Old Men, Cats And Emily Bronte

I've had a bunch of ideas for posts about Wuthering Waves bumping around in the back of my mind for a while now, all waiting their turn to be spun up into posts of their own but instead I think I'll just stuff a few into a Friday Grab-Bag get them out there before they go stale.

Before I do, though, I'd like to thank Naithin once again for introducing me to the game, which quite honestly I doubt I'd even have heard of, had he not mentioned it in passing. I've played every day since then and it's been a joy.

I'd also like to thank whoever it was at Kuro Games who thought of naming it Wuthering Waves. Without that, I doubt Naithin's nudge would have moved the dial on my interest.

I still don't know why the game is called what it is. As Redbeard pointed out in the comments, there's really only one association anyone is going to make when they see it and that's Emily Bronte's novel. (Okay, I suppose someone might think of the Genesis album, Wind and Wuthering, but I very much doubt it. And anyway, even that title was inspired by the book.)

At first blush it seems like a bizarre choice, given the game's obvious skew towards a younger audience and the fact that it's, well, a video game made in China but it isn't such an outlandish idea as all that. I don't know how things are elsewhere but where I live the classics are very big with a certain youthful demographic right now. At work, we've hugely expanded our Classic Fiction section and the substantive majority of customers browsing it are teens and twenty-somethings, seemingly buying the books to read for pleasure as much as to study. 

Whether it has anything to do with Tik-Tok I'm not sure, although most trends in bookselling do these days. Among the black spines, though, there have always been certain titles that seem to hold an innate fascination for adolescent and college-age readers. Wuthering Heights holds a prime position on that list.

You might think, if there was a connection of some kind, there'd be evidence of it in the theme or setting but if there is, I haven't been able to spot it. I'm not a big fan of the Brontes but I do know the plots of just about all the novels and I don't recall a lot of magic, guns, monsters or swinging from rooftop to rooftop on a grappling-hook in any of them. 

There is some romance in Wuthering Waves but it's far from central to any of the plots. Most of it so far involves the middle-aged and elderly, of which more later. Pretty-boy villain (Or is he the anti-hero?) Scar does have a little of Heathcliff's smoldering arrogance about him but if it's having the traditional effect on any character in the game they're not on my team. 

However the name came about, I do get the feeling someone at Kuro must have studied Eng. Lit. at college. I just finished a side-quest where I had to go stand in for a guard who hadn't turned up for his shift. I had to hang around at the top of a tower until he turned up, which he did not. The quest was called Wait for Godo.

It's the kind of detail which contributes significantly to my affection for the game, unsurprisingly. If we're going to have irrelevant cultural icons casually shoe-horned into our fantasy roleplaying games, I'd sooner have have Emily Bronte and Samuel Beckett than Haris Pilton any day. And I like Paris Hilton...

Since I mentioned the possible intended age profile of the audience, I feel I ought to offer a retraction of something I said in my Very First Impressions post. I described Wuthering Waves as "an anime world, where no-one looks much over eighteen even if they turn out to be the Magistrate in charge of the city." 

This doesn't give a fair or true impression of the population of Jinzhou and its hinterlands. There are a lot of fresh-faced young folk, for sure, but also a good number of citizens of middle years and more than a sprinkling of elders. Perhaps more surprisingly, senior citizens, particularly retirees, feature prominently in a number of side quests.

In one such quest I enjoyed, my pal Chixia asked me to have a word with her grandfather, who was having some kind of problem. It turned out he was infatuated with a very elegant elderly neighbor, who sadly seemed resistant to his charms. 

The sprightly old fellow wanted to come hunting with us so he could add some more daunting "Echoes" (Hologramatic images of defeated monsters.) to his somewhat feeble collection. For some reason he thought this would influence the woman to receive his attentions favorably. 

It did not. She was singularly unimpressed. I think she thought he was an embarrassment, frankly, and who could blame her? I was embarrassed for him. He, however, seemed perfectly fine about it all. Ah, the resilience of age.

That quest was mostly played for laughs. Another, centering on a retired photo-journalist, who wanted to take some final photographs of locations in the city that held special meaning for him, but who was no longer spry and agile enough to climb up to the vantage points he'd reached in his youth, had a much more elegaic tone. 

Another, lengthy questline involved a senior executive at a mining installation who was beginning to suffer from age-related memory loss. The topic was handled with surprising delicacy, although the translation did it no favors.

All the quests came with a wealth of back-story, revealing something about the lives these old men had led in their younger days. The writing in Wuthering Waves employs a lot of those kinds of textures, making the world feel more substantial and grounded than can often be the case in free to play games and mobile ports. 

The occasionally shaky translation makes the nuances harder to appreciate at times but the sentiment usually makes it through, as do some very revealing cultural differences and assumptions. In some less obvious ways, I think this feels like the one of the most Chinese games I've played.

Another somewhat atypical aspect of Wuthering Waves is the way quests recur in varying forms. The one I wrote about, concerning learning the languages of animals, turned out to be the first in an ongoing series. I've talked to dogs and rabbits so far and I hope there will be more. It's a fun sequence.

I also wrote a while back about a quest I was given to find a missing cat. That turned out to be part of a set of dailies in which the person who persuaded me to find the first one kept calling me up on my communicator and asking me to go look for more.

It wasn't just lost cats or cats stuck up trees. There were also kittens to find homes for and at one point I even met some guy who told me he was a member of the Kitty Rescue Team. The only member, as it turned out and also the "better half" of the crazy cat lady who keeps calling me. I was very surprised to find she had a partner, to be honest...

The cat dailies went on for a while. Each time I found and returned a cat I got to give it a name, which was the best reward of all. The cats I named are still strolling around the little park where I left them. I go visit them sometimes. 

After a while the dailies stopped being about cats and started to be about a very bad portrait painter instead. Then it was a guy who was trying to perfect some kind of sales pitch and wanted to try out his material on me. 

