Following up on Saturday's post on the subject of my return to Wuthering Waves, I have good news and bad news. It's nearly all good news, though. Just one bit of bad. I'll get that out of the way right at the start.
The Bad News
I finally hit a skill wall. No, not exactly. I guess it's more of a level wall or a progress wall or an upgrade wall. Whatever it is, I ran into a mob today that I needed to kill to carry on with the story and I couldn't kill it. Or I haven't been able to yet, anyway.
It's not a boss. It's not even a sub-boss. It's just a regular mob, one of many that stand around all over the place, guarding chests you want to open, buttons you want to press, force-fields you want to remove. Anything you might want to get at either has a puzzle you need to solve or guards you have to kill to make whatever it is you want to open or switch on or turn off interactable.
Until now I've never had a problem with any of them. Sometimes the fights are longer than I'd like and sometimes it might take a couple of tries but generally it's just clearing the trash. You do it, you forget about it.
This time, there's this one big fellow I just can't seem to put down. Honestly, I can barely put a dent in him. He had three or four pals at the start and I saw them off easily enough but no matter what I try with the big one, he just shrugs it off then stamps on me.
I'm not sure why he's so much tougher than the others. Part of it is level. He's level 56. But all the mobs in the areas I'm exploring now are mid-fifties and I've killed what I needed to up to now.
Not that it's easy any more. My main character, if the term can reasonably applied to games of this kind, which I'm not at all convinced it can, since you can play as anyone in your currently selected team, is level 50 but all my other characters are level 40 at best. Also you have to level weapons in this game and I don't have any weapons higher than level 40 either. Or any very good weapons, for that matter.
I have turned the difficulty down but you can only drop it one tier and while that made me godlike for a while, I've now caught up and overtaken the benefits.
There are two specific things I need to do overcome this roadblock. One is Ascend all three characters in the team I'm playing to level 50 (Or, better yet I guess, 60.) and upgrade their weapons likewise. The other is learn how to play.
Both easier said than done. Progression and combat in Wuthering Waves are, by my reckoning at least, insanely complicated. While I always prefer to do things the easy way for as long as I can, in most games I can buckle down and learn the ropes when I have to. In Wuthering Waves, just reading the guides on how to play properly melts my brain.
I am not going to attempt to outline the complexities. I don't understand most of them and without constant reference to a playbook I can't remember much, either. The point is, there are dozens of moving parts that need to be aligned before you hit an acceptable standard and all those parts have their own upgrade paths.
For people who like this sort of thing I imagine it means countless hours of entertainment. From my perspective, having slacked off up to now, it would take me multiple sessions just to go farm the basic requirements to Ascend the two characters in my team who are stuck at level 40. A that would just be the beginning.
Even so, leveling and gearing up looks a lot easier than learning how to play all three characters adequately, let alone well. Each character has a number of attacks that may revolve around stacks or counters that need to be monitored and sequences of moves that directly or indirectly affect each other but combat is also very much a team enterprise, with all characters having intro and outro skills that affect other characters as you swap between them.
And that's just the basics. It gets far, more complicated than that. I foresee very little prospect of my ever being able remember the combos and moves required, far less having the dexterity and concentration to pull them off.
I'm not completely hopeless. For some time now I've been capable of more than the mindless button mashing I was using at the start. I figured out I needed to keep the characters zipping in and out and I even managed to work out which of them were best at DPS or healing. I read some builds back in the summer and made some tweaks so my load-outs weren't completely random.
That, along with lowering the difficulty by a tier, was serving me pretty well up to now and even when I reached Mt. Firmament yesterday and the difficulty very noticeably ratcheted up several notches, I was still managing to win my fights without too much trouble. They were taking longer than I'd have liked but the results were never in any doubt.
It looks like that isn't going to cut it any more. If I can't figure out a short-cut or find something on the web that tells me I'm doing something wrong that's an easy fix (Amazing how often that happens...) then I'm going to have little choice but to back off the main story quest while I spend a few sessions gathering the necessary materials and farming the appropriate bosses to stock up on enough ingredients to Ascend and level the whole team up to where they can handle the content I'm trying to do.
