Miracle | Superior Realities

Trying to do these a little more promptly so I don’t end up having to write 2,000 words at once.

Dispatch:

A friend got me ~~I Can Fix Her Simulator 2025~~ Dispatch as an early birthday present, and I played through it a couple weeks ago. I largely enjoyed it, though I’m not sure it’s quite worthy of the fawning praise I’ve seen it receive.

A lot of the humour fell pretty flat for me. I’ve no problem with foul language (I’ve seen the Trailer Park Boys live twice), but something isn’t automatically funny just because you throw in the word “dick” every three seconds.

However, I did enjoy the characters, and the more serious moments generally landed. I also thought the animation and artwork were top notch. Some of the scenes are gorgeous to look at.

World of Warcraft:

Having quickly gotten all the trading post stuff I wanted, I struggled a bit to find stuff to do in WoW before my sub run out once more. Mostly just did my weekly apex cache chores and ran some delves here and there.

I did like the new summer event quests. Usually WoW holidays are awful and grindy, but the new skyriding quests are fun and rewarding, with some cool Tauren and Dwarven lore to boot. Good stuff.

I also continue to immensely enjoy playing my paladin this time around. The class feels great right now, especially Holy, but Ret and Prot are also enjoyable. I’m kind of repeating myself, but this is really the big story of Midnight, at least as it pertains to my personal journey.

The look is part of it, too. I’ve had a figurine of a Blood Elf paladin for a long time, prominently displayed on one of my bookshelves. The other day I was dusting it off, and I realized my paladin in-game now has nearly the exact outfit as him, glaive and shield and all, and that just feels awesome.

I’ve always loved paladins, Blood Elves, and most especially Blood Elf paladins, and for all Midnight’s faults, it’s letting me live out my dream of patrolling Quel’thalas as a Blood Knight, lore accurate transmog and all, and that brings me much joy.

One notable thing I did do was take down the current delve nemesis on her (? difficulty only). I played Prot with DPS Valeera, and I’d say it was relatively easy all things considered. A long and tense fight, but I beat it on my first try. I’ve only done one delve nemesis before, on my demon hunter back in War Within season one, and that took several tries. Paladins OP?

Overwatch:

Grumbling about Overwatch is becoming tradition. It was another disappointing season for Stadium, with hero reworks in lieu of a new hero. There was a lot of talk of it shaking up the meta, but things have mostly settled back to the way they were before the patch.

Ashe is a little less omnipresent. Reinhardt’s shield and charge builds and Soldier: 76’s weapon build both got buffed despite being already among the most dominant builds, so they’re now even more oppressive than they already were.

I think the only really big change was to Reaper with his incredibly OP new wraith burn build. It’s already been nerfed once and is now a lot more reasonable, but I definitely wouldn’t be shocked if it gets nerfed again.

I haven’t been above abusing it for some easy wins, but it does feel a bit cheesy, and it’s not really adding anything new to the game. It’s basically just a very powercrept version of Mei’s Coulder build. Turn invulnerable, bump into people to damage and debuff them.

The one big piece of good news is that they gave Juno back a version of Rally Ring. The new Mars Walking power not only reduces her Ring cooldown, but it turns her ring into a trampoline for her, which has niche applications but is definitely a fun side benefit.

With my Ring build functional again, I’m having fun as Juno once more, and that’s great.

Diablo IV:

Thanks a to a Humble Bundle discount, I now own the Diablo IV base game, but I’m waiting to pick up the expansion (hopefully on sale) before really investing into it.

I did, however, poke my head into the recent warlock trial. I wasn’t expecting to like the class, feeling like necromancer is all I need for my dark caster needs, but I ended up enjoying it a lot. It’s now a strong candidate for my eventual main.

Warlock feels like the first class built with the Diablo III design philosophy rather than D4’s half-hearted approach. It’s about bombast and spectacle rather than just having the bare minium needed to make a class functional. I also enjoyed the relative lack of reliance on cooldowns in favour of resource management. It reminds me of a mix of wizard and demon hunter from D3.

