The Queue: Too many games edition

What a time to be a gamer. We live in a golden age of video gaming, in which there is a constant deluge of new, great, innovative titles everywhere — and this week in particular is jam-packed with indie game showcases highlighting the weird and the wonderful (and the weird). Of course we also live in an age of big-budget live service games packed with must-have microtransactions, so maybe on the whole it balances out.

But I’m trying to focus on the positive here, which is the many new games hitting my Steam wishlist.

(Is that a positive? Hm.)

This is the Queue, our daily Q&A column where I make my best attempt to answer your gaming questions. Let’s get to it.

Patch 12.0.7 launches on June 16, and I expect we’ll have news of the patch 12.1 PTR before the end of the month. My guess would be a PTR announcement a week after the patch drops, possibly two, but no more than that. Blizzard is on too tight of a patch schedule not to roll at least parts of the next patch out for testing soon — patch 12.1 is expected in August. (And this isn’t the Diablo team, which is satisfied with running a one-week PTR every three months. The World of Warcraft devs recognize the importance of testing the game, even if their QA is still… let’s just say inadequate. But they at least make an effort.) That means the PTR can’t be very far away.

But a teaser at the Xbox show? I don’t know. We don’t have a lot of history to work off since Blizzard’s acquisition by Microsoft, and before then it was abnormal for them to do reveals at major gaming showcases. Not that they never did reveals at other conventions, but other than Gamescom it was pretty unusual for them to make major announcements at other conventions.

It’s a new era, though. A Microsoft-driven era. Blizzard announced (and shadow dropped) a new Diablo 4 class (the Paladin) at The Game Awards last year, and it’s possible they’ve got something planned for Summer Game Fest as well. While I think this week is a little early for a patch 12.1 announcement, it’s not so early as to put it outside the realm of possibility. I’d give a 60% chance of a patch 12.1 announcement this week, either during the main show or the Xbox show.

Anybody else one to put odds on it? We’ll meet back to discuss later this week.

I’m thinking much more narratively than mechanically, but I’d like to see Azshara again. The Eternal Palace raid was very fun — something I say despite my dislike for underwater areas, which should tell you something — and the entire thing oozed with personality. Azshara’s personality. She was toying with us throughout the whole raid, because she needed the power in the Heart of Azeroth we carried; the entire raid was just her luring us in, and even our eventual victory was a loss.

When we last saw Azshara, she said she was leaving to claim the “true throne of power,” and who knows what that is.

But I know it means that Azshara isn’t done with us yet, and that she’s out there planning something. I’d like to know what it is, because Azshara is just fun to interact with. She’s not the classic villain that we stab until they go away. She always has a plan, and I imagine we’ll have a part to play in it.

Unfortunately, Blizzard is great at letting story threads like the “true throne of power” dangle, forgotten. If it doesn’t fit the current devs’ vision of where the Warcraft story is going, it won’t come up. It may not come up for years, until someone who’s interested in telling that story is making the call.

Or it might be a surprise patch 12.2 twist, like how Nazjatar was a surprise patch 8.2 twist.

We’ll know when we know. Until then, I keep wondering what exactly Azshara is up to…

I buy games on Steam for two reasons: I’m just really interested in that game or I see that game’s on sale and it sounds interesting. In the former, I might jump in immediately, whatever the price is. In the latter, it may be a game I knew but now have time to play or it caught my eye specifically because it was on sale.

So would I buy a game knowing that the Steam Summer Sale is just around the corner? Maybe. If I had time to play it immediately and found it extremely appealing.

But that means I frequently don’t buy games that aren’t on sale, because there are always too many games and too few hours in the day. I have a huge backlog of games to play, so it has to be something special to spark my attention to buy it, regardless of its current sale status.

The practical answer is to wait on the sales to hit. You don’t need a new game right now, and maybe you can buy two (or three) on sale soon.

The emotional answer is that sometimes you just really want to play a game and you cannot resist its siren song. There’s nothing to be done about that.

That’s all for today, my friends. I’ll be back next week with more dubious answers to your questions, and in the meantime I’ll see you in the comments section.