The Queue: This is the part where we shoot each other

Starfield has a lot of influences. The spaceship design borrows heavily from old 60’s and 70’s NASA launches like the various Apollo missions, while also feeling not dissimilar to Space:1999 if y’all remember that one. In terms of gameplay, it’s a bit of a mixed bag, with a clear line of descent from Skyrim and the Bethesda Fallout games — in many ways it’s a successor to Fallout 4 with all the addictive spaceship and outpost building you can do.

But strangely enough, I can also detect influences from games you wouldn’t necessarily have expected. Bethesda has clearly played The Outer Worlds and enjoyed at least some aspects of it.

But every so  often I feel a strain of Red Dead Redemption 2 in the game, especially in the game’s Freestar Collective regions, where a whole lot of wild west goes from subtext to text. It ended up with us facing down waves of armed mercenaries ala The Magnificent Seven, because of course it did.

Not that I’ve seen but why let that stop me? Here’s something I’m literally just making up right now.

Coming in 2024, World of Warcraft: The Anguish of Nirn sees the long running fantasy MMO engage in its first crossover event with a famous franchise that some of you already know by the name and others are googling Nirn already. This time, the forces of Azeroth actually strike first, staging a major campaign to invade Nirn and prevent a powerful series of ancient scrolls from being used to summon an ancient Dragon back from the past. But have they been misled? Is this attempt to prevent a horror from returning instead being used to bring that future to pass? And how many times can we raid the Red Mountain?

Please oh scaly Bahamut please don’t be another D&D reskin. I love D&D, but if any game needed a system designed to bring what players like about the MMO to the tabletop instead of just being shoved into a D&D box, it’s this one.

Usually the ones everyone else seems to hate.

I mean, I really had a lot of fun in Cataclysm, raided a whole bunch Horse side, got a bunch of realm first kills. I also just generally enjoyed the raid design, I thought it was pretty neat and challenging. I don’t know that I’d say it was better than Vanilla, or BC, both of which I was very active in, but it was certainly a lot of fun for me personally.

Keep in mind a lot of the stuff from that leak was pretty old, and some of it was even pre-pandemic planning. I think the sheer amount of effort they’re putting into Game Pas means we’ll see the Xbox for a bit longer.

Still, if they did pivot, it’s not like Game Pass wouldn’t still be around, it would just be PC only.

So far every time I’ve picked up a PlayStation, it’s been a real downgrade in terms of how it runs and its UI compared to my Xbox. This was true for PS 3 and PS 4 and I expect it would be for PS 5 if there was even a snowball’s chance in my oven of me ever getting one.  I’d be sad if they stopped making them.

Anyway, here we sit, waiting for  ship after ship to drop Syndicate goons in on top of me. I will be shooting them with this shotgun/grenade launcher combo, as one does.

Have fun, be nice and ask Liz some questions for tomorrow, and we’ll see each other again soon. I’m gonna be running a Session Zero for the upcoming Pathfinder game, so that’ll be fun.