The Queue: And if you can believe it, it’s a Friday once again

It’s Friday! Can you believe it was just BlizzCon last weekend? Honestly, even as someone who was a somewhat disinterested watcher going into the whole thing, it was hard not to get more than a little excited about some of the stuff that we’ve all discussed endlessly all week around here. Now it’s a new weekend, and I have to shift into a tabletop headspace: I have four games scheduled for this weekend. Pray for my poor brain cells, they’re gonna get worn out by Sunday night.

This is the Queue, our daily question and answer question column where the definition of “question” can get pretty broad, but so can the definition of “answer.” Let’s get into it.

I have purchased a number of things in the past that coincidentally came with beta access, but only once have I purchased beta access for itself: I purchased the collector’s edition of Diablo 3, despite having no interest in Diablo 3, because it came with beta access for Mists of Pandaria. I was coming off of a break from WoW that lasted for basically all of Cataclysm — my guild crashed and burned hard within a month of starting raiding, and I didn’t return until the post-Dragon Soul waiting period — and honestly I wanted to see if the game was going to be fun enough for me to continue playing or if my time in patch 4.3 was a fluke.

On top of uncovering some bugs which I dutifully reported (one of them was that the starting hat for male Pandaren was a blue-and-white checkered cube), I also gave the Monk class a thorough playtesting that led to me playing it for most of that first patch even though it started at level 1, and put the early pet battle system through its paces. So hey, at least the one time I paid for beta access, I at least did beta stuff.

Yes. It’s specifically to annoy you — only you — and give you a sense of FOMO. They’ve got your number, bundtcake.

More serious answer: everything you named lasts for multiple weeks. No one is forcing you to try to make time for all of them at once. In fact, I recommend you don’t. Slow down.

So by Cyberpunk 2077 I’m assuming we mean a story-driven, choices-matter action adventure game with multiple playthroughs encouraged to see the whole thing, open world, lots of skills and approaches to challenges. I think I’d want this in the world of Overwatch. I imagine a lot of folks were thinking something like that during the brief, hopeful period of time where we optimistically thought we might get a story mode for Overwatch. It’s one of their franchises where there’s obviously just a lot going on in the background in terms of world-building and it would be nice to get a single-player game that really lets us play in that space.

As for the Stardew Valley treatment: World of Warcraft, but set it in Hillsbrad Foothills. Let me be a Forsaken farmer growing my bumper crop of Humans. Give a gift of a cockroach to that cute, slightly-less-rotten girl in the nearby village. Clean slimes up in the Ruins of Southshore for crafting materials.

Forever beta: I’ll probably play it a little bit if I get in, but I didn’t buy any of the things that guarantee access and I didn’t remember to opt-in until yesterday, so I suspect it will be a while until I get in. After seeing the queue and server stability issues yesterday, I have a feeling Blizzard will be a little wary before they open the next wave of invites.

Weekend plans: as I alluded to in the header, I have four tabletop games this weekend, two as GM and two as a player: running Fabula Ultima tonight, running a game that you’ll find out when it releases for the Tavern Watch Plays tomorrow, Shadowrun Sixth Edition on Sunday morning, and D&D on Sunday evening.

Also trying to decide if I should get the new Fire Emblem. How is it?

Paying the cat tax, as requested.

Happy Friday!