we had a dungeon completely reliant on that vehicle component? Not so much.

I don’t really know what an encounter with Azshara is going to look like, but here’s my biggest hope: I hope she gets away at the end. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure she’s a serious villain and all, someone that needs to be dealt with. But we’ve been hearing about her without seeing her for so long that it seems like it’d be a tremendous disservice to introduce her and then just kill her off all in the course of a single patch/expansion.

I love WoW’s cavalcade of villains. I don’t really love how they’re often reduced to popping up, screeching maniacally at us for a few months, and then getting killed as quickly as they arrived. I’d call Garrosh a good example of a villain — he was around for a long time. We got to see his story progress, and him progress right along with it, from Burning Crusade through Warlords. I like when the narrative allows a villain room to have a complete, developed story.

Oh, and one other thing — man I hope they have some kind of callback to the Vashj encounter in Burning Crusade. Who wants a Tainted Core macro?

Here’s the tricky thing about Troll tribes — a tribe can be ‘neutral’ and still be gunning for some kind of supremacy. The Zandalari were the first major powerful Troll tribe. All other tribes kind of splintered off — they were offshoots of the Zandalar. The Amani and Gurubashi were two offshoots that valued conquest over knowledge, so they left to go pursue those interests.

So think of the Zandalari like…a parental figure to all these smaller Troll tribes. All tribes unite and get along with the Zandalari, and attempt to get along with each other. But that doesn’t mean that scheming siblings aren’t seeking to overthrow each other — or fighting over who inherits what when that parent finally passes away. Or maybe…you know…engineering that parental figure’s downfall so they can inherit early.

If you look at it that way, it’s no wonder these guys aren’t particularly happy with the Horde showing up. Not only are they not Trolls, they’re also a potential outside threat for that proverbial inheritance, as it were. So it’s kind of up in the air if they’ll actually go neutral towards the Horde, or…you know, keep right on squabbling with a vengeance.

Like I said above, I think Allied Races are more about providing additional options than introducing loads of new story. Yes, each Allied Race has its own intro and its own reason for joining the Alliance or the Horde. But those stories don’t necessarily have to tie into the main narrative — they’re around to help out. They’re also around to offer us some more cosmetic choices for races, which is nice from a gameplay standpoint.

Battle for Azeroth isn’t so much focused on one race over another, story-wise, as it is the factions as a whole. What race you’re playing doesn’t particularly matter — it’s Alliance vs. Horde, this time around.

Not to my knowledge! But I’m hoping we see some sign of that soon. I think I’d much rather jump from leveling in Cata/Mists to Legion than go traipsing around on Draenor for the umpteenth time. No offense to Draenor, I just…you know…leveled there a lot.

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!