The Queue: Atmospheric storytelling

After last week’s article about survival games, Liz has been working through Subnautica, which made me want to go back through Subnautica. There’s a lot I like about this game, but the way they use atmospheric storytelling to both show you where to go without showing you where to go, while also heightening the utter dread of what could be lurking out there in the water just out of vision, is just freaking brilliant.

This is The Queue, where you ask us questions and we’ll answer from our cushy underwater seabase.

On the one hand, yes. I do think that it would be nice to add small things for every holiday, and slightly revamp things as they go to reflect the state of events as they unfold. However, in general, the amount of work required to update things for one short holiday tends to be disproportionate to the payoff for the overall game. Think of something as relatively trivial as the beloved April Fools’ patch notes, for instance. Just mechanically typing out that many words would take 45 minutes to an hour — let alone thinking of the jokes, bouncing them off coworkers to make sure they’re funny or still relevant, formatting them into readable lists, possibly running them past an editor, making sure they’re scheduled properly, working up a pitch with the marketing and social teams to promote it externally… even that tiny, unserious update takes serious man hours.

So yeah, while I’d love new things — more holiday-themed tiaras and crowns please — and I don’t think it’s out of line to want anything, per se, I totally get why the cost-benefit just isn’t there for holiday updates.

I find this unlikely just because they’re already Horde for the better racial bonuses. Because guilds aren’t cross-faction the benefits of doing stuff like collecting mats and trading will still remain far easier to facilitate if everyone’s on the same side.

We may see a character or two swap, and I do think that mixed faction raiding will definitely reign overall. However, unless there’s a specific boss fight where there’s a very specific effect — the tank is dealt 100% of their total HP and the Dark Iron’s 1% mitigation means they don’t die, maybe — I doubt things’ll change much in the RWF guilds.

You mean, how we’ve ended literally every expansion til now? Hmm, it’s a possibility.

Apparently with a lowkey viral tweet which is honestly really annoying more than anything. Hey guys, did you know I think you shouldn’t pay writers or editors? People on Twitter are wild.

Anyway, while I enjoyed playing it, if it gets paywalled — when it gets paywalled, really — I’m just not likely to continue to play. I play a lot of Boggle-style anagram games anyway, like the app Word Hero, which still pits you against other players on a ranked list. While I’ll miss the community interaction, particularly over on the BlizzardWatch Discord, meh. I’m really glad the creator was able to get his coin, though. That’s almost a fully funded retirement fund, which is #goals.

The science is still sketchy, but I try to always eat and then go to the grocery store if possible. I find I’m far more likely to ignore the list and make impulse buys if I go when I’m peckish, regardless of how healthy those impulse purchases are. And my impulse buys are rarely healthy when I’m hungry, too.

At least, that’s my excuse for buying a pack of conversation hearts, oatmeal creme pies, and a baguette I still don’t really have a plan for while I was at the store yesterday. Don’t blame me, blame my lack of a sandwich.