The Queue: Decks Dark

The Inky Black Potion is magnificent. You can make space look like actual space. You can imagine that your character is staring into the vast darkness and pondering their insignificance before it all. (My headcanon is that every Draenei does that every once in a while.)

This is The Queue, our daily Q&A column where there’s a spacecraft blocking out the sky, and there’s nowhere to hide. You run to the back and you cover your ears, but it’s the loudest sound you’ve ever heard, and all we trapped, rag-doll, cloth people, we are helpless to resist into our darkest hour.

It’s weird because they did add a ton of boat and zeppelin rides to the game, and both of those operate on a similar “you have to wait for the transport to arrive” fashion. But tram rides are slightly more inconvenient than those, because you also have to wait for the actual ride to happen, in full. Meanwhile, the boats and zeppelins just “teleport” to the destination with a loading screen in-between.

In addition to that, the tram requires all of that instanced space to exist in the game. The full extension of the Deeprun Tram physically exists; you could jump off the tram and go on foot if you wanted. It’s more work, more data. I guess the Ironforge-Stormwind tram was a cool experiment or one-off thing, but nothing that the WoW devs actually wanted to repeat, probably.

That said, I’d be okay with more trams in the game if they simply disappeared shortly after departure and got the same loading screen treatment as other transports, transitioning to a loading screen and then “teleporting” to a point near their destination.

Being fully honest, I’d hate that.

I get the devil’s advocate argument you’re making that Forever is meant to be more about the journey, while modern/retail is more about the endgame push. I can see several elements that point in that direction, but I certainly don’t think the contrast needs to be that high. Removing all the “enjoy the journey” elements from modern is throwing the baby out with the bathwater, and the same would be true for removing all endgame progression from Forever (trust me, a lot of players will be doing raids or pushing hard on endgame PVP in Forever).

Some players will argue that leveling is “just an annoyance on the way to the ‘real’ game” — I’ve been hearing that for decades at this point. But player experiences are incredibly diverse. I know quite a lot of players who are more than happy to play WoW as nothing but a leveling game, simply taking as many alts as possible through the content, leveling in different ways, enjoying that journey over and over. And rest assured that a lot of those players want to continue doing that, and not everyone, no matter how casual, is willing to simply abandon their existing characters, or guilds, or friends, or collections from Retail to start over in Forever.

There are four games on my Steam wishlist right now that qualify!

Penguin Colony. Apparently it’s a cosmic horror game where you play as a penguin. You have to explore and piece together what happened to an expedition. For some reason, they use the Neon Genesis Evangelion font for their title. I’m intrigued.

Detained: Too Good for School is a 2D beat-em-up RPG where you control a delinquent schoolgirl, kinda like River City Girls. I mean, sign me up. Sign me the F up.

Blighted is a Metroidvania from the creators of Guacamelee!, which is a fantastic game, and the visuals remind me of Hades, but with a darker vibe. They describe it as a “psychedelic Western nightmare,” and that sounds super compelling.

Theos: Cities Of Myth is a city builder where you create a city dedicated to one of seven Greek deities. Sim City meets Age of Mythology? At least in theory, that’s the angle, and it’s an angle that appeals a lot to me.

When people use question marks on sentences that aren’t actually questions, purely for emphasis.

Like, it’s so weird? Those people are crazy?? I literally can’t even???

There’s a song called Decks Dark by Radiohead which might be the most gut-wrenching song I’ve ever heard. I legit can’t even listen to it sometimes, if I’m in a more depressed mood, because it’s like it takes your soul and grinds it into a paste. It’s one of the most beautiful songs I’ve ever heard, between the piano, the RIDICULOUS bassline, the vocalizations, and the way the whole mood shifts around the 3:25 mark.

I legitimately think it’s one of the most sorrowful songs ever written. But it’s so gorgeous. And apparently a lot of people got to know it because it was used in the final scene of the first episode of the show Ozark. Some people claim that particular scene + music combo was so powerful that it got them to start listening to Radiohead.

Have a great weekend, friends, and try not to crash land your spaceships!