This Is Going To Take Some Processing...

Somehow I seem to have gotten myself into a situation where it feels like every time I play Wuthering Waves I ought to write about it. Even when I have nothing to say. Like now.

I can't think of any other game I've played where that's happened. Usually I'm either hip-deep in a game and can't wait to talk about every last damn little thing to do with it or I'm posting because I have a specific observation to make or a topic to explore. The closest I can come would be the "What I've Been Playing" kinds of posts that mostly give updates on what I've been up to or act as a kind of diary for my own future interest and amusment.

This, though, isn't quite any of those. It's as if I play Wuthering Waves (I refuse to call it "WuWa", which always makes me think of Al Pacino in Scent of a Woman, a movie I haven't even seen but whose nonsensical catchphrase became unavoidable in the culture for a while.) so infrequently that every occasion becomes a kind of event that has to be recorded, if not celebrated.

I'm not going to go over, yet again, the peculiar way playing this one game drains all my energy to the extent it takes me weeks before I'm ready to go again, except to say that I played it on Saturday and that's exactly what happened. Neither am I going to go on about how hard I find it to keep up with what seems to me like an overwhelming flood of content that just never ends. We'll take all of that as given.

On Saturday evening I finished the final part of The Maiden, The Defier, The Death Crier. It's Act IV, Chapter 2 of the main storyline and it dropped in Tangled Truth In Inverted Tower, the update before the current one, so I'm behind as usual. I didn't time my sessions but I believe it took me at least four hours to finish just the MSQ portion (I did nothing else.) Maybe quite a bit longer. As always, much of that time was spent watching cut scenes.

That said, it's not just cut scenes. There are 82 separate quest steps in the walkthrough on the wiki so there is something to do. But even the text summary of the storyline, not including any instructions, comes to more than three thousand words. That's about a fifteen-minute read. If you want to watch the whole thing for yourself - and it is very much possible to watch it like an anime - there are plenty of options on YouTube. Most of those last more than three hours.

I found it overwhelming. Not because of the length, nor for the quality of the writing and voice-acting, impressive throughout, nor yet from the emotional depth, which is considerable. Mostly I found it overwhelming because of how much thinking I had to do, trying to understand what the heck it was all about.

With the later chapters of Wuthering Waves main storyline, I find myself in the strange position of thoroughly enjoying the narrative, caring about the characters and being invested in the plot, without ever having much more than the vaguest idea what's going on. Every time I play I end up spending half my time trying to figure out not just what the implications of what I'm watching might be (And there are always implications.) but what much of it even means.

There's a whole, intricate, complex backstory underpinning everything, precious little of which I understand. The dialog is stuffed with jargon that quickly becomes familiar without ever becoming clear. 

I have no more than a surface understanding of what Resonators are or do. I don't entirely get what the difference is between Tacet Discords and Echoes. I'm uncertain about the role of either the Sentinels or the Threnodians. I don't have a working knowledge of the Dark Tide and what it was or how it changed things. I'm not clear on the exact definition or usage of terms like "Remnant" or "Frequency"...

And on and on like that. All of it has, to some degree, been explained in the game but since I play so sporadically, I can barely remember anything I've been told from one session to the next. I'm sure that has a lot to do with why I find it so exhausting and why I prevaricate so much before logging in again. It's a vicious circle.

Because Wuthering Waves is such a successful and popular game (In marked contrast to most things I play.) there's a wealth of explanatory material available online. What I'm thinking is that I might need to do some background reading. It's not something I normally do (Ok, I have browsed through the arcane lore of the Norrathian gods and demi-gods a couple of times because it's hard to keep all that nonsense straight) but it seems like it might be worth it.

In most cases, in a translated, free-to-play title, it wouldn't be worth the trouble. In most cases, if the story didn't make sense it would either be because the translation was inept or because the story was tripe to begin with. Most likely both.

With Wuthering Waves, though, neither of those explanations fits. The writing is obviously well up to any standard you might expect from a video game and the translation is excellent. I suspect the problems I'm having come from two entirely different sources. I'm thinking there may be genre conventions I'm not familiar with that make this type of dense, layered, complex lore something players both expect and appreciate and I'm wondering if the jargon isn't mostly there to add a sheen of technical gravitas to make the whole thing feel weightier than it would be otherwise, not to make anything easier to follow.

None of which is bad. It's a narrative choice, whether to invite the audience in or make them feel they need to earn admission. If you pick the second, though, you'd better be sure you have something they want to see to make that extra effort worth it. Wuthering Waves, it seems, has. For me, anyway. 

It's tiring, sure, but the payoffs are always worth it. The way this chapter ended felt deliciously bittersweet, as have others before it. The whole game is suffused with a strangely elegaic sense of loss in place of the threat or menace on which most games rely and it's refreshing. 

Put it another way, there are an awful lot of moody longshots of sunsets and fields of flowers for an action adventure. People hug a lot before saying goodbye. And it all happens at some length.

I found the ending slightly unsettling, as usual, particularly the way one of the characters I'd just spent several hours with seemed to have hardened into almost someone else altogether. Is it just me or was she threatening my character there at the end? My character certainly seemed to think so, although she's so saintly it's not always easy to tell when she's annoyed..

Add to that the wholly unexpected plot twist concerning the two feuding Rinascitan families, the very odd behavior of Cantarella just before the big fight and Abby's apparent recovery and there's a lot to think about. 

The next chapter is already up but I'm not sure I'm quite ready to open it yet.

Turns Out More Is More After All

What I want to talk about today, even though I'm pretty sure no-one but me wants to hear it, is Suno. I wasn't expecting to write about AI music again but that's because, as Vic Reeves used to say, I hadn't thought it through.

Here's the thing: I spent two months generating literally hundreds of versions of about thirty songs until I had what I thought was a definitive version of all of them. I moved on to making the videos and I didn't need Suno for those, so I thought I was probably done with it, for a while at least.

I was just about to unsubscribe then, just before the sub was due to renew, Version 4.5 arrived. Which was a complete surprise to me. Even though the "Cover" feature I'd been using was clearly flagged as "Beta" and there was a drop-down menu of previous models in the app itself, it never occured to me that meant development was still going on. 

I mean, I knew, obviously. I just didn't know.

Several things changed with the update, all of them potentially significant for the project. For a start, the cover feature was much improved in 4.5. I'd been very satisfied with the 4.0 beta version but things can always get better so naturally the first thing I did with my remaining credits was generate a few covers for comparison. The difference was hard to miss. 

