#11 - Poppette - Born 5 August 2000 - 6 days 10 hours #12 Coutts - Born 16 February 2001 - 9 days 4 hours

And now we come to a curious hiatus in the story. Up to now it's been nothing but a continous stream of new characters, some born from my never-ending search for a class that could solo and make it feel like fun, others so I could join in the excitement whenever a new server opened, something that seemed to happen almost every other week back then.

All of those characters stand out very clearly in my memory and the more I write about them, the more incidents and anecdotes come back to me. In a while, we'll get to my most-played characters of all, about each of whom I have far more to say than would fit into a single post.

Right now though, in the twelve months between the summers of aught and '01, I only made two new characters. They were both Enchanters and I have very little to say about either of them. 

After that, just to offer up a spoiler for the next post in the series, I made one more character for a very specific purpose, which I'll get to next time, and then there were no more new characters for over a year. The reason for that is very simple: I didn't play EverQuest for a year, from October 2001 until October 2002. 

I still had an account. I didn't unsubscribe. In those days you didn't dare in case they wiped your characters. I think the Terms & Conditions said they'd hold them for three months but I wouldn't have risked it. 

In practise, I don't believe Sony Online Entertainment or Verant or whoever was nominally running the show back then ever deleted anyone's characters. They were a bit more on the ball than that from the get-go, realizing they needed to keep the barrier to re-entry low enough to allow all those rage-quitters to have second and third thoughts and come sheepishly creeping back, as so many did.

It was very much in their interest at that stage to let people feel they might lose their characters if they didn't keep paying, though. Treat 'em mean, keep 'em keen could have been the motto of most MMORPG devs in those days. All that touchy-feely, we really value your custom stuff came later.

Writing this, I find myself really surprised to see just how tenuous EQ's hold on me must have been. In the lore of my life it feels like I was a hugely committed player, verging at times on being addicted, as so many ex-EQ players claimed to have been, once they got clean. 

I'm not sure the facts entirely support that interpretation. I certainly played a lot of hours but I don't think I truly became embedded in the culture until after my return from where Mrs. Bhagpuss and I went in October 2001, which was, of course, to the newly-launched Dark Age of Camelot. 

DAOC was where I learned to play MMORPGs in the "right" way. I joined my first two guilds there, never having bothered with anything so scary in Norrath. I learned how to do PvP, both open world and in instanced battlegrounds and found that wasn't scary, either. In fact, I enjoyed it. 

I didn't quite reach max level in DAOC but I got a lot closer than I had in EQ. When I came back to EverQuest, I was a different player, ready to do things differently. And I did.

But before that, I must have been close to running out of steam with EverQuest. A lot of the things I've talked about in previous posts in this series must have happened during the period covered by the creation of the two characters in this post, when I settled down and played all those characters I'd made.

I think I pretty much just pottered about for a year or so, juggling a dozen characters across half a dozen servers, mostly soloing but grouping on weekends - always pick-up groups - slowly meandering my way acoss Norrath doing nothing much in particular.

It's no wonder I was ready for a change and yet I'm quite astonished, looking back, to see that I must have been all but burnt out on EQ after not much more than a year. To have recovered from that ennui to go on to play the game for a quarter of a century and still be writing about it now seems incredible. Of course, although I had no way of knowing it at the time, the best really was yet to come.

As for the two characters at the top of this post, I do have a couple of things to say about them, not least why they're called what they're called. One thing that also suprised me a little as I was putting this series together was how much the names told me about the characters themselves.

For the longest time, I made up new names for every character I ever made. We haven't yet reached the first character whose name I repeated and it's only in very recent times that I've taken to using variations on the same name as a matter of course. 

Back at the turn of the millennium I was still in thrall to concepts of roleplaying I'd learned at the
tabletop in the mid-eighties. It took a long time to break those chains and learn to play each new game without lugging along the baggage of the past. One of the dictates of the kind of roleplaying I indulged in then was that every character was entirely unique. Another was that my characters were never me. Of course they all had to have individual names.

Which apparently didn't mean they had to have serious names. Or sensible names. Or even roleplaying names. 

Popette is named after the sister of a friend of mine. I never knew her well although I met her plenty of times. I even went to see My Life Story in London with her once. 

She, naturally, did not go by the name of "The Poppette". That was how her brother referred to her. I don't think I ever heard him use her real name. He named her that because of her interest in popular music, something he affected to find outre, since his own schtick was dressing and acting like he was about thirty years older than he actually was.

It was also somewhat of an ironic epithet, since the music she enjoyed would hardly have been described as "pop" by anyone other than a grandparent. She was reputed to have the largest collection of Velvet Underground bootlegs in England for a start.

I wanted a light-hearted, fun character so I made an Enchanter, god forgive me. I still had no clue. I'd always found the name "The Poppette" highly amusing so I stole it. I would have loved to be able to keep the definite article but EQ didn't allow it so I settled for just "Poppette".

Coutts, on the other hand, is named for the bank long preferred by the Royal Family. There was a branch near where I lived for a while. I named my new gnome after a financial institution because he was supposed to be my banker and I made him an Enchanter because bank alts are supposed to go unplayed and after my time with Popette I was about as certain as I could be that Enchanter was a class I wanted nothng more to do with.

I don't know how things stand now but back in the day, the two classes considered to have the highest skill floor were Bards and Enchanters. The former required you learn to "twist", which meant swapping between several short-term abilities non-stop so they were all running simultaneously. It required very high dexterity and a lot of concentration and I never even began to manage it, which is why you won't be reading about any bards here, or at least not any played me.

Enchanters didn't require such manual manipulation but they were ferociously dangerous to play well because of both the Mesmerisation and Charm lines of spells. Several classes got some form of both but Enchanters got the top-end versions. 

One of the Enchanter's key roles in a group was to lock down adds using Mesmerisation spells. I was okay with mezzing. It's crowd control and that was something I both enjoyed and wasn't at all bad at. Over the years I did plenty of it as a Necro, a Cleric, a Beastmaser and others. 

The downside of doing CC as an Enchanter, though, was that people would keep breaking Mez. It happened all the time and when it did the mob generally wasn't mad at the last person who'd hit it, it was mad at the Enchanter who'd mezzed it in the first place. Being an Enchanter in a group meant constantly having angry mobs barrel through the rest of the group to get to you. I spent more time yelling for people to "get this damn thing off me!" than I did fighting, or at least it sometimes felt that way.

That, however, was nothing in terms of risk compared to charming a mob and making it act like your pet. Really good Enchanters did that all the time and made it look both easy and incredibly effecient. Mobs in EQ have far more power and strength than regular, docile player-pets, especially when buffed up, so it can be hugely advantageous to have a charmed pet on dps duties.

Until it breaks charm, that is. Then it comes straight for the Enchanter and kills them before starting on the rest of the group. Great Enchanters can deal with that so quickly and effectively the rest of the group don't even notice. Good Enchanters might require a bit of assistance before they get their slave back in the shackles. 

All the other Enchanters, which always seemed to be about ninety per cent of them when I was pugging, claimed they knew what they were doing, insisted on charming a pet even when asked not to, then lost control of it on the first pull and had no idea how to deal with the chaos they'd caused. 

When I played either of my enchanters, I was none of the above. I went to quiet areas where no-one would see me to experiment with charming mobs, something I did a few times with almost no success at all. I later spent quite a few sessions duoing with an Enchanter who charmed mobs as if there was nothing to it, so I got to see how it was done, but I never learned to do it myself and pretty soon I gave up trying.

