Gaming Round-Up: Diablo, BioWare, NextFest, and More

Posted on October 27, 2026 by Tyler F.M. Edwards

Grab-bag time.

Diablo IV

This has really been the month of Diablo for me, with Diablo IV taking up almost all of my gaming time. I’ve poured my pretty extensive thoughts on the game into some Massively columns that should go up in the coming weeks, but I want to briefly cover it here as well.

As you’ll read over on MOP, I mained a warlock for my first run through the campaign, but now that that’s done, I’m letting my altoholism run wild. I deleted almost all the myriad characters I made during the various trials as I’d put no thought into customizing them and felt no attachment to them, so now I’m making a fresh round of characters. The one exception is a druid, whom I did put some effort into.

I initially skipped the side quests and optional objectives for most zones, so I’ve decided to assign a character to clearing out each remaining zone. I’ve assigned a sorcerer to Kehjistan, a paladin to Hawezar, a necromancer to Nahantu, and of course my druid will do Scosglen. Most likely I’ll save Skovos for when the amazon class releases. I also have a barbarian and a spiritborn I created for reasons I’ve already mostly forgotten, but I don’t plan to play them much, if at all. I will probably make a rogue at some point, too. I want to throw knives at people.

It is a bit crazy how much power disparity there is between classes, at least at low levels. We’re talking “coughing baby versus hydrogen bomb” levels of imbalance here. I’m playing on higher difficulties as is my wont, and my paladin is struggling to survive even basic fights on expert, while my necromancer is just obliterating everything on penitent. If I wanted to I could probably just stop pressing buttons entirely and let my minions deal with everything.

I maintain very conflicted feelings about Diablo IV, as you’ll see when my columns on it go live, but as I’ve always said, ARPGs are like pizza. Even when they’re bad, they’re still pretty good. There’s a lot of joy to be found in smashing hordes of demons, now as it was in the past.

BioWare’s end

This is of course the big news lately. I feel for the people who’ve lost their jobs, and I hope they find new work quickly, but otherwise I’m surprisingly empty of strong feelings on the closure of what has historically been a favourite studio.

As someone who stayed a cheerleader for BioWare much longer than most — I adored Andromeda, enjoyed Anthem, and didn’t hate Veilguard as much as some — it’s a bit odd to me to see everyone suddenly changing their tune. I’ve seen nothing but pessimism and hate towards BioWare for so long it’s hard not to feel like the current outrage over their closure is a bit hypocritical.

I didn’t have a lot of hope for their future prospects, either. I’m really only excited for more Mass Effect if it’s a continuation of Andromeda, but given the unjust hate towards it, that was never likely. I don’t see how you can continue the Milky Way story without it being a bit of a mess.

Now that we’re getting leaks about what they were planning for the next game, a lot of it does sound promising, but it’s easy to say your game would have been great when it was just an idea in early development. Dragon Age: Dreadwolf sounded amazing too, and look how that turned out.

I certainly wouldn’t be unhappy if the crusade to save BioWare somehow found success, but I think my hope is better put towards other companies continuing their legacy by creating other games in a similar vein. That’s more exciting to me. I was never that attached to Mass Effect as a universe; I just like the way they tell stories. Please be good, Exodus.

SlopFest

I played a few demos in the latest Steam NextFest, or SlopFest as it has been crudely but accurately dubbed by the wider community. Between the wildly inaccurate tags on so many games and the flood of AI garbage, it was pretty painful trying to find anything worth playing.

The most noteworthy demo was that for ArcheAge Chronicles, but that’s going to be the subject of another Massively Overpowered piece, so you’ll have to wait to hear my thoughts on that.

I also put a decent amount of time into Theos: Cities of Myth, a spiritual successor to the ancient Greece city-builder Zeus: Master of Olympus, which I loved when I was a kid. Theos has that same familiar gameplay loop with some nice quality of life improvements, like being able to set patrol paths yourself, but it did feel a bit low budget for my taste. The lack of voice acting was a big bummer, as the goofy voices were a lot of what made Zeus so charming. Still, I did end up playing the demo for longer than I expected. I put it on my wishlist, but I don’t know if I’ll ever get around to actually buying it.

Next was old school RPG Wyldheart. I wanted to like it, but it just felt too low budget and janky. I only played about twenty minutes of it before I decided it wasn’t for me.

Finally, there was Silberheim Evolving Card Game. Another one I really wanted to like as it has a strong emphasis on story and some lovely card art, but it’s also lacking voice acting, and more importantly it was just fiendishly overcomplicated. I love card games, and learning this one gave me a headache.

