The Queue: T’was the night before BlizzCon, and all through the house…

Sorry for the late Queue today, folks! I blame baby.

That’s an interesting argument, and I read through the thread on yesterday’s Queue and was pretty surprised at the civil debate on the subject.

Your point is a good one — if BFA is going to be a good expansion, then it will need good content. Today people expect content to come regularly to a game like WoW, and they expect the quality of it to be at or above par with other major AAA game titles. Legion definitely delivered that in spades, I think, and probably put most of the overall gaming industry to shame in the way it moved a narrative along (whether or not you liked the narrative at the end is another thing entirely; just consider how the story progressed).

For BFA to do the same, Blizzard will need to keep not only the same momentum it did in Legion, but also the same quality. I know a lot of folks are not happy with the quality and/or quantity of the content in BFA right now, but I think that has more to do with the lack of replayability of it at the moment. I’ve mentioned this before a few times too — in Legion we had tons of alt content right out of the gate. The main story was the same, but each class had unique content in the order hall and weapons. In BFA, we have, what to me, feels like the same amount of content, but it’s spread out over two factions this time, and not a dozen classes.  That makes it inherently feel not as large as past expansions, and a bit of a let down from the preceding one.

So while I might not agree with you on the current state of the game, our views converge that the major thing that will need to happen is now that the initial content is out, everything after this must be of high quality. WoW should not have another WoD again.

I want to highlight Buscava’s comment too, because I thought it was good:

“Will BFA be WoD V2” No. Because they are actually adding content to BFA.

If Blizzard had actually continued to add content to WoD it might have been really good, but they didn’t. BFA is already far better as an overall expansion then WoD was, it’s problems are that the new systems and mechanics they’ve added just aren’t as exciting and interesting, and the rest was carried over from Legion.

If anything BFA is looking more like a MoP rehash, except less pandas and less exciting.

100% without a doubt, yes — there are other Old Gods doing their Lovecraftian horror thing out in the cosmos of the Warcraft universe. It’s noted specifically in the first volume of Warcraft Chronicals, and it also has come up a few times in various Q&As and chat with story people from Blizzard.

Azeroth originally had four Old Gods present on it — ‘Shaarj, C’Thun, Yogg-Saron and N’Zoth. They made up the Black Empire and ruled Azeroth for a long time (G’huun came later and wasn’t part of the Black Empire). The Black Empire is, in general, something I’m quite interested in from a story perspective. I’m enjoying the bits and pieces that we’re getting about it more and more, and I’ve got an idea in the back of my head that we could end up with a lot more lore about it in the not-too-distant future. Part of me thinks it’s still possible to being that journey in this expansion, although I kinda doubt it now.

Anyways, do you want to know more? Wowpedia has a good article on the Old Gods.

Yes.

I’ve changed it when I catch it, but there’s some very annoying behavior on Twitch’s end that makes this kind of crap the default. I’ve got it on my list, and have bumped it up in priority, to remove the need for editors to place an embed directly and just toggle a button on the site’s admin. That’ll stop it from happening. Note I am not in any way blaming anyone on staff. I am, however, throwing shade at an embed player that defaults to autoplay.

It’s too bad that he didn’t.

Part of me thinks that Nintendo and Blizzard are both too protective of their respective IPs to allow it, but another part of me hopes that they’d see some common ground and go for it.

I’ve been watching a lot closer lately for the last few years how companies are becoming more and more restrictive on the use of their intellectual property — and that includes collaborating with others. It’s also curious that they’ve started to crack down more and more on the Etsy market and things like that; sometimes going so far that they cross the line and “issue” C&Ds to places without realizing they hadn’t been enforcing their trademark for so long that it’d be impossible to enforce it in court. But that said, these studios make so much money that it’s unlikely anyone will legitimately challenge them because they’d be able to empty the coffers of the defendant long before any decision would be made.

I’d like to walk around as a Tier 6 warrior, complete with sword and shield. There’s been folks that have done it before, but it’s still something I’d like to do.

Except — I want to wear the actual armor. As in metal plate, heavy, spiky, hurt-y, terrible for security and safety armor. I don’t remember who it was, but a few years ago a guy had made a Tier 6 outfit that crossed that line and Blizzard/Anaheim Convention Center said no. Still though, it’d be cool.

Millenial.