The Queue: Devouring the scenery

One thing I always adore about Overwatch is how completely over-the-top the performances and lines are. Every character is larger than life, with reactions and interactions to match.

This is The Queue, where you ask us questions and we FACE THE SUNRISE!

As someone who doesn’t attend BlizzCon, this would be amazing. Build that hype with describing all the cool stuff that’s coming, and now I actually get to play it for keeps? Right now, right this second? Amazing.

However, I realize and acknowledge that the people attending BlizzCon in the flesh hit the sweet center spot of the venn diagram between diehard fans, people with some degree of time on their hands to boost those engagement metrics, and people who have cash to burn. If a game or patch or whatever went live for real — as opposed to demos or vertical slices playable on the show floor, which we have seen fit this idea in the past — it would certainly alienate those people. It would feel like they were being punished for going to BlizzCon, because they couldn’t have their cake and eat it too.

Though I will say by that same token, for me as a fansite journalist, I pretty much always have zero time for anything during BlizzCon weekend anyway, so I’d be left in the cold too. Articles like, “a hands-on look at the (game) demo” wouldn’t fall to me, and even if it did, I’d play for maybe 20 minutes and then sit idle in the game typing.

In the abstract, yeah that would be cool. But considering how they do customization options, in practice it would end up being a little odd. Since Eredar is basically a Draenei off-color, they’d need to add UI elements to add those options, which would end up shifting around a bunch of random stuff as you swap. I don’t think it’s necessarily bad to add those shifts, and I’d think they’ll add something like that in the future, but that’s a different team than the people making the art, so it seems natural that there would be a mismatch in how those things come into play in-game.

Weirdly, this went live in the middle of the night, but yeah, the Kalimdor Cup is live now. We did a whole write up on this new feature. Seems fun!

There’s always a certain charm to Timewalking because of little things like this. Yes, re-running the instances regardless harkens to the past, but remembering what a pain in the butt all those motes of whatever and the randomness of grabbing a bunch of herbs from an instance is what really brings the nostalgia home for me.