Eternal

Speaking of card games, I haven’t talked about Eternal in a while. While I never fully stopped playing, I did scale back drastically. I’ve been very burned out, and it’s a bit stale as the game is in semi-maintenance mode, with only the weekly story chapters for new content. Even as someone who loves video game story, these aren’t exactly riveting, and the new promo cards they offer are usually too niche to be exciting.

Neuron activation.

I have been having a bit of a resurgence lately. I’ve been trying to build some new decks, though I’m scraping the bottom of the barrel for ideas. There’s more I’d like to try, but it’s so hard to earn legendary cards, and I’ve already got most of what I’d want at other rarities.

So far I haven’t had any big hits. The Clockroach deck is strong, but boring. I made a stealth deck that’s moderately fun and moderately effective. I just made an Elysian singleton-ish deck using Archmagister’s Portal and Sacred Tableau that seems kind of neat.

This is old news at this point, but my proudest achievement so far is making a good Elven tribal deck. You might think that would have been one of the first things I tried to do, and you’d be right, but it took a long time and many attempts to make one that’s actually good. There’s a lot of Elf cards in Eternal, but they were never designed with any overarching mechanical identity, so it’s hard to build an all-Elf deck that’s any good.

What I finally settled on was a Shadow/Primal/Time deck that uses relics to buff flyers and unblockables. On paper it seems like the sort of thing that would be way too convoluted to work, but it’s actually proven to be probably my most consistent Gauntlet grinder. Trust in the shadow.

ZeroSpace

Try as I might, I’m struggling to maintain my interest in this. I’m glad they added Xol to co-op, but like everything else about the game, they’re so incredibly unfinished. Posted a bunch of feedback on their reddit if you’re interested.

ZeroSpace has good ideas, but their complete inability to prioritize which ideas to focus on will be the death of them. They’ve spread themselves so desperately thin that nothing is even close to finished, let alone polished. What I wouldn’t give for a well-funded, competently managed Blizzard style RTS.

The future

For now I’m still happy grinding away in Diablo IV, but I’m not sure how long that will last or what I’ll do after. I want to play some more New World while I still can. I still play Overwatch Stadium here and there, though that increasingly feels like more a source of frustration than fun. I’m still on the fence on if I’ll buy Age of Empires IV’s Raiders of the North at launch or wait for a sale. Will be back to WoW at some point, but I’m not in a rush for that.

I keep seeing posts about Deadlock popping up on social media, and I’ve seen it often compared to Stadium. It’s starting to intrigue me. It’s got that some magic Overwatch has where every other character I see from it feels like the coolest character I’ve ever seen. Does seem overwhelmingly complicated, though, and I’m not fond of MOBAs (Heroes of the Storm is the exception that proves the rule).

I think I’d like to give Deadlock a try, but I should probably let it cook a bit more first. I’m hoping its rumoured PvE mode comes to pass; that would definitely have my attention.

Fan Fiction: Light and Wonder

Posted on October 31, 2025 by Tyler F.M. Edwards

When I quit WoW at the end of Legion, I wrote a fairly self-indulgent fan fic to say goodbye to my warlock/demon hunter. Since my unexpected return to the game, I’ve been thinking I needed to do another fic to explain her return to the adventuring life.

It took me longer than expected, but with Midnight looming and all eyes on the Blood Elves, now felt like the right time.

* * *

Light and Wonder

She donned her armour.

It was not a simple process. Like all the works of her people, it was almost excessively intricate, a work of art as much about making a statement as it was about practical purpose. Every layer, every material, carried with it the crushing weight of meaning and history, both of the ancient lineage of the Highborne and of her own painful life.

Layers of bright red silk. The red of blood. The blood that been spilled in the futile defence against an unstoppable enemy, the blood of the loved ones they had lost.

She remembered the slaughter of her friends, the erasure of her family. Nearly everyone she had ever known gone in a matter of days. In many cases she had never learned how they had died, but from the deaths she had witnessed, she knew none of them had been merciful.

Those losses had broken something inside her, something that would never heal. She saw that same aching pain in the eyes of every one of her people. It was their burden, and their bond. No one could understand them as they understood each other. No one else had lost so much.

They were Sin’dorei. They were the Children of Blood.

Interlocking sheets of black leather. The black of mourning, of the grief that defined everything her people did.