Each of these sequences lasted several days, with roughly the same task (Find cat/Sit for portrait/Listen to jokes.) but completely new dialog each time. Two of the three had a continuing narrative while the third was more of a social construct but they were all very different from the kinds of dailies I'm used to. In fact, if the game hadn't told me, I'd just have thought they were regular side-quests.

Every activity in Wuthering Waves comes freighted with story. I can't think of anything I've done in the game that wasn't. It's a notable feature of the game and it's something I very much appreciate, although it's not hard to imagine others finding it equally annoying. Not everyone wants to have to wade through several screens of fundamentally meaningless chatter just to get a daily done.

If you feel that way, this is probably not the game for you. Nothing happens without some NPC giving you their life story, explaining their reasoning, offering some historical background or telling a lengthy anecdote. Every time I go questing I spend considerably more time reading about why I'm doing it and what other characters think about it than I spend actually doing anything to fix whatever the problem might be.

This is where I really wish the translation was better than it is. Not that it's bad. Not at all. By the standards of imported F2P games it's actually pretty good. 

It isn't consistently good enough, however, to land all of these stories with the impact they deserve. Given how involving and entertaining I find them despite the variable quality of the translation, I can't help wondering how much more satisfying they'd be if they were rendered in fully fluent and demotic English throughout.

Translation is a complex and contentious issue that deserves a full post of its own. I'll have to write one some time. Until then, I'll just say I'd rather read good dialog in a less than perfect translation than poor dialog in perfect English any day. It's only when I literally can't figure out what the characters are supposed to be saying that I lose patience.

Finally, on the topic of things in the game being generally just more than they necessarily needed to be, let me introduce you to Maqi, the Pioneer Association Receptionist. She's really keen to tell you what a great organization it is. Boy, is she ever!

The Pioneer Association, previously known as the Universal Geographic Society, is an organization dedicated to exploring and understanding the world. You can get rewards for doing tasks, something that could easily be handled through the UI and explained via a tutorial tip, a process the game makes extensive use of elsewhere. 

In this case, it doesn't. Instead, you have to go to the Association's plush offices in the city and talk to Maqi. 

Maqi is full of information about the Association and its many public-spirited and commercial activities. She was so convincing, I actually went looking around the reception area to see if I could find copies of Wutherium Geographic or Post-Lament Anthropocene. If there'd been a way to sign up for them to be delivered to my mailbox every month, I'd have subscribed on the spot.

Sadly, this all appears to be flavor text. Still, top marks for effort to whoever wrote it. It's this kind of commitment that makes Wuthering Waves such a pleasure to play. How much longer it will continue is another issue. I've been spoiled by launch content then let down by updates before.

Fortunately, the game appears to be somewhat more successful than other recent favorites of mine, so there's an outside chance more content in this vein could follow. 

I won't count on it but it would be nice...

What Makes Barry Run?

I just finished Season Three of The Flash last night and I'm more than half-way through Season Three of Roswell: New Mexico, from which the astute reader will conclude I'm taking the reckless step of watching two CW series at the same time. And without a net, too.

I can't speak to the whole of the CW's output because mostly I've just watched the DC superhero shows and not all of those yet, either. Also a few of the Sci-Fi/Supernatural ones, I think. Based on the shows I have seen, there are more than a few tropes that are just hard to miss.

The Plots Make NO SENSE! - Seriously, do they even run these things past a grown-up before they put them into production? It's like a seven-year old telling you the plot of a movie he just watched. There's a lot of hand-waving and nothing connects with anything else. I pity the person who has to write the summaries for the TV Guide, assuming such a job still exists. Never mind about the plot, though, because...

The "Science" Makes Even LESS SENSE! - Okay, I get it. This is comic-book science we're talking about. No-one expects it to make sense. But this is another level of gibberish entirely. I'd say it might as well be magic (A character in The Flash actually pulled out the old plum about "Any advanced science..." in an episode I watched last week.) but weirdly magic, when they feature it, seems to be more grounded and cosnsistent. I gave up even trying to figure out what they were on about in both series weeks ago, which is a pity because every damn episode of each of them features at least ten minutes of pseudo-scientific gobbledegook. And that's mostly because...

Everyone's A Genius. - I mean, it's just as well, because they'd need to be to keep up with anything anyone else is saying. The ratio of pseudo-scientific jargon to regular conversation is off the scale half the time. I pity poor Max Evans, one of the Roswell:NM leads, who's playing a small-town cop (Who also happens to be the alien clone of an interplanetary Tyrant King but let's not go there right now.) surrounded by savants, scientists and seers. Half the time he's the action hero and the rest he stands there looking confused, as well he might. The viewers certainly have to be. Detective Joe West performs much the same roll in The Flash so I guess every CW show needs at least one player who can hold up his hands and say "What, now?!" on behalf of the audience. But no-one cares about the science because...

It's A Soap Opera - Okay, soap opera first, superhero/SciFi/supernatural drama second, like Third Rock From The Sun is sitcom first, SciFi second. It's why they work so much better as comic book shows than almost anything else I've watched in half a century. I've been telling people all my life that superhero comic books are first and foremost soap operas but no-one ever believes me. Finally, someone gets it. Of course, if I'd grown up elsewehere, I might have said...

It's A Telenovela! - Liz even makes a sly, metafictional reference to it in one episode. Admittedly, I'm on shaky ground here because I've barely ever seen a telenovela but I feel I have a basic understanding of the form and cross-checking against the Wikipedia definition confirms my thesis: "...telenovelas tell one self-contained story, typically within the span of a year or less whereas soap operas tend to have intertwined storylines told during indefinite, continuing runs...This planned run results in a faster-paced, more concise style of melodrama compared to a typical soap opera." They left out the part about them being bat-shit crazy but otherwise that pretty much sums it up. Or it would, except  for the very un-soap-operatic, telenovelistic fact that...

Everyone Is So Damn NICE! - It's like someone watched Friends and thought, y'know what, that'd be quite a good show if it had people in it you didn't want to slap. There's a relentless, almost demented positivity about the whole thing. Everyone is someone's best friend or soulmate or perfect parent, even when they're acting like the exact fucking opposite, which is about every other episode on a conservative estimate. After a while you feel like they're your best pals, too. I know all TV does this but it's another level of emotional appropriation when...