There was a noticeable improvement in quality and the annoying glitches almost completely vanished. Most importantly, the new covers I was generating stuck much more reliably to the uploads. Under 4.0 that had not always been the case.

One of the reason I generated so many covers of the same songs was to get one where the AI didn't decide it had a better melody for the bridge than the one I'd given it or that it could phrase my lyrics more evocatively than I could. Which might have been okay except that nine times out of ten the AI was wrong. The original was better. (The other reason I keep making more and more covers, of course, is that it's incredibly satisfying and tons of fun. I'm not saying it'll never get old but it sure hasn't yet.)

With 4.5 the AI rarely deviates from the template it's given. Hardly at all. When it does, it's usually because I'm trying to make it accomodate my lyrics and melody to an entirely different and wholly unsuitable genre, something I do mostly for my own amusement. I can hardly blame the AI for losing patience with me there.

As well as producing much more accurate versions of my originals, the new model can also make them longer. Output from 4.0 was limited to four minutes. That's doubled in 4.5. 

Not that I've got anything that's eight minutes long. This isn't prog rock. But I was having problems with a handful of songs that naturally run just over four minutes. They kept getting cut off in the coda or the final verse. 

There are ways to get around that with extensions in the old model but it's fiddly and usually doesn't sound quite right. The new model just keeps going until the song's over, which is infinitely better. And it gets the timing right so the songs have an actual ending rather than just stopping like the machine's been switched off.

All of that meant I've had to think again about the whole project. I might need to go back over all the "finished" versions to see if they really are as good as they could be. I suspect some of them are not. More to the point, I'm now aware there may be further improvements to the AI in future releases, so I'm just going to have to draw a line somewhere for sanity's sake. 

Either that or keep playing around with it until I finally get bored, something I'm showing absolutely no sign of doing so far. I have to say that at £8 a month I'm getting at least as much use and entertainment out of the subscription than I ever got from an MMORPG sub. It's cheap entertainment by the Dollar per Hour scale and you have something to show for your time and money at the end.

Perhaps the most intriguing addition to Suno's capabilities in this latest model is the new Prompt Enhancement Helper.  The AI as a whole has had its interpretative and creative powers increased and extended, something that's apparent from the results. That's probably the most important change but the most fascinating is the way it now lifts the curtain to show how it's doing it.

I had been under the impression that to get the best results I needed to keep my prompts as concise and tight as possible. I didn't think long, descriptive prompts full of adjectives and metaphors did all that much. I was convinced that even listing multiple genres or naming more than one or two specific instruments led to the AI cherry-picking a couple of them and ignoring the rest.

Based on the new feature, I had it all backwards. What happens when you use the Prompt Enhancement Helper is that your brief summary gets translated into a long paragraph, full of clauses and imagery and opinion. The exact opposite of what I expected, in other words. 

For example, if I prompt 

"1960s garage rock, female vocals" 

the Prompt Enhancer turns it into 

"Raw, punchy 1960s garage rock led by gritty female vocals. Begins with fuzzed-out guitar riff and tambourine accents; bass and drums drive a stripped-back rhythm. The chorus bursts open with call-and-response backing vocals and harmonized guitar lines. Short, energetic instrumental break before a brisk finale."

That's some "enhancement". 

Because I can't help myself, I tested the results on a few songs using the basic and enhanced prompts and the enhanced ones always come closer to what I was imagining. It's still true that the end result appears to have ignored a lot of the specifics but the overall effect is much closer to the intent. That's great in itself but the best part is that, now I know what the AI is looking for, I can write more detailed prompts myself.

Of course, once I'd started playing with the prompt enhancer, I started getting ideas. The first thing I thought of was to see just what the AI would make of that mysterious, seemingly meaningless prompt I wrote a whole post about a while back, Post-Post-Vibe Cassette. 

With enhancement

"Post-Post-Vibe Cassette, female vocals" 

becomes

"Dreamy lo-fi "post-post-vibe" cassette track: begins with washed-out, tape-warped synth pads and muffled drum machine groove. Minimalist bass pulses subtly beneath airy, melodic female vocals, layered and filtered. Interspersed analog samples weave throughout, adding texture."

Seriously? Where is it getting all that detail from? As far as I can tell, the original prompt is void of all context other than "female vocals". You can't be "post-post" a "vibe" unless you know what the vibe is and "cassette" isn't a genre. Cassettes don't even sound significantly different to other forms of recording (Except worse.) And the enhanced prompt admits that by putting the phrase in quotes. It doesn't recognize it as a genre. It just takes my word for it that it might be one.

I was curious to see if the prompt enhancer would always interpret post-post-vibe cassette the same way. It doesn't. It's not a fixed response. 

Here's another version it gave me:

"Atmospheric synths lay a hazy, lo-fi bed, layered with warbly cassette textures and saturated drums. Minimalist bass pulsates beneath crisp, delayed guitar plucks. Female vocals glide with dreamy reverb, while tape flutter and subtle noise accent shifting, moody sections."

That explains why the results vary when I just use the basic prompt. Even so, the long prompts are very similar. It's clearly not just making stuff up at random. I have no clue how it's landing where it does but it clearly thinks post-post-vibe cassette means something fairly specific, which explains why the variations always sit within a relatively limited range of styles and sounds. They're always a bit woozy and untethered, which is how the descriptions feel.

I had fun playing with that for a while and then I started to wonder... if the AI can interpret an abstract phrase as effectively as that, what could it do with something more concrete? Quite a lot, it turns out.

All the time I'd been using Suno I'd been seeding my prompts with musical genres and styles, specific instrumentation, production and arrangement and some mood descriptors like "sad" or "wistful". It never occurred to me to leave all that out and just tell the AI the context instead.

So I tried this:

"music heard coming from the local radio station of an orbiting space habitat over a vast conurbation in an anime set in the far future, female vocals" 

Suno didn't blink. It gave me two very nice interpretations, neither of which felt particularly "spacey" but either of which I could easily imagine hearing in the scenario described.

