The Queue: Still Alive

There’s no use crying over every mistake. I’ll just keep on trying though I ran out of cake. Because people panic bought all the butter, eggs, and flour, so I’m sitting at my house with no cake. The cake is… something something.

This The Queue, where you ask us Qs and we supply the As. You have to bring your own cake.

I actually love the way they did Assaults, because it mixes those two options together in a lovely way. You can choose to focus on the dailies, or you can choose to just go murder a whole bunch of random Black Empire NPCs to fill the bar. Best of both worlds, really.

Overwatch seems to be in a really weird place with regard to NPCs. It seems like everyone right now is in three buckets: ultradead, love interests, or heroes-in-waiting. Some characters exist to be in a fridge for the main cast’s character development. These include Mondatta, Mei’s coworkers, or the OG Winston. There’s also Emily and Vincent, who are the love interests. The only other characters we see — not including unnamed characters like the Parisian cop in the Overwatch 2 cinematic — are mostly thought of as heroes we’ll probably see eventually. Hammond started as a throwaway mention, and it took over a year from the first time we saw Echo in Reunion for her to be announced as a playable hero. It just makes sense that, given this general set of criteria, the people who aren’t dead or smooching the main cast are basically Chekov’s Gun, but for new heroes.

Personally, I would love for an Aboriginal Australian woman with a mohawk with Junker Queen’s no-nonsense attitude to join the cast. I would assume she’d play as a melee bruiser, more similar to Zarya’s stand and deliver than Doomfist’s mayhem and ability to escape. Do we need her? Probably not. Would I personally suck at her? Absolutely. But would it be awesome? Heck yes.

I’m not sure how hidden it is per se, but I freaking love tribute NPCs in WoW. From the fun ones like Nat Pagle and Flintlocke to the somber ones like Elloric or Crusader Bridenbrad, each one tells its own story. No, I’m not including Wowhead links. These are quests you undertake on your own, because you want to know their stories.

Some are sweet, some are heartwrenching — I tear up when I walk past Archmage Nakada’s class because that one is so touchingly done — but all of them have unique little touches that make those NPCs unique reflections of the people and characters they’re intended to reflect. Every new patch or expansion brings new ones, too. New tragedies to tear at your heart, new foibles to laugh along with, and sometimes, new awareness of the people behind the scenes who make this game we love. A whole lot of game developers love cats, but there’s only one Crazy Cat Lady.

Back when it first came out the Spider Wing in Naxxramas was pretty overwhelming for me, but now I’m pretty fine with it… maybe it’s a form of exposure therapy?

I do tend to have issues with platformers in general because of a fear of heights, though I’m generally okay with getting on tall ladders in real life. It may be the yawning chasm part of it, though… sometimes time lapse video of the night sky in places like the desert make me feel incredibly anxious, like I need to hold on to the earth to stop falling off it.

I was already trying to farm Normal Nighthold because it has one of the very few Hunter sets I don’t think is hideous. Tier 20 (the Gruul’s Lair recolor tier) and 21 are both boring, with the exception of the floppy physics on the tentacles of the tier 21 Mythic hat.

Honestly I think Legacy Loot kinda sucks as a concept, but I get that it’s tied to Personal Loot for current content… which I also think sucks as a concept for everything other than LFR.

This is kind of a philosophical question. By and large there are very few encounters in raids which aren’t filler. Most of them make sense in the context of sieging the whatever, but they do kind of pull from nowhere. Let’s go through Nighthold, for instance, since like I said I’m still going after that tier set.

Elisande was front and center as a foil for Thalyssra through much of Suramar’s questing, and it only makes sense for us to take her on in that raid. Gul’dan was the main catalyst of the plot through even the previous expansion in addition to being the Legion leader at the beginning of that expansion, so it made sense that we’d encounter him. But beyond that, most of the bosses are there to set the stage that we’re seiging the city (Spellblade Aluriel, Botanist Tel’arn) or taking on the Legion (Krosus, Tichondrius), and most could be interchanged with any of a number of similar bosses. We could’ve had a zookeeper-themed boss that ran through the Suramar menagerie instead of the Botanist, for instance, or Tichondrius could’ve been swapped for some other Burning Legion figurehead.

It’s really tough to strike the balance between having a decent number of bosses to dole out the loot and make the raid memorable, versus just paring things down to the narrative necessities. Sometimes the team definitely missteps, but for every ‘oh look there’s some creature in the sewer’ boss, there’s a boss that’s fun and unique and engaging you may never have thought to include in a raid like that.