The Queue: SGDQueue

I realize there’s a whole h*ckin’ lot of stuff happening in the WoWverse right now, but also… It’s my favorite time of the year! Summer Games Done Quick is currently underway, and while we’re a little over halfway through, there’s still plenty on deck to love. Tomorrow and Saturday in particular have some top picks like Fire Emblem Three Houses, Breath of the Wild, and Mario 64 — but I’d suggest checking out the entire schedule for your personal favorites and tuning in. Even if you’ve never seen a speedrun, I bet you’ll have a good time (and you’ll be supporting a good cause!)

Anyhow, I could talk about GDQ forever. But this is The Queue, and it’s time to Queue things.

(As a note: The first two questions talk around the latest cinematic. Nothing is explicitly spoiled, but please do be careful if you’d like to go into the raid 100% blind!)

There are a couple points to talk about there, but the first one I want to address is that I think the cinematic “[bit] them in their backside” in large part because so much time has passed from the Teldrassil burning until now. Think about it — it’s been almost three whole years since Sylvanas burned Teldrassil and, frankly, changed the course of WoW’s story in a bigger way than we’d seen in a long time. We get entire expansions’ stories doled out to us in less time than it’s taken to get here, and we still have more left.

That’s not saying that tighter pacing would have fixed every issue every player has with the cinematic. But I think what bit Blizzard in their arse is less what actually happened and more about the time it took to get there. To your original question, though, I’m gonna take us to Arthonos and answer it by proxy —

It was brought up in the comments, but variety is the spice of life. Personally, I prefer a bit of a cliffhanger because it’s fun to speculate, but I’d get tired of that if we had it every single time. Having a clearly defined next step also avoids speculation from running rampant and players getting their hopes up. That’s not exactly a Blizzard problem, but it’s something in the back of my mind here.

That said — and getting back to the first question — I feel like Blizzard doesn’t always get credit for the subtleties in their writing. Was what happened in the cinematic a surprise? In some sense, absolutely! But a lot of what happened has been telegraphed throughout Shadowlands’ cinematics. I like it when Blizzard can pull the rug out from under us and take us to a new, surprising location. But there honestly haven’t been too many instances where I couldn’t retroactively go from A to B to C and see how we got where we are. Maybe that’s the bigger issue though — maybe piecing things together shouldn’t have to be done retroactively.

Cinematic talk is over now! Feel free to keep reading below.

Binti! I don’t know anything about Binti except what I’ve just read here, but now I am committed to getting Binti the title she deserves. Binti the Bold! Binti the Brave! The Benevolent Binti!

Let’s hear (see) some more options, y’all! What’s Binti’s new title?

No, but that’s because I’m not personally all that crazy over Pepe. He’s cute, and I did enjoy him back in Warlords when he first popped up… but I hit my Pepe saturation point way back when. It’s nice to see Pepe fans get a lot of cool custom outfits in-game and plushies and whatnot, don’t get me wrong! It’s just not my thing.

…That said, the Venthyr Pepe reminds me a bit of Bloodborne, so I might actually be okay adding that one to my collection.

I would assume it meant I just did a magic trick and the person was completely unaware of it. Now, if someone told me “I’m going to play a magic trick on you,” I’d expect some sort of sleight of hand where a coin appears seemingly out of nowhere or a bird comes out of my pocket or something.

Heck yeah! It’s still a bit weird to do in-person things — and I always encourage being safe about how you do those in-person things — but it feels really good. I’ve had a small handful of board game nights since being vaccinated, and there’s something really nice about all gathering around a table and getting lost in a game together while you can also just shoot the shtuff.

I hope you have a great board game night! :D If you don’t mind me asking, what games will you be playing? Any commenters out there have board game recommendations?

It’s account-wide! Goodness, if it weren’t, I think I’d have just given up altogether on ever getting it on my alts.

That’s all for today! I hope everyone has a great Thursday and an even greater weekend! Don’t forget, Games Done Quick is on for another couple days, and it’s a real good time. (And if you’ve never tuned in before but me fawning over it here changed that, I’d love to know ☺)