Only thing I didn’t like was the aesthetic. I wish it had more of a classic gothic occult vibe instead of the weird torture porn horror look they gave it.

Age of Empires II:

Played some AoE2 as well. Been slowly working my way through the handful of campaigns I hadn’t done yet.

I was about ready to regret ever buying The Mountain Royals expansion. The Persian campaign was mediocre, and the Armenian campaign was possibly my least favourite campaign yet. Felt like every single mission had you being constantly attacked by multiple enemies on big open maps without defensible positions. I never lost any missions; it was just annoying. Also, the story was mainly about that French crusader dude rather than Armenians themselves, which is just weird.

However, the Georgian campaign saved it for me. While the Georgians themselves are an aggressively vanilla civilizations, the missions were very well designed. Lots of big huge maps with plenty of optional objectives. This is why we play Age of Empires.

Stronghold 4 demo:

I went into this with pretty low expectations, which were pretty much met. It’s not horrible, but it’s slow, mildly buggy, and generally unimpressive. I swear this franchise has done absolutely nothing to evolve since the original more than twenty years ago.

The Secret World and Miracle:

I’m writing this on July 3rd, and on my other tab I’m watching Catboiler‘s TSW anniversary stream. He’s playing through a mission of his own design made with the Untold Stories add-on. I’m a bit mixed on his use of generative AI for it, but the writing feels authentically TSW-ish. I did also pop in to kill a golem earlier, and I may play some more later.

Someone in chat mentioned that Ragnar Tornquist has finally begun work on Miracle, now called Project M. Now that’s exciting.

Given legalities, it’s unlikely this will be officially part of the TSW continuity, but according to someone in Twitch Ragnar is calling it a spiritual successor to TSW.

I will have to do my best to manage my expectations because for the last decade or so there has not been any potential future game that excites me as much as Miracle. I have spent hours combing the Internet for the slightest hint about it, and after so long without news, I had all but given up hope of it ever being a reality.

But now it’s actually in production. It feels surreal. I know a thousand things could wrong, especially in the current state of the industry. I know it’s probably still years off. But as much as I try not to let my hopes run away, it kind of feels like I just found out Santa Claus is real after all.

I love the parallelism. From “everything is true” to “anything is possible.”

Is there a word for something that’s both unexpected and yet totally unsurprising?

Last month, the Halloween season had me feeling nostalgic for The Secret World. It was the first time in years I didn’t have TSW’s Halloween event to look forward to. Eventually I figured, “To hell with it, it’s not Halloween without TSW.”

So just a few short months after saying goodbye to the game, I was back in the dark days. For what it’s worth, this was still probably the longest I’d gone without playing the game since I started.

For the most part my characters are still retired. The only one I’ve pulled out of mothballs is Kamala, my second of three Dragons. Years after her creation, I finally finished Kingsmouth with her, and as of this writing she’s just started on Blue Mountain.

I’m playing very casually, just poking away at a mission or two here or there, and I’m not sure if this is a long-term return or just a lark. At this point I might as well finish Dawning of an Endless Night, but I’m not thrilled with the idea of slogging through Egypt yet again, so we’ll see.

The irony is not lost on me that I refused to make the jump to Legends because I didn’t want to start over, so my solution was to pretty much start over.

I’m complex.

I will say there’s a difference between starting over by choice and starting over by necessity. In the immortal words of Frank Costanza, “It’s different psychologically.”

And there’s things Legends can’t offer me. I’m a big fan of Kamala’s appearance, but near as I can tell there’s no way to make a character who looks like her in Legends. That same problem dogs all my characters, really — it would have made such a difference if I could have imported my original character looks into Legends.

Nor can I tinker with builds in Legends to the same extent. That has always been one of the greatest joys of TSW, at least for me. For Kamala, I’ve focused on super-charging her resource generation as much as possible, so she can fire out finishers like a machine gun. As with all fist builds, it does lack AoE damage, but otherwise it’s proving very effective, and it’s damn fun. It’s crazy how fast I can tear through single targets. Being twinked six ways from Sunday doesn’t hurt, I guess.

