As the title says… it’s been a busy week (and a half)! I was busy for a couple days making Father’s Day cards for several people, and birthday cards for several more – plus planning what to do for Bognus’s birthday this week! In between all of that, I managed to get our fields dug out a bit more, so we now have 4 really good-sized fields for farming / keeping animals. We have way more cows and horses than we actually plan on keeping in the long run, but we’ve been trying to get Animal Husbandry leveled on the priest – and the more animals, the faster it goes! The fields look great though, and we have so much more room. I’ll post some before & after pictures soon – once I remember to take the after shots during the day! I looked back at the ones I have, and they’re all dark and /or foggy. Whoops! Must not have been paying attention when I took them.

To add to the list of things we’ve been busy with, Bognus and I have been trying out a couple betas for upcoming games. Most recently (the weekend just past) we tried out The Secret World, and the weekend before that was Guild Wars 2. While GW2 didn’t quite seem like our cup of tea, we both had a lot of fun with TSW and can’t wait for launch next month!

Guild Wars 2 seemed like a relatively amusing game, but we honestly couldn’t really get into it. I never played the original Guild Wars, so I went into it with no knowledge of the world, or expectations for the game as a whole. The characters were cute, and the combat system was okay, but it felt very grindy. We didn’t really find any quests, just lots of affection-based area grinds (go kill this many things in this area, or perform this many simple tasks, etc). It was fun to dabble in for a bit, but we honestly didn’t see much to hold us there long-term, and we were bored by the end of the weekend. We went back to Wurm before the beta event was quite finished (and then got our priest killed right outside our gates, when the power went out for hours right as she got attacked by multiple spiders… /sigh). It was okay, just not what we were looking for.

I also went into The Secret World not knowing much about the game. Hubby didn’t think that I would enjoy it for whatever reason, so neither of us really had our hopes up about it at all. We mostly just wanted to try it because we’re still in search of an MMO, and it’s one of the ones coming out pretty soon. I was honestly not expecting to like it anywhere near as much as I did. As Moxie said on her blog, I definitely think it’s more of a niche game. I don’t really think that it’s going to be “the next big thing” – but I’m okay with that. I play Wurm, so I already tend to like the helpful communities and slightly more mature player-base that’s found in smaller games! TSW has a more modern setting (you start out in London, New York, or Seoul depending on your faction), and has a very interesting travel system that will make it very easy to expand the world further. I can see lots of potential for future expansions here!

The game itself really makes you think. There are lots of little riddles to solve and puzzles to figure out. Some are text-based and some are more platform-based. They do have some pretty straight-forward “go here and kill this many dudes” quests, but they’re usually interspersed with plenty of quests that require you to pay attention to your surroundings and pick up on little details to be used later. It’s hard to really go into much more detail without giving away some of the quests, but it was really a lot of fun to run around completing quests that you actually have to think about! Plus, the whole underground Templar / Illuminati thing has always had some appeal to me. As a whole, I really enjoyed the beta this weekend. It was tough to put it down and save the rest until the game actually launches (July 3rd)!

So that’s what we’ve been up to for the last week or so. More deed pictures to come, soon!