The Queue: Another hour of life gone (to another gaming showcase)

I am not a fan of gaming showcases and events. They’re usually heavy on hype and light on things to actually be hyped about. Last week’s Warcraft showcase actually went pretty well, with a lot of info to share and some exciting reveals. But today’s Overwatch showcase? Well, since my expectations were on the floor, it managed to exceed them, but I’m not exactly overwhelmed, despite a new cinematic trailer … something we haven’t seen since… well, I started scrolling to find one and eventually gave up. It’s been a while.

Maybe Overwatch can stage a comeback. Maybe.

But while we wait for that to happen, this is the Queue, our daily Q&A column. Let’s get to your questions.

Overwatch is planning to do a year-long narrative told through hero cinematics and in-game events, focused on Talon and its change in management. I’ll call the new cinematic a sign of life, but in recent years Blizzard hasn’t put in the legwork to make us care about these characters in order to make us care about their fate. That makes it tough for a cinematic like this to land on an emotional level, even as it starts out in tearjerker territory with Vendetta’s father.

It’s trying to do what some of those early cinematics did, make us fall in love with a character and break our hearts in an instant. And it does a very workmanlike job of it. It’s got all the pieces there. But what it doesn’t have is any heart. All we know about Vendetta up to this point is that: her father is dead and she’s big mad about it. That’s just as much as we know about her after watching this cinematic.

Overwatch 2 was the beginning of the end for Overwatch, because even as it purported to include a new (never launched) story mode, it was the end of Overwatch storytelling. We stopped getting cinematics. Story got pared down to lightly animated or motion comic backstory trailers for new heroes. But they were characters to play, not characters to relate to. Not characters to root for. Characters in Overwatch today are just there, with light set dressing on why they’re there, and no stories to tie anything together.

So even as Blizzard is trying to tug my heartstrings about Vendetta, I don’t know why I should care about Vendetta. She’s a supervillain nepo-baby with no defined personality beyond anger. This trailer adds no stakes. This trailer doesn’t give me a reason to care. It’s a big dramatic moment, but we’ll have to see if the Overwatch team follows through and gives us a reason to care in an ongoing fashion, as it tries to build characters back up.

That seems to be the goal, but it has a long way to go.

You can just watch this cinematic from 2016 to see how far the game has to go to get back to where it was.

I’d be willing to do quite a lot, but it depends on the decor. The Dark Portal decor item that we can currently get for just logging on? I’d do a lot more for that, even though I don’t know exactly what I’m going to do with a Dark Portal of my own.

But if it’s just some chair? I don’t know. I think we all have the “gotta catch ’em all” vibe due to the fact that we get XP for collecting new decor, but if the reward for Worldsoul Searching was just a neat chair, I don’t think I would bother.

In fairness, I have not bothered, there’s a lot to this achievement, and getting a new chair would not help matters.

But maybe if it was a really cool chair…

It’s the little touches that make a scene, so yeah, I think the game could stand to have more small decor items to just scatter around and make your home a space that feels real. I mean, players are doing a lot with what they have, and resizing and rotating and moving things into new contexts can greatly change what they appear to be, but it’s the little pieces of decor that are especially charming, tiny details.

Housing invites all kinds of creativity into making our own quill pens out of whatever we happen to have in our inventory. But more things means more options. So yes, give us more little things to collect and scatter around. I’m never going to have a writing desk that matches the one I have in real life, but I can keep trying.

I think the event has gotten a lot better, in that there’s a pretty good pace of rares to hunt and things to kill, plus for people who really want to grind, you can spread it across alts. Since gear drops are warbound (and not keyed to your armor type), you can collect gear for everybody from everybody… though at the same time it’s a little slower to gear up just one character.

But the event overall is pretty reasonable to participate in, and jump in and out of. I don’t know why it’s taken several weeks to get here, but we’re doing good (at this point).

I doubt they’ll add it this late after the fact, even though it would be nice. Even being able to get a non-optimal trinket easily would be nice, particularly for those new Devourer Demon Hunters who couldn’t even get int-based trinket drops before the patch. Having an easy trinket option would help you fill out that last awkward gear spot, but no event can do it all, and this one does have plenty of gear rewards. Maybe that’s enough.

If so, I’m staying away. I know it’s supposed be a spooky game mode, but there’s a line between fun spooky and too spooky.

Abby is too spooky.

Since I haven’t decided what I’m maining in Midnight, that could become even harder to answer soon.

That’s all for today everyone. We’ve survived to another Wednesday, so let’s keep it going. Take care of yourselves and I’ll see you in the comments section.