The Queue: Superfuse

So I’m kind of watching Superfuse, an upcoming ARPG that kind of feels like a fusion of Strikeforce: Morituri, Bioshock and Diablo 2, and so far I’m pretty interested in the game. It’s got a kind of dystopia with superpowers feel and you can customize your character’s powers with things called fuses that drop as you mow your way through waves of enemies which is somewhat reminiscent of plasmids, but the gameplay is very much an over the top ARPG gorefest that reminds me of games like Darksiders Genesis or the various Warhammer games.

It’s coming to early access in January and I’ll be trying to get in so I’ll report back to y’all when I get a chance to play it. The videos I’ve watched about it so far seem promising, but I always prefer to get to play a game first before I gush too hard about it.

Anyway, that’s something I though some of you — the Diablo liking folks — might find interesting. Now, let’s do that thing where we chat about stuff.

There actually is at least one lion in the Eastern Kingdoms.

This guy.

So it’s probably fair to assume there used to be a lot more of them. As others have pointed out, back when all of Kalimdor was one big continent the ancestors of Humans probably saw a lot more lions, but I also think it likely that Lions in the Eastern Kingdoms were hunted in lands dominated by Humans until they became more a mythical symbol than a real animal.

In real world history, lions survived in parts of Europe until the 3rd century BC, and they’re mentioned in the Iliad, composed some time before the 8th century BC, so considering the time scales of the Warcraft universe it’s quite feasible that the traditions of hunting lions to prove one’s strength and fitness to rule became so widespread that the lack of lions in the ‘modern’ age wouldn’t really matter.  The Twilight Highlands aren’t very far from the Arathi Highlands, and the migration of Humans from Arathi to modern Stormwind took place 1200 years ago.

So it seems pretty possible to me that they’d know about lions, even if they didn’t actually ever see one on a day to day basis.

So you’re saying you want something akin to the Dracthyr Evoker, but sorta useless? I’m assuming this is a joke, so I’ll look at your question as if it were the serious part.

I think it could be interesting if we got Naga, and they got a class called Naga Tidehunter, one with three talent specializations — but lady Naga could only learn 2, and male Naga could also only learn 2. So there’s be a Sea Witch spec that was caster oriented, a Warlord spec that was open to both, and a Destroyer spec that was heavily mutated, akin to Harjatan.

It would reflect the divisions in Naga society pretty effectively — almost all of the Naga spellcasters we see in game are women (I can’t think of a male who really specializes in spellcasting) and Naj’entus or Battlemaiden Nar’jira represent a middle ground of armed fighters who come from either gender. But it would be weird and probably sexist, so maybe not? Maybe whichever Naga faction joins the Horde, Alliance or both would have the ability to learn all three despite their gender and that’s how they break from Azshara in the first place. You could have a quest at level 40 that lets you learn the forbidden third spec.

Honestly it feels very Mists of Pandaria to me. Up until Siege, that expansion was delivering content at a frenetic pace — we went right into Throne of Thunder testing directly after the launch, and for a while there it really felt like we were going to keep having content drops on a regular few months schedule.

I mean, seriously, before Siege I was amazed at how fast we were getting new content. This time it feels like they’ve got a real plan for it, barring any testing hiccoughs that will invariably lead to delays. Adopting the Season model that we’ve seen them use in games like Diablo 3 seems like a good bet for World of Warcraft.

It comes down to if we’re going to get a patch 10.3, and what it will entail if we do. It feels to me like the current model is for WoW expansions to last around two years. That means that all of 2023 and a good chunk of 2024 will be Dragonflight, and it seems likely that we could wrap everything major up in terms of the game’s main story by patch 10.2, with whatever the final raid of Dragonflight ends up being taking center stage.

If that’s the case we’ll almost certainly see something akin to Shadowlands Season 4, with some form of enhancement to older raids. But if there’s a patch 10.3 in 2024, that will likely be Season 4, and then we may see a Season 5 during the last half of the year to bridge the gap until the next expansion. This is all just speculation, of course — will we get patch 10.2.5 and 10.2.7 as well? No idea yet.

Well, it doesn’t have to be the FIRST time, for all we know, we could bump into her as a whelp at some point down the road. Maybe we’ll even have to stop someone from killing her as an egg at some point and she’ll hatch and that will be the first time she meets us, even though by that point we’ll have known her for years and years.

This is the kind of stuff I love about time travel stories and I hope we get more of it. Also, it could just have been an artistic choice on the dev team’s part, thinking she looked better as a Drake than a full Dragon. But I like your theorizing.

Okay, that’s the Queue for Thursday. See y’all next week.