The Queue: More coffee please

Look, I know what they say about making coffee your whole personality and everything, but sometimes I feel like the only thing standing between me and just lying on the floor is a nice cuppa.

No, Rutherford, I absolutely do not share.

This is The Queue, where you ask us questions and we might answer, as long as you bring me a biscotti or something. Just a little nibble.

I’m still mad about the Flight Master’s Whistle.

And it’s weird, because if they’d never added it in the first place, I wouldn’t notice its absence. Of course as soon as I’m done with the quest I need to go back the way I came, avoiding aggro, trying to not get lost on my way back to the quest giver. That just makes sense! But now that I know I could’ve just tapped the geegaw in my bag to warp directly to a taxi, that short hike seems bad.

So, generally, my line is where the devs decided to set it — but heaven forbid they ever try to walk it back.

Usually if staff get a Queue question answered, it’s because the Queue writer complained in staff chat about the paucity of questions, and the questioner quickly came up with one to help us out. There are a few Queue posters who try to throw us a bone in a similar fashion — thanks, Roxxii… I think. In terms of questions, some days are feasts and others are famines. It can be tough to tread the line between being thorough and being timely with a daily Q&A column — re-reading old Queues and cross-referencing the questions asked with which things the previous Queue writer asked isn’t likely to happen for me, personally.

Plus, remember that not all of us have the same experiences or knowledge bases on Blizzard’s titles. If your question is really in the weeds we may not answer it just because of the research it would involve, especially if another writer would just be able to toss an answer out off the top of their head. If you’re asking about Overwatch Mitch or I are your best bets. Cory is our go-to for Heroes of the Storm. Matt and Liz are all about Diablo. And even in terms of titles, we have different knowledge bases. If you have a question about Hearthstone‘s Battlegrounds I’m all over it, but for the rest of the game Liz is the person you should ask. And of course, each of us has our own outside interests and quirks. If you have a question about Broadway or classic literature I can’t possibly help but answer (though there’s a pretty big overlap with Matt there, too).

If there’s a question you really want answered, feel free to repeat it until the person with the right expertise can grab it.

Ahune specifically really heckin hates pets. Always has. I think there’s a weird individually targeted mechanic for stuff in melee range, but as a Hunter, pfft, how would I know. This is why it’s a good idea to have an offspec with Lone Wolf. Just swap for dungeons and keep it rolling otherwise. I personally would never subject Rutherford Bear Hayes to something so vulgar and common as a dungeon. He can lounge in his den and eat blackberries until I get back.

But no, the Heritage armor is labeled Cosmetic, so you only have to do the quest line once to enable it for all armor classes.

This is honestly hard to say. It depends on how much presence he’ll have during the Murder at Castle Nathria action. If all we see of him was in the trailer, meh, minimally. But considering how closely this pulls from the 1985 murder mystery comedy classic Clue, and we see him again at some point, we’ll see far more thirst.

I may have chosen to answer this question solely to remind everyone that Clue is one of the best movies of all time and you should definitely watch it.

Cozy Grove is really excellent in a number of ways. I haven’t really seen any notable bugs. I will say that there’s a limited amount of stuff it’s worthwhile to do on any one day, so if you tend to game in binges, you’ll either find it a refreshing change of pace or incredibly frustrating. Also, on some level it’s a “vision test” game — especially early on, a lot of quests require you to find random crap on the ground among a huge amount of visual clutter, and a core part of gameplay is turning things from black and white line art to color. You can pay coins to have an NPC just tell you where it is, but that can also feel bad.

This Steam sale I spent around $50 and picked up 10 games. I grabbed Penumbra, which is apparently three games. Red insisted a while back I needed to get Fe, so I did. I got The Wild Eight because it looks like co-op The Long Dark (though, of course, it’s unlikely I’ll actually play with anybody). By the by, The Long Dark is on sale yet again, and I always have to recommend it. I picked up Simulacra, because I’m a sucker for a murder mystery game, and The Magnificent Trufflepigs because it also seems like it has a mystery element to it even if disappointingly un-murdery. I grabbed Tiny Lands and Train Station Renovation because my son is getting more into gaming, and I thought he might enjoy those. I picked up Not Tonight because it just plain looked interesting.

So far I’ve played two of these titles. Thief Simulator, I didn’t enjoy. Even if I can suspend disbelief that a string of robberies would occur on different days for a series of next door neighbors and there wouldn’t be, like, you know, cops, the gameplay itself is clunky and weird. I’m supposed to fence loot by using a specific username on a specific internet forum? I’m not exactly well-versed in doing crimes but that sounds like a honeypot. I’m also playing Farmer’s Dynasty, which follows the general trend of modern sim design, where the actual gameplay can get very picky and precise and detail-oriented, which is kind of difficult when you’re driving a frickin tractor, but overall it’s kind of relaxing. My lizard brain loves games where you ‘earn money’ to make your stuff better in order to earn more money. The NPC interactions are some of the worst I’ve ever seen in gaming, though. Each individual question prompt from a single NPC has a different canned AI voice saying it bad.