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The Queue: Convention recovery mode

Alex Ziebart
Owner
Updated ·5 min read
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Welcome back to The Queue, the daily Q&A column in which the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Alex Ziebart will be your host today.

BlizzCon is over. I'm exhausted. Let's do this.

DaEvilGenius asked:

I see no mention of Eye of Azshara. Any thoughts on what it might be since all major announcements were done.



It could still be a WoW expansion. Just not one they were prepared to announce during BlizzCon. It could also be something else entirely -- who knows. But I'm willing to bet we'll hear an expansion announcement before BlizzCon 2015.

Zeijin asked:

In the gameplay video, Reinhardt has typically male features, has a male voice, and has a (normally) male name. The only wonder should be is it a human in some kind of futuristic suit of death knight armor or a robot?

The Overwatch website answers this one well. Reinhardt is a 61-year-old veteran of the Overwatch task force. He was forced into retirement sometime in his 50s and then everything went wrong, with the Overwatch group ultimately being disbanded. He isn't ready to retire, so he keeps fighting the good fight.

Zapwidget asked:

why do I keep seeing phrases like "rose from the ashes of Titan" about Overwatch? "Titan" was never the official name of the game, only the project. All of the developers whose names we recognize attached to Overwatch were working on Titan. We know that Titan was retooled halfway through, but that it continued to be Titan. Overwach simply is the release name for the game the Titan project was creating.

Even Blizzard developers have been saying that isn't true throughout BlizzCon. Titan was a totally different project. When they killed it, they dispersed most of the team to different projects throughout the company. The small group that remained started jamming on other ideas and came up with Overwatch. It pulls some elements from what Titan was, but is not that project. What we know as Project Titan was meant to be an MMO even more ambitious than WoW. That project was killed off entirely after many years of development. The development of Overwatch only actually began in the summer of 2013.

ScottLeyes asked:

Any plans to change the name of this site to "Blizzard Insider"? 'Cuz there DAMN sure isn't any Warcraft news to report.

I'm actually going to tackle this one, because it has come up a few times this weekend even without the context of a lack of Warcraft news. On one hand, we have people who want us to never write about anything but World of Warcraft. It irritates them when we even post about Hearthstone or Heroes of the Storm. On the other hand, there are readers who enjoy our coverage of other Blizzard titles and would like us to continue covering them. We get people being snide when they say "just rename yourself Blizzard Insider already" and we also have people who genuinely mean it and would love for that to happen.

In short, I already consider us something of a Blizzard Insider site and have considered us that for awhile now. Because of reasons, rebranding a site is a lot more difficult than you might expect -- and in some ways, from some perspectives, undesirable. As such, we primarily post about World of Warcraft and I expect we always will. But I also want us to continue providing coverage for other titles -- particularly the ones where our staff feels like we have the interest and expertise to provide good content. The "passion" buzzword Blizzard falls back on for their game design is actually a similar fallback here on WoW Insider. I want people to go where their passion takes them, whether they love something or hate it, both praise and criticism, across Blizzard titles.

That means we'll bring you Hearthstone and Heroes of the Storm in addition to World of Warcraft. If we have someone on staff that really wants to dig into Diablo or StarCraft II, I'm going to encourage them to do that. Will we have Overwatch coverage? Yes, most likely.

If I could, I'd take a crayon and write "And Other Blizzard Titles" beneath the WoW in our logo. It isn't a new approach for us. This is how we've looked at our site for a very long time now.

@Duskhawk asked:

What didn't you hear about at Blizzcon that you thought you would have?

I honestly did expect we would see something about the next expansion after Warlords. Nothing in-depth, not even dedicated panels, but a teaser trailer or a name or something. If Blizzard means it when they say they want to get closer to a 1-year turnaround, we'll need to see some suggestion of that new expansion sometime soon. Even I have struggled with the line of thought that tells me Blizzard wouldn't want to scoop themselves prior to Warlords of Draenor, but the longer I think about it, the more I decide it doesn't really matter. We know there's going to be an expansion after this one, right? They're going to need to figure out how to make that marketing dance work with their intended release schedule. By not saying anything, I'm concerned they're going to miss that 1-year goal. Just like they've always missed it.

Have questions about the World of Warcraft? The WoW Insider crew is here with The Queue, our daily Q&A column. Leave your questions in the comments, and we'll do our best to answer 'em!