That's not a problem in itself. It's an achievable goal and the process involved is entertaining enough that I'm more looking forward to getting stuck in than I am dreading the grind. The real issue is that the next update is only a couple of days away and I wanted to get up to speed before then.
I guess, though, that if I'm not leveled and geared for content when it arrives, there's no point being far enough through the storyline to access it. Assuming that's even required.
I noticed last night that there's a Returning Player program for anyone who hasn't logged in for thirty days or more. I've been away long enough to qualify and as well as some login rewards to encourage me to stay, one of the options now open to me is to go straight to the Black Shores at the click of a button.
It's tempting but I haven't clicked that button yet for a couple of reasons. The main one is that I've been enjoying the story a lot and I want to see it all. I'm a little worried that taking instant travel option might just auto-update everything before that point and mark it as finished.
Even if it doesn't, I'm somewhat concerned that trying to skip the full story may mess something up, somewhere down the line. It's not as if that hasn't happened in other games. It's just safer to go through everything in the order it was intended, if I can.
It's an option, though, in case I can't. I'm holding it in reserve for if I do get completely stuck. For the time being, though, my plan is to go back and do all the stuff I should have done ages ago, get my team to a minimum viable state and then go back, kick that big guy's ass, pick up the thing he's guarding and use it to open the next door I need to go through. Wish me luck!
The Good News
There's way, way more of it than the bad but I can sum it up in four words: this game is amazing!
Honestly, it's such great fun. And it looks so good. Yesterday I made it as far as Mt. Firmament, the mysterious, mountainous island just off the coast. Wuthering Waves is an extremely good-looking game all round but this has to be one of the most spectacularly beautiful zones I've seen in any game.
I took more than fifty screenshots. I could have taken hundreds. Every view is a picture you could hang on the wall, which is something you can literally do in Once Human, by the way. Every game should let you hang your screenshots on the walls of your house.
Unfortunately, Wuthering Waves is one of those games that looks significantly more impressive when you're playing it than it does in the pictures you take so the screenshots here don't entirely do the scenery justice. I don't know why that happens in some games but I'd be interested to hear a simple explanation.
Apart from the apparent lack of definition, there's obviously a loss of intensity from the absence of all those factors that can't be translated into flat images. Even lighting and visual effects rarely come across in stills and ambient scene-setting such as the sound of the wind in the trees, the gentle movement of the long grass or the reflections twinkling in the streams and waterfalls are missing altogether. The environment is deeply immersive to move within as well as absolutely gorgeous to look at but screenshots struggle to convey the atmospherics.
The plot, while never deviating far from the conventions of the genre, remains consistently intriguing. Even though I almost always read all the text in every game, too often I still don't care what's happening. Here, I'm quite keen to find out what's going on.
As for the dialog, it's good and getting better but the voice acting really sells it. I'm so used, in other games, to being taken out of the moment by line readings and intonations that don't match the intent or even sometimes the meaning of the words but here it's just the opposite. The readings are so subtle they bring out nuances I hadn't always registered and add emotional depth to those I had. It's as good as a radio play much of the time and quite often better.
As for the gameplay, other than the aforementioned issues with combat difficulty it's been a total pleasure. Most of it is tactile puzzle-solving at a level of difficulty I find both satisfying and relaxing. I would have said I didn't like puzzle games much but clearly I've been playing the wrong ones because this is fun!
On Mt. Firmament there are also some new devices to play with, like the ring-cannons that shoot you into the air and the consoles that let you move time backwards and forwards. They're fun to play with as well as fitting very effectively into the storyline.
I could go on but since this was originally meant to be a screenshot post and since I really want to get back and play some more, I'm going to stop there. With luck, next time I post about the game I'll be in the Black Shores. I wonder what that zone looks like?
If it's anything like Mt. Firmament, I'm going to need more storage space for all the screenshots.
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