The Queue: Thee Stallions

I heard these were trending on Twitter, so I’m jumping on the bandwagon.

This is The Queue, where you ask us questions and we would answer, but we’re about to let it ride.

I tend to like it, for the most part. At least, if I’m going to have achievements — and I do have some criticisms of the achievement system as a whole — I like that there are some that are low-hanging fruit in addition to the ones that take thousands of hours of gameplay, or require you to do something quirky (or google it, I guess). But one thing I love about the achievement system is that it can give you a much more thorough look at what you can expect out of the gameplay experience, depending on how it’s handled.

A good example is the new game Cult of the Lamb, which has so far proved both entertaining and horrifying. You get your first cultist pretty quickly, and the achievement for doing so reflects this — as of this Queue’s writing, 97.4% of all players earned this achievement. The next step in this achievement, 5 cultists, has a 92% completion rate. This tells me it’s pretty likely that it’s relatively quick to start ramping up your cult, but it also reflects the willingness of players to get to that point, so it’s at least entertaining enough that people want to keep playing it once they’ve started.

By contrast, the easiest achievement on one of my personal favorites, The Long Dark, has a 54% completion rate. This is in part due to the fact that there are a few different modes to play through — that achievement is only earned in Story mode, and lots of people just skip Story altogether in favor of the Survival experience. The lower completion rate also indicates that this game is relatively hardcore, and won’t hold your hand through the early lizard brain dopamine hit achievements. We also see some very low-percentages at the bottom, with a very high play demand, means you’ll be able to eke out a lot of gameplay hours for your buck. Whether that’s for well or ill is up to you.

I have not, but to be fair I haven’t actually done a ton of questing in the beta. In fact, almost none.

The reason why is twofold. One, I want to keep the experience relatively fresh. It’s an odd feeling (and honestly, I feel a little bratty for saying it) but in the betas where I’ve played through the questing exhaustively I end up getting burned out on those quests by the time I actually get to play through them on live. It goes double for the unskippable intro sequences and unlock quests — smell ya later, Tanaan Jungle — but even those quirky little sidequests get tiresome, especially if they’re wiped from build to build.

The other reason is because there are specific things that I tend to cover for BlizzardWatch, and pretty much none of them involve questing. My general expertise is battle pets and cute vignettes. I also tend to stock the CMS in landscapes and other header images. Weirdly, this makes me an excellent tester because I tend to go to out of the way areas and find places to get stuck or fall off the world or accidentally get insta-killed by an invisible unintended something or other.

What do you call a fish with no eyes?

A fsh.