There’s something oddly surreal about playing this walking corpse of a game. You can almost feel it dying day by day. Almost every week there seems to be some new bug or crash. Most recently the DirectX11 client randomly stopped working for about a week.

In some ways it’s not as dead as you might think, though. Oh, it’s mostly dead, but not entirely dead. There are still people hanging out in Agartha, though much less than there once were, and I’ve even run into a few other lowbies out in the world while leveling.

I’m also still getting spammed with notifications about Fusang non-stop. Of course maybe it’s just one guy running around solo-capping stuff for kicks. Over my five years in The Secret World, I think I’ve spent maybe an hour in Fusang, and most of that was to fight the lunar golem back when that was a thing.

Still, I won’t pretend this isn’t a game with one foot in the grave, and there is a very lonely feeling to playing it these days. I guess the silver lining is that this is a game that’s meant to feel lonely and unsettling, so in a twisted sort of way having the population crash kind of enhances the experience.

As I’ve said, I’m surprisingly okay with not seeing any more content updates. I’d love more, of course, but mostly I’m just grateful for all the awesome stuff I’ve already gotten to experience.

What does sadden me is the thought that no one new can ever find this game again. It’s a bad habit, but I’ve always had a great desire to share anything that makes me happy with other people, and so I’ve spent years evangelizing this game and trying to get everyone to give it a shot. I miss being able to do that. I don’t like that this is something I’ll never be able to share with anyone else ever again.

And beyond personal concerns, I wish more people had been given the chance to play TSW. It was always very poorly advertised, and a lot of people were scared off by the fact it was an MMO despite the fact you could just as easily play it as a single-player RPG, so there are undoubtedly tonnes of people out there who would have loved this game but never got the chance.

That’s the real loss here.

Yeah, there’s Legends, but it’s just not the same.

Still, despite it all, I am having fun. Even with the game bleeding out, even with this being my fourth time through, I’m having fun. This is still one of the best games I’ve ever played. Maybe the best.

One thing that I’ve always loved about TSW is that it seems like every time I revisit an old zone or mission, I find something new and interesting that I never noticed before. Amazingly, after all this time, that’s still true.

This time the discovery came while interacting with John Wolf. Now, I’d undoubtedly heard this conversation many times before, but the significance had somehow passed me by.

John talks about a home that he lost. And he gives this home a name: Miracle.

Now, even if you’re a long-time TSW fan, I don’t blame you if you don’t know what Miracle is. But if you do know, it’s a name that’s likely to give you chills.

I’ll explain, and it is very hard to find concrete info on Miracle, so take anything I say with a grain of salt, but this is the story as I understand it.

Ragnar Tornquist has worked on the setting of The Secret World for a very long time. Almost sounds a bit like me and Soulcleaver. And while The Secret World is the only incarnation of that universe to make it to the public so far, it’s not the only one he has planned. Miracle is another.

We know Miracle is a video game, but beyond that the details are harder to uncover. It seems clear that for a time Miracle and TSW were in fact one and the same, but somewhere along the line he seems to have decided Miracle would be a separate game in the same setting.

Reading between the lines — and again, grain of salt — the impression that I’m left with is that Miracle is the true conclusion to the arc of TSW and its main conflicts. The end of the Fourth Age of Humanity and the dawn of the Fifth, all that. TSW is the set-up. Miracle is the pay-off.

The matter of when or even if Miracle will be made, like so much about the game, is an open question. But at least there doesn’t seem to be any evidence that Ragnar ever gave up on the idea.

And it is therefore to Miracle, not Legends, that I am currently inclined to give my hopes for the future of the franchise.

Until that day comes, I’ll continue to enjoy TSW as I can.

Be seeing you, sweetlings.

In the half-light.

Superior Realities

Tag Archives: Miracle

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