I have to say that one of the best things about the generative AIs is the way you can ask them to do all kinds of things that would be too embarassing to ask a person. They really don't care. Bearing that in mind, I asked Suno to enhance that description:

"Dreamy synth layers open the song, with glitchy electronic percussion and pulsing sub-bass creating a weightless atmosphere. Bright, airy pads ebb and flow, supporting spacious female vocals processed with subtle delay and reverb. Futuristic textures blend with downtempo beats, weaving ethereal melodies and brief robotized vocal fragments between verses and choruses. The arrangement gradually intensifies, introducing swirling arpeggios, metallic accents, and digital noise, cresting with a lush, enveloping bridge before gently dissolving into haunting echoes and cosmic ambience."

 I see the 200 character prompt limit is a thing of the past, then...

Obviously, I wanted to hear the results and I wasn't disappointed. They were excellent, although once again I can't quite see what's futuristic about them. But then, it's an impossible task, predicting the future, even in musical style.

Clearly I am nowhere near done with Suno yet. It's a fantastically entertaining toy. I have a bunch more ideas of things to try and projects to work on. I certainly feel more excited about playing around with it than I do about playing games these days.

In fact, I'm starting to wonder if generative AI might not end up becoming a new entertainment medium in its own right. It's clearly not great at facts but it's pretty good at making stuff up. Maybe that's what it'll end up being used for. I can imagine a whole raft of purpose-specific AIs being marketed and sold just as games are now. 

And on that happy thought I'll leave you. I have some songs to generate.

Oh, I Love What You've Done To The Place!

I don't know if anyone's noticed but there really hasn't been a lot of commentary on Stars Reach since the Kickstarter ended. Not here, not at TAGN, not anywhere that I've seen. A couple of news items at MassivelyOP, the game's unofficial cheerleader and flag-waver, and that's your lot.

I can't recall even seeing anyone whose blog I follow, or who comments here, mentioning whether they'd backed it or not. Maybe someone did say something about that - I seem to have the vaguest recollection - but if so, they've been keeping quiet about it ever since.

After the dust settled, I wasn't quite sure where things had fallen. I won't re-hash the whole annoying story of how many different emails and Steam accounts I ended up using but when I got an email from Playable Worlds, telling me I needed to do something to register my Pledge with the Steam account I wanted to use, I had no idea which it ought to be. 

In the end, I made a guess and now I'm getting press releases from Playable Worlds to one email address, Kickstarter updates to another and alpha invites from FirstLook.gg, the company PW is using to handle the test program, to a third. Looks like I'm covered.

The most important of the three sources is presumably FirstLook. Without their involvement I don't think you can access the tests. Or maybe you can. I mean, I have the client on Steam and it's getting updates, so maybe all that would happen if I didn't get the emails from FirstLook to tell me about the tests would be that I'd have to check one of the other sources to find out when the servers were open. Like Discord, for example, where there's a whole section dedicated to dates and alerts for exactly that purpose.

Honestly, the whole process feels way, way too complicated. I know I've made it harder for myself by using multiple email addresses but even if I had everything on the same one, I'd still be getting emails from three different sources and I'd probably need to check Discord regularly as well. I miss the days when there was just one department at any company making a game that would handle everything in a terst program directly. (Shakes fist at passing cloud...)

Anyway, communications and logistics aside, it does appear I'm still in the testing program, although I suspect it may be as a former, pre-alpha tester rather than as a bona-fide paying customer. I don't appear to have the in-game title "Reacher" that was part of the pledge, anyway. At some point I might have to do something about that but for now I can get in so I'm not bothered.

And I did indeed "get in" last night, for the first time since the Kickstarter funded on Day One a couple of months ago. I didn't log in once during the campaign and I haven't since, either, not until yesterday. The extensive "testing" that happened during the Kickstarter was really just an opportunity for the undecided to get a hands-on with the game before making up their minds whether to pledge. I'd already made up mine so I left them to it.

After the campaign ended, everything went very quiet for a month until, just this week, it all started up again. There was a big update in which a whole load of stuff changed. I'm not going to go through it all. There's too much. If you're interested, all the details are in the very extensive Patch Notes, which seem to be public, as far as I can tell.

The gist of it is that everything is getting much more complicated, slower and more inter-connected. The glory days of pre-alpha, when there wasn't a lot to do and what there was you could do all on your own are long gone. I suspect this is going to end up being one of those games where I keep harping on about how it was "better in beta", except in this case it'll be "I prefered it in pre-alpha".

All this massive upheaval necessitated a full wipe, of course. Playable Worlds apologized for that although now I can't find their apology, which I'm sure I saw somewhere... it was probably on Discord. I can never find anything on Discord. According to the watermarks on the screenshots, we are still in pre-alpha, though. There are going to be plenty more wipes, I'm sure.

I logged in last night mostly on a whim. I wasn't even sure of the test times but I figured they were usually much the same and I was right. I had to make a new character, something that takes all of five seconds because as yet there are no customization options at all beyond picking a race and gender and giving yourself a name. 

Character creation is one thing I wish they would get on and gussy up a bit. I particularly wish they'd lay off the ridiculous gimmick of making your character completely change appearance every time you go through a portal. I don't know if it's a device for testing something or if it's supposed to stop players becoming too attached to their characters, since they're all going to be wiped soon enough anyway, but whatever it is I find it very irritating.

That said, I do like the character design per se. The character models look attractive and approachable, as befits the game's decidedly cosy aesthetic. The whole game radiates cosiness. There are a lot of warm, vibrant colors, soft surfaces and rounded corners. Very few sharp edges. Everything gently glows and feels friendly.

All of which makes it even more annoying that there are still so many highly aggressive mobs all over the place. They may have been toned down to an extent but all too often it still feels like my character is the mob, trapped in some nightmarish MMO the actual mobs are playing. I died twice last night just minding my own business and had to run away several times to avoid dying some more. 

How anyone at Playable Worlds imagines that's fun beats me. I've played a lot of MMORPGs and even back in the glory days of corpse runs and losing levels I never had a quarter as much trouble just staying alive in a starter zone.

I always thought there was a tonal disconnect beetween what the game looks like and how it plays, though, and now it feels as though that divide is increasing all the time, not least because Stars Reach now looks fricken' gorgeous! That was the biggest suprise when I logged in last night. It's always been a nice-enough-looking game but now it's stunning. I don't know exactly what they've done but whatever it was it really levelled the graphics up.

Unsurprisingly, most of what I did once I saw how they'd smartened the old place up was run around taking screenshots. I took more than forty in under an hour and a half. Props to PW for having good screenshot commands this early in development. Some games don't have a dedicated screenshot key and another for removing the UI even by launch. 