Even The Villains Are Friendly - Well, some of them. It feels bad when they get caught. I don't know what Peekaboo did to deserve the treatment they give her for a start. She's just trying to make a living. Half of the bad guys seem like they'd be good company on a long road trip and the rest look like they'd be cool as hell to hang out with, even if they would get you into trouble then bail. Of course, there are the total psychopaths, the ones who just want to set the world on fire to watch it burn, but even they have their moments. And it's hard to hold anything they do against them because...

Absolutely No-one Has Any Kind Of Moral Compass. The heroes? Ha! The police? Are you kidding me? The authorities? Are there even any? Everyone does whatever they think they "have" to do or "need" to do at all times because the end always justifies the means. Screw due process! Screw human rights! Lock people up without trial in cells the size of postage stamps with no facilities of any kind and keep them there in solitary confinement, for life, the justification being that they're bad guys and... no, that's it. And they're the lucky ones! Some just get killed. Some get sent to other dimensions like convicts on the ships to Australia. And it's all because...

Everyone Has A God Complex - It's like fascism and altruism had a baby and that baby grew up to believe it was God. Some of the people they lock up or execute haven't even killed anyone, just committed a few robberies. So what? Bang 'em up for life! And the goodies don't even lock up all the baddies. They pick and choose who they imprison based on... I don't know... how nice they think they could be if someone was only nice to them? If they had similar childhoods? Whether they're physically attracted to them? If they have a "connection"? Maybe it's what color costume they're wearing and whether it clashes or co-ordinates. Might as well be. Still, you can't tell these people anything because...

They're The Best At What They Do... NOT! - This applies to many CW/DC heroes but The Flash is the king of incompetence. Does he ever win a fight? Not on his own, that's for sure, and not with anyone that matters, either. No wonder he needs about twenty people to help him. No wonder they call themselves "Team Flash". They're doing all the work! About the only thing The Flash is consistently good at is rescuing people from burning buildings. He can put out out fires, too, mostly by running in circles, which is what he does best. He should leave his day job with the Central City Police Department and join the Central City Fire Department instead. Added to that, his tagline is "The Fastest Man Alive" but it seems as though every other episode someone gets to say "I think they may be even faster than Barry". The whole conceit is a lie, which is only fair since... 

Everyone Lies To Everyone Else ALL THE TIME! - Here's a good drinking game. Take a shot every time any character lies to a friend, lover, relative or colleague about something it is absolutely obvious they should not be hiding from them. And two shots every time anyone comes out with some variant of "From now on, no more lies." when the lie is inevitably revealed. You'll never see the ending of any episode because you'll be totally shitfaced. Still, I guess it doesn't much matter whether you tell the truth when...

There Are No Consequences - Lies are always forgiven just like life-threatening injuries always turn out to be no more than a flesh wound. Almost every episode of The Flash has someone, usually The Flash, since he is the world's least-skilled, least self-aware, most overconfident superhero, being stabbed, blown up, set on fire or beaten to within an inch of their lives. It happens less frequently in Roswell:NM but it still happens several times every season. Sometimes, when it happens, people just get up and carry on as if they'd tripped on a kerb. Other times, they need life-saving surgery. Either way, on average it seems to take the unpowered civilians at most a couple of days to recover while all speedsters are fully fit in minutes thanks to the mysterious and previously undocumented healing powers of the Speed Force (Really, do not get me started on the Speed Force...). If it ever does turn out to have been something fatal, no problem! Just go back in time for a do-over or pop across to another Earth and grab a doppleganger to replace whoever just died. Swapping deaders out for alts always seems to work. Going backwards or forwards in time to fix your mistakes? Not so much because...

The Multiverse Is Fine But Time Travel's A Bitch - This mostly applies to The Flash which, although I did not realise this until I watched it, is a show about time travel. I knew Legends was, because the guy who put that team together is called Rip Hunter, Time Master but I haven't watched that one yet so I'll save any comments about it for the future, which seems appropriate. I do remember The Flash time-travelling in the comics. He did it sometimes because it's well-established in DC continuity that anyone who can run (Or fly.) fast enough can break the time barrier but I don't remember it being the main subject of every storyline, which it certainly has been in the three seasons of The Flash I've watched so far. Unfortunately for the writers - and the audience - as everyone certainly ought to know by now, it is quite literally beyond the ability of the human mind to conceptualize time travel so naturally not one of the storylines make any sense. The concept of the multiverse, on the other hand, is surprisingly easy to get your head around. Just give all the Earths a number and we're fine with it, especially if you throw in a monorail or two for visual reference so we  always know where we are. Wait, what do you mean, that's outside the...

Special Effects Budget? What Special Effects Budget? - Super-speed is very hard to illustrate with a static 2D image, which is why all you get in comics is motion lines and freeze-frames. As anyone who's seen the first Christopher Reeve Superman movie knows, it used to be even harder to portray someone running superhumanly fast convincingly on film but that was several special effects eras ago and now super-speed looks pretty good even in a cheap TV show. Of course, motion lines and freeze-frames are still pretty much all you see but they look really pretty and very dramatic. Meanwhile in Roswell: New Mexico the budget stretches to some 1970s disco lighting and people holding their arms out and pointing but it doesn't matter because...

Acting > CGI - The visual effects may be, shall we say, variable but the acting in all the CW shows I've seen is way, way better than it ought to be. Okay, Max is a plank but the same actor plays Max's clone, Jones and Jones is creepy as hell, so clearly Max is a plank on purpose. This becomes especially apparent in The Flash where, thanks to the aforementioned multiple Earth situation, half the cast end up playing various versions of the same character, which gives the actors a fantastic opportunity to show off their versatility. Every time it happens, the new variant character is significantly and convincingly different from all the others. It's impressive and also highly entertaining...

And I could go on. Believe me. But I'll leave it there for now. I can't imagine anyone wants to hear much more of my sarcastic, back-handed praise for some old TV shows no-one watches any more. 

