The Queue: so little to do and so much time!

No wait, strike that, reverse it. I’m late!

This is The Queue, our daily column where you ask us questions and we’ll answer quickly. We gotta run, man.

lol no.

As much stuff as can possibly fit will be shoved into your bank in the new universal bank system as possible. I’ll also note that there are certain items which are going to go away completely — they would already have been nuked if they weren’t in your Void Storage. I get that they don’t want to maintain that string of numbers, and it seems like a little thing, but in practice there are so many players that anything they go to maintain in any way starts to get significant. That said, the whole point of Void Storage was hoarding those exact items, and I would definitely be upset if they got rid of my weirdo items from 2006.

And no, Pidia, I haven’t started transferring my stuff yet. Ugh.

I’m glad to get Quests back. I’ll miss Trinkets, but not Anomalies. I can feel very locked-in, tunnel vision-y with all three, but Anomalies feels the worst because you’re trying to force the same families as everyone else in the lobby, and especially with a few of the families there are only a few specific cards to nab (and thereby lock out from your fellow players). I love the idea of tier 7, for instance, but especially since they full on removed the only tier 7 Demon for bugginess, that kinda cuts down on the viability of playing Demon in a tier 7 Anomaly lobby.

I will say I’m the most curious to see how they try to start scaling down the power creep. Rally as opposed to Deathrattle seems like one way they’re going to try it, but it’s always so wild to go back and see screenshots of super impressive ramped up boards from like, season 2. Of course I took a screenshot, this one guy has over 100 health!

I don’t think it’s too likely. Gamescom is likely to be 100% Midnight hype. Even doing something like “and we’ll tease the conclusion of the saga a year from now at BlizzCon 2026!” would take the wind out of the sails of that announcement.

While I’m sure there’s someone in HQ who is already freaking out about the organization and the scheduling and everything for BlizzCon 2026, it’s still a long way off from an attendee’s POV.

Goods news, The Long Dark 2 is coming… eventually… and while there are updated systems, including co-op, it’s mostly similar. So, still snowy. And I love that.

I’ve played a lot of survival builders and survival sims, and the ones that I usually find the most compelling are the ones where the environment itself is the true core danger. Weirdly, there are a lot of similarities between something like The Long Dark and a Subnautica, where there’s a good amount of gameplay there, but the true danger is always your own hubris — going just a little bit too far in a blizzard, getting in a little over your head. I’ll play games where there’s weird radiation and zombies and whatever else, but my favorites are a realistic scenario where the true terror comes mostly from within yourself.

There are a few survival games set in heat-related biomes, or mixed biomes. Green Hell does a lot in terms of heat, but it’s a jungle so things like infected wounds and constant bugs are the things that are the most deadly in those environments. Icarus is my current favorite, but depending on what you’re playing (just survival, versus the Missions you’re sent on), you can totally just avoid the desert or winter biomes until you’re so overgeared it doesn’t really matter.