The Queue: Would you look at the time.

Every week, I come into the Queue with high hopes, intending to make a really great pun or have some kind of special insight. And then, after I read the comments, one of you inevitably mentions that we’re getting closer and closer to BlizzCon. This week was no different, and now I need to write this Queue while I write more things in my day planner and lie on the floor.

Two weeks.

Here, enjoy this Queue while I go scream into a dress like Amy Adams.

A bit of a spoiler here for those of you who haven’t been playing both sides — or haven’t played Horde at all this expansion. If you chose to be a Sylvanas loyalist, after the events of the cinematic you’re sent a hearthstone to Windrunner Spire, where you meet up with the Dark Lady. She tells you that she’s mad everyone is still trying to cling to hope, but we’ll see soon. Oh, we’ll all see. And then she makes some vague statement about the next time we see her we’ll understand. Not villainous at all, that Sylvanas.

You know, it’s weird how someone who’s so mad everyone else clings to life and hope chose the place most closely associated with her life and future prospects before undeath as her touchstone, but I digress.

After that it’s anyone’s guess until we get more story beats. She could be kickin it with Helya, trying to see about the deal she struck last expansion. She could be trying to steal the loa right off of Bwonsamdi. She could be banshee-ing around Anduin’s quarters in an attempt to assassinate him — talk about killing hope, offing that kid would also kill the morale of both factions and most of the neutral ones to boot. Where ever Sylvanas is now, it’ll probably come to light in the novel bridging to the next expansion, and then people who haven’t read the book will be totally confused as to why every player character is now a factionless battle pet in patch 9.0. Just read the book, it’ll explain.

As noted with some great analysis by WarcraftPets, Wowhead datamined a couple achievements for patch 8.3 which include both a Blackrock Depths pet battle dungeon and a full meta achievement for completing all the dungeons thus far.

I really like the idea of the pet battle dungeons, but I haven’t jumped through the hoops to complete them repeatedly for all the rewards. I’m just too impatient to do much grinding these days which doesn’t have something fun and flashy in the repetition of it. Diablo 3 works for me because whirlwind is outlandishly fun, but pet battling is generally fairly formulaic. At the endgame it plays more like a puzzle than a more chaotic or adventuring game. While I might repeat some puzzle games for Steam achievements, after the first couple I’m pretty over it.

Nope, not even a little.

This is my guess for the “and you can play it, right now…” for this BlizzCon. They’ve already promised delivery by the end of the year — not in the “Ghostcrawler promised me a pony,” sense, in the “stockholder penalty” sense. With the beta client spinning up and two weeks — oh god two weeks — until BlizzCon, it’s a pretty safe bet that either just Virtual Ticket holders or else everyone will get access to it then. Based on the client’s current completion I’d also guess it’ll be a full beta, not a vertical slice like last year’s WoW Classic limited beta.

Considering how so much of the past couple WoW expansions have story built directly on top of what went down in those earlier games, heck yes I’d play it. Even though a lot of it has been invalidated or retconned at this point it’s still good to know the classics — which is part of why they re-released WoW Classic.

However, I will say that I tend to quite enjoy the building and material gathering part of RTS games moreso than the tactical warfare parts, so anytime I can find one that has a decent story or campaign mode where I can do that in relative peace, I’m all for it. Even on the more difficult AI settings it’s a lot easier to do that kind of thing against the computer than against a real human.