Header Image: Artist’s Representation of Azeroth

This week we discuss the new Blizzard mobile game reveal for Warcraft Arclight Rumble, Azshara and her Naga minions coming to Hearthstone Battlegrounds, the start of Burning Crusade Classic Phase 5 with the Sunwell Plateau launch, and more.

Critical Role announced this week that Campaign 3 will be taking a monthlong break starting at the end of May for yet another installment of Exandria Unlimited, titled Exandria Unlimited: Calamity.

In a recent interview, Ion Hazzikostas -- World of Warcraft's Game Director -- talked about how to solve the eventual leveling squish problem caused by adding levels with every expansion.

The Season of Mastery concept is a game changer for WoW Classic -- it basically allows the game to constantly reinvent itself and keep what will otherwise become a very limited set of content (the original WoW and two expansions) into something evergreen.

Usually the sentence, "enjoy Echoing Nightmares forever," would seem kind of ominous, and well, it still does, because it's Diablo 3's 10th Anniversary, and in celebration we're getting the popular Echoing Nightmares mode from Season 26 added permanently to the game.

So I like Star Trek as a whole, and I grew up with the syndicated re-runs of the original series (child of the 70’s, yes, I am as ancient as Methuselah) and so, for me, Strange New Worlds is the first new Star Trek show to actually feature elements of the franchise that I recognize. I mean, Spock’s there! It’s not Leonard Nimoy, but sadly, he isn’t with us anymore.

So far I like the show quite a bit. Anson Mount is fantastic as Captain Pike, Rebecca Romjin does fantastic work as Una, I pretty much like all of the cast I’ve seen so far and that switcheroo with Lieutenant Kirk was pretty dang amusing. But I am still forced to admit that TNG had a point and that Captains of the TOS era keep exposing themselves to ridiculous amounts of danger.  Pike just beams himself down into a tense, about to become a war meeting like it ain’t no thang and man, even with the whole I know my future thing it’s pretty nuts.

And man, Anson Mount is hot.

Video games are full of real-life references -- some of them are more overt, like WoW's Floyd Pinkus, while others are a little less obvious, like a license plate on a car or a background piece of artwork that reference something a little more niche.

Hearthstone just had a bit patch release, but it might have come with unexpected side effects: many players are reporting slowdown issues.

I have always wondered about AI and how it will actually shake out when we finally create a fully sapient artificial mind. If movies are to be our guide, it won’t go great for us.

It’s the Queue. Let’s chat.