For her, grief had not just been a matter of tears. It had burned within her as a furious rage, a quest for vengeance that had led her across worlds. It had led her to cross almost every line, to pollute her soul with the dark hunger of the fel, to turn herself into a living weapon of unbridled destruction. No price had been too high to pay if it brought her family’s killers to justice.

In Icecrown, her rage had burned its way into the cold heart of death itself. On Argus, she had turned the demons’ own power against them, bringing doom to the ultimate architects behind the evil that had despoiled her homeland.

Then, at last, when every monster involved in the ruination of her people had tasted the pain of true death, the anger within her had guttered and died. And she had found that without it, there was nothing left. She had become an empty husk, without purpose, gnawed constantly by the hunger of the fel and the grief that no amount of screaming vengeance could soothe.

Plates of strong steel, enamelled in brilliant gold. The gold of the light of the Sunwell renewed, of the eternal sun that guided them still.

Following the last battle in Antorus, she had retreated from the world. She had taken up residence in an isolated corner of Eversong Woods. Alone, without love nor purpose, the pain had threatened to swallow her whole. Then, at last, the tears she had longed denied had come, flowing until they threatened to drown her.

The hunger for blood and violence was with her always. It would never leave her, not through all the long centuries she had still had to live. The knowledge had almost broken her. She had turned herself into a weapon, and that could not be undone.

Slowly, as the years passed, she had learned to live with the pain. It never left her, but she gradually came to learn she could fill her heart with other things as well. She began to see the world around her – really see it – for the first time since undead had taken everything from her people. She heard the birds sing in the morning, and saw the way the light shone through the crimson leaves of the trees. She smelled the perfume of spring flowers, and felt the cool waters of mountain springs upon her skin.

Then had come the visions, the Radiant Song. And then, at last, she had realized that there was still something to fight for. Not to avenge the past, but to safeguard the present, and the future. It had taken her so long to see the beauty in the world again, and the love for it filled with a purpose as urgent as the searing hate she had once felt.

She had made herself into a weapon, but a weapon could be used to protect as well as destroy.

She had rejoined the world, had seen the wonders and the terrors of Khaz Algar, and now she had returned home again, as darkness came to Quel’thalas once more.

Her intricate armour in place, she stepped forth into the streets of Silvermoon City. Her name was Dorotaya Duskfury, and she was ready to fight for her home.

The sky above was dark. No natural clouds these, they flickered with violet and azure lightning, the touch of a power beyond this reality. An unnatural chill beat down from that otherworldly sky, like some cruel perversion of the sun’s heat.

The streets buzzed with activity as other Sin’dorei joined her in making their way to city’s battlements. There were mages and warlocks, who like her had risked wielding powers that might consume them. There were Farstriders, sworn to defend the fragile remnants of the forests that even now still healed from the wounds of the Scourge. There were sombre Blood Knights, sworn to honour the memory of the god they had murdered.

Among such company, Dorotaya could walk free of judgment. They saw the horns upon her brow, the cracks in her skin that crackled with green fire, her lank hair and sickly skin, and they did not look away. None among them had not made desperate choices in the years following the fall of Quel’thalas, and now they were united in purpose, all making the same silent promise: We will not let it happen again.

She ascended the battlements of Silvermoon, joining the ranks of her people in their resplendent amour, so much like hers. The red of what they’d lost, the black of the grief that weighed heavy on their shoulders, and the gold of their spirit unbroken. She looked south, and saw the growing darkness in the sky, the fathomless hungry evil that came to take everything from them once again.

But she also saw the forests below, the trees with their leaves of red and gold. She saw the faces of her people, some hopeful, some terrified, all determined. She saw all they had rebuilt in the last few years, the glorious monument to triumph over impossible grief that was Silvermoon itself, and her heart swelled with a love she had long feared she was no longer capable of.

Her mind went back to her time in Pandaria, to words spoken by one of that land’s gods. She hadn’t understood their meaning then. She hadn’t been ready to hear it. But now, she felt the true depth of them.

“Someday, you may also be called upon to defend all that is dear to you. When that day comes, seek all the light and wonder of this world, and fight.”

A cry of defiance, of joy, rose from her lips. “Anaralah!” By the light.

The cry was taken up across the battlements, becoming a chant as dozens of Elven voices joined as one. “Anaralah! Anaralah! Anaralah!”

A cold wind struck her face, and she greeted it with a smile.

Superior Realities

Tag Archives: because Elves that’s why

Gaming Round-Up: Diablo, BioWare, NextFest, and More

Fan Fiction: Light and Wonder

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