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The QueueMay 9, 2024 12:00 pm CT

The Queue: Got no way to

And it returns, as it always does, to Celldweller.

A painful picture/
That I can’t forget/
Now what I see/
Is what I get/

Let’s Queue this.


MUSEDMOOSE

Q4tQ: ever miss out on a big chunk of a game for a long time because you misread something? Today I realized that the quest I’d been ignoring in Cyberpunk 2077 was in fact the continuation of the story I thought I was waiting to have continued. >_< I hadn’t done it because I thought it was the one that started the Phantom Liberty story, and only realized I was wrong after seeing the actual Phantom Liberty quest in my journal too. Oops.

Honestly, I’m a very obsessive reader and re-reader of information in games. So I usually catch that kind of thing pretty quickly. I did once realize that I’d missed an entire zone in Dragon Age Inquisition because I never did the quest chain with the weird skulls across various zones that serves as a breadcrumb for it, and so, never got the special items from it.


PLUNDERLORD ROXXII

Ugh I was trying to reply to a comment and when I hit the reply button it caused the page to refresh and now I can’t find it. :(

Meanwhile, I was trying to write the Queue, and I fat fingered and ended up restarting my PC.


RETPALLYJIL

I am having a terrible day at work. Please post pictures to soothe my jangled nerves.

Here’s one that often helps me, I like to imagine Superman punching Mongul  like this over and over again. Just really soothes me.

This one’s my dog. She’s really great. She likes to kind of get a bit too intense with the face lickies. But she’s super sweet.


DRAKKENFYRE

WoD has a duality in VA performances for me. A LOT of the stuff is great, like that exchange. But then my ears want to cringe at every single female Orc line in practically the entire expansion, especially the raid bosses. They sound like the audio director told the VA(s) “Do the lines like someone trying to imitate a rough-sounding voice but not quite getting it. And then slow them so there’s obvious gaps between every word like each one carries great weight.”

Warlord Zaela is in this comment and she doesn’t like it.


FALRINN

There really has been a trend in cities either being retaken, built, or redesigned lately.

It started at the end of Shadowlands when the Forsaken reoccupied the Ruins of Lordaeron and committed to eventually cleaning out the Undercity, then we had the Night Elves build Bel’ameth, the Gilneans retook Gilneas City, we all know that Silvermoon is due for a redesign in Midnight, and it wasn’t even in the cards before but in 10.2.7 we learn that the Draenei’s next big project is building a new city instead of hanging out in the wreckage of the Exodar forever.. I think there were even some recent-ish rumors of a Stormwind redesign and even some relevant assets datamined (high poly versions of classic Stormwind buildings).

Could just be a result of Blizzard wanting to clean up some long standing plot threads. There is something to be said about the game having too many open plot hooks and “waiting for the right opportunity” often means “not happening ever”, so it’s better to just force an opportunity. But I almost wonder if it’s building towards something else, like a proper world revamp beyond the Worldsoul Saga? Dunno, but it is something to think about.

Honestly, we are in a weird period for World of Warcraft and frankly, I suspect that the discussion from Battle for Azeroth about the Horde and Alliance has had something to do with the shift.

Look, not to drag the whole thing back out again, but even for Horde players it gets weird to be playing as the guys who destroy cities all the time. I managed to keep playing my Tauren through the destruction of Theramore, but when the quest chain to burn Teldrassil showed up I was simply no longer interested in playing Horde. It’s not the players, it’s the sheer number of times the Horde has burned Alliance cities, and the one time we could have had the Alliance pay it back with the Undercity assault, Sylvanas blows the place down?

Two capital cities were destroyed in Battle for Azeroth and both of them were destroyed by the Warchief of the Horde. That’s crazy. It’s just wild, and the speculations about a particular person who once worked on the story (the one who had a dragon named after him that suddenly wasn’t named after him) have always made it feel rancorous and bitter.

So seeing old cities get rebuilt and new ones erected, hearing about more changes and repairs, I think it’s at least partially a course correction. Frankly, I don’t think the WoW player base wants or needs to do the whole Enemies With Benefits thing the Horde and Alliance do every time an Old God or a invading force of Demons shows up. It’s cool to see the Horde having finally addressed the way it was created and the things it’s done, and to see the Alliance and Horde work together in a diplomatic way. I want that to continue.

Sure, it’s World of Warcraft, but at the end of Warcraft 3 we were essentially promised a new age with these factions standing togerther. That was over 20 years ago in real time. I think it’s time we got that new age.


KALCHEUS

Q4tQ Can you recommend any scifi/fantasy novels where the protagonist(s) are middle-aged with either grownup kids or simply not parents?

The Wolf’s Hour is a solid Werewolf fighting Nazis novel by Robert McCammon, and it’s one of his better works. The main protagonist was orphaned by communists during the Russian Revolution during the chaos during World War I, and by the time of the novel he’s in his forties with no children (the one werewolf baby he sired died). It’s essentially What if James Bond fought Nazis during World War II and was a werewolf.

The Repairman Jack novels by F. Paul Wilson (author of The Keep, which is another books involving fighting Nazis) involve an unmarried man (at least at first, I don’t remember if he gets married eventually) who ends up fighting supernatural horrors despite his down to earth approach as a sort of hired mercenary similar to the Equalizer from the TV series and the Denzel Washington movies. They’re really a lot of fun. It’s sort of similar to if Batman was okay with murdering people, chose to use being nondescript as his costume, and ended up fighting monsters and demons more often than he’d really prefer.


ARTHONOS

EA is considering “dynamic ad insertion” again, so surely Blizzard is soon to follow.

Bleep I hope not. I’m getting too old for this bleep.

Okay, that’s the Queue for today. Take care, all. Hug the people you love. Make sure they know you love them.

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