Which, ironically, actually made me more popular in pick-up groups, because if there's one thing no-one in a PUG wants their Enchanter to do it's charm a damn pet. Just like the one thing no-one wanted the Cleric to do was melee. I pugged with plenty of both of those types, unfortunately, but I never commited any such faux pas on either class. I knew my job.

And my job was not playing an Enchanter. I wasn't confident enough with Charm to use it solo, which was how the class got a rep for being great at soloing. I just plodded along with my summoned "Animation", a sub-class of pet that only reacted when I was attacked and couldn't be given instructions. At least it never tried to kill me.

Soloing was a chore but grouping could be fun, not that I got many offers then. I got a lot more grouping in on my third Enchanter, who we'll meet later. He used to volunteer as Duty Enchanter on Babies' Day Out, a fun little event for low-level alts one of the guilds I joined on my return to EverQuest post-DAOC used to run. 

Poppette ended up taking over from Rachelsunday as Nickolai's ammanuensis and probably spent more time in the bank than Coutts ever did. Mostly, though, I left the enchanting to those who knew how to do it properly. Poppette and Coutts just bumbled along, going nowhere. And yet it seems I remember quite a bit more about the pair of them than I thought I would.

 Enough for this post, anyway.

Audio, Video And The Boy From Brazil

Can't help but feel like I've written a lot of words this week so I'm going to keep this short. Well, we can hope...

I wanted to do a music post yesterday but I wanted to vent about Supergirl S6 more so I thought okay, Saturday is always good for tunes. But then I looked at what I have waiting and blimey charlie! 

I scrapped all the old stuff after last time because it was getting on top of me and I haven't built up that much of a stock since, not on this PC at least. This is where the sensible stuff I cull from feeds goes. On my laptop though... oh boy...

Since I stopped using my Kindle Fire to watch tv and switched to my ancient Dell XPS laptop, I've taken to ending most evenings with a quick trawl through YouTube, the way I used to do. That way randomness lies. Over the last couple of weeks I've mostly been listening to French Yeye, Japanese punk, glitchcore, hyperpop covers and most recently of all, mash-ups.

Remember mash-ups? I'd almost forgotten they existed but apparently people still make them. Like this.

HOT TO GO  x  MICKEY - Chappell Roan, Tony Basil

I seriously thinks that's a work of art! It's long but it just gets better and better the longer it goes on. I have no idea how anyone would go about putting something like this together. It seems like magic to me.

I remember when mashups were a big thing but I'd kind of forgotten about them. It's great to see the art form is still in such robust good health. I'm gonna be looking out for more if that's the standard now.

Anyway, this isn't specifically a music post, although it's going to have some more music in it. Quite a lot more, really, so maybe it is a music post after all. If those don't interest you, don't tab away quite yet, though. I have a couple other topics that might interest you.

Although not if you're also one of my readers (Ha! "My readers". Listen to him! Who does he think he is? Will fekkin' Self?) who can't stand to hear anything good about AI. I suspect there may be a few of you out there.

But It All Seemed So Real!

You can blame UltrViolet at Endgame Viable for this next bit. Or at least send some of that blame his way. I would never have known about it at all if he hadn't posted about it yesterday.

You can read his post and follow his links for the full skinny but the takeaway is that there's now a way to have your content rendered into a scarily authentic two-person AI podcast. Not only is it possible, it's easy. In fact, it takes almost no effort at all.

After I listened to the podcast UltrViolet generated from a video on his YouTube channel, which I one hundred per cent would have believed was created by two actual humans just sitting there, riffing off each other, I jumped through the necessary hoops to give it a go myself. (For some reason NotebookLM absolutely would not accept the Google account I wanted to use - the one I made specifically for AI experiments - even though it was happy with every other one I tried. They know when you try to trick them...)

Once I'd gotten that sorted, I picked a recent post pretty much at random and fed the url into the AI maw. It took maybe five minutes to process, then this is what came out:

Comparing the "podcast" to the original post is a very weird experience, although not nearly as weird as hearing two apparently real people discussing what I wrote and using my name to do it. That is really quite disturbing. 

Leaving aside how terrifyingly well the AI does at pretending to be two freaking people chatting - it makes them sound like they both have history together and play the damn game themselves, which is just too Philip K Dick to process - they do get most of what I was saying about right. There's one bit where they conflate two things I said and turn them into a third that's just plain wrong, and they have an annoying tendency to make the actual negatives sound more like positives than the positives, sometimes, but overall it's not a bad precis.

I wouldn't want to use this exact format to turn every post into a podcast. I'd want a lot more control over both the voices and the editing than there is at present. Actually, any control would be good. At present there is literally none. It is still beta, though.

The software (Ooh! He called AI "software"! I bet an alarm just went off at Google.) isn't actually intended for that, though. NotebookLM is Google's stab at something I've been saying I wanted out of AI almost since the start - a Research Assistant. 

I've been using Gemini in that role and it's been useful but this (Which is powered by Gemini.) is different. It acts like the kind of research assistant you send away to look stuff up then give you a summary. The talking heads version is just one of the options available to make that information easier to assimilate.

What it mainly did for me was make me realize how much more negative my post came across than I'd intended. Hearing the two voices point out, unnervingly accurately, to each other how critical the post they were discussing was about so many things made me hear my own words in a very different way. I might use it in future to make sure I'm hitting the tone I think I am.

I also might just use it for the fun of hearing people talk about my stuff. Even if they're not real. I always did have a thing for imaginary friends.

Time for another tune, I think.

I Used To Be Lou Reed - Vamberator

This one came right out of left field. It turned up in a squib on Stereogum and naturally I scanned it because of the provocative title, which is when I learned Vamberator is a duo featuring the Cure's ex-drummer Boris and a guy out of one of my favorite bands from the '80s, about whom I'd heard nothing for decades and who I'd pretty much forgotten all about: Shelleyan Orphan.

And stap me if it doesn't sound like Shelleyan Orphan, too, which nothing ever does. It looks like Vamberator have only just started but now I'm wondering what Jemaur Tayle has been doing all these years. I might have to look into that. Caroline Crawley too, for that matter.

File under "Old but still got it". It's getting to be quite the fat folder these days.

Talkin' 'Bout An Evolution

Now for a couple of things I really have nothing to say about other than "Here's a thing that happened." Or in the case of the first, is going to happen, some day.

I played ArcheAge for a while. There are posts here about that. I liked it but not as much as some and I always felt other games ended up doing what AA wanted to do a lot better. 

Still, I don't think it's unreasonable to say it was innovative, even somewhat ground-breaking in its day, so maybe when the team behind the sequel, now named ArcheAge Chronicles, claim it's going to be the "next evolution of the MMORPG genre", we ought not to laugh out loud. 

Curious, if so, that they also choose to describe it as an "online action RPG" but I think in doing so Jake Song is just making my point from a couple of days ago. Thanks, Jake!

Brazil 1- USA 0

Remember old whatsisname? The guy who plowed the fortune he made playing baseball into building his dream MMO and nearly bankrupted the state of Rhode Island in the process? Curt Schilling! That was him. (Had to look it up. It's been a while.)

