The Queue: Don’t press this button (press this button)

A game can’t put buttons in front of us and expect us not to press them. Buttons are there for the pressing, and the bigger and redder they are, the more tempting they are to tap. If you don’t want us to press a button, have you considered not having a button? I think that’s a surefire method.

With that out of the way, let’s get to the Queue.

I think portals should be consistent and stop confusing me.

I’ve gotten used to how the Azj’kahet portal works, so now I just walk up to other portals, which don’t work. And then I remember oh, you have to click them. And then I go back to the Azj’kahet portal and try to click it, but nothing happens until I walk closer to it. Oh, right, I don’t have to click this. And then I visit another portal and….

You see where this is going. It doesn’t matter whether portals need to be clicked or not, but it should be consistent across the game, otherwise it’s just confusing.

JUST MAKE UP YOUR MIND, PORTALS!

I think the number of bosses needed to understand a raid’s story depends heavily on the raid, and so far Story Mode has only been available for one raid, Nerub-ar Palace, which only includes the final boss fight.

And honestly… I think it works just fine that way. Sure, there’s more story in the raid than in the last fight, but there’s also a log of tedious slog through boring encounters (narratively, anyway) and piles of trash. The question to ask is whether these fights are narratively significant (and narratively interesting). Is every fight a story that’s really worth telling? I don’t think so. I think you can focus on that big final fight and let some of the middle just be implied. But some raids have more fights of note and/or more complicated story structures — Battle for Dazar’alor stands out in my mind as a raid with a great overarching story, complete with unreliable narrators. You would miss a lot of the excitement of that raid if you skipped to the end.

Where will the next raid fall in that range? We don’t know, so it’s hard to say if it’s a story that can be easily wrapped up by jumping to the end, and skipping past all of the bosses in the middle.

There’s no such thing as too silly for Warcraft. World of Warcraft is a silly sort of game, packed with pop culture references, in-jokes, and easter eggs. I don’t think there’s a too far to go, and Undermine’s silly mounts don’t get close to a line here.

Also I am going to be riding that tyrannosaurus mech everywhere.

My favorite books span two wildly incompatible genres: long fantasy or sci-fi series I can get lost in and not think about reality, and nonfiction that is so crazy that it reads like fiction (or is so crazy it wouldn’t make believable fiction). For the former, Steven Brust is an absolute favorite of mine, who I never seem to hear about beyond my own head — start with Jhereg and keep going for as long as you’re entertained. It’s “rule of cool” fantasy (that bleeds into science fiction in places) that paints an unconventional fantasy setting that has sprawled out over forty years.

For the latter, a nerd like you might enjoy The Cuckoo’s Egg. (You can borrow my battered 1989 paperback if you promise to take care of it.) I’ve been thinking about rereading it myself, and in writing this has reminded myself what a great opening it has: “Me, a wizard? Until a week ago, I was an astronomer.”

That’s all for now, my friends. Take care of yourselves, have a pleasant weekend (if at all possible), and leave a question for Cory to answer come Monday, won’t you? I’ll see you back here next week.