The Queue: Cozy Fall Gaming Session?

Every year, I get really excited for fall. The slightly crisp air, the food, the crunchy leaves, the cozy vibe, all come together to make it my favorite part of the year. And then as soon as I take a good, deep breath, I remember that this means we’re also rounding the corner on the most intensely busy time of the year. Between holidays, fall fundraisers, and the amount of stuff that getting ready for winter entails, I’m always too overwhelmed to truly enjoy it. But today? Today I’m wearing a soft gray henley and sipping a coffee with some nutmeg in it, and I’m pretty ok with that.

This is The Queue, where you ask us questions, and we promise we’re thinking of something other than what we should buy for our Halloween costume while we answer.

I always thought Fandral got a completely crummy deal. He’s one of the few characters who played a foil to leadership without being completely mustache-twirling evil. While the Morrowgrain thing was a little suspect, considering the general nature vibe of the Night Elves, it’s kind of surprising that he was the only one to have a little sidequest involving plants. Maybe Tyrande could be the spiritual and military leader of the Night Elves, while Fandral dealt with stuff like feeding them, or creating mundane saplings to bring to Ashenvale?

But then, they decided to go with that old Blizzard trope: Oops, he’s corrupted now. And that’s a real waste of a character like him.

I don’t necessarily need to see him back again, but I do wish we had a character like him, especially given the current state of Night Elf leadership. Heck, nearly every major faction could use some kind of antagonist in the vein of Fandral to spice things up. Questioning whether an unelected king for life appointed via primogeniture is the right person for the job isn’t exactly out of line.

I desperately want Sea of Thieves, but single player, or with PVE servers. I swear to god, every time I’ve loaded up that game, within five minutes somebody steals and sinks my boat while I’m trying to figure out… well, anything while I’m in port. Just figuring out how quests work or the basic features of that game seems like a death sentence. If I just jump on my boat and start sailing toward nothing in particular though, it’s fun as heck — but I have no idea what I’m doing and no opportunity to learn. Salt 2 kind of scratches the itch of that high seas adventure vibe, but their team is literally maybe three dudes, so while it’s a fun game and an incredible effort for the size of their studio, the development process is steady but very slow, and it’s still very rough around the edges.

While we’re at it, a Baldur’s Gate/Warcraft mashup would be stellar, and not only because I’ve always wanted to smooch half the cast. Also, a Warcraft/Stardewlike mashup. Again, not just because of the smooching — somebody has to grow those pumpkins, right?

Yes. As I recall, it generally goes XP style, so if you’re level 60, your pet gets some amount of happiness out of the level 45 food, but it’s green, so it’s decreased, and they’ll get almost nothing (if anything) out of food lower than that. They’ll get the most out of level 55+ food, though as I recall there’s no true difference between raw ingredients and cooked, so it makes sense to have a stack of quails on hand even if you’re farming spiders in Silithus. Conversely, if you’re in a dungeon and happen to pick up some level 45 food along the way, you may as well feed it to your pet. It’s not nothing.

The what?