Apparently he's not the only retired professional sportsman to take the notion to get involved in making the games he loves to play, only someone else has made rather a better job of it. Matheus Vivian, a not particularly famous footballer is now CEO of "one of Brazil's largest games studios", Hermit Crab, which he also started.

Brazil is also tipped as the next breakout country for gaming development so that's actually quite a big deal. Nice to see someone get the difficult transition from hobbyist to pro right for a change.

Couple more tunes and one more item and I'm out of here. I've got more but you know what they say about more. That less is it, I mean.

Trust Nothing But Love - Haru Nemuri

Despite what you might imagine, given what I said earlier, I didn't find this one late at night. I discovered Haru Nemuri via New York hyperpop sibling duo Frost Children, with whom she just released a collab called Daijoubou Desu. 

That one's fine but this is better. Mostly I love the video, which proves you can make a great promo for no money. Okay, I suppose she had to pay for the roses...

Quiet Please! I'm Trying To Watch This!

And since we're on the topic of promo videos, there's something Beyoncé said that I've meaning to comment on for a while. I hadn't actually noticed but it seems Queen B hasn't made any videos to support her recent album, Cowboy Carter. She has a very convincing explanation for that. As she told GQ:

“I thought it was important that during a time where all we see is visuals, that the world can focus on the voice. The music is so rich in history and instrumentation. It takes months to digest, research, and understand. The music needed space to breathe on its own. Sometimes a visual can be a distraction from the quality of the voice and the music. The years of hard work and detail put into an album that takes over four years! The music is enough."

She really has a point. I discover most of my music through my PC or laptop these days and have done for more than a decade. The great majority of new tunes I hear come with visuals of some kind, either a proper video or a visualizer. 

It's not uncommon for me to find myself watching the video and not really paying attention to the music. Ironically, the better the video is, the less likely I am to remember the song afterwards. Of course, the flip is I will remember the video and very likely watch it again, so I guess the marketing department is happy either way.

Cheer Up Bob! It Might Never Happen!

And at this point it would make sense to have one of Beyoncé's tunes, only since she hasn't made videos for any of them, we're not going to. Instead, it's back to the "Old duffers that can still do it" file for the first new Cure song in sixteen years. 

I confess I had no idea it had been that long but then Mrs Bhagpuss is the big Cure fan in this house, not me. I do like them, though, and I like this, although not as much as the guy at Stereogum, who seemed to think he'd seen the second coming. Or heard it, rather. It's not like this is a video that's going to keep your mind off the song.

Suffice it to say, those sixteen years haven't left Laughing Bob feeling any more cheerful than he used to be. Luckily for us.

Alone - The Cure

The Lovecats it is not.

Staring At The Sun - Supergirl Season 6

Last night I watched the final episode of the final season of Supergirl. Only three years late. 

For some reason, even though the first five seasons all streamed on Prime in the UK, the sixth, which was slightly delayed by the pandemic and came out in 2021, did not. If it was on another service at the time, which is the usual reason for an unexplained disappearance, I either couldn't find it or didn't want to pay for it. 

I waited for it to come out on DVD and added it to my Christmas list so someone would buy it for me, which they duly did. I imagine my logic was that if I was going to have to pay to watch it I might as well pay to own it and if I was going to do that I might as well have it in a hard copy with a pretty box so I could enjoy looking at it on my shelf rather than as an invisible, intangible, digital file, tucked away somewhere on a hard drive.

And then I followed my usual pattern of not watching it until it did eventually turn up on a streaming service I was paying for anyway. I believe that's at least the fourth or fifth time that's happened and I'm sure it won't be the last. 

In this case, the show finally surfaced on Netflix but only the US version, which is what I've been watching exclusively since I started using a VPN back in the spring. Even then, I didn't start watching it right away. Much though I loved the first four seasons, the fifth wasn't great and I'd lost a little steam with it, plus I had a bunch of other shows to watch that seemed more urgent at the time.

I got through all of those. Supergirl Season Six floated to the top of the watchlist and I started on it a few weeks ago. When I'm watching shows these days I try to stick to a steady tick of one episode per evening, which I find to be the perfect cadence; short enough that I remember exactly what happened in the last episode but not so fast they all blur into one.

Season 6 is twenty episodes so it took me three weeks, give or take. It's been a long three weeks...

I wanted to write this post a week ago. I was so frustrated and annoyed in the middle of the season I felt the need to vent. Had I given in to my irritation and posted, the first line would probably have been something like "Season 6 of "Supergirl" has to be the worst season of any super-hero show I have ever watched!" 

It still may be, although I realize that's a pretty low bar. Having reached the end, though, I do now have a little more perspective, helped to a considerable degree not just by having seen the thing through - and it does pick up after a mid-season slump - but by having read a whole bunch of reviews and discussions afterwards. 

Immediately afterwards, that is. Like, seconds after the final credits ran. I never read commentary or reviews while I'm in the middle of watching something unless it's on the specific episode I've just seen but I frequently dive straight in after the series ends. It's a way to decompress emotionally from that awkward, unpleasant sensation of loss that follows the ending of the para-relationship between the viewer and the viewed, when it sometimes feels like the last day of school, when you know you'll probably never see most of these people again and it feels like you'll really miss them.

Or not, in some cases. I was at a point with The Flash by the end of Season Three when I fervently hoped I'd never have to see any of them again, which is why I stopped watching the show. I'm very happy to say that I don't feel Season 6 of Supergirl soured the good relationships I had with nearly all of the characters up to then. It's more that it made me sorry for the way they'd been let down by some excruciatingly bad writing.

So off I went to the echo chamber of the internet, fully expecting to see my disappointment and disdain faithfully reflected in a clutch of one and two star reviews and angry, impassioned rants... and I didn't really find much of that at all. 

I mean, there was some. I read a couple of low-scoring reviews that made many of the same negative points I would have - the platitudinous vacuity of the dialog, the incoherence of the plot, its derivative and trite structure, the complete breaking of faith with the personalities of most of the characters as established in previous seasons and so on and so on. I read a very good, thoughtful, Reddit thread in which almost everyone thought the Season was terrible but still managed to keep their cool as they explained why it sucked so badly.

Mostly, though, to my complete astonishment, I saw high-scoring reviews and high praise. A lot of people really liked the final season and almost everyone, even those who didn't like anything much else, loved the final episode, a long, emotional wrap-up of the kind we all often complain cancelled series need but don't get.

All of which I found very helpful indeed. Hardly any of it made me think the Season was any better than I'd realized but it did do an awful lot to remind me that most of the meaning happens in the head not on the screen. 

At this point I ought to make a couple of things clear. I am and have always been one hundred per cent on-side with the political attitude of the show. It's been described variously as "leftist", "liberal" and "woke", all of which I take as strong positives. That's what the show has been pretty much from the start and neither the political or social intent or content form any part of my objection to Season 6.

The execution though... Oh, boy...

There are two specific problems with the way the politics are presented in Season 6. The first and most important is the language used. 

Language is in constant flux and all media struggles to capture that pace of change so the risk always exists that what appears on screen or on the page will feel dated or stilted or inauthentic merely through the passage of time - sometimes even small increments of time. Many shows and books and movies are also produced with a specific audience in mind, sometimes by people who would see themselves as part of that demographic, sometimes by outsiders wishing to access or exploit it.

All of this means that it's very easy to look at something and think "No-one speaks like that!" when actually what you mean is "No-one I know speaks like that!" Watching Season 6 I frequently found myself thinking "No-one speaks like that!" pretty much any time anyone opened their mouth. Having read some other opinions and thought about it, I'm slightly worried now that maybe, yes, some people do speak like that after all.