Maybe I'll come back for another round when I've finished the two series, which at the rate I'm going is likely to be sometime next Christmas. I'm pretty sure I'll have a lot more to say by then. 

Or maybe I ought to wait until I've watched Legends too. And I know if I'm doing this at all I ought to watch bloody Arrow, even though I really don't want to...

PSA - Islands Of Insight Is Free On Steam Until 1PM EST On 27 June

Thanks to MMOBomb for the heads up. I'm downloading the game as I type this.

I knew about Islands of Insight already but I hadn't really considered playing it, even though it does look quite interesting. Puzzle games and platformers aren't generally my thing but it's nominally an MMO, which means I probably should at least take a look at it - and it does look pretty. 

There was already a demo and the game will be 50% off in the Steam Summer Sale but between now and then it's free and free is a price point I really like. As for what the game is all about, here's the Steam thumbnail description:

Welcome to Islands of Insight: a sublime shared-world puzzle game set in a fantasy realm of ancient wonders and natural beauty. Brimming with mysterious puzzles to solve, secrets to uncover, and vibrant landscapes to explore, this peaceful world of floating islands is the perfect place to unwind. Embark on a puzzle adventure of your choice, all at your own pace.

That sounds okay. It also has a Very Positive rating from over a thousand reviews. What's not to like?

Having to play with other people, did I hear someone say? Apparently a lot of people did express that opinion because the game is also getting an offline mode, so you can puzzle away without anyone chipping in to tell you you're doing it wrong and "helpfully" giving you the solution. 

Although they couldn't have done that anyway because apparently the MMO version (Which you can still play if you prefer.) doesn't have chat. What kind of MMO doesn't let people talk to each other? 

Don't answer that!

Why We Fight

Wuthering Waves continues to entertain me very well and for no cost whatsoever. I am starting to wonder how much longer that can go on. I'm at something of an impasse with the game just now.

It's nothing to do with lack of content. There's no shortage of new, interesting things to do and even if there was, there's a major update with a whole new region due to drop tomorrow. I'm not losing interest, either. I'm more than happy to keep playing. I'm having a fine old time.

The problem lies in progression. I'm stuck.

Wuthering Waves is not dissimilar to Genshin Impact in a number of ways, a design choice that's absolutely fine by me. There's nothing whatsoever wrong in taking inspiration from the best. And, as Palworld's creator Takuro Mizobe said in a recent interview, "To make new things is very hard. In game development, of course, sometimes we have to do it, but, as much as possible, I try to avoid creating new things." 

Sound counsel. In most cases, originality isn't all it's cracked up to be. That's not the issue here. The problem is that, much though I enjoyed Genshin Impact, fairly swiftly the skill level required to progress proved to be higher than my personal ceiling. In plain language, the game got too hard and I quit.

I would prefer not to quit Wuthering Waves. I'm enjoying it too much. Considerably more than I ever enjoyed Genshin Impact, in fact, and probably more than I enjoyed Noah's Heart, although I have another post in mind to write about that.

The world is beautiful, charming and fascinating to explore. I like the characters. The quests are varied and often amusing. There are plenty of puzzles, games and non-combat activities, most of which I find fun. Even the main story has managed to hold my interest, despite being basically the same one I've heard in a dozen games I've played over the last ten years.

Even the combat is okay. I do like to kick a little ass in-between all the cat rescues, portrait sittings, improv and match-making. Unfortunately, when it comes to the set-piece, instanced boss fights that gate-keep both story and levels, I'm not having such a great time as all that.

It's mostly my fault. Wuthering Waves is an action rpg and by most accounts I've read, a fairly simple one. Combat relies on timing and observation. You need to read visual cues to know when to dodge so as to minimize the damage you take. You need to build chains and swap team members to maximize the damage you deal. That's about it.

All very straightforward and certainly within my capabilities to learn and execute successfully, given  sufficient practice. The question isn't whether I can do it; it's whether I want to. And thinking about it carefully, I find I don't.

Over the last couple of years two, distinct, apparently contradictory trends in gaming have emerged: coziness and difficulty. The success of the Elden Ring series has revitalized the once-common idea that games should be hard and players should learn to play them. Conversely, titles like Animal Crossing and Stardew Valley have popularized the concept of chilling out in a peaceful environment as a legitimate way to play video games. 

My problem, as I've only recently come to realize, is that what I'm looking for is a combination of both. I want a cozy world with friendly characters and homely activities, but I don't want to faff around farming or romancing. I want to punch monsters in the snoot. 

Except I want that to be cozy, too, and as easy as everything else. Cozy combat. What's so hard to understand about that?

In quite a lot of games I've played there have been ways to manage those kinds of expectations. Some games actually come with difficulty settings. Failing that, you can out-level the fights and come back when they've been reduced to a difficulty you find manageable. You can improve your gear without fighting (Crafting it, buying it...) until you're able to stroll through the fights with little trouble. You can call on friends (Or willing strangers.) to come help.

None of those worked for me in Genshin Impact and I'm pretty sure they won't work in Wuthering Waves either. It's a single-player game for a start, at least at the level I'm at, although I believe it does open up to co-op play later on, Bringing in more people isn't an option, even if I knew anyone who played or I was willing to start making new in-game friends, something I've shown no inclination to do for well over a decade.

It is possible to upgrade gear to a some extent but not enough to make a big difference as far as I can tell. As far as out-leveling the fight I'm having trouble with goes, it just so happens to be same fight that unlocks the next twenty levels, so that's a bit of a Catch 22...

Still, there must be some way to deal with it. After I failed the fight (To be fair, I've only tried once, so for all I know I might have just had some bad rolls. I could win quite easily on a second attempt. That's what happened when I fought Scar, which I think may have been a tougher battle.) I did some research to see if there was a way around it. 

Most of the advice focused on how to play better. I knew immediately I didn't want to play better to beat it. I didn't want to have to deal with it at all. I didn't want to change myself so I could beat the game. I wanted the game to change so I didn't need to.