Everywhere I turned there was a spectacular view or a striking piece of scenery. I could have taken twice as many photos but I forced myself to stop and find something else to do.

Mostly, what I found was the same as ever: surveying, harvesting, mining... All the old favorites are still there only now the skill-trees have been separated a bit more and the xp is a bit different. Well, supposedly, according to the patch notes. Didn't seem all that different to me in practice but I was only scrubbing along at the bottom. I imagine the differences become clearer as you clamber up the branches of those skill-trees.

One very big change I couldn't miss is that crafting has been hived off from everything else. It's now completely siloed, meaning you have to actually craft if you want to be a crafter. No more making single items you need, as you need them. Wave goodbye to self-sufficiency. The idea is that crafters will make stuff and everyone else will buy it from them.

Of course, there's no currency yet so for the time being so trade isn't so much buying and selling as swapping. Player-to-player trade is in but only in the most primitive form imaginable. There's a barter system.

You stand next to someone, open a trade window and pass stuff to each other, just like we used to do back in the 90s. Seriously, I think the last time I played a game where it was done that way must have been EverQuest before the Luclin expansion, which added the Bazaar. It seems incredibly primitive more than twenty years on. Presumably it's just a first step towards a real trading system with vendors or an auction house or something. I mean, this is meant to be set in the future, isn't it? Not before the invention of coinage.

I didn't test the proto-trading experience for myself because a) I didn't have anything to trade and b) I barely saw anyone to trade with. I think I might have seen half a dozen other players in the ninety minutes I was online. One of them was obviously AFK at the spawn-in and the others just ran past me on their way somewhere. I never saw anyone twice.

Suits me. I had a pretty good time just messing about on my own. What with the beautiful scenery and the enjoyable survival-lite gameplay, Stars Reach makes for a good noodling game. 

Digging holes, especially, never gets old. That laser is hella fun to operate. I had a great time putting a big hole in a large chert rock. It took ages because different materials now react differently and hard rock is resistant to lasers but when I was done I felt ridiculously pleased with the result. It was like I'd made an abstract sculpture. Pity someone else can just come along and destroy it.

Destruction is a big thing in the game, of course, and I can't claim I'm immune to the urge to tear eveything down just for the fun of watching it fall. There's been a change that means if you dig caves they might collapse on top of you, so when I fell into a huge underground cavern, the first thing I did was try to cut through some of the pillars of rock that were holding the ceiling up. 

I was ready to die just for the experience but nothing dramatic occured. I managed to sever several pillars alright but they immediately self-healed, which was a disappointment. Health and safety gone mad.

After that, I was just about to go looking for some metals so I could start crafting, when Beryl bounced in and suggested I stop and play with her instead. So I did. That's how most of my pre-alpha sessions have ended. Some things just don't change.

I will go back again soon for another run around, though, at which point I might have something more informative to report, although I doubt it. I don't tend to do much of any significance when I get to play. Mostly I just goof around. At least now I'm a Reacher, not just a Tester, I don't have to feel guilty about it.

Even though I like the game, I still find it hard to imagine ever playing Stars Reach with any serious intent. I can't really see why anyone would want to devote the amount of time to it that it's obviously going to require. But then I could say that about most games these days. Like a lot of people, I think I may finally have outgrown the appeal of games that take up as much time as a full-time job and never come to an end.

Still, it's got a lot of potential as something I might pick up and put down for an hour or two, now and then. Give me a nice, quiet planet with no aggressive wildlife, no more wipes and full character customization and I might really be able to get into it.

Horse Latitudes

I had a great plan for today's post.... okay, a good plan... well, a plan, anyway. I was going to stump up my $25 (£20.99) for the weird horse-mystery MMORPG Equinox: Homecoming. It's going into Early Access on Steam today. Then I was going to play it for a couple of hours and write a First Impressions piece. Those are always fun and easy to do.

It seemed like a good idea to buy the thing anyway, not only because of the blogging opportunities it offers, always a major consideration these days, when I'm writing about games a lot more than I really play them, (And just how long can that go on, eh? Eh??) but because of that too-good-to-be true "Lifetime Subscription With Every Early Access Purchase" offer. 

As a blogger, even if the game tanks, $25 would be a fair price to pay, just to there for the drama. Lots to write about in a crash-and-burn. And if it turns into a success, $25 for permanent subscription-level perks is an insane bargain. Anything in-between would just be par for the course for an EA buy-in so it seemed like a no-lose scenario.

I was all set to Add To Cart when something caught my eye:

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS
MINIMUM:
Processor: i9-9900K 3.6 GHz 8 Core
Memory: 8 GB RAM
Graphics: GeForce RTX 2070
Network: Broadband Internet connection
Storage: 20 GB available space

Wait? What? i9?

This is going to sound very strange to a lot of people reading this, I know, but I can't recall ever even seeing a spec for a game I've been interested in that had an i9 requirement as a minimum. In fact, and you'll laugh when you hear this, I wasn't aware there was an i9.

I think the highest I've noticed before was i7. My PC runs on an i5. 

I have been looking at upgrades, although only because my desktop, which is nine (!) years old, isn't eligible for Windows 11 so I'm going to have to make some kind of decision about what that means in a few months, when Microsoft switch off support for Windows 10. All I need to do to make it acceptable, though, is to enable Secure Boot and TPM 2.0 in the BIOS, which I could do quite easily, and swap the CPU for one on MS's approved list.

The thing is, it's not the i-number that's the issue there. My laptop, which is already running W11, has an i5. In fact, Windows 11 runs on an i3. There are plenty of them on the Approved list. So, when I've been looking at possible processor upgrades, I haven't been thinking about how much more powerful they are, or how much newer; only how cheap. And there are plenty of relatively cheap CPUs that Windows 11 approves of.

Then there's the question of functionality, aka "if it ain't broke...". The reason my PC is nine years old, by far the longest I've ever gone without buying a new box, is that it runs everything I'm interested in without any noticeable problems. 

I have upgraded it a few times. Most recently, I doubled the Ram a  few years back. Still only 16GB, which I realize is nothing these days, but more than adequate for anything I'm asking it to do. 

I also bought a decent video card (GeForce RTX4070) in the summer of 2023, which made a big difference to my gaming then, although I'm so used to it now I don't think about it any more. I've been doing a lot of video editing recently and that's been painless and comfortable. I haven't run into any games I wanted to play but couldn't up to now. Other than the W11 issue, there hasn't seemed  to be any point thinking about further upgrades, let alone replacing the whole machine.