Not exactly like that, of course. The way just about everyone speaks most of the time sounds like the social equivalent of business jargon or, worse still, the kind of New Age cant I associate with the early '90s. Hardly a sentence goes by without a buzz word or an appropriated phrase from some discipline or other. It's hard to listen to even when you agree with the sentiment, which is the second problem.

There's a tipping-point in any discussion, where the sheer determination of one side to get their point across begins to undermine what's being said. My go-to example there is always Richard Dawkins, whose sheer arrogance in expressing his profound contempt for religious belief has probably filled more church pews than Desmond Tutu's affability ever will.

This isn't that bad (Nothing could be.) but it's relentless and wearing. At times - far too many times - it didn't feel like watching a TV show about super-heroes so much as it being cornered at a party and lectured at by a particularly humorless bunch of zealots. It's not just that it's the absolute worst way to convert someone who doesn't already agree with you, it's that it's the best way to make those who do, reconsider their position in case it might mean anyone thinks that's how they come across, too.

Oner thing it also made me wonder, especially in that finale, which I did not warm to in quite the way most viewers seem to have done, is whether a show about DC super-heroes is really the best platform for transmitting these kinds of ideas. 

It should be. There are some huge synergies, particularly with the Superman family side of the house, which has always iconified fairness, equality and progressive thinking. Unfortunately, the ultimate take-away from the final season appears to be that Supergirl feels her role as protector of those unable to protect themselves is not just unnecessary but unwarranted and possibly pernicious. 

The world can do better if she gets out of the way and allows people to help themselves seems to be the message although the messaging in the entire season is so compromised, inconsistent and fractured, it's impossible to know for sure what the intended meaning might be. I think we're supposed to feel proud of Kara for the growth she's achieved by the end but, in common with many commenters, including plenty who liked the whole thing a lot more than I did, all I felt for Supegirl as the credits rolled was sorry.

Sorry she'd been so badly served by her writers, not just in this season but throughout the show. And sorry for Melissa Benoist, the actor whose superb portrayal of Supergirl now has to be seen as the quintessential version of the character, that she was never allowed to fully explore the potential of the role. Or win any good fights.

Seriously, why make a show about a super-hero and then have that super-hero lose most of her battles? She almost only ever wins when she has help. It's been a trope of the entire series and no amount of pretty talk about friendship and having each other's backs makes up for the fact that Supergirl is supposed to be one of the most powerful beings on the planet and yet constantly needs saving like the heroine of a silent movie. She needs to be the prime motivator and key to success in at least 50% of her battles before the one-for-all, all-for-one ethic kicks in.

But then, Supergirl, like all the DC/CW shows, has never been primarily a super-hero show. They're all soap operas at heart, just soaps that happen to have people with powers at the center. I think the best ones, like Stargirl, succeeed by keeping the scale intimate and human rather than universal or, as is now so unfortunately the norm, multiversal.

Season 6 of Supergirl became quite blatant in its desperation to prevent the major characters, heroes and villains, from using more than the small fraction of their powers that would allow the fragile plot to just about hold together. The Big Bad of the season, Nixly, is a 5th Dimensional imp with godlike magic powers that can do just about anything... so Brainiac 5 somehow whips up a wrist-cuff that completely nullifies them and cannot be removed by any means. 

And it never is. It just stays there, incomprehensibly immune to all forms of science or magic. Nixly is still wearing it when the show ends. It's utterly unbelievable as anything other than a deus ex machina to further the plot.

Supergirl, the other supposedly unstoppable force, spends several episodes in the Phantom Zone, where she has no powers at all, and a couple in high-school, before she'd come into her full powers, where she's played as her younger self by a different actress. 

In most of the rest of the episodes she's riven by doubt and indecision and rarely gets to cut loose. Mostly she flies about looking for things. When she lands she usually gets knocked about a lot. I don't recall if she ever actually hits anything or anyone. She certainly doesn't make a habit of it.

Melissa Benoist was pregnant and/or had a newborn child for much of the filming, which explains why she's barely in some episodes but it doesn't explain why she does so little when she is there. Don't get me started on the terrible use of powers in the show in general, though. Absolutely no-one does what you'd expect them to do with the abilities they're supposed to have. They nearly all end up shooting different colored force-beams out of their hands or eyes or just touching their temples and staring really hard. 

All of which (And there's so much more I could say along the same lines... Lena Luthor's a witch, now?) makes it sound like I hated the show. I did not. I love the show and now I've had time to reflect, I don't even hate that final season. At least it made me think about how good the show used to be. I own almost all the seasons on DVD and now I want to go back to the beginning and start over. 

As I said, Melissa Benoist is about the best possible Supergirl and the rest of the cast are all excellent, especially Callista Flockhart, who makes an absolutely scene-stealing return as Cat Grant in the finale, reminding us all just how pivotal she was to the show in the early seasons and why it was never quite as strong again once she left.

I liked Peta Sergeant as Nixly quite a bit, too. Her expressions are delicious. Her mouth seems to be trying to crawl off her face sometimes. Her phrasing is very odd, too, which really adds to the other-dimensional feel of the character. Jon Cryer reprises his amusing, wry take on Lex Luthor enjoyably, too, although whoever came up with the concept of Lex genuinely falling in love needs to go have a lie down.

But then, is Lex really in love or has he just convinced himself he is? The one saving grace of the writing in Season 6 is that, for all the bluster and didacticism, all the preaching and pontificating, all the moral certainty that frequently verges uncomfortably on smugness, it keeps on asking interesting questions.

Are the Super Friends justified in taking unsanctioned, unilateral action to safeguard the people even when it's against the specific direction of the peoples' democratically elected representatives? Does love trump duty? Is responsibility greater to those you know than to those you don't? These and many more moral and ethical concerns get raised, discussed and largely left unanswered, which is entirely in keeping with the argument put forward by Kelly to Alex that she shouldn't try to fix her problems, just be there with her as she lives through them. 

Which brings me back to whether this ought to be a super-hero show at all. If Supergirl isn't in the business of fixing people's problems, then what is she for? The finale ends with her asking herself the same question and I don't believe we ever get an answer.

I suspect next time someone decides to make a Supergirl show - and there will be a next time - it will involve a good deal less introspection and a lot more action. I think this iteration took the interior view about as far as it could reasonably have gone - and then some.

I'll look forward to that next vision of the Maid of Might (Bet they won't be bringing that back.), should it ever come. Meanwhile, I'll happily re-watch this one. I just might stop at the end of Season Five next time, though.

File Under...?

There's a new Producer's Letter out for EverQuest II and I feel I ought to say something about it. The only problem is I'm not sure I have anything I want to say about it. 

I am not playing EQII right now. I'd like to be. I'm paying for it, along with all those other Daybreak games I'm also not playing, namely EverQuest (Where I should be logging in every day so I can slowly grind my Magician up to max level through Overseer quests.) and DCUO (Which has a new update that looks both interesting and controversial.) 

The sad fact is I'm just not feeling it for any of those games right now, whereas I really am feeling it for a whole bunch of much newer titles, like the revamped Nightingale (Unconvincing though that attempted rebrand has been.), Once Human (Just waiting on that new PvE season.), Wuthering Waves (Ditto the upcoming huge content drop for that one.) and of course the almost-but-not-quite-here-yet Throne and Liberty.