I realize this is neither a realistic nor a reasonable expectation, although it might well be what drives the economic engine that makes Wuthering Waves a commercial proposition. It is a Gacha game, after all, even though I haven't been playing it as one up to now. 

I think what you're supposed to do, when you get stuck like this, is to spend money in the cash shop in the hope of getting better Resonators. Then, when you get some, you spend more money buying the materials you need to upgrade them.

Do all of that and then, presumably, your team gets stronger and the fights get easier. Except that in my experience it doesn't work that way. I had some very strong characters in Genshin Impact and I remember them doing me not much good at all because, in the end, player skill was still the most important factor and you can't buy that in the cash shop, more's the pity.

Even if I was willing to spend money on Resonators in Wuthering Waves, and even if I thought it would do me any good, there is one more, rather unusual problem: I haven't figured out how to buy them. 

In both Genshin Impact and Noah's Heart, the games constantly pushed you towards ways to obtain new characters. They were both big boosters of the first hit comes free principle. Not so in Wuthering Waves, where the developers seem to want to keep the whole process as much of a secret as possible.

I've been playing Wuthering Waves for close on a month now and I have a grand total of five Resonators, four of which I had by the end of my second session. One is the original character I started with and two are the NPCs I met as soon as I logged into the game. The fourth is an NPC the first two took me to meet immediately afterwards and the fifth is someone I met a little further on in the story, who was given to me as a reward for logging in for five days straight.

Since WW is a gacha game, I have to assume there's some way to buy draws to win Resonators from a pool but as I write this, I still have no idea what it is. I've seen nothing in my packs that opens up to give a free draw. No windows have popped up trying to sell me a bundle. I haven't even been offered one of those starter missions, where you have to go "buy" something for free from the cash shop, just so you know there is one and where to find it. 

I googled but I couldn't find a straightforward explanation of how the gacha process works in this game. In fact, the only way I was able to figure it out so I could write about it was by logging in and clicking on every icon to see what they all did. Thanks to that, I can now claim I know how to use the gacha system in this gacha game I've been playing for a month. I'm not sure that's indicative of a sound marketing strategy.

Just in case anyone cares, this is how it works. There's a system called Convene, which is accessible through an icon like a four-pointed star inside a circle that's always on display at the top left of the screen, alongside several others. I do now very vaguely recall the game demonstrating it at some point but that was when a new mechanic was being introduced every few minutes. I paid no attention and it was never mentioned again.

If you press the icon, a window a menu with several more options appears. Two of those let you draw for Resonators. One is a "Targeted Convene" for weapons and the fourth is the same but for Resonators. What a Targeted Convene might be is not explained.

The draws use a currency called Lustrous Tides. Somehow, I appear to have acquired 72 of those, I have no clue when or how. Each draw costs ten Lustrous Tides but there's a 20% off sale on at the moment so that makes it eight. I just tried it and got a gun, not a Resonator, so weapons would seem to be in the same pool. I wonder if that means they're equally important?

I could go on - there's a button that brings up some very extensive rules and drop chances - but I won't bother with any of that because the points I'm trying to make are unaffected by the minutiae.

My main arguments are that a) I've managed to play very happily for a month so far, without even seeing the gacha system in action and b) I still wouldn't be bothering with it if I hadn't gotten stuck on that boss fight, which from all I've read isn't even considered much of a speed bump by most players.

It started me thinking about what I wanted out of the game. I'm not sure it's what the developers want me to want, which would appear to be to keep spending money to become more powerful. But to what end? I can't even claim to be able to see what the point of getting more powerful in this game is any more. 

If I do, several things will happen. It will allow me to carry on raising my Union Level from 20 to 40, after which I'll need to do another, similar fight, followed by a third at 60, opening the path to the Union Level cap of 80. 

Granted, that has a certain attraction; some instanced content is capped to various Union Levels but, most importantly, it so are some of the chapters of the main story. Less helpfully, it will cause all the mobs in the open world to level up to the new Union Level tier, making fights across the board that much harder. 

On the plus side, it will also alter the loot tables so those mobs drop the correct mats and upgrades for the new tier but that, too, is something of an escalator to nowhere. Why get tougher to fight tougher mobs to get drops so you can get tougher to fight tougher mobs if they're all still the same mobs in the same places?

As must be obvious, that isn't much of an incentive for me. I don't see the appeal of things getting harder so they can keep on getting harder still. And it's not as though I even need to do it. When I stop and think about it, I can enjoy most of what I really like about Wuthering Waves without getting caught in that endless loop.

I'd like to see how the story turns out but I can watch it on YouTube if I want. I already have it bookmarked.  I can carry on exploring the world just as I am and I won't have to worry about the mobs getting tougher. I mostly only fight the ones that aggro on me as I'm exploring, anyway. 

As for all the side quests, regional quest lines, character story arcs and so on, which are the ones I'm enjoying the most, they all seem unaffected by Union Level. As far as I know, I can just keep on doing them. There's no shortage, either. There should be plenty to keep me entertained for a good while yet.

The really weird part, though, is that the game does even have a sort of difficulty setting although it doesn't become available until you win that fight. Once you begin to raise the Union Level cap, you can always go into the settings and reset it back to an earlier tier if you want, even though doing so doesn't stop your own Union Level from rising. 

If I did the fight again and won, I could reset the world to the previous tier and carry on leveling. That way, I'd end up overpowered for everything in the open world, which I admit does have some appeal.

All of this leaves me in a state of confusion about how to carry on, which is the main reason I wrote this post. I'm basically talking out loud to myself as I try to figure it all out.

Thanks for listening. I'll let you know what I decide.

Sometimes It's The Little Things...

This is just a short post (No, really...) about a couple of Norrathian bits and bobs I happened to notice  yesterday. The first is a small but very significant change to the login process for EverQuest that's going to make choosing a server much more straightforward for new players. It should also make life much easier for anyone coming back after a long layoff.

EverQuest has a lot of servers for a twenty-five year-old game. More than two dozen of them and the number keeps growing. Two new ones were added just a few days ago. If you've been away for a while, it can be hard to remember where you were last time you played. I've created a lot of characters over the years and I always have trouble remembering what server half of them are on. 

