The main problem with having played fifty hours of Once Human in two weeks and having written several thousand words about the experience is that it's left precious little time for anything else. Before all that, I was perfectly content with Wuthering Waves. I feel like I ought to apologize to my Resonators for ghosting them. It wasn't like they - or the game - did anything wrong.
The tide has yet to turn on my obsession with Starry's survival MMORPG but today I did at least manage to tear myself away for long enough to log into Wuthering Waves, finish some quests and reach Union Level 30. I also took a whole bunch of screenshots because damn! this game is beautiful!
I don't have a big essay to write about it (Waits for the cheering to die down...) but I would like to share a few of those shots with a comment or two on both the process and the content.
In particular, I'd like to praise the game's exemplary screenshot functions. Both of them. There's one of those stop-everything-and-pose-for-a-picture features that allow you to change the focal length, lighting and so on so you can get the shot just right without having to wait for the right time of day or whatever.
Those are great for serious compositions but you always have to go into the UI and fiddle with the controls to get things set up and that's not so good for quick snaps or action shots. Luckily, there's also a camera you can get from the storyline and add to the selectable wheel menu you control by a single press of the "T" key.
You can T-bind a grapple or a sensor and a few other devices as well as the camera and I imagine most people do but I have the camera selected most of the time. It comes in handy when I turn a corner and happen on something like this...
That's two gigantic bears locked in a vicious battle to the death. When I first spotted them going at it, there was some human or other in the middle of it but whoever they were, they didn't last long. The bears finished them off then turned on each other.
I absolutely love it when games have hidden animosities or factions that pit certain creatures against each other when they meet but it's going above and beyond to set things up so even two of the same species can start a ruck. Or maybe it was friendly fire in the original fight that started it, which is something I enjoy seeing even more.
As you can see from the second shot, these two were really going at each other. Those are some great facial expressions. What I didn't get a shot of was my character running back to a nearby node that had an exploding rock she could pick up and throw. There are lots of those all over the place. It's a mechanic designed for a kind of physical puzzle but you can chuck the rock at anything.
I chucked it at the bears. It exploded and did damage so I kept doing it to see if they'd notice and come for me. The rock reappears instantly on its spot after it's been used so I just kept throwing it until the bears were almost dead.
Not that my rocks were responsible. I wasn't even doing enough damage to draw their attention away from each other. They were evenly matched so they both got to about five percent health at the same time, at which point I jogged over and killed them both. That's what I call entertainment!
This is the Great Banyan. It was corrupted somehow and I cleansed it. Here I am, admiring my handiwork. I forget the exact details because I started the quest before Once Human and didn't finish it until today.
A slightly unusual feature of Wuthering Waves I really like are the regional quests to cleanse large areas from some kind of corruption, after which you really get to see them change. There was one region that was so polluted with some gaseous chemical that drained your health really fast if you even tried to pass through on the way to somewhere else. I died the first time I went there because I didn't notice just how bad the pollution was.
It's very satisfying to see places like that change into really lovely, scenic countryside and stay that way. That's the big advantage single-player or co-op games have over true MMOs: the developers don't have to fudge permanent change with awkward workarounds like phasing that never really seem to work.
And finally, something that can often be an under-rated feature in many games: player-character resting animations. In Wuthering Waves they're seriously good. There's spoken dialog with some of the animations, too, and that's almost always charming.
Given that they're something you end up looking at one whole hell of a lot, it's always a pleasure when the artists have really taken some trouble over them, which they very much have here. Encore is especially fun to watch when she's doing nothing. Her fighting style involves summoning a couple of pets she calls "Woolies", little stuffed toys that fly around and do a lot of damage. When they're not fighting, they vanish into some other dimension but if Encore isn't doing anything in particular they have a tendency to pop out and try to get her to play with them.
In the shot above, she's spinning around, trying to get one of them to go back where it came from. But that's not even her best resting animation. This is:
After a while she just sits down on the ground and starts counting. Best of all, that's always what she's doing when you log her in. I dunno, maybe I'm easily pleased but this sort of thing is worth more to me than a good boss fight. It's what makes the characters sing.
Hmm. Now there's an idea ...
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