The Queue: Did someone ask for another Island Expedition? Because it wasn’t me.

Siren Isle is fine. It’s completely fine. Nothing wrong with it at all, and there’s not much more to say about that.

I also enjoyed the Forbidden Reach more than Siren Isle, but I think a notable portion of that is because the two are so similar. Siren Isle is fine, but it feels like the off-brand version of the Forbidden Reach.

On the Forbidden Reach, we got some notable story about the Dracthyr and Neltharion. We got to explore Zskera Vaults, full of Neltharion’s secrets, which I found very fun, sometimes funny, sometimes with interesting narrative clues. Siren Isle is just a place that is like the Forbidden Reach but without any story tie-ins and no relation to The War Within. You really feel the place’s origin as an Island Expedition that didn’t make it into the game in Battle for Azeroth. The whole thing just feels so random.

Siren Isle is completely fine. There’s nothing wrong with it. It’s fine.

And that does rather damn it with faint praise, but it’s all the praise there is to give it.

I think it’s fascinating that Team Liquid is venturing into chess, which you can’t exactly call an esport. But it does fall into this liminal category of competitive gaming that isn’t based on physical prowess.

Are we going to see a competitive Excel team next? Farming Simulator, maybe? (You may think I’m joking, but there are in fact competitions in this space.)

However, expertise in one form of gaming does not always translate into another. Strategy may be strategy, but WoW is full of odd quirks. It would be like playing chess without knowing how any of the pieces moved.

This is a somewhat serious question to a somewhat silly question, because it is interesting. What is esports anymore, if a professional esports team is now adding chess grandmasters to its roster? I’m honestly not sure.

There are some excellent floating islands in WoW that you could make a home on, and honestly I feel like there has been some buzz about that idea ever since Burning Crusade, when we all rushed to see just what was on those islands (and where are those waterfalls coming from??) as soon as we got flying.

But it doesn’t quite vibe with the concept of a neighborhood, which I think is one of the interesting conceits of WoW player housing: that you’re part of a community full of people, to hang out together and critique one another’s interior design choices.

At least it doesn’t inherently vibe with the concept of a neighborhood. But there are certainly ways to make it work. There could be larger landmasses with more houses, though the larger they get the less they feel like a floating island. So perhaps instead it’s a network of floating islands, with bridges or teleport pads connecting them. They could maintain the rocky character of those islands in Outland, but still be part of a community, perhaps with a large island as a sort of “town square” at the heart of things. Or perhaps you could have an ordinary neighborhood, but with a few islands floating over it, styled to match the aesthetic of the area

If I had the option to build a house in Durotar or a house in a floating island above Durotar, I’d choose the island every time.

And maybe that’s coming in the future. Blizzard has already said that they wanted to focus doing a couple of areas well for the initial launch of player housing, rather than doing a whole bunch of areas that were just okay. I think that’s a good philosophy, and it means that there will always be places to expand, including islands.

Not Siren Isle style islands, though. Once we’re into the next patch I do not plan on going back.

And that’s all for today, my friends. Thanks for being here and keeping the Queue an interesting (occasionally too interesting) place. Take care of yourselves, have a good weekend, and I’ll see you again next week.