There are more but I won't go through the list yet again. I'm more interested in the why than the what this time. Why have I pivoted from being more than happy to re-tread old ground to falling prey to every new fancy that comes along? Is it just typical fickleness? A butterfly mind? Or is there some more fundamental change going on?

I can't help but notice there's been a blurring of the lines over where the kind of games that interest me get shelved in the Great Genre Library. For a long time all multiplayer online games with persistent worlds and some kind of progression system got labelled MMOs, with a more specific but still very large subset being called out as MMORPGs. 

Now they're marketed as all kinds of things. "Open World RPG" seems to be popular but there are numerous variations. I asked Gemini to give me "precise genre descriptions" for the games I've already mentioned and this is what it came up with:

New World Aeternum

    Genre: Open World MMORPG
    Description: A massively multiplayer online role-playing game set in a fantasy world, where players can explore a vast open world, engage in crafting, PvP, and PvE activities.

Once Human

    Genre: Action RPG
    Description: A single-player action role-playing game with a focus on fast-paced combat and a dark, futuristic setting.

Wuthering Waves

    Genre: Open World Action RPG
    Description: A massively multiplayer online action role-playing game set in a post-apocalyptic world, featuring a focus on exploration, combat, and social interactions.

Throne & Liberty

    Genre: Open World MMORPG
    Description: A massively multiplayer online role-playing game with a focus on dynamic weather systems, real-time combat, and a vast open world to explore.

Nightingale

    Genre: Survival Crafting MMORPG
    Description: A massively multiplayer online role-playing game with a focus on survival, crafting, and exploration in a procedurally generated fantasy world.

All of those seem about right, even if the marketing departments wouldn't necessarily agree.

Nightingale's official description on Steam is both wordy and awkward: "PVE open-world survival crafting game played solo or cooperatively with friends". It might be that, now, after the revamp, but it definitely used to have an endgame identical to a lobby MMO like the original Guild Wars. Not sure if that's still the case. I'll tell you when I get there.

As for New World Aeternum, it's amusing to see that even an AI hasn't been fooled by Amazon's desperate attempt to rebrand the failing game as something other than what everyone knows it to be - an MMORPG. The actual description as per the FAQ on the official New World Aeternum website is unequivocal: 

What kind of game is New World: Aeternum?

New World: Aeternum is an action RPG.

Yeah. No, it's not. I mean. it's their game. They can call it what they want. It doesn't mean the rest of us have to follow suit. We call Beryl a princess (God knows she behaves like one. A cartoon one, anyway.) but she's still a dog to everyone else.

I'm starting to believe that all of this nitpicking over tags is kind of missing the point, though. I've seen certain people getting quite grumpy about these sorts of rebrandings and repositionings but maybe that speaks more to their own insecurities than to any intrinsic problem with the terminology. 

The companies involved in sending out the publicity material and giving the interviews in which these labels are used obviously have their own agendas but so do those who earn a living by writing about them. No-one likes to see their specialisms infringed or compromised, especially if it means losing ground in the marketplace.

There's also the academic argument, that nomenclature and classification matter. If you're in the business of keeping records, it's annoying to have to refile everything just because someone else can't keep the names straight and it makes life harder than it need be for future researchers.

As players, though, does it really matter? I'm not playing games because of what their makers call them, am I? The tags and descriptors are only there to help me pick out the ones that might be of interest. If I'm flipping through my feeds and I see "platformer" or "side-scrolling beat-em-up" I know to move on. If I see "survival" or "open world rpg" or "mmo" I stop and take a look.

It's taken me longer than it should have to come to the realization that playing MMORPGs isn't equivalent to a vocation or a religious calling. Individual games possibly might merit the kind of emotional commitment you'd give to a sports team but getting agitated over what to call the sport being played is just silly. (And yes, I know people do it!) 

In the end it's all just shorthand so you can find what you're looking for and don't have to keep describing the whole thing when you talk to other people about it. Working that out has come as quite a surprise for me. It was nowhere near as intuitive as it should have been. 

It's not that long ago that I was mostly only interested in MMORPGs. It was all I wrote about on this blog for quite a while. I didn't even look at RPGs or survival games, which I now realize often contain most of the things I always liked about MMORPG gameplay, only condensed to a solid core. 

For the longest time, I also had what now seems to me a weird affectation: the sense that playing RPGs offline, alone, was somehow a lesser, more hollow experience; that playing online in a multiplayer environment, even when I never actually saw, let alone interacted with another player, was somehow innately superior.

There clearly is an existential difference between inhabiting a gamespace that contains only one living person, you, whether that's on or offline, and playing solo in a shared world, where you see other players moving around, even if you never speak, group or communicate with them in any way. Whether it's a greater, equal or lesser experience is open to debate. 

I have, however, played plenty of MMORPGs where I never once saw anyone else at all. Ever! Any sense of shared experience there has to be metaphysical at best.

There's been no moment of epiphany for me when I realized I no longer cared whether the game I was playing was called an MMORPG or an Action RPG or anything else; whether I was playing on my own, with a handful of others or with multitudes. The penny only began to drop fairly recently, when I was writing about certain games I'd been playing and found myself having to google to check whether they were solo or multiplayer. I mean, if you can't even tell...

The first time I remember that happening was with Genshin Impact. It played exactly like an MMO but when I came to post about it I couldn't actually remember if I'd ever seen another player there. That sort of thing happens more and more.

GI, of course, is an online open world action rpg with optional co-op multiplayer. It just rolls off the tongue, doesn't it? No wonder we shorten these things. 

These days, almost every online rpg has some form of multiplayer option but the multiplier is frequently very small. Four players in the same shared world or instance is common but it can be even fewer. Wuthering Waves only allows two other people to join you in a shared version of the game. Noah's Heart, on the other hand, which seemed to be an almost identical type of game, had other players running around all over the place.

Clearly, the word that's most negotiable in the MMORPG acronym has to be "Massive", which may be why MassivelyOP seems to be so exercised about the linguistic shift that's taking place. I don't really think they need to be worried. It's just the tectonic plates of the language shifting and grinding against each other as they always do. 

There's no sign that players in general have lost interest in shared worlds capable of accommodating hundreds, thousands of people at a time. If anything, it's more that marketing departments are increasingly wary of the residue of negative sentiment that's attached itself to certain acronyms over the years. 

Gaming isn't just a business, it's a medium and if there's one thing we know about pop culture and media it's that nothing feels as stale as last year's Next Big Thing. Or last decade's, for that matter. Change the name, change the perception; that's the hope.

And yet, under the surface, the gameplay remains remarkably consistent, something I've really noticed when it comes to gathering, crafting and collecting. Non-combat activities in Nightingale or Once Human can be extremely similar to their equivalents in EverQuest II or any older MMORPG. 

The animations are a lot more dramatic, sure, but if you flow-charted the processes they'd look much the same. In fact, the original, 2004 version of crafting that EQII launched with and later scrapped because almost everyone hated it was even closer to what both those games use now, except that in EQII you couldn't make all your own sub-combines and had to ask someone else to make them for you.

And that may well be why crafting in modern open world RPGs can be so much more complex than we tend to see in MMORPGs any more and yet be better-accepted than it ever was in those games, where if we're honest with ourselves, it was always something of a niche activity. It's much the same gameplay but with most of the inconveniences boiled out and that applies to the whole game, not just the crafting.