Even knowing the name of the server where you were playing doesn't always help. As many servers as the game has now, over the years it's had many more. I long ago lost track of which servers merged and then re-merged. The merger process is hard to keep up to date with not least because it never ends. Next month a server called Thornblade, which I can't honestly say I knew existed, is merging with Mischief, where I think I might have made a character once.  

There have always been a few places you can go look this stuff up but as with all information on the internet, you can't always find exactly what you need and even when you do, you can't always be sure it's current or correct. Now, all you need to do is look at the Server Select screen, which has been re-tooled to be far more useful and informative than ever before.  

Every server is listed along with five topline criteria:

Status - When the server is up, this shows the current online population (Low/Medium/High). Otherwise it will say Locked or Down as appropriate. This information has always been available from the Game Server Status page on the website and it might have been on Server Select before, but never as clearly as it is now.

Ruleset - This tells you Daybreak's official name for whatever ruleset is operating on a specific server, for example Standard, Timelocked Progression or Randomized Loot. More detail about the ruleset in question appears in the description at the foot of the table.

Expansion - This lets you know exactly where each server sits in the progression chain. With thirty expansions to date, all of them adding features and many changing the level cap, knowing which one is in effect when you log into a server is crucial information.

True Box - If a server is flagged "True Box" it means each player can only play one account at a time per computer. There can be variations to the basic Yes/No binary - one server is currently listed as "Relaxed(3)", meaning you can play up to three characters per PC but no more. It's a complicated issue that needs a little background.

The game has a long tradition of multi-boxing, where one player simultaneously logs in multiple accounts and plays one character from each, often making a full group of six to do group content "solo". This used to be quite tricky and often required the use of 3rd party software that would get you banned if you were caught using it. 

These days, EQ is so undemanding of modern gaming PCs you can easily log multiple accounts in on the same machine, making swapping from character to character very straightforward even using just the regular, in-game controls. As so many of EQ's hundreds of zones are often empty and so much of the later game is instanced, multiboxing came to be seen as a legitimate activity, provided multiboxers also abided by the general "Play Nice" rules and didn't get in anyone's way. 

That attitude changed when the often much more crowded and competitive special ruleset servers came into play. There were a lot of complaints and new servers started to include rules on how much, if any, "boxing" was allowed at launch, along with how far the server had to progress before those rules were relaxed.

Even if the server is flagged Yes for True Box, theoretically you can still play more than one character but you have play each of them on a separate computer, old school. How DBG can tell is beyond my remit to explain but apparently they can and they'll ban you if they catch you, so it's good to know what the rules are in advance.

All Access - Finally and crucially, this lets you know if you need to have paid your sub to log into the server in question. Mostly it's the Standard ruleset servers that are Free To Play but there are exceptions.

All of that is great and an improvement and all but it's not worth getting excited over, let alone writing a whole post about. What got me really excited was the additional detail available in the full server description that appears at the bottom of the screen when you select a server.

This includes a full description of the ruleset with unlock schedules for expansions and notes about special features such as increased spawn rates and economic models. All stuff I can never remember, in other words.

There have been more than a few times in the past, when I've had to go digging around in old press releases to find which of EverQuest's myriad special ruleset servers is on what set of special rules. There are so many of them now and the differences between them are sometimes so arcane and abstruse, I'd be surprised if even the people who set the rules can remember them. The new Server Select screen collates all the pertinent information in one easy to find location and will make my life much easier any time I decide to write about EQ.

Even more useful to me is the inclusion of full details of the merge history of each server. Once again, this has always been available online somewhere... I just could never find it when I wanted it. Now I can just log into the game and see immediately that one of my old servers, Lanys T`Vyl, merged with Tunare in 2005, as did E`Ci. Another server I had characters on, Seventh Hammer, joined them all in 2010 and the whole crew now goes by the name Tunare - Seventh Hammer.

Since I can almost always remember the name of the server where I originally made a specific character but almost never where that character ended up after all the merges, this is going to save me a load of time and trouble. I may not play most of these characters any more and most likely never will but there have been a surprising number of occasions when I needed to find a particular character to check something or to take a screenshot for a post. This is going to make doing stuff like that a lot less annoying.

The second thing I noticed yesterday relates to EverQuest II and a vlogger I follow by the name of Borgio. Borgio used to make useful and entertaining video guides that he posted regularly to his YouTube channel. I found them very helpful in getting past a few instances and bosses in various expansions, which is why I subscribed.

Unfortunately, like many veteran players, Daybreak eventually managed to piss him off sufficiently to make him quit (I forget if it was anything specific or just the general drift of the game away from the way it used to be.) and he moved on to other games, then stopped posting much at all. 

He has sporadically popped videos up since - he briefly visited the Vanguard Emu a year or so back, which was nice - but his channel had been silent for almost a year until yesterday he posted this:

While he doesn't explicitly say so, I'm guessing Anashti Sul lured him back.The video is short and - at least for anyone who's ever visited the Isle of Refuge - quite interesting. I was surprised to find I had actually seen and killed all of the Named mobs he shows but if you'd asked me about them before I watched the video I wouldn't have remembered any of them, even though I just played through the whole main quest series on the Outpost of the Overlord just a few days ago.

It almost makes me want to go back with another character and do it again to see what else I might have forgotten.

Almost...

The Revolving Door Into Summer

Somewhat to my surprise, I don't appear to have posted about Wuthering Waves for a couple of weeks. I don't want to give the impression I'm not playing the game any more or even that I've forgotten about it altogether. That would be entirely incorrect. I've just had too much else to write about. There's so much going on in gaming this summer.

Seriously, though, isn't there? Syp posted about it last week, name-checking expansions for Final Fantasy XIV, Elder Scrolls Online, Guild Wars 2 and World of Warcraft. He also mentioned the Tarisland launch, as did both I and Wilhelm (Who was less than impressed.)

Wilhelm also reminded us of another major MMORPG getting a global launch this summer, namely Throne and Liberty, the not-a-sequel to whatever version of Lineage came out last. That one doesn't actually launch until the middle of September but there's a short open beta in July and anyway September is still summer, the way some people reckon it.

