The Queue: John, Paul, George, and Rathma

I cracked this joke in the fabulous Blizzard Watch Discord, and if you think I’m going to let a gem like that go by without rehashing it, you must be new here, hi. One of my favorite things about playing Diablo is being able to juxtapose the gritty, literally dark gore against lighthearted jokes.

This is The Queue, where you ask us questions, and we’ll answer them as long as we can slide close enough to the bottom quarter of the wall in this isometric view to actually see them.

Watching the development process of Blizzard as a whole, this would kinda suck. While Blizzard’s expansions tend to come out within six months or so of their original projections — they have to, or else we get a year of Siege of Orgrimmar — their new titles and sequels tend to have egregiously long timings, for a variety of reasons. We saw the first Diablo 4 cinematic at BlizzCon 2019, for example. Have you heard a single peep out of Arclight Rumble in the past, like, 2 years?

So if they gated off a story beat to Warcraft 4 which they intended to carry through as a “current event” in WoW, they would necessarily have to push off that expansion until WC4 was out, and out long enough that it had the time to breathe, both story-wise, and please purchase and play this game-wise. So that means, unless it’s a completely tertiary plotline with zero real effect on the world at large — basically Deaths of Chromie, but a whole game — we’d be shoving back the WoW expansion literally years.

I like the idea of a rebuilding-style expansion, from a general mechanics standpoint. It would be tough though, because most of the places I’d like to rebuild are old, and so it would likely feel very “Cataclysm Part 2.” We’d probably be able to revisit the past via Chromie, unlike Cata, but even though I’d love to have a whole hub where I rebuild everything it would still generally be somewhat dissatisfying in the long run.

But my dear sweet queue friend, what was Teldrassil if not a defeat launching a whole expansion for a particular faction? And as someone who’s mostly bifactional, it did, in fact, feel incredibly bad. If I want to play a game like that, I can always boot up Fallout 4.

First of all, I’m answering this question as a subtle reminder that yes, you can earn a huge variety of cosmetics and other junk just by watching Drops enabled Diablo 4 Twitch streams for the next few weeks. I certainly didn’t forget, but you may have.

After ensuring everything is linked up and delivered (with Drops in particular, this usually takes a couple days for me) when things are in-game you’ll be able to transmog them via the Wardrobe, like all other transmogs.

Gasoline. No, really. …no, not because I’m huffing.

I don’t know why, and I certainly wouldn’t buy a gasoline-scented Yankee Candle or whatever, but almost any time I catch a whiff of gasoline I think to myself what a good smell it is. It’s also wrapped up in good memories of my dad and my childhood. Especially now that I use an electric car most of the time, it’s a novelty in some ways.

And also it’s a lot more interesting answer than cardamom or vanilla or whatever.