The Queue: I am the worst bear

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!

You know, over the years I’ve quietly wondered if my memory regarding leveling my first character in WoW was a little misguided. I remembered it was painful and I really hated the lower levels — but the farther I got from those early days, the more I wondered if maybe that was just perception. I mean, I didn’t have the knowledge then that I do now, as far as gameplay goes. So when the Classic demo rolled around, I made another Druid, just to refresh those old memories.

It turns out I was not wrong, it is definitely horrible, and I’m pretty much the worst bear in Westfall. But I’m okay with that, because the wave of nostalgia upon seeing the old stomping grounds again was pretty great. And now, let’s get to your questions, shall we?

I highly doubt that will be the case, but keep in mind — we’re still early in the expansion right now. I mean, we’re looking at the first patch for this expansion, not what lies ahead in the next one. Generally speaking though, “expansion features” are still available after the expansion is over. You can still hit up Draenor and build a garrison — you can still head to Pandaria and make your very own farm.

Mage tower appearances were removed at the end of the last expansion, but keep in mind that those were obtained via carefully-tuned skill checks. It was meant to be a personal challenge, and the appearances were for weapons that were Legion-associated. It made sense to remove them, just by the nature of what they were, and how they were earned.

Island Expeditions don’t really feel like that. They’re extra content to do, like Legion invasions — which still pop up on the Broken Isles, incidentally. I don’t really see them removing anything regarding the Expeditions at the end of the expansion — but if they do decide for some reason that they’re going to do so, they’ll certainly give us a heads up well ahead of time, like they did with the Mage Tower.

I mean…my last “console” was a Nintendo 3DS, so I don’t feel like I really have a leg in this discussion to be perfectly honest. I will say though that while we’ve been shown it can be done with other titles, we’ve also seen that people that play games on consoles are usually isolated from those that play on PC. So you’re already looking at a split playerbase if you go that route, which is kind of the opposite of what WoW seems to be encouraging these days.

Beyond that, with the sheer number of abilities/spells/everything else that exists in WoW, trying to make it feasible to recreate that experience with a console controller would be…challenging to a degree that feels nigh-impossible. Blizzard’s got some incredibly brilliant people out there working on titles, but I’m not sure that’s something that could be realistically done, at least not with the current game as it stands today.

Classic, on the other hand…well. If they wanted to try their hand at porting WoW to consoles, starting with the earliest iteration of the title seems like a logical choice. But I don’t really see them entertaining that option anytime soon.

I think if we saw any kind of Forsaken Allied Race, it’d be human skeletons — because I think the most likely choice are the remnants of the Desolate Council from Before the Storm. Sure, the Council itself was crushed pretty thoroughly in the book, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t still like-minded Forsaken in the Undercity…they’re just far less likely to do anything that might raise the Dark Lady’s suspicions or ire.

But these are former citizens of Lordaeron. They have their free will, and maybe they’re not as on-board with Sylvanas and her plans. There’s a spark of potential there, if Blizzard wanted to pursue that route. Other undead races…well, they don’t quite have the same motivation or history. Mind you, Blizzard could easily whip something together — I mean, who was expecting the whole Junker Gnome storyline that’s on the way later this expansion? It was out of nowhere, but it looks fascinating.

There was nothing announced along those lines — there’s the Mechagon mega-dungeon, but that’s it. Mind you, that could change as time goes on — after all, we only got a hint of what’s going on in Nazjatar. They didn’t go over everything. But they might be focusing all their efforts on said mega-dungeon, to make it as mega as possible. Either way, we’ll have to wait and see — and we’ve got a while to wait, since we still need to see 8.1 and 8.1.5 first.

Nope! There were no system requirements or any of the technical details released, to my knowledge. Keep in mind that Immortal is still relatively far from release — they still haven’t hammered down things like pricing, even. I would say, however, that it’s likely going to require a slightly newer phone to play. I’m not saying you need to go out and pick up the best brand-new phone out there on the market, mind you. However, the Samsung S4 is already five years old at this point — and we still don’t know how long it’s going to be until the game comes out.

Then again, most companies are releasing new phones pretty regularly every year, so you could be golden. I know as far as PC’s go, Blizzard has been pretty good about trying to keep games available for players on older systems, it’s possible they’re going to keep the game on a technical level that will work even on older phones. However, PC and mobile are two pretty different things, and I’m really not sure what their approach to mobile is going to be like.

Unfortunately, this is more of a “wait and see” answer than anything else — but don’t feel like you need to scurry out and snap up a new phone now-now-now, because the game really isn’t at a point where we need to worry about that just yet.

I know this wasn’t exactly a question, but I felt like commenting on it anyway — I’ve been in the same spot as you in regards to alts and gearing them up. The way I’ve approached it is by logging in to do a brief once-over of World Quests, looking for two specific criteria: It has to reward a piece of upgrade gear, and it has to be either the easy Tortollan quests, or one of the “kill this one named mob” quests. If it meets that criteria, I’ll pop out really fast and complete it, then hearth back home and log out until I feel like checking again.

I mean, I guess you could call that being lazy, but I’m really just looking at it from the perspective of how much time I have on any given day, and how much effort I want to put into a character that I’m not playing a lot. Sure, it’s a much slower way to acquire gear — I could just go run a bunch of dungeons or whatever — but I’m not particularly invested in playing that character full-time, so I’m not really in any hurry. My main, on the other hand, does a lot of different stuff every day.

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!