I'm still not sure there is but even if I did decide to swap out the CPU, I'd only be looking at going up to an i7 because my motherboard, a Gigabyte z170 Gaming K3, can't accept anything higher. The incentive to upgrade isn't really there, either. I've looked into it before and the difference between my i5, which has always bench-marked as faster than expected, and the i7s I've considered isn't all that great. If you can't see the difference, what's the point?

If I did decide to go further than that, it would mean changing the motherboard and while I'm okay with a certain amount of fiddling about inside the case that's where I draw the line, so it would mean a new PC. And I am not about to buy a new PC just so I can play an Early Access game where I ride around on horseback solving mysteries.

I could just buy the game and try it to see if it runs anyway. It might. I've played a few games before, where my PC didn't meet minimum spec and they've worked fine. I've never refunded a Steam game but I believe you get a couple of hours grace. Plenty of time to see if it would run acceptably. Or at all.

So, I suppose I might do that. At the moment, though, I'm kind of disposed not to bother. It'd be nice to be in at the beginning but I'll lay odds Equinox:Homecoming will be in Early Access for a year or two so there's no hurry. Also, give it a few months and we'll all have a better idea of whether it's going to be worth our time or not.

Right now, I'm thinking more along the lines of whether I might want to replace my PC later in the year after all. Maybe the i9 minimum for the horse game is a straw in the wind. After all, that processor generation, for all that I didn't even know it existed, is itself about five years old now. If I'm going to carry on playing new games into my retirement, I guess I'll have to get a new machine eventually. Maybe now's the time.

No rush. No need for snap decisions. I might start looking, though. See what's around. Given the volatile nature of both the global economy right now and of computer hardware in general, it's always hard to know when is or isn't a good time to buy. It's always fun window-shopping though.

Finally, dragging my thoughts away from the personal, what does this i9 minimum spec mean for the game itself? According to Games Radar, Colin Cragg, CEO of Blue Scarab, the developer behind Equinox:Homecoming, is aiming for an audience of "horse girls", described evocatively by Ashley Bardhan, who wrote the piece, as

 "Graceless, American; rough hands, and breath that smells of apple pie – the stereotypical female horse enthusiast, or horse girl".

Cragg used to be CEO of Star Stable, the well-established long-running horse-based MMO (What? You didn't know there were more?). It's a successful game: "$35 million of recurring revenue every year". 

Star Stable, though, has much lower minimum specs than Equinox: Homecoming. My nine-year old PC would have no problems running it. In fact, even my laptop meets the requirements, integrated graphics and all. 

The interview and especially Ashley's commentary is full of entirely appropriate and very welcome observations about the need to address the "52% of the world population" currently being ignored by conventional AAA game design, while at the same time making them feel like they're being "catered to" and not infantalized: 

"characters say "fuck" like the teenagers they're meant to be, rather than speak in My Little Pony talking points about friendship and magic"

I'm not entirely sure all these points connect, exactly. I'm not a major My Little Pony fan but I never really thought of it as an IP that appealed much to teenagers in the first place, sweary or otherwise. And I don't believe either friendship or magic come pre-gendered. 

More importantly, I wonder how many Star Stable players have hardware capable of running Equinox:Homecoming? I don't and my ageing set-up generally falls around average in those Steam surveys, which I'm guessing are already somewhat biased towards both males and hobbyists.

I wish I could run it, though. The more I hear about the game, the more interesting it sounds. I look forward to reading someone else's First Impressions. Sadly, my own will have to wait, for now.

Has It Been That Long Already?

 

I had a busy day today. I was going to skip blogging - again - even though that would make it four days out of the last five. It's bad but in a way it's good. I'm trying to be more laid-back about posting so as to get in shape for Blaugust, when I hope to make missing a day here and there feel like a win. 

With the extra time I wasn't going to spend writing, I thought I might play some Wuthering Waves. I'd read Naithin's post so I knew I was behind again. I never quite caught up after Black Shores. Wuthering Waves has to hold the record for Game I Like Most But Play Least.

I thought I ought to find out what I was missing, so I watched the promo video for the latest update, which is also the First Anniversary Celebration. It goes by a typically overwrought title: "Fiery Arpeggio of Summer Reunion". 

The video is long! Over ten minutes! It's also only partially translated. The first part is in English but then it's hit or miss. I watched the cinematic at the start and then skimmed the rest. After I'd finished I was more confused than before I started so I read the Patch Notes.

The patch notes are long!. I ran them through a word counter. Over four thousand words but at least they're all in English. Even so, most of them meant very little to me.

I thought I'd better log in and see the thing for myself. The patch was long! 3GB but thankfully it was fast. When I got into the game, though, things slowed down. My fault, not the game.

I began by claiming everything I was owed since last time I played. That took a while. Then I went through every tab that had an exclamation point indicating something new. That took a lot longer.

As I was doing that, I came across the Anniversary "gift" that most interested me. I knew from various sources that there'd been a deal of grumpiness about the birthday handouts, which were widely seen as inadequate if not downright insulting. I wasn't much bothered by any of that. I just wanted to read my First Annual Report.

If you click on the "Resounding Waves" banner in game it takes you to a web page, where you can watch a personalized presentation of the highlights of your year in the game. It goes through the key story points you've completed and gives you a bunch of stats about what you've been up to over the last twelve months. 

Then at the end it ties the whole lot together in an infographic that's pretty much impossible to see. That's it in the tiny banner at the top of the post. Fortunately, I took screenshots of every interesting page as I went along so I've dropped a few of those in but if you want to watch the full presentation, you'll find a QR code in the header image that supposedly takes you to the web page and lets you watch the same slide-show I did. 

I haven't tested it. If you try it, feel free to let me know in the comments if it works. Or, I guess, if it doesn't, although I don't suppose there's much I can do about it.

As I was watching the report, one of the pages seemed to indicate I'd saved a lot of currency but not spent much, which is absolutely true. It made me think of something Naithin said, namely that the new Resonator is OP and that he'd been lucky enough to get her, so I thought I'd spend some of my tokens to see if I could, too.

I couldn't. Or rather I didn't. I spent about half of my good tokens and about a fifth of my newbie ones, which got me some four-stars on the 1-in-10 guarantee, plus a couple of genuine wins on top. But no five stars and certainly not Zani, the one I was after. It was fun trying, though.