As for crafting itself, I'd have to say that, when you're doing it all yourself and not tendering it out to
contractors, it feels like crafting. When you have to liaise and negotiate with others for resources, materials and skills it feels a lot more like administrative work and who wants to do admin for fun?

All of which doesn't exactly explain why I'm finding it so hard to motivate myself to play any of the older MMORPGs right now, or even come up with any comments on Jenn Chan's latest letter. (My attempted return to Star Wars: the Old Republic isn't going anywhere, either.) What it does is suggest it probably has more to do with surface factors like appearance, style and convenience than any substantive differences in gameplay. The new games aren't really all that much different from the old ones - they just tend look a lot better and waste a lot less of your time.

Of course, slick, frictionless surfaces have their drawbacks. They're not sticky, for a start. As we've discussed many times, people mostly don't hang around for long. It's a few weeks and on to the next thrill ride. The old MMORPGs don't seem to have that problem. EQII is twenty years old in a few weeks and half of that Producer's Letter I'm not talking about today is given over to news of the next expansion, the twenty-first, coming out in November.

Maybe that'll feel new and exciting enough to get me back and playing again. Having seen where we're going, I kind of doubt it but I guess it could happen. Still, I somehow managed to get a whole post out of the Producer's Letter without talking about anything that was in it until the final couple of paragraphs, so I think we'll call that a win.

Nothing Has Changed : Nightingale, Realms Rebuilt And Early Access

With more than twenty hours play in Nightingale: Realms Rebuilt, the update that was meant to reset the entire game, and having beaten the bosses required to gain access to the second and third zones, I feel ready to give my provisional judgment on the revamp. So here it is:

"Huh?"

Or maybe:

"Is that all?"

As far as I understand it, the game didn't receive the reception its developers were hoping for when it went into Early Access earlier this year. It didn't attract players in the numbers that flocked to similar games around the same time (Particularly Palworld and Enshrouded.) and it wasn't able to retain most of the players who did give it a try. The hope for Realms Rebuilt was that, by relaunching the game, at least some of that failure could be mitigated, some of that decline reversed.

Immediately prior to the rebuild, concurrency on Steam had fallen to the low hundreds from a peak of just under fifty thousand at launch, itself not a particularly impressive figure. The relaunch, if that's what we're calling it, did result in a significant bump, with concurrency rising to around six thousand in the first week although it's already dropped to more like half of that.

I can't say I'm all that surprised. I put more than a hundred hours into the first version of the game and while it would be disingenuous to say I couldn't tell the difference between that iteration and the current one, I find it hard to see how anything like enough has been improved to make anyone who didn't like it the first time around change their mind, let alone for Nightingale to gain and hold the attention of anyone who wasn't interested to begin with.

The pre-publicity for the update seemed to suggest a pivot to structured narrative with a linear storyline that would play out in "handcrafted" zones known as "storied realms". The collective content contained within all of these new areas was described as a "campaign", which at least to me suggests some sort of coherent and continuous story. After those twenty-some hours, I'm still waiting to see any of it.

From my perspective, having completed just about all of the content in the original build, I'd have to say it feels like Realms Rebuilt has even less in the way of a through-line than before. I thought the old version told a somewhat consistent and reasonably convincing story that led the player through each of the biomes available at a steady, manageable and enjoyable pace. Lack of story was not one of the problems I'd have said Nightingale had anyway, but if anyone did, I'm pretty sure this is not going to convince them that problem's been fixed.

Here's the Main Story as I've experienced it so far:

First Realm: Abeyance. 

Walk around the map and pick up some stuff other Realmwalkers have left behind to get free recipes to craft those things.

Talk to some people in a cave to get a breadcrumb quest to the next Realm

Fight a boss to open a portal.

Second Realm: Sylvan's Cradle

Talk to some people in a village to get a couple of quests to clear some mobs from a building and a cave and get some hints about who to speak to about opening the next portal.

Speak to that person and do a couple of jobs for them so they open the gateway to the building where the portal is.

Fight a boss.

Third Realm: Welkin's Reach

Complete three Bastilles of Agility to open the Empyrean Observatory to reach the third portal.

That's as far as I've got. It doesn't seem like a lot but I'm working from memory here so I might be missing something.. 

Nope. I went and checked my Journal, which handily keeps a record of completed quests, and if anything I'm making it sound more impressive than it was. 

The Abeyance Realm chapter records seven Main Story quests but when I read them through they were pretty much all just listening to Puck explain how things work then doing something basic so he'd believe I was capable of surviving in the Faewilds. In other words, it's just a series of tutorial tasks. 

It also lists five "Side Quests", one of which is the picking up left-behind trifles one, so that isn't even in the main sequence. Neither is the one where the NPC tells you where to go next. In fact, the official "Main Quest" in Abeyance is literally doing those tutorial tasks for Puck and nothing else at all.

Worse, I remember doing the tutorial the first time around and I'm pretty sure there was actually quite a lot more to it then. Puck had more to say and he made everything sound more exciting, plus there was a sense of urgency and adventure that's wholly absent now. I also seem to remember there being more conversation with the journalist Wilhelmina Sasse, who stood out as a character worth remembering. She doesn't any more. I feel she's had some of her lines cut, too.

On inspection, Sylvan's Cradle turns out have an eight-part Main Quest sequence that was so memorable I had entirely forgotten it until I re-read my journal, even though I only finished it a few days ago. It involves talking to a woman by the name of Desma Valavani about the corruption in the region and helping her test a possible cure. 

That entire sequence of eight quests amounts to about the same amount of narrative content as a run-of-the-mill EverQuest II or World of Warcraft side quest. It doesn't begin to come close to anything in one of those games you might call a zone storyline, let alone anything anyone would ever label a "main quest". 

I cannot imagine how anyone could think this is an improvement on what was there before. At the most generous interpretation it's a side-grade; largely the same as before but swapped about a bit. I'm almost convinced by what I've seen up to now that it's actually a downgrade, with significantly less story than there was in the version I played a few months back. I suppose that might be down to a poor memory on my part plus the excitement of everything being entirely new back then but still.

What I am completely sure about is that Realms Rebuilt has not turned Nightingale into any kind of story-led experience. It's still a survival game with some generic quests bolted on, seemingly as an afterthought. 

As for the expanded and revised Progression path, there's certainly more evidence of that than there is of any new narrative. Crafting has been tidied up and organized into the kind of tree you find in many games. That's not something I'd have asked for or wanted but it's certainly something that's happened. I don't think it's a particularly well-designed or intuitive layout but it is more structured than than what came before. If anyone gave up on the game last time because they found the crafting too disorganized to deal with, I suppose it might be worth another look.

In terms of content, though, I don't think much has changed. Azuriel has an excellent post up, where he goes over the potential of the system in detail but as far as a I can remember, all of that functionality was already in the game already and I don't think the new system even makes the complexity any more accessible. Possibly less so, given the tendency of the new UI to overwrite itself as you use it, a reminder this is still Early Access.

I believe there may now be slightly fewer crafting stations and Augmentations to deal with although there are also some new ones so that might come out equal. You can now make short and longbows as well as guns, which I don't recall being possible before. Magic (Or Magick as the game irritatingly spells it.) also got a minor upgrade but it's still a very low-magic environment all the same.

