![]() “Before Retribution it was mostly skirmishes, but afterwards we saw stuff like sovereignity and more life-or-death battles.” “Fights in Serenity since Retribution have got bigger and more frequent,” says Ye. In April 2013 they released the Retribution expansion and in August the Odyssey expansion – these together did things like rebalancing the most common combat ships (frigates, cruisers and destroyers) adding more ships, allowing players to train dual characters (so they could have a 'combat alt'), revamped scanning, and various other minor tweaks. “So this was designed to get people fighting. ““It was too calm and we wondered if we'd made an error in judgement,” says Ye. What's really interesting is that Tiancity, at this stage in Serenity's life, thought that things were too quiet. At Fanfest one of the game's producers, Duo Ye, ran through Tiancity's strategy – they started trying to reduce the time between Tranquility's expanions and the launch in China, naming the first in June 2012 'A New Era.' They immediately started to pull the audience back in, setting a new simultaneous user high of 42,000 players, and by the second expansion 'Inferno' saw paying subscriptions double.īut player numbers are one thing. ![]() When the licensing agreement expired in 2011, CCP decided to go with a new partner Tiancity. Over 2007-2009 Serenity was in relatively dark times, never seeing more than 6,000 players logged in at one time. After a hugely successful opening few months, which saw over a million accounts registered and a simultaneous login peak of just under 39,000 pilots, the game began to tank. It was given a simple name: the slaughterhouse.Ī brief history lesson about Serenity EVE Online was launched in China in 2006 and initially operated by the publisher Optic Communication. Barely two months after all those headlines about B-R5 being 'the biggest / most expensive videogame battle ever,' a 23-hour war in EVE China made that look like a dry run. The Chinese version of EVE Online has its own server, Serenity, operated by the publisher Tiancity – and it has just as much, if not more, capacity for the enormous player-driven events EVE is known for. Cool story bro, but the only problem is that's not quite true. Will there be redemption for Villanelle/Oxana in the next series? Would that be too neat?įor a musical Villanelle, Berlioz’s Nuits d’été is gorgeous:įor more from PWB, see Fleabag and Exotic travels and do watch Jodie Comer in the recent Talking heads.Įnter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.įollow Follow Stephen Jones: a blog on WordPress.One of EVE Online's most important features is that everything takes place on a single UK-based server called Tranquility. I’m sure there’s a sound feminist response to this. It can hardly be much consolation that whole generations of women are also subscribing to the image. ![]() So now for the chic assassin (for terms like femme fatale, see here and for Lulu, here). Great sex-and-suicide flick-turned a whole generation of men onto girls with mental illness. It’s your basic undergraduate lunge for individuality.Īpril: I’ve not even seen Betty Blue. Which I suppose leads me to just one niggling doubt, encapsulated long ago by Mark in Peep Show, visiting a student he fancies:Īpril: Thanks. OK, among these clips, the Psychopath scene (from 6.22), ending with Villanelle’s response to “Are you upset?” is wonderful: While Luke Jennings’ novel Codename Villanelle can hardly compete, one location that sinophiles will enjoy there (not used in the TV version) is an ever-sleazy Shanghai, scene of one of the most grisly murders-with its references to Moon river and the 1930s’ silent-film actress Ruan Lingyu.įor astute comments from Unloved on how they created the soundtrack for the series, see here. And indeed this New Yorker review, and now this from the LRB (you may already have noted that I tend not to favour the Ku Klux Klan Gazette as the ultimate source of critical wisdom). You can take your pick of a plethora of rave reviews, but I like this. The brilliant Sandra Oh and Jodie Comer are inspired by Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s script, which wears its feminist credentials lightly. Just in case you’ve been holed up in your ivory tower studying medieval Daoist manuscripts or suchlike, neglecting to delight in all manifestations of the Terpischorean muse, here’s a tribute-and a query. I entirely share the widespread adulation for Killing Eve.
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