It also took a while. And when I was done I thought why not whip out a quick post about it? Which I've just done. And now it's too late to play.

That's how it always happens....

Let's Go Round Again

Kaylriene has a long post up about rotations and one-button mode in World of Warcraft and reading it made me think about the whole twisty topic in something of a different way. I'm not sure if I have enough to say about it myself to warrant a whole post but let's see how it goes.

I used to get quite irritated at the very mention of "rotations". At first it just wasn't a term I was familiar with from MMORPGs I'd played so I was suspicious of it on a purely linguistic level. What did it mean? Was it jargon from one or two specific games, bleeding across and staining the others? Why did people keep throwing it into conversations as though everyone obviously knew exactly what it meant?

I didn't know what it meant, not from personal experience, but it became clear enough from context quite quckly; it seemed to mean the order you cast spells or used abilities in combat. Or, if you prefer, the order you pressed the buttons to make it happen. Same thing.

This seemed weird to me from the get-go. Why would you have any sort of set order for something like that? Surely it would always be dependent on too many outside factors, like where you were, what you were fighting, who you were with and so on? I found it hard to imagine many situations where it would be advisable, let alone necessary, to stick to a pre-defined set of spells or abilities rather than assessing the situation in real time and choosing accordingly, which was how I'd always played.

By the time I'd seen the term "rotation" often enough to take notice of it, I guess I'd been playing MMORPGs for maybe a decade and a half. I'd been through my grouping years and come out the other side. Even though I was pretty much a solo player by then, I had done a lot of group play in my time and anyway it seemed the "rotation" concept applied to solo play, too, although obviously there it was deemed less crucial since if you were doing it wrong, no-one was going to suffer except you.

And that was even weirder; the idea that you could do it wrong. It was strange enough to me that people thought there were sequences of button presses that ought to be followed to begin with, let alone that you could be ostracized for not getting it right. Then again, I was well aware that MMO players were perfectly capable of refusing to have anything to do with each other over things far more ridiculous than that, such as which race they'd chosen at character creation, based not on RP prejudice but on the tiny variation in starting stats.

Whatever, I thought it was affected and obnoxious to tell other people they were playing the game wrong, even if it was true that the way they were doing it was less effective than it might be. It wasn't that I thought it was a bad idea to give people suggestions on how to hit harder or kill faster. Helpful advice is always welcome, or should be. It was more that I'd always felt that it was other people's business how they played and that if I didn't like the way they were doing it the solution was not to play with them.

Which, now I come to write it down, does sound like saying ghosting someone is better than telling them to get lost. But by and large we rarely did either. What we mostly did, all those years I was grouping with friends, guildmates and passing strangers, was to put up with pretty much anything anyone did that didn't get us all killed. 

There were certain names that used to make Mrs Bhagpuss and I groan out loud when they asked to join a group we were in or who we'd see log in and hope they didn't start asking us what we were doing and if we had space, but when the moment came, we pretty much always invited them anyway and worked around whatever their peculiarities or incompetencies might be. I'm sure other people felt the same about us but we all generally just muddled along and had fun somehow.

One reason I was never really aware of any kind of pressure to perform was that I never went near anything that could be called top-end content. I didn't raid and I was mostly behind or just up to the endgame, which was a lot harder for anyone to get to in those days.

The other significant factor was that in all the time I was grouping as a matter of course, roughly from the turn of the millennium to about 2008, in maybe half a dozen or more games, I never had to deal with damage meters. There were parsers in use, particularly in EverQuest. I ran one myself for a while, when there was a fad for them in the guild I was in. It was fascinating to see who was doing what, but everyone treated them more as something to gossip about than an indication anything ought to change. 

That makes it sound as though we were all little plaster saints and we certainly were an easy-going bunch but also gameplay was very different then. If you were down the bottom of the parse for damage or healing it might mean you were bad at playing your class but it could just as likely mean you'd been doing something else equally important like crowd control or debuffing, both of which were abolutely crucial to success in some MMORPGs of the era.

There were two ways you could be welcome in a group back then; one was being good at your role and the other was being fun to be with. The first is self-explanatory. We'd put up with some fairly irritating personal behavior to have a tank who could hold aggro like the tar-baby and knew how to turn mobs, and a healer who could be relied on not to let anyone die was allowed a great deal of leeway when it came to being grumpy and sarcastic (Holds up hand!) 

I imagine that still holds true today. The second, though, I suspect was an artefact of the time. Group combat back then involved a lot more down-time between fights and there was a lot more conversation both between pulls and during combat itself. People talked non-stop, frankly. It was like being in a chat-room where every so often a mob ran in and we beat it to death for interrupting our conversation.

In that scenario, being funny, amusing, witty, sharp-witted and a good conversationalist was about as likely to get you invited back as coming top of the parse for DPS. More so, in fact, since anyone can poke a sword into a monster from behind but not everyone can time a punchline.

In an environment like that the idea of a specific rotation designed to eke out the last few drops of damage seems like a luxury at best and a fantasy in most situations. While it's true that some groups did develop a rhythm that had them killing mobs like shelling peas, for the most part every pull was at least partly a surprise and every fight was likely to turn into a scramble for survival, with everyone living on their wits and their reactions. 

My persepctive as a Cleric in EverQuest also colored my understanding of what a fight was. I only had access to a limited number of spells and I had to choose them in advance. I had a lot more potentially useful spells than I could load so I had to try and predict which I'd be most likely to need. 

That meant a bunch of heals, of course, but also some cures, buffs and utilities, some of which would end up not being used at all. And there were plenty of times when things happened that I hadn't planned for, leaving me without the tools to do the job I'd suddenly been given. Many times I ended up leafing through my spell-book mid-fight, frantically trying to load a spell I never expected to want.

later, when I was playing a Beastlord, something I did for a couple of expansion cycles, I never even knew for sure what my role would be from fight to fight. As a swiss army knife class, I might be off-tanking, back-up healing, debuffing or adding DPS. Sometimes I'd be doing all of them in the same pull. The idea of a rotation would have seemed laughable.

With all of this in mind, later, when the concept became clear to me, I saw it is as restrictive, unintuitive, unimaginative and fundementally opposed to most of the reasons I'd ever played the games to begin with. Why would I want to limit myself to a set pattern of key-presses just to make a few numbers go up? 

