The Queue: Down With The Sickness

It isn’t often that my now-teenage daughter gives me something but when she does it’s usually a cold. Her immune system tends to be ironclad, and mine is also similarly strong, so when the littler one brings something home, eh, it’s a headcold or whatever. But when my daughter brings something home and I catch it, it is gnarly and won’t let go. I’m on day 4, and I feel worse than I did yesterday.

If Cory also gives me his cold I’m going to haunt this website when I die.

This is The Queue, our daily column where you ask us questions and we ooh-AH-AH-AH-AH

Swords, then hammers, then axes.

I use knives constantly for everything from slicing boxes to cutting veg to trimming bushes. Everything else is considerably less versatile, but I find many more uses for hammers than axes. It’s pretty rare that I go split wood, but I’m fairly confident I could do a serviceable enough job with a single-sided sword and a mallet.

It may be the Dayquil talking, but I am freaking out about the whole “Next Chapter” verbiage. I’ve seen a lot of people joking about Diablo 5 and WoW 2. Though I do think it’s likely we’ll get big flagship sequel announcements — some kind of WoW Classic+ or WoW Classic Classic Classic is almost certain — this seems to imply that it’s not the next chapter for a particular IP, but the next chapter for either BlizzCon itself, or Blizzard.

This will be the second BlizzCon under the Microsoft umbrella — sort of. BlizzCon 2023 happened a month after Microsoft’s acquisition, then BlizzCon 2024 and 2025 were both cancelled. And if I’m Microsoft, this is probably the last BlizzCon. It has always operated at a technical loss, and none of Microsoft’s other gaming studios has something like this. They just announce at PAX or gamescom or whatever instead of having to deal with the expense and logistics of their own festival. The other option would be MicrosoftCon, which let’s be real, would just be Call of Duty Con with a side stage that Blizzard and Bethesda share. Though, I wouldn’t mind just BlizzThesdaCon, really.

This year, we also saw a rash of projects shuttered, studios shuttered and spun off, as Microsoft’s new CEO wanted to hack and slash, lean and mean, AI-driven blah blah blah. This is where I’m trying the hardest not to spiral and failing. I don’t think it’s likely that Blizzard will be shuttered or spun off, but I do think it’s likely that we’ll see the announcement of actual closures of games that are already on maintenance mode but require some degree of constant server traffic for PVP. Rumble, Heroes of the Storm, and Starcraft 2 are already on ice for new stuff, and I’d even be so bold as to maybe suggest the Warcraft 3 remaster may also get the axe. Blizzard Arcade would likely be safe. They can just sell a box and you can play Rock N Roll Racing where ever you want, and they can even play it fast and loose with peer-to-peer downloads, but if you need additional server bandwidth just to keep it alive, it’s unlikely those Microsoft Excel spreadsheet columns for microtransactions jive. They can use those AWS instances for even more Call of Duty! (I was going to write a different joke here because it feels kinda hack comic, but out of 16 total non-Blizzard games on the launcher, seriously, nine of them are different versions of Call of Duty).

But those are negative announcements, and not likely to be all that welcome at the convention itself. Unless they did have a full on new IP to showcase all that would take center stage as opposed to the games, which would (sigh) make the shares tank instead of rise, which is really (double sigh) the whole point of doing an event like this.

So I’m fine, everything’s fine, it’s just the Dayquil, it’s cool.

It’s funny, because I appear to have crossed a weird threshold with survival crafters. It would appear that I now own so many that there’s very little left to entice me, even with an entire fest dedicated to it. Several of my longtime faves (Long Dark, Icarus, Pacific Drive, Project Zomboid) are on sale. Several items which are on my wishlist but not on sale are highlighted (Zero Seivert, Grounded 2), or have a halfhearted 10-20% off sale (Windrose), and those I can just wait on.

So right now I think I’m going to grab The Planet Crafter and Sunkenland from the sale, and also throw in Aerial_Knight’s Mr. Freezy, which just came out today and is a puzzle game where you play as a lady serial killer, which is also very much an Anna kind of game. I do kind of adore the ones which mix wanton lady violence and survival crafting, but I already have 7 Days to Die, so.

I may wind up doing a whole article on the sale later, depending on how long it takes me to write up Lore Watch this week.