The Queue: My favorite part of BlizzCon 2023

There is a point every BlizzCon where my brain has devolved into a useless mass of half-wrinkled goo. At that point, everything seems funny, everything is enraging, everything seems like simultaneously a good and bad idea. Brings me back to college, really.

It was at this time when I encountered this photo of a single tiny cactus in the Hearthstone area from our Away Team member Joe Collins. I don’t know why this cactus is such a vibe — so lonely, so precious, so special, so charming — but it is the best thing to come out of BlizzCon 2023, and I will protect it with my life. It is so stupid. I love it so much.

This is The Queue, where you ask us questions and we’re… not promising anything at this point.

If the square says “before,” go ahead and tick that box. BlizzCon itself tends to be such a whirling infodump that there are always smaller news stories that sort of fall through the cracks. Though we do try to catch them, “oh, btw, new race heritage armor,” is definitely a minor bullet point for most players next to “the next THREE expansions!” And even if it is an announcement made after the fact, that’s probably why they waited to say so — so us poor beleaguered news writers can have half a second to breathe.

On the one hand, probably, but on the other hand, with The War Within, it seems like they’re all but doing away with realm distinctions for everything with the possible exception of naming rights. Everything from the AH to guilds to M+ raiding is cross-server now. In light of that, it seems kind of odd to arbitrarily cap character creation by server.

Bringing this up because while yes, this is kind of hilarious, it was disruptive enough that it’s been hotfixed rather quickly. Don’t worry you’re about to get Cask of Amontillado’ed in Stormwind.

My supposition is that we’ll get 10 levels for each of the upcoming expansions in The Worldsoul Saga, and then when that arc concludes, we’ll have another level squish.

I’m not quite sure if they’ll continue to announce full arcs rather than simple expansions from now on. However, regardless, or even if they have an expansion in between arcs I’ll kindly refer to as a “rebuilding expansion” in between to set the stage and allow us to finally live out our player housing pumpkin farmer dreams, that will definitely be the time to do the next level squish.

I also don’t think we’ll get away with having an expansion with no leveling at all. The leveling experience is more or less an expository tutorial phase, where you’re brought up to speed with the new stuff for your class, and the new borrowed power mechanic, and all the narrative motivation for the events of the expansion. Letting everyone just start at the level cap kind of makes that guided tour of the new stuff far tougher.

I really and truly enjoyed a lot of Wheel of Time. I actually enjoyed a lot of the stuff other people didn’t — most people I speak to who are into Fantasy Fiction really like the swordfighting, action-adventure aspects a lot. And while Wheel of Time does have those, and does them well in my opinion, there are also wide swaths of pages (and pages and pages) which are dedicated to politicking and more subtle skullduggery, which I personally tend to enjoy more.

The middle is a slog, for sure — by book eight, there are so many secondary and tertiary plots afoot we don’t even see one of the main characters at all. But it’s worth a read.

I will caution you that, if you take up the Amazon Wheel of Time series, it vastly differs from the books. It’s to the extent that we’ve taken to calling it Wheel of Thrones, because it diverges so hard from the source material, that if we keep it in our heads that it’s supposed to be the same work it’s kind of irritating.

Site’s haunted.