The Queue: An auspicious day

Happy Friday the 13th, everyone! Let’s enjoy the day while we have it, so we’re gonna get right to questions.

The thirteenth is always an auspicious day, whether or not it coincides with the nearest Friday, and regardless of where it falls in the cycle of calendar months. However, it Is now the 13th and a Friday and it’s October — scientifically proven the best month of the year — glorious! Oh glorious day!

I think the fear here is pretty simple. The Old Gods try to twist our minds, toy with our perceptions. They try to take away our friends. They try to take us away from ourselves.

It’s not an overt horror, limbs ripped from limbs. It’s a whisper in the dark. Your friends will abandon you. Kill them all before they kill you. Trust is your weakness. Your courage will fail. They have turned against you. 

It is not that the Old Gods try to kill, destroy, corrupt. It is not the horrors they are or the horrors they create. It’s that they take all that you are, and leave you a shell, friendless and alone. The gulf between what you were and what you might become is by far the scariest thing they might do.

I think the fantasy of archeology — an Indiana Jones-style adventure where you run through tombs, recover treasure, and defeat the bad guys — is a great one, and we’ve seen Blizzard pull out that trope in multiple stories before. The problem is that archeology, as an in-game profession, has never lived up to that promise of adventure. Instead, it has you out collecting fragmented relics as you survey potential digsites across the continents.

We’ve had some neat rewards from archeology in the past. Uncovered bits of lore. Explored. But it’s never been an adventure. Secrets of Azeroth is a quest chain designed to be, perhaps, archeology-adjacent, and capture a bit of that fantasy of uncovering the unknown. But I don’t think it’s an attempt to revamp the archeology profession — I simply think it’s its own way of capturing that fantasy, because the profession itself never did. But story quests? Those can create the kind of narrative necessary for such an adventure.

I have it on good authority that the must-play night elf class is Paladin… we’re just waiting on Night Elves to get Paladins before we can do anything about that.

We are as we were, as we ever shall be.