My philosophy had always been the same; any fight that ends with the mob dead and the player alive is de facto a good one. The idea that there might be some kind of gold star on offer for doing it faster seemed nuts. TTK is another term I never heard used in those days.

Not that I was against efficiency. As a sit-and-heal Cleric of the strictest order, I used to rate my own success by how few heals I cast and how much mana I had left. A perfect fight for me would be one in which I sat and medded through the entire thing. With an attitude like that, you can see why the concept of rotation wasn't doing anything for me. 

As I was reading Kaylriene's post, though, something occured to me that I hadn't thought of before, whenever the topic came up: when I was playing my favorite class of all time, in any MMORPG, the Disciple in Vanguard, I did have a rotation.

Well, of sorts. It wasn't hard-coded. I did vary it a bit. But in essence, there was an order in which I pressed the buttons and I followed that order in nearly every fight. And it was great!

Why did I do it there, when I didn't do it anywhere else? Because the Disciple relies on builders and finishers and they are displayed on-screen in such a way as to be blindingly obvious and extremely easy to understand. You press some buttons to kick and punch and after a few of rounds of that some other buttons light up and you press those to heal yourself or debuff or do damage. 

It's a very simple system as used in countless games but the Disciple is by a long way the most intuitive and organic version of the mechanic I've experienced. It has an amazing rhythm to it that makes playing the class feel like playing an instrument or dancing. It's very satisfying when you get it right and as I read Kaylriene's post, which goes into great detail on why and how rotations operate, I finally felt a glimmer of understanding as to why people might not just feel getting one right was necessary but also why they might even enjoy it.

That was my epiphany, such as it was and with that insight, looking beyond that one class and character, I can now see elements of kinds of rotation in the gameplay of a number of classes I've enjoyed playing. The cyclical nature, the repetition and the predictability have a kind of zen-like appeal, particularly when you find a rhythm. Rather than being restrictive, the pattern frees the mind from outside interruptions and allows entrance to the fabled "zone".

Or it can do, when it works. On the other hand, when it doesn't, what you get is grindingly dull, slavish drudge-work, the hallmark of one or two classes I can think of (Looking at you, LotRO Guardian...) 

So, in conclusion, thanks to Kaylriene I feel I now have a clearer understanding of the rotational concept and a better appreciation of its merits. I'll try not to be so openly sneering about it in future.

I had something to say about the whole "One Button" thing, too, but that's going to have to wait for another time. Seems like I had more than enough to say about the subject after all.

Every Bookmark Tells A Story

Looking at the songs I've bookmarked since the last time I did this, I'm wondering If I might have had an agenda. Some are just really good songs, or songs I really like, or new songs by people I favor, but several I've clearly noted down because I had some sort of point to make or because I thought I might hang some anecdote or story from them. 

Is that good? Does it suggest some sort of structure or - god forbid - plan? Dunno. I guess... just pull a few up and see what happens?

Supergirl - Springbok Nude Girls

That's a place to start, isn't it? Blimey, charlie! I'm guessing no-one's heard of the band unless I have any readers in South Africa, which is where they're from and where they were, as far as I can gather, quite well-known at one time. 

I'd never heard of them until a week ago. You might assume, with good reason, I only discovered they existed because of the title, which would clearly have caught my interest. I mean, I have an entire blog dedicated to the Maid of Steel in my feeds... (I thought it was in the blogroll as well but it's not... it is now!)

That's not how it happened. Something else by them came up, purely at the whim of the algorithm, and unsurprisingly I found the band's name click-worthy. I mean who wouldn't? Presumably that's why they picked it. 

With some trepidation I clicked on it and it turned out to be an alt-rock band in the vein of, oh, I don't know... Faith No More, maybe? Eleventh Dream Day?  Even The Church, dare I say it? Something in that area. 

I do have a weakness for that kind of ragged, blissed-out braggadocio so I carried on listening and it was pretty good. That track wasn't Supergirl, it was Blue Eyes, which I think is their best-known song in their homeland, which is presumably the only place any of their songs are well-known. I liked it enough to see what else they'd done and that was how I came across Supergirl. Once found it I obviously had to be heard and now here we are, all listening to it together.

As to whether it has anything to do with the actual Supergirl, I have no idea. If anyone can make out the words, perhaps you'd like to let the rest of us know what they're about. The lyrics aren't anywhere online that I can find. I bet it has nothing to do with Kara Zor-El, though.

Tell me I never knew that

caroline ft. Caroline Polachek

Looks like I'm doing all the ones with a story attached first... Okay then.

So, Last week I was reading a really good novel by Holly Brickley called Deep Cuts.  It's out in hardback and I'd seen it a few times at work without thinking much about it until one day at lunch I noticed a proof of it lying around, which had presumably been there for a few months at least. I picked it up out of curiosity and read on the blurb that it used the "indie sleaze" era of the noughties as a setting, a period I slept through, musically-speaking, thanks to EverQuest, but which I'm now starting to rediscover for myself with all the inauthentic fervor of any young person mining a golden age for nuggets. The irony is stifling.

It's a very good novel. I wholly recommend it. Since I read the proof, not the published version, I'm legally obliged neither to review it or quote from it (Says so right on the cover.) but I doubt Harper Collins are going to sue me for saying it's a great read with relatable characters and a lot of very interesting background detail about the period. Also a huge number of specific songs get mentioned, many of them very good. I'm thinking of doing a YouTube playlist of them all. 

Anyway, the story features the formation of a band called Caroline and when the main character hears that's what they're going to call themselves... let's say she doesn't think it's a great idea. But it's the name of the lead singer's dead mother so she really can't say much against it. 

I don't know why caroline called themselves caroline or why they chose not to capitalize but it was weird that they turned up in my recommends at the same time I was reading the book. I listened to the song because of that but I'd most likely have listened to it anyway because of Caroline Polachek's involvement. I don't know if the band would want to hear it or not but the song really goes somewhere else, somewhere better, when she comes in.

In Heaven - Princess Chelsea

This is a cover of the song from Eraserhead sometimes known as the Lady in the Radiator Song. It's Princess Chelsea's tribute to the late David Lynch and it absolutely does the great man justice. Princess Chelsea can do no wrong.

I'm a very poor example of a David Lynch fan. If asked, before he died, I would have said he was one of my favorite film-makers. Still would, actually, although now I've had cause to think about it I'm not convinced it's a justifiable position for me to take. After all, how many of his movies have I even seen?

