The Queue: Two Minutes To Midnight

Well, more like “seven patches to Midnight,” according to the recently-revealed roadmap for World of Warcraft in 2025. Did you see that?

In fact, did you see that there was a big Warcraft event a few days ago? Crazy, huh?! We sure got a ton of new info about the whole franchise, from WoW (retail and Classic) to Hearthstone, Rumble, and even some RTS remasters! Which means that there are a lot of questions asked and answers given pertaining to all of those things.

Player housing! Woo!!!

Without further ado, let’s Queue.

Dearest Liz,

While I can’t be certain about the reason StarCraft is getting mixed up in our Hearthstone, I’d venture a guess that it’s because they’re trying to shake things up a little, attract some eyes to the game — especially from lapsed players. (Which is not unlike the strategy that WoW uses these days: for games that have been out for 10+ years, it’s certainly less difficult to pull back the old players than to attract brand-new ones.)

Is it going to be as bad as the Diablo crossover events? Hopefully not! But I’m confident it won’t, because this is a miniset, which simply uses a StarCraft “skin” over cards designed to work with the current Constructed mode. It could have been about, say, the Dragon Isles as easily as it is about StarCraft; they’d just have to come up with a different flavor for the very same card designs.

You should be excited! You should only have been worried if the expansion had been “Heroes of Call of Duty,” or “Heroes of Candy Crush,” or something like that.

Warmest regards,

Red

Like, ram horns or bull horns or unicorn horns or–

Oh, you mean the tool used by vehicles to signal those around them with sound. Gotcha. Moving on, then.

I’m digging the idea that you can customize your vehicle to increase its acceleration, or its top speed, or its drifting ability, etc. It feels very Mario Kart to me. (Did you know that Mario Kart is apparently the most stressful game ever?  Look it up, it’s true! But that’s not why I want those customizations.)

However, I wouldn’t mind if I could add the ability for my vehicle to shoot Red Tortollan Shells and Blue Tortollan Shells, or to allow me to consume a star-shaped magical item to become temporarily impervious to all forms of damage while also dealing heavy damage to outworld mobs around me for a few seconds — like the Monk ability Touch of Karma, on wheels. That would be sweet.

1. No! I just think they’re not gonna spend precious developer time on such a laborious (and tedious) thing; I still hold on to hope that they’ll find a way to automatize that task one day. Let the machines do the repetitive, menial tasks while the humans do the thinking!

2. ‘bout 27.6%, give or take. Outlook isn’t so good, honestly, but I wouldn’t totally count it out!

That theory is a bit strange, Thomas, but I like it. I feel like it has potential to be a serendipitous future lore development: I don’t think the developers did it on purpose; I feel like they did always intend for the Nerubians to have their own architecture, which implies that they have the means to build their own cities. But that doesn’t stop them from also taking over cities that they conquer — and it’s certainly a very interesting direction to take their lore on.

I’d certainly dig it. And then I’d find an underground city beneath it, and spread my pheromones there, and live there once we got the Player Housing feature. Wait, what?

Patch reveal for sure. At this point, I’d bet the Harronir will take the spotlight as soon as we deal with Gallywix and the threats in the Undermine. But I don’t think they’ll be made immediately playable: just like with the Earthen recently, and other Allied Races such as the Nightborne, the Zandalari, the Vulpera, etc., I feel like we’ll be introduced to those new allies, spend some time with them, but only get to actually play them in a patch after that. Possibly 11.2.7, or even 12.0 (which is technically before Midnight).

I gotta be honest, man: I was thinking hard about this yesterday, long before I even saw your question, because I really have no freaking clue.

Perhaps the designers felt like they had to take us to Undermine now, because there’s simply no moment more appropriate for it — we’re finally doing the whole “underground” thing this expansion. But Undermine has nothing to do with the story at hand, so they had to work backwards to come up with some sort of justification. And I honestly don’t have the slightest idea of what it could be at this point.

If I had to take a wild guess, I’d say Gallywix tried to make some sort of agreement with Xal’atath. Having been pretty much forced out of the Horde, lost his prestige and much of his power — and having no scruples to his name — Gallywix could simply be trying to pull a Queen Ansurek, and make some sort of deal wtih Xal’atath. He’d offer her something — resources? Azerite mines? I don’t know — in exchange for a position within her empire once she inevitably wins.

Which I’m sure she’ll give to him. Like, yeah, that seems extremely likely. Xal will totally make good on that promise. Trust her, bro.

I don’t know, man, the patch where VanVan and Jaina join forces to fight crime and due to their actions we end up getting four new Allied Races (Saberon, Vrykul, Corrupted Arakkoa, Uncorrupted Arakkoa) and a multi-class system will have that one topped.

This has been The Queue, friends. Take care, and have a good weekend!