The Queue: Long, long queue

The famous “Sakeru Gummy vs. Long Sakeru Gummy” series of commercials — more popularly known as the “Long Long Man” commercials — are some of the greatest commercials ever made. So much that they actually won the top prize (the Silver Lion) at the 2018 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, among other awards.

I’m reminded of that commercial because last night I asked for Queue questions, and you guys delivered (I love you all): I got so many of them that this Queue grew incredibly long. So long that the very first draft already went over the unknown limit where the ghosts in the machine get fed up with our crap and decide to erase the whole thing. So I had to cut some questions, which is really sad.

Alas, much like our hero Tooru-san, This Queue will forever be envious of a longer Queue — the kind of Queue that would make his beloved Chi-chan swoon — but that it’ll never be.

Explorer gear will start at item level 415 on patch 10.2.

It’s also worth mentioning that Heroic and Timewalking Dungeons will now count towards the Great Vault, and that Crests will now be upgradeable. Combined, all of those changes mean that even the most casual of players will be able to get some nice weekly rewards, and depending on how diligent they are about their playing, upgrade that gear to higher and higher item levels!

I hope it happens. There’s a whole dedicated Classic community out there, but there’s no more content for them — I don’t think Cataclysm Classic will happen, because it seems to go against the whole premise of what that community wants from the game.

So I do hope the Classic players are supported in some manner, and I think there are ways to create new systems that work with the existing content, rather than developing brand-new content — whether it’s with dungeon affixes and timed runs akin to Mythic+, or new raid challenges and achievements with some nice rewards, etc.

However, if they do end up developing brand-new content for Classic, I’m all for it. The Hearthstone team did it! The pipelines for those two games have completely different scopes, of course, but hey: there’s some sort of precedent, at least.

1) We’re gonna have an article going up Soon™ where the BW staff will share their predictions for BlizzCon! I’ll go into a little more detail there, but spoiler alert: my biggest wish is for the Hearthstone team to announce a new game mode that’s single-player focused, like my beloved Dungeon Run, but make it robust enough that players can viably keep playing it for a long time.

2) Not really, but that’s fine. With gear, catch-up is coming soon, making it a bit irrelevant to chase now. And with story, I am getting caught up on the stuff that interests me the most. I’ve done the Human Heritage armor questline (LOVED IT), the Warlock questline, the Eredar questline, and I started the Night Elf heritage armor questline. I haven’t really done much on the main Dragonflight story yet, though, but I do plan to get caught up on that eventually.

3) The cat asks you to change the channel on the TV, and if you refuse, he calls you an [REDACTED]. I’d trust him with my life.

4) I tried really, really hard to remember one that was specific to Halloween, but I couldn’t! I guess for some reason I just haven’t played many games that delve into that particular theme.

So instead of Halloween-themed, how about my favorite spooky/scary video game song? I’m glad you asked! It’s “Who’s There?” from the Persona 4 Soundtrack:

The piano is super eerie, like something bad’s about to happen.

1) Capybara. No question.

2) YES. In fact, once you do that, the game should just start spawning a Defias Pillager that automatically aggros you every 5 minutes.

1) Sadly, I don’t think so.

2) An HD version of the Cataclysmic Gladiator’s Scaled Armor (Elite Recolor), the coolest armor ever put into this game.

3) This guy — it’s not exactly a death scream, but it’s close enough. He’s just so happy about your failure!

Here’s some context for that question. The director of the upcoming Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, Naoki Hamaguchi, recently revealed that tidbit in an interview:

A fun little tidbit that I wanted to share about that is in the original, you may remember that Red XIII, if you go to Cosmo Canyon, once you go there, his personality changes a bit. And considering that his personality changes, we have it designed so that all quests in the game kind of has a Red XIII and a Nanaki version. So for people it has all options available for that.

I think that’s really, really awesome, and I wish more games embraced things like that. It adds a ton of flavor, and it allows players to make things slightly different on a replay of the game — but at the same time, it’s not something important enough that they feel like they “have” to play through the entire game twice just to see the different dialogue options. I love it when games embrace things like that.

Not enough Potassium. Eat bananas — or, if you don’t like them (like me), try avocados or sweet potatoes. Drink coconut water.

Microsoft Excel.

This has been The Long, Long Queue. Ask questions, friends — no matter how long they are! It’s the meaning within that counts.