The Queue: Get your rose-colored glasses here

Do you remember your first trip to Ironforge? If you were a Gnome or a Dwarf, you were probably sent there around level 5 on one errand quest or another, your whole game life to date spent trekking through the snow of Dun Morogh. You can’t even see Ironforge from down there; the city is nestled in the mountains, up a steep hill, and you trek up, through the snow on foot, and the entrance slowly comes into view. And there it is, massive, so much bigger than you.

There’s a sense of grand scale that, somehow doesn’t come across in the modern game, where we would take a flight path or ride a mount or use a hearthstone to get to Ironforge without much thought. We wouldn’t trudge up to it on foot; how tedious! But there’s something to be said for the sense of scale and wonder as you walk up for the first time, or for the first time in a long time, and think about how small you are, and how large this Dwarven city is.

But I digress. This is the Queue, our daily Q&A column where you ask questions and I do my best to answer them. Here we go.

I wouldn’t hold my breath on this one, particularly after the Microsoft acquisition. Even though MusedMoose accurately points out that Blizzard games support Macs, in recent years new titles have only been on Windows. Overwatch, Diablo 4, Diablo 2: Resurrected, Warcraft 3: Reforged, none of them are Mac compatible (even though Diablo 3, Diablo 2, and Warcraft 3 all ran on Mac). And Mac support on World of Warcraft is not always spectacular. World of Warcraft is the only application I have ever run that has caused my Mac to hard crash with a kernel panic, as recently as last week (the Forever beta performs abysmally on Mac).

I don’t think Mac support is going away from current games, as it has too much of a legacy and too many subscribers, but I don’t see Blizzard rolling it out for more games, or adding more operating system support.

However, you can get Blizzard games running on Linux, and I have friends who use Linux for all of their gaming. While I continue to suffer through middling Mac performance, I understand that Bazzite is a good Linux distro for gaming and as Moveover pointed out, there’s SteamOS.

Well, there is this game called World of Warcraft that’s over 20 years old now… and I’m thinking about going back to something called Warcraft 3...

But I really don’t go back to old games that often, even if I’m nostalgic for them, sometimes that nostalgia breaks quickly when I actually play them and remember how much games have improved over the years. I do semi-regularly go back and replay Mass Effect, but it’s not that old (ME2 was 2010). I had an inkling recently to go back and play BioShock (2007), but I was quickly frustrated and watched an actual play instead of going in myself. Mostly I’m happy with my rose-tinted glasses staying rose-tinted, and enjoying the fond memories of games past.

All of that stuff I just said about leaving the past in the past? Apparently complete lies, because I have really been enjoying the World of Warcraft: Forever beta (despite its abysmal Mac performance).

Welcome to the cult, brother. We hand out rose-colored glasses at the door.

I am waiting until October 1 to pull out my ghost candleholders for the year.

But October 1 is very fast approaching….

That’s all for today, my friends. Take care of yourself, be kind to one another, and I’ll see you in the comments section.