The Queue: Work, work.

You ever been so busy you just need to sit down and stare for a minute?

This is The Queue, where you ask us questions and we’ll… we’ll get around to answering in just like, a minute. Be cool.

It’s tough to say, and it would’ve depended a lot on exactly how much it had earned. Weirdly, if you look through the gross numbers, the domestic box office was awful, but the total gross was over $400 million, which is on par with several of the Marvel stand-alone character movies like Black Widow or the Hulk movie. However, they burned through so much coin in marketing it was a net several million dollar loss, unlike even the most panned of the Marvel movies.

If it had a higher net, we’d probably have a trilogy, pulling from each of the original three games. If it kept growing through those, we’d likely see spinoffs — perhaps a “wacky adventures of Khadgar” series on Amazon or Netflix, even. And honestly, that’s all I want out of a Warcraft cinematic universe now. Think Wandavision, but Khadgar.

For me the future going forward is one big question mark, almost entirely because of the early allusions to the Shadowlands being akin to the wardrobe to Narnia, with time going all wonky when you cross worlds. I’m not sure whether they decided to keep that in, because I know my character’s been back to Azeroth a few times in the narrative, but if that’s the case, it definitely makes sense to have all the leaders who went to the Shadowlands take a back seat for a bit, just to catch up on whatever transpired while they were away. Heck, it only took like a year for N’Zoth to go from a background entity to full-blown world-consuming threat. Even if time passed normally they probably need some time to debrief on current events.

Weirdly, I think it would almost be comforting if the next expansion started with somebody telling us Azeroth finally had 20 years of peace while we were away, so we’ll start the next expansion in our stately manor-slash-pumpkin farm, as befits our station. Time skips can feel like a cheap narrative device, but Azeroth has earned herself a nice quiet stretch where nothing happens for a while. Unfortunately, peace tends to be kind of tricky when your entire play structure is built around defeating things, but I feel like a lot of us are ready to just kick back for some status quo for a while.

Oh wait, never mind, there’s still a sword killing the planet. Whoops.

With what little I know about gamedev and IT as a whole (read: lol) I’d conjecture that it mostly has to do with whatever backend wizardry they’re using to deploy the goods. Every other expansion they’ve announced, they almost always say something like, “and you can pre-order and/or start playing now,” so that’s the most likely culprit for a 2-day delay announced just before the announcement was supposed to be announced.

It’s not like they’re going to look through the cards and go, “oh crap, we need to add more!” and now some artists are in the back drawing up a very cute and vicious filler character or five in the space of a day. It may be possible the gameplay devs are using this opportunity to rebalance a few numbers, but even that I doubt — these presentations are already filmed and set up, and it’s unlikely they’ll re-render the whole thing now just to change a 2 into a 3 or something.

Also, speaking of backend, they’ve been announcing the announcements on Thursdays of late, which is a much better idea than Tuesdays because the server teams are already dealing with weekly maintenance. Makes sense to separate it a bit. I could definitely see some IT manager just firmly saying “no, we’re not deploying on a Tuesday.”

Oh, they absolutely do, for a variety of reasons. One of the most notable to me was John Madden Football and/or Madden NFL. When the game initially launched in the late 80s there were only three instances in history where a team had gone undefeated through the whole season, the most recent of which was the 1972 Dolphins, with the other happening before World War II. The rumor had it there was a sneaky set of rules in the backend which completely prevented the player from getting a flawless season in the game because it was so rare IRL. The result was called the “(heck) you game,” one game toward the end of the season where you just absolutely could not win no matter what you did. Your opponents were an unstoppable force and the refs constantly called penalties on everything they possibly could. Your field goals would get blocked. Your QB would get sacked in the endzone for a safety. Just a game where the computer stacked the deck so hard the game is unwinnable, so you couldn’t get a perfect season.

Now, I don’t exactly have factual evidence of this, but having played several games in this series I will absolutely die on the hill that the (heck) you game is real.