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The joy of Hearthstone’s ‘Sweating Panda’ emoteAsk not for whom the panda sweats; it sweats for thee.
Ask not for whom the panda sweats; it sweats for thee.
I’ve never really been one for pre-packaged emotes in games. There’s just some deep-seated arrogance in me, which always sneered at the idea of a piece of software boiling down all the vastly different ways I might react to a situation into five or six cutesy, pre-packaged sentiments, and letting me have no further say in the matter.
But then I metHearthstone’s ‘Sweating Panda’ emote, and now everything has changed. Blizzard, it turns out, knew me better than I knew myself all along.
Hearthstone Battlegrounds Announce TrailerWatch on YouTube
Hearthstone Battlegrounds Announce Trailer
Sweaty P, as I shall now call him, is one of the six emotes in Hearthstone’s autochessy Battlegrounds mode, now so popular there’s a case for calling it the electric card game’s main format. For the uninitiated: a game of Battlegrounds has eight players, who clash with each other using gradually upgraded sets of cards chosen from a central pool. I wrote about ithere.
An emote can be deployed at any point, either during fights or in the tense bouts of admin between them, and every other player can see it pop up beside your icon on the left of the UI. There are six emotes, and besides The Sweatmaster General, they comprise:
Listed from top to bottom, left to right.
This is it. This is the moment I die. Sweats
The Sweating Panda emote, in other words, is playing Hearthstone. And honestly, in the time since I’ve gotten really into Battlegrounds, I’m yet to find a situation in which he is not an intensely articulate expression of how I feel.
Desperately buying and selling frogs in between rounds, like a man engaged in a collapsing ponzi scheme against himself, in an attempt to get a statline that will survive one more fight? Sweating Panda.
He’s winning… but he’s still sweating.
Clawing your way back to the top of the ranking as the weaker players start getting knocked out, only to find you’re bracketed against that heartless ape who bullied the life out of you with lava boys three rounds back? Sweateroonies.
Video games are art.
Generally, in the bitter, hyper-jaded world of competitive card games on the computer, you get used to using emotes sarcastically, or even sadistically. The classic “well played”, as an opponent runs face-first into a horrible bit of RNG, is something we’ve all been guilty of. But Sweating Panda never lies. His is a face that tells a thousand eerily similar stories, and there’s never a moment in battlegrounds when I’m not living out one of them.
