Christian Thoma

The Tokyo Game Show is this week and it's the final big gaming showcase event of the year (while the Game Awards are still scheduled for December -- hopefully with some fixes -- we typically only get a few announcements and seldom gameplay).

Guild Wars 2 latest expansion Janthir Wilds introduced an exciting new player housing feature known as Homesteads.

I am admittedly a sucker for many things, and the new Grizzly Hills Packmaster Mount includes several enticing aspects that’ll likely make me crack open my wallet to purchase. For one thing I love bears (don’t get me wrong — yaks are very cool — but I’m a bigger fan of bears of the non-Chicago variety). For another, the Grummles on the Grand Expedition Yak have a tendency to annoy me because they only have about a half dozen lines they repeat frequently; this is the same reason I don’t use Ban Lu on my monk. Finally, who doesn’t love a bear mount?

Trivia time: Transmogrification was not one of the original services provided by the Grand Expedition Yak. What did it replace? Answer in the outro!

All that said if the Packmaster only lets you repair and doesn’t give you the ability to sell items then forget it, I need to clean my bags way more often than I need to repair or fix my transmog.

While I wait for other players to determine this info for me, let’s answer some questions!

I'll be honest -- when we were first told that the Earthen would be an Allied Race with The War Within, I was pretty whelmed.

The first allies we encounter in The War Within are the Earthen, and thus it only seems natural that they are also the first Allied Race we can recruit as well.

Dragonflight patch 10.2 added a lot of new content to the game, so it may be a surprise for you to learn that one of the minor additions was a gold-sink vendor in the Valdrakken Black Market Auction House.

Yesterday’s Nintendo Indie and Partner Directs were full of a lot of cool announcements, but the one I’m most pumped for is Coffee Talk Tokyo. Coming out on Steam as well as on Switch, XBox and Playstation 5, the third entry in one of my favorite indie series is heading overseas to a café in Tokyo to make drinks, talk to the locals, and maybe change someone’s fate if you get an ingredient wrong. It’s a charming and wholesome series and it’ll be a day one purchase for me.

That said, I am concerned that this may be the second sequel in a row where Freya — my absolute favorite character — will be largely or completely absent. Hopefully she finds her way to Japan for this entry but I’m guessing we’ll need to cross our fingers that the new characters can match her presence.

While I try to remember the ingredients for the STMJ let’s answer some questions! I hear there may be exciting stuff happening in World of Warcraft this week? Let’s find out together!

The War Within is World of Warcraft's latest expansion and as with all previous expansions we'll be operating out of a major city that provides most of the services and NPCs a player needs.

As is traditional in World of Warcraft, the pre-patch prior to The War Within expansion came with a limited-time event with gear and collectibles: Radiant Echoes.

World of Warcraft's latest expansion The War Within will take players through the depths of Khaz Algar into the realm of Azj-Kahet where we'll battle against the machinations of the Harbinger of the Void Xal'atath.