The Queue: I’m just a girl

Once again, Cory earworms me even though I’m not even familiar with the song he chose for me. I have my own personal musical idiolect, and it’s not as quirky or as serious as you might want it to be.

This is The Queue, our daily column where you ask us questions, and whoa-oh, I’ve had it up to here.

I’m subbed and with the Early Access pack for the expansion, so no, it’s not just you. I’ve also seen “get back in the fight” ads on Instagram and on random pages in Incognito mode, so it seems like the marketing department just kinda figures that everyone out there has paid for a WoW sub at some point in the past 2 decades, so it’s safe to assume that slogan will land more often than not. Also, there’s always the pre-expansion doldrums. I’d guess I’m not the only one twiddling my thumbs waiting for the next expansion, especially since that was Anduin’s arc — he pretty much sat out Dragonflight to dink around in the Maw or whatever.

There are two titles I’m excited about in September, and they’re weirdly somewhat similar in tone, but diverge in theme and gameplay.

Reka is coming September 12, and I’ve been incredibly excited about this Baba Yaga simulator since I first saw the sizzle reel at I want to say Summer Game Fest 2 months ago. Foraging the forest for food and medicines and witchcraft reagents while living in a cozy little house on crow legs is so thoroughly my jam. Conversely, Bloomtown just crossed my dash for the first time at Gamescom earlier this week, and I’m so thoroughly bought in. It’s superficially a very cozy slice-of-life sim a la Stardew, but somehow a little twisted, a little wrong once you start scratching through that surface. It’s developed by Lazy Bear, the same studio behind Graveyard Keeper, so I’m expecting something equally weird and weirdly wholesome. That one is coming September 24.

If you really held me to it, I’d probably lean more toward Reka, as that is a very novel concept all around, and I tend to fall off life sims as being kind of complicated for me to keep track of, but both are very anticipated for me.

They are, but you have to be level 80 for them to unlock.

While I do chat in The Queue from time to time, most of my WoW chatter is in our fabulous BlizzardWatch Discord. I’m not sure that it’s public per se, as that’s a specific designation within Discord which then makes it searchable within the Discord app itself, but anyone with the link is more than welcome to join in. The “private” designation in this case is mostly to make the server easier to moderate.

We talk about WoW, of course, but also other Blizzard games, and other games we’re excited about, especially during events like Gamescom, or even today’s Nintendo Direct. Right now, a lot of us are excited about yesterday’s update to Spirit City, which is a gamified productivity demi-game a lot of our staff use to help stay on task. They added a ton of new options you can use to dress up your body doubled work buddy, and even more options to decorate your space. Ironically, I had to use the pomodoro timer in the game to get myself to stop redecorating my dang room. Now that’s gamification for you.