The Queue: Purgatory

The holidays have gone, but my kids are still at home, so we’re mostly playing games together. It’s next to impossible to queue up for a solid game of Overwatch when you need to go make somebody a waffle, or if somebody — in a move which was impossible to predict — spilled a bunch of syrup on the floor and needs help to clean it up. So we’re mostly playing Roblox for the next few days. Yep.

This is The Queue, where you ask us questions and we’ll honestly do anything to get out of playing Royale High for a few minutes, so.

It sure does! Get ready to kill an additional three bosses. The Caverns of Infusion features Kurog Grimtotem, Sennareth the Cold Breath, and Terros.

As a former Worgen, I completely understand this feeling. For a while there, I had a set macro to swap myself back to Human form when I did stuff like mount, because I was never a huge fan of the Worgen stuff beyond the steampunk pseudo-Victorian aesthetic. But unfortunately, much like the Worgen, Dracthyr don’t really have a huge reason to be in their Visage form a majority of the time, especially in battle. I doubt we see anything like this later on (sorry).

Absolutely! I’ve always disliked the notion of making things unavailable forever if you don’t do them by X real life date, especially since a lot of these things are season-by-season. If you always have limited availability in the summer months because your kids are out of school, that’s a whole lot of neat cosmetics you’ll always be missing, even if you have oodles of time to play in the fall.

This lowkey rant may or may not be motivated by the fact that, by putting all Blizzard’s holiday events so late in the season I effectively missed out on all of them, despite being hype level max toward the beginning of December. Just annoying.

Stagnated is kind of a loaded word. Pet Battles have been relatively samey for a while, yeah. But given the nature of pet battling it’s a tightrope to walk between collectors and battlers, and people who just want to earn achievements and play the main game but also dabble in battling occasionally.

It’s tough, because on the one hand you want fun new battles and encounters for your die hards. Designing around the older pets mean the encounters usually have a very simple counter or two to work around that are more intuitive for your newbies but boring for the experienced battlers. Newer ones use more synergy and can be a fun puzzle, but can be frustrating for newbies who have a limited stable, and worse, those battles can start to represent power creep.

In this case, I’d definitely stick closer to the side of being more grindy and repetitive but easy to jump into.

To some extent, figuring out the synergy between various talents and such is emergent gameplay. So is whatever the heck Rextroy is working on lately.

Emergent gameplay is one thing I’ve found to be frequent in indie games more often than AAAs, and I think it’s less because of the QA-type testing in AAA to figure out every single combo of conditions, and more because it can represent a sense of mastery of the material. It can also help foster a sense of community for the game in tertiary media and meeting places, which is very important for less well-known indie games in general, but especially for games which don’t have a multiplayer function in order to build community in-game organically.

In The Long Dark, items like raw meat decay more slowly if you leave them outside in a snowbank, but items like canned peaches will decay more quickly outside. Plus, if you earn enough cooking XP, you can eat even completely rotten meat as long as you cook it first — it bumps the durability to half when you cook it — but if you store the meat in a container like a car trunk or plastic bin, when it decays to zero the item disappears. Knowing that little tidbit of game mechanics helps me to optimize my chances of survival, but it also makes me more likely to seek out other enthusiasts who might know more little tricks.

Is that kind of depth of knowledge fun for everyone? Absolutely, obviously not. Do you sometimes feel like an idiot when you come back to a place and all your stuff is gone because you put it in a locker? Yup. Am I about to post a meme about spraining my ankles in the subreddit? You betcha.