The Queue: Friday returns… for revenge!

Friday keeps sneaking up on me, leaving me with a worrying pile of things still on my to do list. But it’s Friday, and that means it’s time for a family meeting: let’s talk about what’s been going on this week and, most especially, patch 10.2.6.

You don’t have long to wait: Diablo 4 hits Xbox Game Pass on March 28. For anyone who hasn’t tried the game out, the single-player campaign is well worth your time: Diablo 4 is, surprisingly, a very solid story-centric RPG with some truly spectacular cinematics. After completing the campaign, however, it falls into the usual Diablo cycle of endless leveling, which may or may not be your thing.

It’s… fine, I suppose. It has some fun rewards and it isn’t hard to participate in — even though it is a little buggy, even after a couple of rounds of bug fixes. I’ve gotten the mount but I really want the pet and certainly wouldn’t say no to the bag, and will probably keep working at it until the event ends next week.

However, like many events in WoW, it’s one new event just like the old event. This is mostly a copy of the Diablo event, though it’s dropped the semi-random placement of the treasure goblins, and the bosses coming through the portals are both large enough to easily see and sturdy enough to survive for everyone to have a chance to hit them. It’s a good event, with some genuine improvements. It’s not a very exciting event, but it’s a good event.

I think we can’t say with certainty that Blizzard missed the mark with patch 10.2.6 until we see what 10.2.6 is. Can it live up to expectations? It’s hard to say, because Blizzard hasn’t set any, only said there’s going to be a patch and we won’t know what it is in advance.

It’s an interesting experiment, really. Blizzard has seen the success of WoW Classic’s Season of Discovery, which has sent players back to vanilla, but with a twist. With some new content. With some surprises. And it’s been a very long time since World of Warcraft has had any surprises: typically we know every move the game will make months in advance. Maybe this surprise will resonate with retail players the same as it does with Classic players.

But the problem may be specifically that Blizzard hasn’t set any expectations, which means players are setting their own expectations. My expectations aren’t very high: I think we’ll get a harmless bit of fun that’s nowhere near full patch sized. But without expectations being explicitly set, there’s plenty of room for people to expect everything from this minor patch.

Still, I think it’s possible that patch 10.2.6 could hit that sweet spot and give players that little bit of surprise they crave without being a disappointment. We’ll see next week.

Honestly, I wonder if something went wrong, if a technical issue or uncertainty made Blizzard leery of posting anything meaty. A simple release date announcement doesn’t fit what we’ve come to expect in something called a “developer update.”

As much as yesterday’s announcement was a disappointment, Blizzard never said it was going to be about 10.2.6, and I certainly hadn’t expected it to be about 10.2.6. All we were told was that there would be a dev update post, which I personally assumed would be about Season 4. As far as a development update, from what we’ve seen in the past, a release date is a little less than I expected.

But again, this is a matter of misplaced expectations. I think one of the most important things a game developer can do is set appropriate expectations with their community, so nothing is overhyped — because overhype inevitably leads to disappointment and frustration, and that’s bad for everyone.

In the case of this release date announcement, I think it would have been better not to have announced that there would be developer update.  The term implies something in-depth, which wasn’t what we got, and because of that everyone was disappointed when all we got was a release date.

And that’s all I have for now, friends. Stay safe and take care of yourselves, and I’ll see you back here next week.