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The Queue: Warcraft RTS, April Fools is dumb, boost to 90 zone, and the holy grail

Adam Holisky
Editor
Updated ·4 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. Adam Holisky (@adamholisky) will be your host today.

This Queue is dedicated to my amazing staff that dropped in Diablo 3 over the weekend. I got it in adventure mode on level Torment 1. So great, and so over powered.

My wizard > yours.

AzerProf asked:

I feel like Warlords of Draenor is bringing us back to the roots of the Warcraft franchise - which I love. But it makes me miss WC1-3. What, in your opinion, is the likelihood of the original RTS'(RTSes?) getting some 20th anniversary love in the form of a re-release? I expect something, and have already committed to buying whatever Blizzard decides to release.



There already is going to be a re-release of sorts -- although it's not much the way that you're thinking. Blizzard said at BlizzCon 2013 that they're working on updating the games to play nicely with modern graphics hardware and operating systems. This means that you won't have to do weird tricks to get the games to work. You'll just be able to download them from the Blizzard Store (or your account page) and go to town. Hopefully they'll be made available via the Blizzard Launcher at some point.

Will we see a re-release of the games with updated content, etc? No. Additionally I can't imagine a scenario where Blizzard would offer the games up for sale again touting some new useless "feature." What I could see them doing is offering an entire package of their older games for sale for some insanely low price (or free?), and attracting people to them that haven't played them before or have lost their discs.

Rode asked:

Sooo... do you think the draenei model update news that was hinted to appear this week was an April 1st hoax? Or are they gonna show the ogre model update with a female model?

I don't think we're going to see the new model today. And it's not an April-stupid-day joke. Furthermore, I hope that Blizzard doesn't do anything with the new models for April Fools. There's too many people in the community that are really tied to them, and with as volatile as people are right now over WoD, messing around doesn't seem like a good idea.

Also April Fools on the internet has been done to death and it's time to move on. It was fun back in the late 00s, but now it's just boring. Been there, done that. Give me something more interesting that isn't lame.

Edit 11:00 a.m. EDT: This answer was written the evening of March 31st, before Blizzard's April Fools releases.

Crikit310 asked:

Is the death-knight-style starting area, that I swear I heard about, for boosted 90s in-game? If not, does anyone know if has it been scrapped, or will be available closer to WoD's release?

That's coming at the release of Warlords of Draenor or patch 6.0 -- we don't know the specifics. There's also the possibility it has been scrapped, we haven't heard anything more about it since BlizzCon. I was pretty surprised that it didn't appear with the release of the boost to 90 program, since Blizzard made a relatively big deal about the zone being used as a way to introduce players to their new class. In my opinion it was needed now more than at the WoD release. Now you have people that boost their character and jump right into LFR after 30 seconds of logging in for the first time. In WoD you won't have that.

ZophieWinters asked:

What if WoW created a custom scenario builder similar to the toolset that Neverwinter provides? That way blizzard could control all the art assets and still let players build their own little pieces of content to share. There would need to be a good rating and reporting system on it, but otherwise I think it would be a great way to fill in some of the content gaps, especially during those long waits before the next xpac drops like we're experiencing right now.

This is one of the holy grails of WoW, it seems. Blizzard hasn't done it yet, but they certainly have a ton of experience with community created content in Warcraft 3 and StarCraft 2. I'm not sure that they want to allow players to have that amount of control over the game's play style and quest creation. It makes sense with other games that have a much smaller team than Warcraft has, but with so many designers working on the game, there isn't a compelling reason I feel for Blizzard to launch it from a game-play perspective.

Maybe once WoW goes into a more maintenance mode it will show up.

Now watch Blizzard announce it next week.

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!