The Queue: Don’t play with my heart, Blizzard
@MatthewWRossi
I don’t think I’m gonna make it to June.
It’s your friend Roxxii here with a question about a new trend in the WoW community. What do you all think about this new “hardcore” movement in classic (classic hardcore) and retail (KSM hardcore)? My understanding are it’s basically a solo experience where if you die you delete your character. I know Classic also only allows you to run dungeons once, no auction house usage, and no receiving purposeful help from anyone. They have a dedicated discord and even an appeals process from muliganing deaths. Should Blizzard try to support these “challenges” more directly?
I feel like Blizzard has already put stuff in Classic to help with Hardcore challenge mode play and it’s a bit niche to really make supporting it all that big a priority. I mean, Diablo has always had it since D2, so I could be wrong about that. And there have been signs of Blizzard potentially adding something to the retail game, so who knows?
I personally think it seems like people can do Hardcore mode entirely on their own, based on the KSM (Keystone Master) or KSH (Keystone Hero) trend you mentioned where players try to get a new character to max level and get the Keystone Master or Hero achievements without dying once. They’re already doing it and doing it just fine on their own, what would Blizzard really add to improve it?
QftQ: Has there been any word about Warcraft Arclight Rumble?
Also, I get the Warcraft and Rumble parts of the name, but is there any other reason for the name to have the word Arclight, besides the acronym?
To answer your first question, we have heard vanishingly little about the game since last year. As in, nothing. The Beta appears to be cranking along, but in terms of things like a release date or even yes, we’re still planning on releasing this I can’t recall the last time we got any new information.
As for why it’s called Warcraft Arclight Rumble MusedMoose’s answer that the conceit of the game is that it is being played on a mechanical arcade device powered by the mysterious ‘Arclight’ is the one I’ve heard as well.
If the Oilers could stop giving the LA Kings opportunities I would be so happy
Yay! I’m so happy!!
Now they just need to do it again a few more times!
15… more times
Get Wayne Gretzky to sneak into the arena and hide a twoonie in the ice, that’ll hex the Kings but good.
Man, I kind of hope the team on BG3 fixes some of the things that were pretty annoying in Divinity: Original Sin 2. Not that it made the game terrible, just too many little things can be pretty annoying.
I realize DOS2 was a very ambitious game and it succeeded in a lot of ways though. I’m just hoping BG3 is better since that’s a, I think, bigger and probably an even more ambitious game.
Honestly, as someone who has played both games, BG3 doesn’t really feel all that much like Divinity: Original Sin 2.
I mean, you can tell it’s a Larian game, but it has a very different vibe and I didn’t really notice anything that made me have a Bethesda moment, you know? No lingering bugs or issues that were present in Morrowind that are popping up in Fallout 76 or anything like that.
As of right now, based on what’s available in early access, I’d say BG3 is going to be the biggest CRPG of 2023 and probably one of the best. It’s not my personal favorite new era CRPG — that’s Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous which was just a phenomenal game — but it is very good.
Q4tQ: if there’s a genre/style of games that you don’t play, what could change about it that would get you to play it?
For me, I’d love to give souls-like games a try because I’ve heard amazing things about what it’s like to learn the lore and story via exploration and little pieces of history. But I won’t play them because they’re designed to be unforgiving – I’ve tried a few, and there’s a “figure out how to play and keep dying until you do” mentality to them that just doesn’t work for me. If those games could have an easy mode, I’d be all for it.
Unpopular Opinion — the Souls-like ‘learn the lore from exploration and little pieces of history’ thing is basically just what other open world RPG’s have been doing for years and years. The Witcher series, various Bethesda games, even the recent more RPG like Assassin’s Creed games have all been doing this. Cyberpunk 2077 was absolutely chock a block with hidden lore drops and environmental storytelling.
For me, the example I usually use for this is Overwatch/Overwatch 2 — I get motion sickness from the swooshy graphics and if they added the same kind of accessibility options that WoW has to turn certain things off, I’d love to give that game a shot. Also, where did that PVE stuff go? I was mostly interested in that, and then it never happened.
That’s the Queue for today. Brought to you by the letter G and the number 103.
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