Once again, I don't feel any of this is a substantial change to what went before, let alone a major improvement. It is better. It's just not better enough to make anyone who turned the game down last time decide to give it a second chance now.

Then there are the new bosses. I am not impressed. Well, not with the two I've seen so far, anyway. They manage to be both very annoying but also completely trivial, which is a good trick if you can pull it off. 

The reason they're annoying is that someone has tried to make them "challenging". Apparently the developers had "seen how much players have enjoyed some of the more formidable creature encounters in Nightingale" and "wanted to expand those types of encounters". Since I would very much have been one of the players who did not enjoy those encounters and would have liked to see a lot less of them in the revamp, this was never an approach likely to endear itself to me.

For that reason I am quite pleased to find they've made a total hash of it. Yes, the bosses are "challenging" in that they have some of the most unwelcome special abilities of any mob, namely teleporting all over the place and healing themselves back to full health. Fortunately, any advantage they gain from these cheat-mode tricks is largely negated by the fact that they can be worn down by attrition using the tried-and-trusted endless respawn method. With no meaningful death penalty the only barrier to success is tedium.

That was how I beat the first boss. The second was even easier. It's a very large bear that can only attack from the front and it's in a cavern with corridors too small for it to turn around in. Once I figured that out, it was cake. (Okay, technically the bear can turn around but it takes so long to do it and its so easy to just skip round the back again that it might as well be stuck. It certainly doesn't require any skill from the player, which is just as well because I don't have any.)

The thing that puzzles me most about this isn't the unsuccessful implementation. God forbid they get that sorted out and make the encounters genuinely challenging. That really would be an "I quit!" moment for me. No, it's the idea that this is substantively different from what was there already.

Didn't we have to open each new biome with a fight with a Boss last time? Or am I getting mixed up with the half-dozen other games I've played recently where I had to do that? It's pretty much baked into the survival game model by now, isn't it? Although, now I come to think about it, I can't actually remember a single one of the original bosses in Nightingale so maybe there weren't any.

Or maybe they just weren't very memorable. I will say that this time around I can at least remember Jabberwock and the Bear (Azazel or something like that I think he's called.) so maybe that's a sign that something has improved. Then again, it's only been two weeks. Ask me in six months and see how much I can remember about them then.

One final note concerning combat and general mechanics. Azuriel mentioned in a reply to a comment I left on his previous post about Nightingale that he's already stopped playing due to the Early Access nature of the game. When I read that, I was a little surprised because the game has never seemed all that rough around the edges to me. After a few recent incidents, though, I'm beginning to see what he means.

There are the usual bugs, of course, like my entire house disappearing the other night (It came back when I relogged.) and that flickering UI I mentioned earlier but there are some things I can't quite decide whether to put down to an Early Access build or some very peculiar design choices. If it is the former then it might actually be more fun to play now before they fix them.

Here are a couple of the more egregious examples I've noticed. The first was only revealed to me when Beryl ran in and started jumping up at me and pawing at my mouse hand when I was in the middle of a big fight. I got killed as a result of her exuberance but for once, instead of using the revive option, I just logged straight out. That's how I discovered that if you simply quit to Character Select when you die, when you log back in you reappear just where you died instead of halfway across the zone, which is a huge advantage and made any number of potentially tough fights trivial once I'd discovered it. 

Just as well, too, because one thing that does seem to have changed is the overall difficulty level of the game, which seems much higher, at least when it comes to fighting regular mobs. It's particularly horrible in Sylvan's Cradle, which for some inexplicable reason (Sadistic tendencies on the part of whoever designed it being the only rational explanation I can come up with.) has been lumbered with a massive debuff to health regeneration, making it extremely difficult to recover from any fight at all. 

I realise there's something of a fad for "challenging" content right now but I don't think that having to go into every fight at low health is the kind of challenge most people are looking for. Also, being killed repeatedly by boars that charge you from behind while you're trying to talk to NPCs in a fricken' settlement probably doesn't figure prominently on most players' dance cards either. None of this seems likely to expand the audience for Nightingale as far as I can see.

My second example of something that may or may not be working as intended comes from crafting. In the old build, you could always set up a bunch of crafting stations with some recipes that had long run-times, then go to sleep and wake up with them all finished. In that build, though, you couldn't go to sleep until dusk so it was a once a day bonus.

In Realms Rebuilt, not only can you go to sleep at any time, you can nap as many times a day as you like and you can set your alarm for morning, noon or night. This means every time you have a combine running that's likely to take more than a few seconds, you can just lie down and have it done in a moment. 

There's no penalty for this whatsoever other than the mild inconvenience of having to do it at all. If it's a quirk of Early Access then I think Azuriel has a point. If it isn't, though, and it's intentional behavior, then I can't see any reason to have timers on the recipes at all. They might as well all auto-complete instantly, which would certainly be my preference. 

The final aspect of the revamp that I'm going to mention - briefly - is the way it looks. Nightingale was always a very good-looking game but now it's even more gorgeous. I remain to be convinced just how "hand-crafted" these new Realms really are but I have no complaints about the eye-candy. It's spectacular.

All in all I'm happy enough with the new Nightingale but then I was pretty content with the old one. They haven't wrecked or ruined any of the things I liked and even if I'm not all that impressed by the changes they have made, I'm finding enough that feels slightly different to want to make a second run at the game. If they were expecting a huge revival of fortunes from the work they've done, though, I think they're going to be disappointed. 

It would be easy to conclude that this is another example of why developers shouldn't rush into Early Access before the game is ready. It's very hard indeed to get a second bite at that cherry. In the case of Nightingale, though, I'm not even convinced Inflexion know what game they want to make. Waiting longer might just have meant more work to undo when they realized they'd taken a wrong turning.

Against any criticism of Early Access, as a commercial choice at least, you have to set the successful examples such as those against which I'm sure Inflexion have been bench-marking. Games like the aforementioned Palworld and Enshrouded, both of which went the Early Access route and seemed to fare pretty well by doing so.

Intriguingly, though, while both those titles outsold Nightingale hugely when they entered EA, all of them have experienced a similar decline, with Enshrouded being the most successful at holding the audience it won. Looked at from that angle, perhaps Nightingale isn't under-performing quite as badly as it seemed. In fact, with the boost Nightingale got from Realms Rebuilt, it currently has about the same concurrency as Enshrouded, which suddenly lost fully half its remaining players over the last thirty days, having been stable for months prior. What's that all about?

And, looking on the bright side, at least Nightingale isn't being sued for patent infringement. That silver lining is always there. You just have to look hard enough!

Black Shores Brings A Bright Future To Wuthering Waves

I was planning on posting more about Nightingale: Realms Rebuilt this morning and since we have an Amber weather alert for heavy rain going on for most of the day, I might still get around to it. Beryl is operating in stealth mode just now, hoping no-one tries to make her go outside, so  that should give me an extra couple of hours.

As I was checking Feedly late last night, though, I saw on MassivelyOP that there's a major content drop coming for Wuthering Waves, something I knew but had forgotten. Yesterday's post was, to a large extent, a stiff note to myself about dithering, telling me how I ought to focus more. I'm quite cross with myself for letting games I was happily enjoying only a short while ago get away from me, Wuthering Waves being chief among them.

Put simply, Wuthering Waves is too good to ignore. I'm all too aware that my tendency to gush and gosh-wow over every new game I play does none of them any favors; it has to lessen the impact of any recommendation I make, when it seems like I think everything is good. But Wuthering Waves really is good and I ought to play it more consistently than I do.