Then there's the Anashti Sul server Darkpaw just spun up for EverQuest II and not one but two fresh "Legendary" servers arriving in Lord of the Rings Online next month, all aimed at the surprisingly large number of people still interested in starting over for the umpteenth time in the same games they played years ago, a demographic that apparently no longer includes either Wilhelm or me, at least as far as EQII is concerned.

I could go on. For example, there's Pax Dei, a game I have no interest in but which a lot of people seemed to be very excited about, at least until the developers made the mistake of letting people play it. So many games make that cardinal error. Palworld has its first really big update scheduled to land just three days from now, the same day as the Steam Summer Sale...

Had enough? Because there's plenty more. EVE just launched an expansion. Once Human goes live on 9 July. Even Raph Koster is up to something...

What is it with the summer? Looking just at the games and events I've mentioned, I get the point of a summer launch window for some of them. I'm guessing the demographic interested in playing Tarisland, Throne and Liberty and maybe Palworld probably skews towards school and college age. 

The rest, though? Don't these people have jobs? Do they really take the summer off to play games?

It's almost as though the developers think it's still the 'nineties or the early 2000s, when most people over twenty-five couldn't have told you the name of any video game, unless Hollywood had made a movie out of it. And even then all they'd really be able to say about it would be that the movie was terrible. 

Back then, it probably did make sense to push everything at kids on their long summer break. Catch them when they were all sitting at home, the empty weeks stretching out ahead, nothing to do to kill the boredom but play video games... not to mention their parents, frazzled and flustered, ready to throw a few dollars at anything that might keep the little darlings off their backs for a while.

The world isn't like that any more, is it? Everyone plays games now, grown-ups included. Gaming's not just kids' stuff any more. Or so I'm led to believe.

Yesterday, I watched a recent episode of a mainstream TV quz show in which two contestants in their sixties were asked to identify famous video games from the name of one of the main characters and the initial  letters of the words in the game's title. They couldn't do it but the mere fact the producers thought it was a reasonable question to ask shows how far towards the mainstream video-gaming has moved over the last twenty years.

Some of it is just perception bias, of course. Games don't all come out in the summer. New games and expansions arrive year-round. The carousel never stops spinning. Still, there does seem to be some old thinking behind a lot of the scheduling choices. 

It's long seemed like an odd practice to me and this current glut really draws attention to it. As an adult in employment, I've often thought the time I'd really appreciate some good, new titles and expansions would be the long, dark, inhospitable evenings of winter and early spring. From the New Year until Easter. That's when I get home from work and fins myself with time on my  hands. 

It's also the very slot that did so well for Valheim and Palworld, neither of which I might have found time for had they arrived in the summer. Is it a co-incidence there've been so many unexpected hits around that time of year?

The other big launch window of the year, late November through early December, is even worse for me, although that does have a lot to do with the commercial sector in which I work. It's when I'm at my busiest, with the least interest in - and time for - playing games. Summer may not be ideal for staying inside staring at a screen - at least not when we get some decent weather as we are right now - but it's certainly better for me than right before Christmas.

Then again, if I lived in one of the parts of the world where it's too hot to go outdoors in the summer until after dark and I had good-quality air-conditioning, I guess I might be happy to have something to keep me entertained while I hid from the big burning ball in the sky. 

Where I live, warm, dry sunny days are so rare it feels positively ungrateful to sit indoors when one happens to come along, let alone if there's a whole week of good weather (Fanciful idea, I know...) I sometimes forget it's not like that for everyone. We all look at things from our own perspective too much, sometimes.

And that was a somewhat over-extended introduction to the post about Wuthering Waves I was planning to write but no longer have time for. I ought to keep it in mind for that bit of Blaugust where we share our blogging tips, the specific tip in this case being "Don't do what I just did".

Had I stuck to the script, I would have extemporized on how I'm still playing WW and on what a very good game it's turning out to be. I even had some specific examples in mind, drawn from my many hours of play, ready to drive the point home.

Now I guess all of that will have to wait for next time, assuming I can keep my mind on the job then.

At least I got to use a few of the hundreds of screenshots I've taken so far so I guess my afternoon hasn't been entirely wasted...

Can't Stop The Music

I've been trying to get a What I've Been Listening To Lately post up for the best part of a month now - the last one was all the way back at the end of May - but I just haven't been able to fit one in. So much going on. Shouldn't complain but...

Also, there's a structural problem with this feature: if I can't put one up at least every other week, the title's just plain wrong. It ought to be Stuff I Listened To A While Back And Now I've Moved On. 

Maybe I should call it that...

There's another problem with the format I've started to notice, too. I alluded to it last time, when I said "Bunch of friends of the blog dropped tunes since last time...They're all good. I guess we can't have 'em all, though." 

The songs I post these days break down to two types - brand new tracks I've had pushed at me by the likes of Stereogum, Pitchfork and NME and older tunes I've scratched up, digging through YouTube late at night. When I first started doing music posts, I used to include quite a lot of stuff I already knew but mostly I've moved on from that. 

Not sure why. It's not as though I ran out of ideas. I think at some point I started to see dragging things out of my memory or my record collection as the easy option and I wanted to do better.

I've been thinking I should maybe split the music posts into a New Fads And Fancies feature that I might do as often as every week and a What We Missed When We Weren't Paying Attention column for the older stuff. Then I could do a Covers post every so often, like maybe once a month, sprinkle in those journalistic features I like to indulge myself with every once in a while, throw in a random theme post now and again and top it all off with the odd lucky dip from my ever-growing archive, just because that's fun for me.

And look! A whole new blog!

Maybe I'll do it, one day. When I retire, perhaps, which is technically in about five months from now, although I'm not planning on giving up work right away.

It's the old question: should I cram everything in the one blog, regardless of whether it fits, or should every obsession have its own space to grow? Another topic for Blaugust, I guess. 

