The Queue: It’s still the best AC game

Yes, this is purely my opinion, art and game quality are both subjective, others may prefer a different game. I know all that. I also know that I’ve now played quite a few Assassin’s Creed games, and for me, the best one hands down is Odyssey. It’s three years old and it’s still the one I play the most, by a long margin. I played and liked Valhalla — Eivor’s a cool protagonist, I have no beef with her — but for me Odyssey is absolutely my favorite of the entire series, and it’s not even close.

And since it’s nearly the end of 2021, I felt like a replay was in order. So I’m back flinging myself off cliffs, playing the new DLC for both Odyssey and Valhalla, and generally having a grand time doing it.

Depends on what you mean. I’m still playing WoW, for example, so I haven’t retired my character, but one of my longer running D&D campaigns came to and end with Coronavirus and so I had to retire my Dwarf Barbarian. For her I concocted an elaborate story of returning home to smash the undead dragon that was the bones on which her home village was made in.

I have retired specific characters in MMO’s, like my character from City of Heroes or my Draenei Warrior that I left on Draenor at the end of Warlords. But I tend not to retire from games, even if I stop playing. There’s always a chance I could come back, at least in my head.

I’ve argued in the past that BFA was in fact extremely episodic, feeling almost like it was designed for a Netflixian binge instead of the slow drip of expansion patches that it actually got. So I’m not entirely sure what you’re expecting or trying to say when you talk about making them episodic. I mean, the structure of Shadowlands is very much built around patch story moments that feel episodic to me — we see Anduin captured by the Jailer at launch, then we watch as he’s held in Torghast and his interactions with Sylvanas, and finally we see him controlled by the Domination magic of the Jailer, and now we’re going to go after him at Zereth Mortis.

Based on your question’s focus on spreading out the storylines of BFA, I’m going to assume you’re asking for a more decompressed style of storytelling. Some players would likely consider that a bonus, others wouldn’t like it much at all. I’m personally willing to flirt with it, but for me, it wasn’t the sheer amount of scenes and story beats in BFA that was the problem, but rather the overall sense of fatigue I felt watching everything getting unrelentingly worse. I’d be more interested in an upbeat expansion than one that took more time to bum me out.

I couldn’t find anything specific to your issue, although I did find this bug from a year ago for base Legendary crafted items which reminded me of it. I checked in the bug report forum but I didn’t see (ha, because I’m blind, get it, total self own) anything about items displaying the wrong level when looking at the recipe.  Does anyone reading this have any idea why this is happening to Saalmis?

My favorite gag is when Garrus and Tali are talking in the elevator in Mass Effect 2 and Garrus asks Tali if she misses the long talks in the elevators from the first game and she replies I have a shotgun.

There are things I gave up after one try and things I tried to do for literal years, some things I’m still trying to do. So I don’t really have an answer for that.

If I get COVID, even the Omicron variant, I am exceedingly likely to die from it due to various reasons. So I really prefer not being dead to engaging in that particular social experience right at the moment.

My mom died back in 1990. Before she died, she and I only had the one Christmas tradition after my dad left — we’d watch Christmas movies together, except they were all just movies that had a lot of violence and action and just happened to be set during Christmas. Her favorites were Lethal Weapon (she had a crush on Mel Gibson, hey, she didn’t know he was a jerk), Die Hard (same thing with Bruce Willis) and Silent Rage (Chuck Norris, it turned out not to have anything to do with Christmas but we just shrugged and watched it anyway).

After mom died, I stopped watching those movies. So I don’t really have a favorite Christmas movie anymore. Maybe I’d say A Very Dolphin Christmas if I hadn’t just made that up.

Okay, so that’s my last Queue before Christmas done. See y’all next week for my last Queue of the year.