The last update was genuinely one of the best I've seen for any game I've played in quite a while. It had a lot of new content, more than I've so far been able to see for myself, and all of what I did try was excellent. Reportedly, the next update is even bigger and it looks very impressive from what I've seen and read so far.

I only have one real complaint about the game, which relates to a fundemental design decision. The reward structure isn't ideal. Pretty much a hundred per cent of the rewards for everything you ever do are consumables, most of them intended to help you upgrade your characters and weapons. 

I'm sure that's very welcome to most players as they work on making their Resonators as powerful as they can be but since my only interest is keeping mine sufficiently powerful to progress through the storyline and since 90% of that content consists of talking or traveling, nearly all of the rewards I get just sit in my inventory, unused. I'd really like to get a cosmetic or a fluff pet once in while instead of another canister of magical goop that makes me 0.1% more awesome.

With that said, I suppose I ought to recognize that one of the reasons I'm not further along in the narrative than I am is because, while there isn't anything like as much combat as I'm used to in other games, there are still the obligatory Boss Fights now and then, barring the way to the next step of the story. My unwillingness to get involved in the necessary and expected process of upgrading my team is probably making those tougher than they need to be. 

Although I haven't yet hit any hard skill barriers of the sort that made me stop playing Genshin Impact and made me give up on following the storyline in Noah's Heart, those experiences have made me wary of pushing too far ahead. I'll be returning to this theme in the Nightingale post, when I get around to writing it, so I'll just say that the reason I'm mentioning it here is that the new update appears to assume a certain amount of progress in the main storyline that I don't believe I have.

There are not one but two promos for the update, which goes by the intriguing and evocative name To The Shore's End. The action takes place in a new map called The Black Shores, a hitherto unknown island somewhere out in the ocean. As the description has it "After your journey across Mt. Firmament, all clues now point to a hidden island in the sea — the Black Shores."

Only I don't believe I've been to Mt. Firmament yet, let alone gone across it. I didn't even recognize the name when I saw it so I looked it up. It is nice to be able to do that. I'm used to playing games that don't always have all that much in the way of accurate, up-to-date information available so it's nice to play one that has a reasonable number of well-maintained sources for a change.

Mt. Firmament, it seems, is also an island, which explains how you can go "across" it. I was wondering.  More specifically, it's "A secluded island situated in the southeastern ocean of Jinzhou territory. Cloaked in mist, it obscures its connection to the secular world.... Navigating its waters is treacherous due to the thick fog. To safely reach its shores, you'll need to wait for precise timing and the expertise of a "Wayfinder" "

I'm fairly certain I've never done that. It seems like something I'd remember.

The question, then, is whether the new area is going to be open to everyone or only to those who've already done whatever they were supposed to do in (Or on, I guess...) Mt. Firmament. And even if it is possible to get to The Black Shores without going over the mountain first, there's the little matter of levels to contend with. If the new content is aimed at players who've done all there is to do, it will most likely be tuned in the expectation that they'll be levelled and geared accordingly.

Of course, Wuthering Waves does offer the option to lower the level of the mobs in the world. It's a difficulty slider of a kind and I am already making use of it. Perhaps that's why I haven't been bothering so much with upgrades. When you can downgrade your opponents with a single key-press, why would you want to spend hours working on your gear just to get the same advantage?

I imagine there's a reason. I expect I'll run into some sort of skill or gear wall in time. For now, though, everything feels about right so I'm not keen to mess with it. 

I am very keen indeed, however, to see the new island, which looks stunning in the trailers, and to discover what stories it holds. It's not all that easy to explain just why I find the storytelling in Wuthering Waves so satisfying but I very much do. I was positively excited when I realised there was more to come, even though I haven't finished what's already there.

Watching the trailer did make me think about just why it might be that I've enjoyed the stories so much. It isn't because they're exceptionally well-written. They're not. The translation, while occasionally patchy, is generally well above average but I'd say the prose and dialog are at best only slightly above par for an online RPG.

It certainly isn't because there's anything special or even unusual about the central narrative, etiher. It's a typical post-disaster tale of devastation and reconstruction. I must have played literally dozens of games now that use the same basic premise. Again, it's well-enough delivered but it's hardly ground-breaking

No, what I think is most likely the reason for my sustained interest and enjoyment is the consistent focus on the day-to-day lives of the characters. There's a really huge amount of what I'd have to call slice-of-life storytelling. Some of that revolves around behavior that could broadly be categorized as adventure but even then it's often more about having to put yourself into dangerous situations for down-to-earth reasons than setting out to have adventures for the sake of it.

The adventurous characters we meet are mostly scientists or soldiers with quite believable jobs to do or projects to complete and the things the player character ends up helping them with tend to have as much to do with setting up camp and getting the equipment working as fighting monsters.

A lot more of the side stories - and a good deal of the central narrative, too - are more concerned with personal relationships and social responsibility. There are numerous recurring characters and crossovers and a great deal of discussion of expectations, duty, friendship and maintaining a work-life balance. At times, the whole thing feels more like an anime series I'm watching than a video game I'm playing and that, I think, is why the storytelling works so well.

Of course, if you came to press buttons and kill monsters, you can do that non-stop, too. I imagine a lot of people do. Maybe if I'd done a bit more of it myself, I'd be feeling more prepared for what's coming next.

Excited as I am to see everything in the update, what has me the most hyped is the news that we're getting a Companion Story for my favorite Resonator, Encore. I'm not sure how many of the Resonators have their own storylines as yet - presumably not all that many if we're only getting one for Encore now - but the couple I've done have been very engaging, so I have high hopes for this one.

The best thing about it is that it takes place in whatever dimension Encore summons her "Woolies" from. I can't say I'd spent any time considering where the mischevious, violent, anarchic cuddly toys she pulls out of nowhere actually come from but now the idea's been put into my head I really want to know.

There are two new Resonators in the update, both of whom look very intriguing. One is an ethereal young woman called The Shorekeeper, the other another childlike troublemaker, seemingly cut from the same cloth as Encore. She goes by the somewhat amusing name of Youhu. Well, it made me smile.

By my count, that will make twenty-one Resonators so far. Without logging in, I can't remember exactly how many I have but I think it's less than half of them. I probably ought to do something about that, too, but since you can only have three Resonators on your team at any one time, I'm not entirely clear on what the incentive would be. I'd have enough to make seven teams and to keep them all relevant to the content I'd be doing, I'd have to upgrade and gear the lot, which seems like it could be a full-time job.

... oh... I see how the reward structure works now! Silly me!

Anyway, I won't go through the entire contents of the update, which lands in six days time on 29 September. It's all in the videos above and at the website here. I'll just tabulate what's in it to give an idea just how extensive it's likely to be:

• New map, with two exporable areas above (The Black Shores.) and below ground (Tethys Deep.) .
• Two new Resonators - The Shorekeeper and Youhu
• Two new weapons - Stellar Symphony and Deep Sky
• New chapter in the Main Quest
• New Companion Story - (Encore)
• Seven (!) new Events including combat, collection, parkour and exploration.
  
• New Echoes (Either two or three - I'm not quite sure.)
• A new game mechanic (Portals)
• A new mini-game involving old game cartridges (!?).

I should probably have put that list at the start of the post. 

Oh, well. Too late now!