The Queue: And I know it

Y’all wanted an earworm? Y’all got an earworm.

This is The Queue, our daily column where you ask us the questions and we don’t care bout anything but youuu~

Right now I’m playing a ton of Starbound, which plays like a kind of spiritual successor to Terraria in a lot of ways. The graphics style and gameplay loop is very similar. The key difference is that, in Terraria you’re kinda stuck with the seed you get on your map unless you want to reroll, but Starbound revolves around your ship and interstellar travel, so if you don’t like a particular planet, that’s fine. You can move to a new one — and will have to, in order to progress. There’s also a story element which guides you through the next steps of gameplay in a way Terraria doesn’t, and it all guides you toward exploration.

My favorite part — or at least, the part that appeals the most to my lizard brain — is the base building and survival elements. After you’ve visited a particular area, you can plant a flag or even place a teleporter to get back there quickly, so building multiple houses and having bases for different purposes is a great idea. I have a small hanging out base in a relatively safe Forest biome for when the combat aspects get too spicy, an orbital space station for crafting gear and tools, and a beach house right on the water for food prep and cooking. And having tons of different beings in tons of different biomes means that there are a ton of varied neat little doodads for me to secret away and hoard in my own bases.

But, in a “only you use games like this Anna” way, I’m really enjoying the soundtrack and ambient sound design. The game sounds continue even when you’re tabbed away, and I’ve gotten into a (maybe bad) habit where a lot of the time when I have my headphones it sort of puts my brain in Work Mode, so I want something to listen to in the background. At my beach house in particular, the music is very relaxing, but I also get the sound of the waves, and I also may have stolen some windchimes from houses in a different biome, so it’s just perfect for, you know, sitting around and writing The Queue.

This is less a question, obviously, and more a PSA, but this is my Queue so I do what I want. Thank you for your service, sir.

Speaking of Gilneas, I have been waiting almost 15 years to get a version of the NPC birdcage veil and small hat fascinator, though I think if I go back into my old characters’ bags I may be able to transmog it now. But the Gilnean female NPCs had them forever, and it is such a freakin serve that I’m not sure why it took as long as it did.

While we do have a few backpack options now, the lack of random weird back options is kind of surprising. The fact that Night Fae got those weird little backpacks instead of moth wings is still appalling. The Kyrian wings were alright, I guess, but there are so many things you can do with a back slot and Blizzard hasn’t done very many of them. The back slot could be used for everything from Doc Ock style Yogg tentacles to a Baptiste-style robot arm tech, and it seems like they haven’t even scratched the surface on the zaniness they could allow.

I’d suppose it comes from stuff like model clipping, especially now that we have the Dracthyr — but then, there were always a ton of weapon options sheathed on the back that could interfere with things like that. But still.

I find it very tough to predict sometimes exactly what Blizzard is going to do next with things like this. On a narrative perspective, it makes sense. Heck, in terms of realism it makes sense for Humans to go traipsing their merry way through Orgrimmar even when the relations between those nations was at its most hostile. Trading goods — and knowledge, which is crucial in a universe where we have to somehow learn how to make fireballs out of thin air or heal wounds by waving our arms around — is still important, and occurs in real life even when the nations of the people doing that trading are actively at war. If pumpkins won’t grow well in Durotar, it makes absolute sense for some Westfallian with a real big cart to hop on a boat and sell them at a huge markup in The Drag. Heck, some of those lumberjacks from the Eastvale Logging Camp could bring an end to the hostility between Orcs and Night Elves by easing their need for wood.

But, from a mechanical aspect, Blizzard seems so in love with the faction conflict. They’ve said over and over that it’s completely inextricable from the narrative of WoW, and that they will never, ever remove it. I do think that “hey maybe we should have a detente while we try to solve this whole stabbed planet thing” is in the cards. But I’m not sure how permissive they’ll be on a mechanical level. Heck, I’m not sure how permissive they can be on a technical level. It’s possible, considering the dang near 20 years of code that have been sunk into this thing that removing a faction divide might make Orcs incapable of wearing shoulder armor or something equally bizarre.

That said, I feel like it’s unlikely we’ll be back in Silvermoon as it exists now. There’s a possibility they’ll let us into a newer version of Silvermoon, but if so they’ll likely rebuild it from the ground up. And the thought of a new, updated Silvermoon is enough that I do kinda hope it’s in the cards.

Um, what on earth makes you think those two things are mutually exclusive? Wow.