The Queue: Never have I ever

Since we’re playing icebreaker games this week, apparently, I decided to go for the gusto. Never Have I Ever, the game where either you want to confess your secrets, or want to pressure your friends into revealing theirs. In hindsight, it’s a very mean girl thing to pick (so it makes sense that I picked it).

This is The Queue, our daily column where never have I ever asked the questions. So, I get to put a finger down, and you…?

It’s hard to say. The original two had such deep, weighty ties to lore. Yet, we’ve seen other races pop up that also have strong ties to Demon Hunter lore — it seemed a mistake to omit Draenei and Orcs from the lineup to begin with, let alone races like Void Elves or the Nightborne which both seem even more Demon Hunter-y.

And then you can be a Tauren Warlock now so sometimes the rule of cool trumps lore.

I always hope we see more races able to play more classes just in general — there’s almost always a way to headcanon a justification for a class for a small handful of characters to become whatever class you can think of. I’m not going to be upset about it either way, though.

You know, it’s funny, there’s nothing that categorically turns me off in terms of biomes, per se, but there’s a strong feeling of “must be a vibe.” I loved Pacific Drive and Caravan Sandwich and The Long Dark and Cozy Grove and Blue Prince because they are all unmistakably incredibly different, but all undeniably vibes, from art style to gameplay to mood.

I’m finding over the years that “high fantasy” by itself tends to rest on that, making most games in that setting emphatically not a vibe, especially since there are so many of them, and even as they seem different there’s also something a little samey about them. Part of the reason I gravitated more toward Oblivion than Skyrim, for instance, is because while both are a kinda samey high fantasy setting, Oblivion lets you detour into, you know, Oblivion, so you pingpong between grass and ponies and picking flowers, and literal hell. Gotta respect that. Though Skyrim‘s title screen and its version of the Elder Scrolls main theme is the biggest, most hype vibe I’ve ever come across in gaming, even compared to the other versions of the same (kinda hype) theme, to the extent that it has the lead spot in my running mixtape. It spent all its vibe in the first two minutes.

Anna you’re saying “vibe” a lot without defining it. Good point, person I didn’t ask. Anyway,

So I’m a big believer in, if you don’t want to do it, don’t. You definitely have a valid gripe in being annoyed at all the stuff that goes into professions these days — the random discovery mechanics which grant recipes that may or may not suck are the pits. But I also don’t think that forcing yourself to do it because it might be useful when XYZ happens is going to lead to a good time. This goes double for stuff that’s landing in a future expansion. While I don’t discount the possibility of say, putting a pattern for a wall-mounted anchor on a Kul Tiran-aligned Engineer, I don’t think it’s worth doing a grind you loathe just in case they do. That info will likely surface before it goes live, so you’ll be able to grind it out then — and from there on out, since this feature certainly shows no signs of going away.

Plus, while there are always those few outlying recipes, I’d bet the vast majority of stuff you’ll be able to just buy or trade off someone who already did that grind, and hopefully didn’t hate it as hard as you are right now.

oh honey I’m cursing even if everything is going right. You just don’t get to see it because we’re generally PG around here so it’s not appropriate to call names. Especially when your coworkers deserve it.