Meanwhile, let's just carry on as we are for one more time. I think this one's going to be mostly people we already know, promoting their new record, but can I help it if they all release good ones at the same time?

Right Now - New Jeans

Or in the case of New Jeans, if they put out three pretty much all at once? The music biz sure has changed a lot since I was buying albums and singles. Back then even the most hyperactive pop acts waited for one 45 to hit or miss before they spat out another. Now its all bang bang bang.

Last time I did this I linked - but didn't post - a new New Jeans number called How Sweet. Look, there it is again! Since then they've released Right Now, apparently for the Japanese market, since it's sung partly in that language, and also Supernatural, produced by Pharrell. They're all good but Right Now is my favorite, possibly because it has that great Powerpuff Girls video.

I really need to watch the Powerpuff Girls some day.

The girl, so confusing version with Lorde 

Charli XCX feat. Lorde

Don't look at me that way. That's what it's called. 

Stereogum made me laugh out loud last week when they posted their regular Friday feature The 5 Best Songs Of The Week. I've only been following the site for a couple of years so maybe this wasn't the first time they've picked all five from the same person but even if it did feel a little like a situationist prank,  honestly it makes total sense. 

I could have done the same. This feature you're reading is called What I've been Listening To Lately and if I was going to make it mean what it says, this post would just be all the tracks from BRAT because that's what I've been listening to all week. Most of the posts from the last seven days were written to it. There's another great remix of 360 with Robyn and Yung Lean I could have featured, too, but I'll show a little restraint, for once.

Beryl loves the album, by the way. Every time I play it, she comes into the room and jumps in the old swivel chair I keep here for her and spins it around. I think she's dancing.

Please, Please, Please - Sabrina Carpenter

Oh, you think I won't go there? Let me quote the first line for you: I know I have good judgment, I know I have good taste...

Really, though, it was the stellar use of the word "motherfucker" that sold it for me. Pop music has changed, hasn't it? I assume there's a radio edit.

Supersad - Suki Waterhouse

Here's someone we haven't had for a while. From the upcoming album with the wonderful title "Memoir of a Sparklemuffin". I'm going to steal that for a character name sometime. 

It's three minutes long and the video plays right through the credits so we probably have the whole thing but it does kind of end as if someone just flicked a switch at the wrong time. Then again, whoever posted the clip on Suki's official YouTube account couldn't even get the name of the album right. That's not how you spell memoir...

Favourite - DC Fontaines

Yes, alright, I know. I was wrong. Sometimes resistance isn't just futile, it's stupid. This is just merciless, the way it goes and goes. And still goes. That guitar figure is relentless. You can argue with it all you want but you're never gonna win.

En Forma - Hinds

And if we're talking relentless...

Hinds are so much better since half the band quit. This is apparently the first song they've ever done with the lyric in Spanish, too, which is peculiar, given that's what they are. 

Just about every music review I read these days goes on and on about the lyrics and what they mean. I've just finished reading one hundred and fifty pages of Ezra Furman deconstructing the lyrics of Lou Reed's Transformer and brilliant though his analysis is, I'm not sure it makes the songs sound better in my head. 

Sometimes I think songs sound better when you can't understand what they're about.

90 Down The Block - XavierSoBased

Here's something a little older. Like three months. Really doesn't outstay it's welcome, does it? Treat it like one of those palette cleansers you have in the middle of a meal. Not that I've ever had one but I've heard about them.

I Am The King - Fat Dog

The cult starts here. Join early and avoid the rush.

We're All Losing It - Everyone Asked About You

...or When Subgenres Collide.

As someone says in the YouTube comments, "the kids are calling this tweemo... but I'll be damned if this one doesn't go hard."  

Yeah, it does!

This is Tweemo. You heard it here first. Probably.

The End (Diary) - Halsey

Halsey's been ill. Very ill. They wrote a song about it. It's what great artists do and Halsey is a great artist. Get well soon, Halsey. Make more music.

Smack Snack - Terry Poison

Okay, let's bring it on home. I have Syp to thank for this one, albeity indirectly. He constantly suprises me with his Sunday music posts, which have a strange consistency while still seeming almost random at times. His picks often remind me of people I'd forgotten I like or send me rifling through the back catalogs of acts I'd always meant to listen to but somehow never did. 

Last week he had Heavenly in there, a band I've constantly seen mentioned but who I'd somehow never bothered to investigate. The week before, he somehow picked Petite Mellor, doing what I think must have been her biggest stateside success, Baby Love.

That got me to wondering what Petite was up to now. One thing I don't do nearly enough is keep track of old favorites, once they drop out of the news cycle. 

It seemed ike the best place to look would be on Petite's own channel, where the latest video she's posted was for a song called The Drummer, a year ago. But that didn't satisfy me. I started to wonder just who Petite Meller was, something I hadn't really bothered to find out before because I can be pretty lazy. 

Not that I made much of an effort this time, either. I just read her Wikipedia page, from which I learned that before she went solo, she was in "the Israeli synth-pop band Terry Poison."

I wanted to know what they were like and now I do and so do you. I guess Petite is kind of like a Polish/French/Israeli version of Björk, if you want to be reductive about it. Also nothing like that at all.

blu - Girl Ultra

Another lyric I don't understand. I may be half Spanish (Have I mentioned that before? I can't remember...) but I don't speak the language. Oh, I can pick my way through a newspaper article and trot out a few stock phrases in an accent good enough to have people think I'll understand them when they reply, which of course I don't, but picking out more than a word here and there in a song lyric is way beyond me.

Don't need to know what it's about to know what it's about, though. That's kinda the point of music.

Good Luck, Babe - Chappell Roan

Let's end with the woman of the moment, Chappel Roan. She's blowing up so fast it's almost knocked her off her feet. Ten years for an overnight success. I guess we've heard that one before.

Sabrina Carpenter, who just blew up herself (That sounds weird. Maybe add a comma in there somewhere...) just covered Good Luck, Babe for Radio 1's Live Lounge, which seems like the pop version of one of those speeded-up videos, where you see a flower grow from a seed in a few seconds.

Life moves pretty fast. Never been truer.