The Queue: Gosh, that was a lot

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!

It’s Monday. More importantly, it’s the Monday after BlizzCon, where we were promptly deluged with enough information that we’ll likely be spending the next several months entrenched in it all and trying to unravel it. I don’t know about you all but if anyone wakes me before my alarm in the next week or so I’m probably going to channel my inner banshee. But hey. I know why you’re here. You’ve got questions, and I probably have at least some answers for you. So let’s get to that, shall we?

She didn’t kill him because he was essentially meaningless at that point. It had nothing to do with Bolvar, and everything to do with the nice hat he was wearing. Plus, he’s imbued with the flames of the Red Dragonflight — so it’s entirely possible he simply can’t die.

In that, he was the perfect choice for the next Lich King. A hero who would not bend to the Lich King’s corruption, one who was bound to life as much as the helm would bind him inevitably to death. Essentially, he was balance, sitting up there on the throne. And yes, his actions in Legion were questionable — and still are — but the short of it, the answer to your question is that once that helm was off, Bolvar ceased to matter.

Basically, he can’t really “live” — he’s too scarred for that — but he can’t really die, either. And Sylvanas needs souls to fuel the Maw. Bolvar’s soul won’t accomplish that purpose. So why bother with him at all, once she has what she needed?

This has been a really, really long time coming, to be honest. It all goes back to Edge of Night, and what Sylvanas saw — and what Arthas saw when he died, for that matter. They both went to the Maw, and neither one of them cared for it. But Sylvanas was granted a reprieve from the Maw, if she bound herself to those val’kyr, and started working for the Jailer instead.

Since then, she’s been feeding souls to the Maw. I’m sure we’ll have plenty to say about this topic in Wednesday’s Lore Watch as well, so keep your eyes on the RSS feeds for the podcasts!

I suspect that hasn’t quite been hammered out just yet. We’ve been told that if we’re max level, we’ll still be able to solo old raids as easily as we had previously. But we haven’t been told how that will affect running legacy content — or heck, even Timewalking raids, you know? The good part about all of this is that it’s something that Blizzard definitely isn’t going to ignore. There are too many people invested in those answers, and there are a lot of people out there asking the same question as you.

The bad part is that at this time, we simply don’t have an answer for you — but chin up, we will…eventually!

That was also the Shadowlands — and given what little we know about the Jailer right now, I suspect he wasn’t exactly happy we were in there stealing horses to ride around on. Although honestly, it depends on what part of the Shadowlands we were in. At that point, souls were still in theory being shuttled to where they needed to go, so I don’t know if we were in the Maw, where we’d invariably grab the Jailer’s attention, or if we were in one of the other realms tied to the Shadowlands.

Either which way, I doubt anyone was particularly happy that we were stealing pretty ponies and ferreting them off to the realm of the living to ride around on, you know?

I absolutely would not be surprised if we did — the Saurfang arc was really, really well received, and the story being told there was pretty phenomenal. I suspect if we see one of those stories play out in Shadowlands, we may hear the tale of a once shining hero, former Regent, former commander, who was brought low by the fire of dragon’s flames, imprisoned on a throne of ice, then ripped from that prison and left to rot.

And his daughter, too. Really if we don’t get more Bolvar story here I’m going to be terribly disappointed, because I suspect that tale will move everyone to tears.

I think I can safely say that Diablo 4 will not be, mostly based on one of the developer’s comments that it won’t be coming even Blizzard Soon™. I think next year we might get a beta announcement, if we don’t have one already before BlizzCon, but I doubt that release will happen before 2021. But man, what a game to look forward to, right?

As for Overwatch 2, I suspect we’ll see that one much sooner, given how Jeff said they are buckling down and focusing on that development for now. They didn’t say anything about a release date, but I’m hoping we’ll see that one in 4th quarter 2020, whenever that happens to be. Maybe in time for the holidays? It’d be a good time to release it, don’t you think?

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!