The Queue: Nearly the weekend edition

It’s Friday! Finally! Time to get some drinks with tiny umbrellas in them and celebrate.

The Steam Summer Sale is in and of itself a strange game — the only way to win is not to play.

I have a massive, simply massive pile of unplayed games. There are the games I buy because I genuinely want to play them, but may not wind up having as much time as I hoped. There are games I buy because they’re on sale — typically packed with games I kind of wanted, but didn’t want enough to buy them quickly or at full price. And then there are the subscription services. I have Apple Arcade for mobile and tablet games (I like playing games on my iPad). Then I picked up Xbox Game Pass because I’d heard so many good things about it. Then I added the new PlayStation+ subscription, mostly because I was curious how it compared, and also it was a pretty cheap upgrade from my existing pre-paid subscription. That means I have a total of three game subscription services. The number of games available to me is simply obscene. It is beyond every childhood dream of gaming I ever had.

I have more games than ever. And I also have responsibilities, which means have less time to play those games than ever.

So I haven’t looked at the Steam sale and my goal is not to look at the Steam sale. If I do, I’ll just add to my existing mountain of unplayed games.

This expansion is pretty speedy. Blizzard has said for years now that they want to get expansions out faster, but they’ve never really managed. The game has been plagued by tedious end-of-expansion lulls, and we’ve had several expansions that have felt rushed, felt like Blizzard blitzed through testing without listening to feedback.

I think it’s fair to be concerned. But I also feel like we should give Blizzard the benefit of the doubt. The timetable for the expansion seems fast, but we haven’t seen — at least in my opinion — evidence that Dragonflight has been rushed. We have heard that Dragonflight has been in the works for quite a while, so the fact that it’s being “rushed” may just mean Blizzard has been at work a lot longer than we’ve been aware. Maybe Blizzard has finally gotten things together and is getting expansions released at a better cadence.

The truth is we just don’t know for sure, and we probably won’t know for sure until the beta comes out and we have a clear look at the state of the game. Until then all we can do is worry and guess — and I prefer not to worry (at least not too much) until I clearly have something to worry about.

And if the beta comes out and something is terribly wrong? Well, that’s the time to put together feedback — polite, constructive feedback being the most useful — so that Blizzard can fix it. I think we’ve seen very clear signs lately that the devs are paying attention to what the player base wants and complains about. I say work with them to try to make a better game for all of us to enjoy.

If it turns out terrible, if Blizzard doesn’t listen to feedback, if Blizzard doesn’t have time to respond to feedback… we can cross those bridges when we get to them.

In WoW, we recruit a lot of people to help us along the way — Legion was the poster child for this, with each class having its own story campaign that was fully focused on recruiting allies to stop the Burning Legion.

But no matter which class you play, no matter how many allies you recruit, in the end you’re apparently very bad at delegating because you do practically everything on your own. A large part of that’s just the nature of the game: it’s all about you, the player, having heroic adventures, which means you need to go out and do things. And that means all the help you recruited… well, it starts to feel kind of useless.

The Four Horsemen are particularly egregious because they’re notable lore figures, and you’ve went to such lengths — and done some frankly terrible things — to recruit them. And in the end, you, the Deathlord, did all the hard work. And like so many story threads before them, the new Horsemen practically vanished from the game after the expansion was over. They have no ongoing role.

The answer to both questions is the same: talent trees.

I am personally very excited about the return of talent trees. I feel like the current system offers few choices and nearly no customization, and I think talent trees, which have a litany of option, will give me more opportunities to fine tune my character to play what I want.

On the flip side, talent trees are a very big, complicated system — and it would be easy to make a mess of it. We haven’t yet seen Paladin talent trees, so I don’t yet have any evidence — good or bad — as to how my class might turn out. I don’t believe in worrying (too much) about things before there’s anything concrete to worry about, and even if the system is a mess when Blizzard reveals all the talent trees, there will be time to give feedback.

Still, I hope the one thing ‘m looking forward to doesn’t turn out to be a big disappointment.

And that’s all for today. Take care, everybody, pet your dogs for me, and enjoy your weekend.