The Queue: The universal desire for a taco

On Saturday over in the Blizzard Watch Discord, Anna Bell noted that the recently-released Titanium Court was “aggressively Phil U. coded.” She’s not wrong, of course; it has been on my wishlist since the demo launched a month or two ago, and an incredibly wry combination of match-3 puzzler, roguelite, and auto-battler about faerie courts trapped in a perpetual war in a surreal shifting reality, led by a queen who really just wants to go home but finds that her steward who holds all the answers is avoiding her as much as possible, is in fact squarely in my wheelhouse. Titanium Court is a game that’s not afraid to ask the big questions, like “what if you could replace intrusive thoughts with pleasant ones about baseball?” and “is the desire for a taco universal?”

And so, I launched it yesterday and lost my entire night immersed in it. I looked up and said “when did the sun go down?” Been a while since that happened. But today is a new day! So let’s set that “potion of liking baseball” in a sunny spot until it bubbles and answer some questions insetad, because this is The Queue, where we do that kind of thing.

Nope! Not that I don’t think about it — especially after my wife got her first one a couple years ago, it’s got me thinking maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to have a little ink of my own. But I’m a big baby about pain, and also I honestly don’t know what I’d want to have permanently inked onto my skin. That’s probably the first thing I would need to figure out, huh?

Your patience is being rewarded: you can play the expansion today! Here’s our post including details about what time it launches in your timezone!

I have been pretty iffy on Diablo IV in general, but I admit the idea of the wholly revamped skill trees is very intriguing. Y’all go play it and report back so I can see if it’s good, alright? Alright.

You’d know better than me, boss, I haven’t played the expansion.

But the sudden appearance of a fishing feature with no use other than achievements? (Since, as we discussed, you cannot shove fish into the Horadric Cube, and that thing takes anything.) It certainly seems to nod towards something…. fishy.

I’m gonna opine on this. (For background, my day job is as a software developer, although not in the games industry — and my employer has staunchly refused to use AI because we have some pretty stringest privacy requirements in various contracts, though I have experimented with it on my own and have a negative opinion.) Everything I am about to say is purely my opinion; I have no insider knowledge that you don’t have, and it doesn’t reflect the opinion of the site as a whole.

It’s not wrong that Microsoft, Blizzard’s parent company, has been forcing AI adoption on its developers in the fact of it not getting adopted anywhere else — that’s why we have that infamous headline about CEO Satya Nadella bragging that 30% of the company’s code was written by AI, shortly before months of Windows errors that even included things like Microsoft recommending not updating to specific updates. One can reason that this pressure is likely being applied to Blizzard as well as Microsoft’s core teams, so I’d wager that it’s almost certain that AI tools are being used somewhere in Blizzard’s internal tooling — although in extremely old, extremely large, extremely custom codebases, sometimes the impact that AI can make — even a positive one! — is very limited.

That said, I don’t think we can blame this one entirely on Copilot, Cursor, or Claude. Blizzard has been pushing for the eight-week patch cadence nearly since I started playing WoW during The Burning Crusade; I remember this coming up in the keynote as an eventual goal during the Cataclysm reveal! The X.0.0, X.0.5, X.0.7 patch cadence has been around since Warlords of Draenor, but they really did not hit the speed they wanted until The War Within, in my opinion — Dragonflight felt fast, but not this fast. The problem is, when you move fast without adequate testing, stuff breaks.

Not coincidentally, we also know that almost all of Blizzard’s quality assurance testers were laid off two years ago. Scuttlebutt has it that they’ve gradually rebuilt that department to around eighty employees, but the reality is that it’s not like things are entirely untested: bugs are being reported, which means they are being logged somewhere and they’re still either being assigned incorrectly low priorities and not being fixed.

In my opinion, vibe coding may be part of the problem, but it’s just a symptom. This smacks of poor project management, of adherence to schedules above all else, and holding the eight week patch cadence up as a sacred goalpost that cannot be moved for any reason, even if it means shipping broken code. When things go live in this state, it erodes trust; we’re only one major patch into Midnight but at the rate that this expansion has accumulated bugs that have been reported since the alpha and gone unfixed, Blizzard really needs to evaluate if the eight-week patch cadence is worth maintaining at the cost of all else.

As many as they can display, because I do love a little variety, but for the love of all that’s holy, please make some of them match. Look at this snippet of a screenshot I took from Final Fantasy XIV this past weekend (the news of the new expansion, as well as the upcoming Beastmaster job, has me dusting off my old Warrior of Light):

So many golds! So much mismatching! Too many shades of gold is not just a WoW problem, but at least sometimes I can dye them in other games.