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Season 3 of Parallel’s closed Beta is almost here!
That’s right, a fresh new Battlepass drops tomorrow night (Saturday, October 1), unleashing a slew of new exclusive cosmetics, tournament entries, card frames, and more.
Titled Crimson Confidant, Season 3 also introduces the first-ever Premium Track to the Battlepass. For 2400 Glints, you can gain access to this new track, which comes with a ton of unlockable new goodies.
It also includes the chance to mint a First Edition version of Mirielle, the Ghost of Mars.
To get a full breakdown of the new Battlepass, be sure to read this juicy blog from Parallel. There is a lot of information and new features rolling out, so a Discord FAQ is also available.
While Iโm excited for Mirielle to enter the game, Iโm personally hyped for the new Paragon skins. Check out this one of our favorite Shroud leader, Brand.
Along with the cleaner in-game display of the Paragons in the newest patch, these exclusive skins will dazzle and delight players on both sides of the board.
Just hours after Issue 3 of The Priming went live on September 15, Parallel dropped another juicy bomb for all the lore lovers out there. Parallel-specific languages.
As if the images of the individual alphabets werenโt already cool enough, Parallel just leaked the initial design of what are known as Native Language [NL] cards.
These will be Prime rarity cards, so they will be highly coveted. Furthermore, when you play them on the field, the visual treatment appears to be the same as the Artigraphs.
Rare and flexy new Plantefall cards?! More leaks, please.
The two posts above are the extent of what we know about Languages, but now we have an entirely new stream of lore to play with. Everything coming out of the roaring Parallel pipeline โ every new Card, Landscape, Cinematic, Skin, Avatar, whatever โ could include little Language easter eggs.
I’m beyond excited by these languages. They will not only become recognizable elements of an expanding sci-fi universe, but they are ripe elements for creators and world-building enthusiasts alike.
As a huge creativity and writing nerd, I’m going to wax poetic about the Languages for a hot minute.
We all gravitate towards a specific Parallel faction for different reasons.
Those reasons are inherent and personal but usually stem from how we connect with certain characters, traits, and backstories (lore).
We get a little taste of each faction’s identity with every card, comic, and Landscape Parallel releases. Within those little drips are the behaviors the factions exhibit, the history they’ve lived, and, of course, the languages they speak.
Ancient cultures relied on oral tradition for millennia to tell their stories and preserve their histories. Then, when writing emerged around 3,500 years ago from the “cradle of civilization” known as Mesopotamia, the door for a new realm of human creativity swung wide open.
Pictographs were all the rage back then, but as time passed, Cuneiform was introduced thanks to the giga-brained humans who first discovered how to use a triangular reed stylus.
If youโre passionate about the influence of language on a culture, I highly recommend the book The Origins of Creativity by world-renowned biologist Edward O. Wilson. It’s a poetic and intelligent look at the evolution of human expression and how its various forms influence our species and myriad societies.
I wanted to share an excerpt from the book because I believe it points to one of the many reasons why the new Parallel languages are so exciting for fans.
โLanguage is necessary for human existence, but in a way wholly different from the service of our spine, heart, and lungs. It is the basis of a society, from the simplest to most complex. By inquiry and knowledge made possible, our minds are able to travel lightning-fast through space and time, and, with an increasing scientific precision, visit any place on the planet, and beyond.โ
– Edward O. Wilson
There are many cool synchronicities in that stream of consciousness. Specifically, I love that Wilson shares the idea that language already exists well beyond this planet. In fact, on Earth alone there are more than 6,500 active languages, with nearly 2,000 of them in danger of becoming extinct.
Imagine how many might exist beyond the solar system and in the infinite realm of the stars.
I geeked out even more on the languages and encoded a message using my favorite Parallel, the Shroud.
The first person to decipher it correctly and solve the riddle will win a prize. I canโt tell you what that prize is, however, because it also happens to be the answer to the puzzle.
Happy searching, my fellow lore and language lovers!
Goldy’s Hint: The answer you seek is a single Parallel digital asset (NFT).
Thanks for reading, feel free to follow me @Goldy_TGG, and see you on the battlefield!