When The Night Knocks, You'd Better Answer

Readers with long memories may recall I used to play a game called Wuthering Waves. I went on a good deal about how great it was (Which it is.) and how more people ought to try it. (Which they should.) If I was the kind of person who has a Main Game then, for a while this summer, Wuthering Waves would have been it.

It's been more than six weeks since I last mentioned Wuthering Waves. On September 23 I posted almost two thousand highly enthusiastic words about how much I was looking forward to a major content drop called The Black Shores. Since then, nothing. 

As I said in the post, "Wuthering Waves really is good and I ought to play it more consistently than I do." A prophetic observation. Self-knowledge is a wonderful thing.

When The Black Shores update arived, I managed exactly one session before I got distracted by something else. I didn't post anything about it that the time because I hadn't seen any of the new content. As I suspected, much of it, including all the storyline quests, which was what I was most interested in seeing, required a certain amount of progress in the Main Quest. Progress I didn't have.

What I actually did in that one and only session was play through a whole Act of the MQ: Act V - Rewinding Raindrops. It was excellent. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Why I hadn't carried on with the MQ before mystifies me now. I just kind of stopped and carried on playing the game without progressing at all. I guess that's another point in its favor; that it lets you.

I was still way behind. Three full Acts of the original story to go before I got to the new stuff. Even though the chapter I'd just done was so good, I didn't follow on immediately with the next for reasons that had nothing to do with Wuthering Waves itself. I got diverted first by the Nightingale reboot, then by the Way of Winter scenario in Once Human. The two of them together account for something like eighty or ninety hours of my gaming over the last month and a half.

All the while, I've been telling myself I needed to get back to Wuthering Waves, to push on to the Black Shores, without ever doing anything to make it happen. It wasn't until I saw there was a new, major update on the horizon that I finally shook off the compulsion to play Once Human every available hour and logged into Wuthering Waves instead.

This morning, I played through another Act of the MQ, followed by an Interlude. That took me a couple of hours and once again it was top-class entertainment. I've seen Wuthering Waves described as "story-rich" and it is, in more ways than one. There's a lot of story and it's mostly of very high quality.

In fact, as I've said before, the experience can often feel more like watching an interactive anime than playing a video game. There are many very lengthy cut-scenes and the fights are few and far between. 

You do have to be in the mood for that but when I am, I love it. Unlike Final Fantasy XIV, where I just couldn't wait for the ponderous, portentous, pretentious cut scenes to be over, with Wuthering Waves I sit back and just lap them up. The tone is light but exciting, the humor is actually funny and both the character animations and voice acting are emotionally involving. It's quality entertainment all the way.

And the action is great, too. I generally dislike boss fights but WW's variable difficulty options allow for combat that feels urgent and involving without being stressful. The fights are kinetic and explosive and require a little more than just plain button-mashing but not that much more. It's working for me.

There's also lots of interesting and varied non-combat action involving destruction or manipulation of the environment and all in all it's just jolly good fun, something that could well be said of the whole game. It's easy to see why it's been so successful, something confirmed by the trailer for the new update, When The Night Knocks, which has racked up more than a million YouTube views in just five days.

That trailer, like the one for The Black Shores, lists a whole slew of content additions but this time I don't intend to go through them all. Most of them don't really involve me although I'm sure they'll be of huge interest to players who take the core progression and upgrade mechanics a lot more seriously than I do.

What I am interested in is the storyline, which involves a part of the game I have only visited once so far and which I always meant to wrote about but somehow never did. There's a door out in a backwater province somewhere that I happened upon almost by chance. It hangs there, in the middle of an open plain, seemingly leading from nowhere to nowhere, but if you step through it, it takes you to a kind of surreal dreamworld. 

I found it fascinating. I always meant to go back ands see more of it but as usual that never happened, mostly because the door was really far out in the boondocks. 

Well, now we don't have to go there to see the dreamworld. It's coming to us. The name of that place is Somnoire: The Illusive Realm and the opening line of the trailer is "Somnoire breaks into world." I very much want to be there when it happens. 

Once again, though, I suspect I'll have to get caught up first. Then again, maybe not. It's hard to say until the update drops and the terms and conditions become clear. For example, I only realised today that Turquoise Moonglow,  the holiday event I had a great time with, back in the summer, was actually part of continuity, even though it didn't seem like it. 

There were no MQ requirements that I ever saw. I just jumped straight in. I only found out it assumed you'd already finished the storyline today, when I did the aforementioned "Interlude" after the big fight at the end of Act VI: Grand Warstorm. 

Spoiler incoming, just in case anyone is playing and hasn't got to this next bit yet. 

You should all be playing, by the way. 

Just saying..

So, at the very end of Act VI, at the climax of the Big Boss Fight, little Abby, the supercute creature with the odd-colored eyes and the dangly earrings that somehow lives inside Rover, the player-character, emerges to save the day. That's supposed to be the first time you actually see them. 

Except I'd seen Abby already. The flying cutie features prominently in several scenes in the Turquoise Moonglow. There have already been screenshots featuring them here on the blog. At the time I remember wondering why everyone seemed to know who Abby was, since although I had figured out they must be the mysterious force that had come to Rover's aid once or twice before, I couldn't remember ever having been introduced.

I put that down to my faulty memory but in fact the whole of that holiday event assumes you've already completed the MQ. The Interlude, which immediately follows Act VI, is when you get to meet Abby properly for the first time. 

At that point, the creature doesn't even have a name. Everyone just calls them "the Little One". There's a whole sequence where Chixia comes up with possible names, all of which receive the response "Absolutely NO!", until Rover, as a joke, suggests "Abby", short for that very phrase and the Little One, after some thought, decides to keep it.

End of spoiler. You can come back now.

So, clearly, it's possible that the new update may be both in continuity and not require specific progress in the MQ. It's also equally clear that it would be preferable for narrative reasons to be at the point the game expects you to be. Otherwise some things may just not make as much sense as they should.

As always, there is a hell of a lot going on, gaming-wise just now. It's been quite the year for that. There's still another phase to go in Way of Winter and the EverQuest II expansion, which I've bought and paid for, now has a surprisingly early launch date of November 20.

It's going to be tough to fit it all in but I hereby pledge to myself that I will do my best to get caught up in Wuthering Waves before the new update arrives on November 14. Okay, sure, that's five days from now. I said I'd do my best, not that I'd succeed.

I think I should definitely be able to make it through the original game questline but as for the Black Shore story, it's hard to say. I'm not even sure if there's a deadlne on that. All the special events that came with The Black Shore will go away when the new update lands but I'm hoping the story quests are permanent. Assuming that's so, then there's really no rush.

Still, I don't want to be doing this every time and given the quality of the content I'm being a fool to myself by not prioritising it over other games, many of which are, frankly, nowhere near as entertaining. (Not talking about you , Once Human. You're almost too much fun.)

We'll see. I know my butterfly mind. It only takes a light breeze to blow it off course and then chaos follows. Then again, I quite like a little controlled chaos, once in a while.