The Queue: Revisiting the classics

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 finally finished off a replay of Final Fantasy VI over the holiday weekend, after taking my time and dinking around to kit out every character with the best gear and spells. The game still totally holds up, if any of you are interested in diving into some retro gaming! It has a great story, great music, amazing characters and an opera sequence that I firmly believe everyone should experience at least once in their lifetime. Still one of my favorite FF games ever.

I should get back to Bioshock Infinite though, and finish that one off. Maybe I’ll stream that later this week, if you guys are still interested in watching me play! But for now, let’s answer your questions, shall we?

The Light and the Void are kind of interesting, conceptually speaking — one can’t exist with the other. Conversely, if one exists, the other also exists. At one point the universe was simply effused with Light, and then after a period of time, the Void just showed up. I like to think of it in terms of light and shadow — if there’s a lamp casting light on something, there’s going to be a shadow as well. The shadow can’t exist without light.

If you think of it in those terms…no, the Old Gods and the Void Lords can never really die. As long as there is Light in the universe, there is always going to be Void. Even if we wiped out all the Old Gods and the Void Lords, it would only be a matter of time before they showed up again. There’s a balance between the two, one that’s reflected in the Naaru and their Light/Void cycles.

You need to be exalted on the specific character — reputation is account-wide for the purpose of reputation count achievements, but not for unlocking Heritage Armor. It’s relatively quick and easy to max out the reputation with a tabard, starting area quests, and some low-level dungeon grinding, however. Shouldn’t take you too long to get exalted on your character of choice!

I’m pretty sure there’s a twist on the way — and it may be a major one. We actually had a pretty in-depth discussion about this a few episodes back on Lore Watch Episode 95, where we talked about the idea that Sylvanas was simply Garrosh 2.0. While there are admittedly similarities between the two storylines, I don’t think this is a case of a repeat, and I think we’re all going to be surprised with wherever this story ends up.

Having said that, I should also point out that WoW has always repeated the same story in some aspects — there’s always a big bad, there’s always faction conflict, and there’s always some kind of resolution at the end. The story has traditionally been a little cyclical, but Legion really shifted us out of that cycle and into new territory. I don’t think Battle for Azeroth is going to end the way anyone expects it to end — and I think the next expansion is going to dive into uncharted waters, from a story perspective, and take us all by surprise.

Yes, absolutely yes, without question a million times yes. Honestly one of the things I really, really miss are the short stories that were released during the Mists expansion. Comics are great and all, but you can dive even deeper into exposition with a short story. The ones in Mists were fantastic because they expanded on all those reputations we were grinding out, and gave some background into why they were all important. I would love to see some short stories about the various characters we’ve been introduced to in Battle for Azeroth, and what they’re all thinking about at this point of the expansion’s story.

Blizzard has a pretty amazing writing team, and while I’m sure they’re busy with all of the different titles out there, I’d like to see them come back to WoW and give us some good stories to dig into. Mists gave us a ton of supplemental lore with those short stories — I wish they’d do the same for every expansion!

The Light takes many forms and uses many names — the Tauren call themselves Sunwalkers and refer to An’she as the source of their power, but it’s remarkably similar to the Light. The Night Elves refer to Elune and use her powers for healing, but those powers are also remarkably similar to the Light. Akunda is just another form of that — a loa, one that uses something remarkably similar to the Light. Rezan did the same thing, before his unfortunate demise.

In all of these cases, one could reasonably presume that each of these circumstances are instances of the Light being wielded in one form or another — it’s just the names and the sources that differ depending on cultural identity. The source is the same — the Light — but the way that source is “accessed” varies from culture to culture. For the Tauren, it’s the sun, for the Night Elves, it’s the moon, for the Zandalari, it’s the loa, whether that be Rezan or Akunda.

I don’t think so. In the case of the Pandaren, while they’ve been in the Horde for a few years at this point, they still don’t have the depth of knowledge or experience in regards to the Horde’s history to suggest an alternate method of leadership. For the Nightborne, they’re an Allied Race — much like the Zandalari. It’s a different kind of situation, one that Talanji is quick to point out to Sylvanas. The Zandalari stand with the Horde as partners and equals — they won’t kneel to Sylvanas.

On top of that, all the Allied Races that have aligned with the Horde are dealing with rebuilding, in one way or another. The Nightborne just came out of a costly rebellion to oust the old leadership and the Burning Legion. The Highmountain just reunited all the tribes after the Burning Legion’s influence nearly tore them apart for good. The Mag’har are the survivors of what looked like a catastrophic event on alternate Draenor. The Zandalari are dealing with the loss of their former King, and rebuilding after all that internal corruption threatened to tear the empire apart.

None of them are currently in a place where they can feasibly say “Hey guys, thanks for doing us a solid and helping us out when we desperately needed it. Now that that’s all behind us, how about you restructure your entire leadership model and ditch the Warchief that was in charge while you went out of your way to save us?”

Somehow, I don’t think that suggestion, as well-intended as it might be, would go over very well with the Horde that’s been united and working together since the end of the Second War.

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!