Not many. Blue Velvet, which made a huge impression on me and did quite a lot to shape my taste in cinema back in the eighties. Wild at Heart, which ditto. And Fire: Walk With Me, of course, but that's Twin Peaks at the movies. Apart from that, though... well, I own Mulholland Drive but I haven't watched it. 

I've never seen his most commercially successful movie, The Elephant Man, or his big-budget mainstream miss, Dune, and I've only seen part of Eraserhead, late one night, when I came home and switched the TV on and there it was, half-way done. Most of my reverence for Lynch comes from his TV work with Twin Peaks, not so much from the movies.

And this sounds straight out of Twin Peaks. Which is great!

Laid - Miya Folick (James cover)

Another cover. Seems I've given up on saving the good ones for covers posts. Probably just as well.

For some reason, every time I see Miya Folick's name I think she's one of the actors out of Stranger Things. That, in fact, is pretty much the only reason I clicked on this, when it came up as a recommendation. It certainly wasn't because of James. I don't like James.

Miya Folick is not in Stranger Things and if I was going to be less hipster about it, I probably do like James. I mean, I don't want to like them and I for sure don't want to admit to liking them but I do perk up when I hear one of their big, rollicking, singalong refrains and they are the sound of good times in the sunshine, so it seems a bit churlish to pretend I don't appreciate it.

That, though, is where covers are the hipster's friend. They allow people who are too cool to like people who aren't cool enough and to enjoy things that are popular without it looking too much like that's what they're doing. So, thanks Miya, for not being in a super-popular TV show and for covering a very catchy song I'd otherwise not be listening to right now.

 Kratom Headache Girls Night - Asher White

I only listened to this in the first place because of the odd title and the first thing I did after I'd heard it was google what "Kratom" meant. So now I have that in my search history. Thanks Asher.

There was a time when I'd have known but that time was long ago. I don't even like it any more when my thoughts aren't entirely mine. Funny, that. When I was an adolescent it was close to my dream, to get out of my head, even though I was always comfortable enough inside it. It was never a desire to escape from anything, more a wish to find a way to somewhere else, somewhere interesting things might be happening.

Later, when it had just become a thing we did, the thing I did, the thing that made the world a more interesting place for me, was to sharpen it, not warp or hide or reshape it. And now I just prefer to leave it as it is and work around the parts I don't like. I don't even drink any more. Well, barely ever. Like a couple of times a year.

I'm not going to be giving Kratom a go, that's what I'm saying. Especially if it's going to give me a headache. 

Also, parts of the melody remind me the hell of something else but I can't quite figure what it is. Driving me nuts...

Personal Film Reel - Izzy Provenzano

Getting anyone to look at a YouTube channel is a challenge. Too big a challenge for most people. Almost all videos that get uploaded - nearly fifteen billion by now - never get watched by anyone. Well, okay, not quite, because the person who uploaded them probably watched them once or twice, just to check they were working. 

In fact, according to a recent BBC investigation, the median is 41 views. Getting past 130 puts you into the top third of watched content. I have several with that distinction although not on the new channel. I still have a final post to write about my AI Music Project and that's on setting up the YouTube channel for it. I won't pre-empt it here but I'll just say that it's my dream to have 41 views for anything I've posted there.

One thing making the channel has tipped me to is the extreme difficulty of getting any kind of traction at all. It's not just me. I've started to pay attention to how many views some of the videos I watch are getting and it varies wildly. 

I've long had a predilection for posting obscurities here, artists and songs and videos that have been on YouTube for a while - years, often - and still have hardly any views, even though they're excellent in some way or other. It doesn't surprise me that there's truly great work going unseen. What I hadn't noticed and what does surprise me is that many of the songs I'm finding through reviews or news items on the likes of Pitchfork, Stereogum or NME also have extremely low view counts, even after a few weeks. 

More surprising still are the relatively tiny viewing numbers for new videos by bands whose names I see cropping up often, working bands who get played on the radio and draw audiences at clubs or in small tents at festivals. Sometimes, not that uncommonly, they have fewer views by a margin than their channels have subscribers.

The Asher White track, for example, which I saw promoted on at least two large music sites, has managed just 800 views in two weeks. The official video for Witch Post's magnificent single The Wolf has four thousand views after a month and they're a real buzz band in certain circles just now. As for Izzy Provenzano, who put that rather professional video together, it's been a week and thirty-four views. 

Something's killing video stars and I doubt it's the radio.

Caterpillar - Florence Road

If we're talking buzz bands... 

I've seen them compared to the early Cranberries. Actually, I've seen it said that the two are all but indistinguishable. Seems odd to me. I never liked the Cranberries but I like Florence Road. It's certainly a very old-fashioned sound, though. The Cranberries were definitively '90s but this sounds almost seventies at times. 

Well, that was succinct for a change. Let's see if I can keep it up and get a few more in before the end.

 Headphones On - Addison Rae

Here's someone who doesn't starve for views. 2.3m in two weeks. Until very recently I wasn't aware Addison Rae was a TikTok graduate. I mean, I know all music comes to us through a TikTok filter now but she actually was a TikTok star with a huge following (88m) before she started acting, then singing. She's been mega-famous for more than five years but the first time I paid any attention to her was with Diet Pepsi, which I loved.

I love this one, too, especially that two-note whine at the end, which reminds me so stirringly of Venice Bitch. I could hear that used a lot more. I seriously do not care if people were influencers or reality TV stars or if they're industry plants or nepo babies. Who gives a fuck? It's all about the work, or it should be, and if the work is as good as this...

 What Was That - Lorde

Been a while since I liked a Lorde song. I wanted to like Solar Power but I really didn't, much. Then there was the stunning collab with CharliXCX and suddenly she's right back. This feels new and desperate in the best way. And since I've been talking numbers - 2.8m views in a week.

She's back, alright.

Poplife - umru & underscores

I really wanted to end with Model/Actriz' latest, Diva and ElleBarbara doing Operating Thetan: Unknown because they're bangers but neither has a video yet and it seems like a lame way to finish, with statics. Do click through, though.

Instead, I'm going with the ever-reliable underscores followed by Lexie Liu for an all-pop ending that's really no pop at all. Well, pop-art, maybe.

Pop Girl - Lexie Liu

And with that, we're done. A few didn't make the cut but maybe they will next time. Music isn't milk, after all. It doesn't go off just because you leave it standing around for a while.