Weeklies – Haven Week

• MMORPG
• Roundup

• Ashes of Creation
• The Secret World
• Ultima Online
• World of Warcraft

New title! “Weeklies?” Get it? Like Dailies, but Weeklies! I was actually planning to stop doing these but then Bhagpuss had to go and say that he enjoyed them. :)

I’ve been very distracted this week by re-watching the complete Haven series, because @MissByx reminded me that I had not yet seen past season 4, so I started it again from the beginning. I could write volumes about this show but I will try to refrain. The show has almost no connection to the novella it’s based on (which was a noir crime drama, not supernatural in any way), but it captures the spirit of Stephen King’s other supernatural works very well. It is also a textbook example of how building likable, relatable, grounded characters is the most important thing in genre fiction (for me, at least). The style and tone of the show changes quite a lot over the course of its six-but-they-call-it-five seasons, but it still resonated very strongly with me all the way to the end. (The video game tie-in is this: The show’s lead Emily Rose also voiced Elena Fisher in the Uncharted games, and fellow Uncharted actors Nolan North and Claudia Black also appeared in Haven.)

More innovations from Ashes of Creation in ways we can spend money on games without publishers having to develop or release games. You may not have picked up on this, but I find it very difficult to see anything positive about Ashes of Creation at this point.

The new content for Secret World Legends went live. Sadly it’s now too late for me to catch up in time to play the new stuff at launch. (I am currently in the City of the Sun God zone.)

Blizzard announced WoW’s Battle For Attention expansion will launch on August 14. I personally can’t find a single thing in this expansion that sounds like it will be worth my time. Plus, in a philosophical moment, it occurred to me that just as the real world and social media is trying so desperately to divide us into blindly hyper-partisan camps of “us” and “them,” we get a WoW expansion that exhorts us to choose sides and declare our allegiance for Horde or Alliance. Art imitating life? Life imitating art? Pure coincidence? Blatant exploitation of simple-minded consumers? Probably all of the above. Alt noted that the minimum specs for the expansion are pretty high, which is weird, because one of WoW’s biggest technical advantages has always been its ability to run on even the most basic of hardware. It’s a topsy-turvy world when Black Desert Online has fewer requirements than WoW.

Ultima Online launched their free-to-play option. I’m curious to try it out, but I’m not sure I want to see what the game has become since I last played in 1998 or whatever.