The Queue: I’m not saying I’d like to build a summer home here, but the trees are actually quite lovely

Another day, another week, another Queue. Let’s chat!

Hey, let’s go team never finished BG3! I started later than my group of friends and sort of got behind on the craze, then I was busy with moving and unpacking and remodeling (and still am) and I made it through act 1 but no further. At some point I’ll finish it (probably), though I am similarly at that decision point of whether to just start a new playthrough because it’s been months (and also now I understand the basics of the game a little better).

Everything about this statement is true. (But I’m still not rerolling Void Elf, even though they do have really great hair.) I am trying to convince my raid guild that we are all just one amazing transmog away from killing Fyrakk, but I’m not sure the message has hit home. I’m going to be working through the Trading Post this weekend and I am gonna show up for raid night on Monday looking amazing and judging everyone who does not live up.

I hate invisible walls and guardrails and paths that appear to go where you want but you can’t actually take them. Almost every game has something like this; places you can’t climb or parts of zones you can’t get to, and I understand that games need to be built within a specific scope, a specific scale. There’s only so much landscape you can flesh out with details.

But sometimes the ways to navigate around that landscape are obtuse, unclear. You try to get to where the game tells you to go, but you hit an invisible wall. Or there’s a rock you can climb over but you have to click just so to get there. Or there’s one specific path up the mountain and no other promising paths up the mountain work. (I especially loathe running circles around hills looking for the one place you can climb to the top or the one place you can find the entrance to the caves below. I do this in WoW a lot.)

A good game avoids this by making the paths to get to where you need to go clearer and easier to access, or allowing multiple ways to get there, so you don’t have the feeling of running into invisible walls even though they’re still there. Because they have to be there.

Are we not all eggs of the light, waiting to hatch into our grandest and most light-infused selves? Waiting for our spectral wings to carry us aloft so we may inflict righteous vengeance on our enemies?

And that’s the Queue for Friday. Take care of yourselves everyone and have a great weekend!

Also, if you have any transmog tips for plate-wearers trying to kill shadowflame dragons, leave them in the comments. I really do think fashion is the last thing I have to optimize.