Colors, Companions And Catching Up

In an all-too-familiar story, I'm writing this now because a game I wanted to play has decided to re-download its entire 44gb client just so it can "update". I'm getting far more used to this kind of annoyance on Steam than I would like but this time the game isn't even on Valve's platform. It's Wuthering Waves, which uses its own, proprietary launcher and with which I have previously had few problems.

Okay, it does have an irritating habit of asking to restart after every minor update rather than just carrying on when it's done but that only takes a moment. Why it wants to replace the full client this time I have no idea. We're not at the next step in the storyline already, surely? I haven't finished the last one yet. 

Hang on. I suppose I ought to check...

Oh. My. God. We are!! Seriously, has it been six week since Riniscita? It can't have been. But it has.

Give me a minute while I watch the trailer. Better yet, watch it with me.

Make that five minutes. They don't stint on the trailers, do they?

So, the new update is called "Waves Sing, and the Cerulean Bird Calls", a typically poetic and evocative phrasing although the placement of the comma is strange. It's there in the press release but not on the title card, I notice. Does that mean anything?

Also, I never much liked the word "cerulean", largely because I'm never sure how to pronounce it. I bet there's one of those pronunciation guides on YouTube though... yep.

So, yes, that is how I say it and that's one reason I don't like it. It's an ugly sound for a word that's intended to evoke a beautiful color. It's also obscure enough to detract from the meaning of most sentences in which it's used. It certainly doesn't do this one any favors. Why would a bird be "cerulean"?  

Is the color of the bird relevant  anyway? Clearly what we need to know is that it calls, not what color it is. Unless, of course, there are other non-cerulean birds that aren't calling...

This kind of close textual analysis might seem a tad unnecessary when applied to the name of an update to a video game but frankly if the writers don't want this level of attention they should stop being so literary in their choice of language. (I hope they don't do that, obviously.) 

I haven't, I don't think, mentioned it before but Wuthering Waves is stuffed with references to outside sources, many of them quite highbrow, some less so. In this update there's a nod to Hemingway's "The Old Man and the Sea" and another to the agit-prop band Rage Against The Machine. 

Maybe I'll call these calls out more often, when I notice them. They're generally well-used and a credit to the writers' breadth and depth of cultural knowledge, unlike the self-conscious winks and smirks to pop culture in some MMORPGs I could mention, World of Warcraft probably being the worst offender.

Anyway, what's in this update? The usual, I think it would be reasonable to say. And that's a good thing.

There are two new Resonators, Phoebe and Brant, both of whom we met in the previous update. It looks as if Phoebe is the main companion in the new story, which I don't mind at all. She's quite an interesting character. Brant, I don't think I know enough about yet to take a stance on.

I use the word "companion" here very much in the sense it's long been employed in Dr. Who. That show is foregrounded in my thoughts at the moment because I've embarked on a largely unplanned (re)watch of the very long-running series. 

I discovered, entirely by chance, that all 26 Seasons, dating back to 1963, are available on the BBC iPlayer. It always used to be that the BBC was loathe to give free access to the older seasons, presumably because they made good money selling them, first on VHS and later on DVD. I can only imagine that the bottom has finally fallen out of that market, making it more commercially savvy to include them in the iPlayer package, which presumably is in competition with the likes of Netflix and Disney+

Whatever the reason, it seemed like an unexpectedly generous windfall and I started watching immediately. I could have started at the beginning but perversely I chose to come in at Season Six.

Growing up, I saw the first two or three seasons as they were broadcast, when I would have been about five to seven years old. Then, for various reasons, partly nightmares induced by the monsters in the show but mostly the fact that we didn't have a television at all for a couple of years, I didn't see any more until towards the end of the Patrick Troughton era. 

That's where I decided to start this time, reasoning, probably falsely, that the Hartnell years would feel too dated. I was also hoping to avoid too many of the cheaply-animated episodes that have been slotted in to replace the ones where the originals have been lost.

I've gone through Seasons Six and Seven and I'm halfway through Eight, which brings me into the Pertwee years. I remember watching these when they were first shown. This time, though, I'm seeing them in color, which makes a significant difference. I can't remember exactly when we got a color TV set but it wouldn't have been until Tom Baker arrived, if even then.

I imagine I'll do a post or two about the show at some point but for now I'll just say that it's considerably better than I remembered. I mean, I was a big fan of it as a child and even as a teenager, so I expected to enjoy watching it again, but I hadn't appreciated just how good some of the scripts are and, more surprisingly, most of the acting. 

There are a lot of inept extras, behaving as though they're in panto at the village hall, but the featured and supporting cast along with almost everyone who has any kind of speaking part, perform at the standard of any serious, adult drama of the period. It's very impressive.

My point, now that I remember I had one, is that the Doctor always has one or more "companions", people he meets in the course of his adventures, who end up tagging along with him for variously extended periods, before eventually leaving to go back to their own lives. This, I can't help but notice, is the exact same structure used in Wuthering Waves. 

Rover, the player-character, roams around the world, bumping into other Resonators everywhere she goes. Many of them join her for a while, sometimes just for the many, many cut scenes, sometimes in combat and sometimes as members of her fighting team. At every point it seems as though the relationship will last indefinitely but inevitably Rover's journey takes her out of the latest companion's hinterland and another takes their place.

The analogy breaks down mostly because the player can still choose to include any Resonator they have access to in their current team. This is a meta-feature that absolutely breaks narrative continuity and requires a great deal of double-think to ignore. I have people in my Go-team right now, who also send me occasional messages about what what they're doing a continent away. I pretend it's not happening. It's the only way.

Getting back to the update, there are the expected new weapons to win in the gacha game I mostly avoid but also some new Echoes, most likely obtainable in the game itself. I still don't fully understand Echoes, either in the lore or in their role as combat pets. 

Luckily for me, the update includes additional, automated guidance on choosing and using Echoes. I hope it's better than the current version, which every guide I read last year recommended shouldn't be used. I could certainly do with some help in that area.

There are also some improvements to the camera, by which I mean the actual camera you use in the game to take screenshots, not the way the camera moves as you play. I'm always happy to have more options there but I was fine with the ones I had. 

The update brings a bunch more events both permanent and temporary, most of which I probably won't even find time to look at before the next update arrives, not if the last few months are anything to go by. There's far too much content in Wuthering Waves for me to keep up with. I have my work cut out just catching up with the main storyline.

Speaking of which, there's another installment of that, too. It seems we'll be going beneath Riniscita to explore and then escape from a series of vaults. I hope it's not too claustrophobic.

It all looks very entertaining. The game finished updating before I finished this post so I guess I'd better log in and carry on with the story from where I left it. I'll do my best to catch up before this new update is replaced by the next. I'm not sure how long that gives me.

I'm guessing six weeks. It won't be enough...