The Queue: Welcome to 2026 (for real this time)

Stay a while and listen! Get into a comfortable position, grab a beverage of your choice to sip, kick up your legs, and hold on to your seat: 2026 is here, and we’re in this together, for a whole year!

This is The Queue, our daily Q&A column where we answer things and throw our old calendar in the bin because a brand-new calendar with different numbers in it has just been placed on our desk.

It’s been, like, what, five minutes since the year started? Iunno, I don’t feel any different yet. So far, so good?

I’m just enjoying the time off from the day job (got another full week before I return), and family! Nice and cozy.

For me, personally? A bit worse than usual, yeah. It feels like The War Within ended not with a bang, but a whimper.

It was very nice to get Legion Remix (or, as I call it, ReLegion), but I got the distinct feeling that it arrived too soon. People were “done” with season 4 way too quick. I barely did anything this season! This is probably the first time in my WoW career that I’m actively playing through the end of an expansion — a period that I usually enjoy a lot — but barely touching the live game. All my characters, even my main, are woefully undergeared, because I don’t see the point in investing in gear to play a season that has essentially already ended.

Sure, much of that is on me: I skipped the beginning of season 4 because I was taking a short burnout-induced break from the game. But as I came back to catch up, Blizzard had already released a lot of enticing, time-limited content, such as Remix and the housing preview AND the beta! It was hard not to take advantage of all of that, when the live game is just the live game, same as every other expansion. Still, I feel like the timing could have been handled a bit better.

Gone are the days when I would decide on a different main for every expansion! I used to rotate mains (usually between Monk, Shaman, and Paladin). But for a while now, I’ve settled firmly on my Monk as my only true main, and that’s how I intend things to stay. However, I do keep planning to rotate my “main alt” every major patch, as I’ve been doing (while focusing on the Monk as the character I take the most seriously).

For Midnight, though, we’re in a never-seen-before scenario: a new, addon-less world, with a big pruning of complex mechanics and “simplified” spec rotations. It’s scary. And I really need to test all the specs, after Blizzard is done messing with them, to see how they’ll play in this strange new universe. So I’ll probably devote a lot of time on the pre-patch to make a new rank of which specs I want to play the most in Midnight.

Protoss being gone will certainly make me happy, but Quest Warrior dying for good will make me even happier. God, I hate that deck. It stalls and stalls and annoyingly stalls, just like Protoss, but it’s considerably more effective. Ugh.

When it comes to power level, I think we’re in a pretty good place right now. Things don’t feel super overpowered, and it’s possible to win with a variety of decks and archetypes (though I think control is slightly favored over aggro at the moment, but not by much). I hope they keep things roughly the way they are now, while addressing “feeling” outliers — those decks that, while not overpowered in raw numbers, feel super bad to lose to. (Protoss is almost there, I feel, but not quite.)

I’m a bit wary of Paladin. I think it got some pretty strong cards that aren’t really shining yet, but might become scary once stuff starts rotating out. I could predict a future of 7/7 tanks with Divine Shield, bolstered by Auras, dominating the ladder until the nerfs come — but it’s hard to make accurate predictions. We’ll see!

I try not to “expect” these things very much and let the announcement surprise me positively. However, given how long it’s been since they started talking about Persona 6 and the whole 30th Anniversary thing, I do kind of expect a Persona 6 announcement in the coming months. I hope I don’t disappoint myself — we’ve kinda been there with the 25th Anniversary event!

But I don’t expect P6 to be the only thing. I think they’ll have other spinoff games too. Maybe mobile stuff, maybe something aimed at the Switch 2 (but also available for other platforms). And if we’re talking Atlus in general, not just Persona, we could get some sort of remaster as well, from one of the plethora of SMT spinoff titles.

I still want to go to Japan real bad. Two weeks seems like enough time to be there. Sufficient to see both the modern and the ancient. The calm and the chaos. And have a grand old time.

I never take my laptop with me, but I do always pack a portable console (Switch or Steam Deck) for the downtime!

A miserable little pile of mechas. But enough talk. Have at you!

I kid. Macross is a mecha franchise with a story taking place in the distant future of 1999, when technology will have advanced enough that spacecrafts will wage war with each other, obviously.

It’s legit hard for me to say exactly how popular it is/was, but I know we’ve got a whole bunch of OVAs, movies, TV shows, manga, videogames. I’ve never really explored it, but it’s definitely big and famous, and there’s a lot there.

…unless you already knew all of that (which is very much possible), and were wondering more about the word Macross itself. In which case, we’ll have to ask Mr. Wikipedia:

The word Macross comes from a wordplay combination of the prefix “macro” in reference to its massive size in comparison to human vehicles […] and the distance they must cross.

Have fun!

This has been the first Queue of 2026! We hope you have a very good year, better than 2025 was in every possible way. Take care, friends!