Two In A Tower

I saw an opinion piece over at MMOBomb yesterday that asked how much story would be too much in a game. The experience that apparently provoked author QuintLyn Bowers into print about it happened in Honkai: Star Rail but it could easily have been any number of post-Genshin Impact open-world RPGs. It's certainly something anyone who plays Wuthering Waves is going to find themselves asking themselves, eventually.

At the risk of de-railing myself before I've even got going, I could go on to ask how much content is too much, as well. I think we're a lot more familiar with the problems caused by content droughts than content floods but as far as Wuthering Waves is concerned, I'm beginning to wonder if the sheer quantity of things to do might not go some way to explain why I don't log in anything like as often as you might expect, given how much I profess to enjoy the game.

There, at least, it's a two-fold glut- content and story. Taking the story first, as I've said before, it's very good and I always enjoy it enormously but there really is one hell of a lot of it. Sometimes, the sheer volume can seem daunting.

Take the new chapter, the typically poetically-named "Tangled Truth in Inverted Tower". I am, technically anyway, up to date with Wuthering Waves just now, by which I mean I've played through all of the storyline quests from the base game and the previous updates. 

As of today I'm also a fair way into the current chapter, which arrived with the update on 27 March, but I didn't jump straight in when it dropped. It took me a couple of weeks before I felt ready to tackle it. I knew it would be a big job and I wasn't convinced I had the spoons for it until very recently.

A few days ago, I finally felt ready to make a start. I watched the trailer, then logged in to have a look at all this new stuff there was for me to do. When I saw the sheer number of options in front of me inside the game itself it almost made me log straight out again. I won't go through the full list of additions to the game that arrived with the update but let's just say there's much more than I'm ever going to see, far less finish.

Rather than attempt to check it all out, I decided to concentrate on the parts that most interest me, first and foremost among them the main story. Since, for once, I had all the necessary progress and flags required, I got right to it and even more surprisngly kept at it. I've only played two sessions so far but they've both been long ones by my modern standards. I didn't time anything, so this is an estimate, but I believe that first session lasted a couple of hours and my second, this morning, was nearer three. 

In all, I've definitely put in between four and five hours so far, during which I've done absolutely nothing except push through the storyline. I haven't looked it up to see how far in I am but based on context I would guess it can't be more than two-thirds. It could well be significantly less. For someone trained by Guild Wars 2 to expect to run out of narrative road no more than an hour or two after every update, this kind of fictional fecundity takes some getting used to.

Quantitively, Wuthering Waves trounces GW2 on all fronts but qualitatively it's streets ahead, too, at least if the yardstick is time spent watching the story unfold. For almost all of those four or five hours, it would be hard to say if  I've been playing a game or watching a movie. Pretty much the entire thing is cut-scenes, although even that suggests cutting away from something and for the most part there's been little to cut away from. It's been one continuous, unbroken narrative. 

There have been plenty of times when I've watched my character standing in one place as the camera moving around her in the cinematic way I described in a previous post and more when I've watched her watching and listening to other characters talking. I guess all of those could be described as traditional "cut scenes", except that for the most part all they're cutting away from is more of the same rather than from any action I've been taking. 

There have been far more occasions, however, when what's happening has been a combination of narrative and action, in the broadest sense of that word, where I've nominally been active, pressing buttons and so on, while all around me the talking went on and on. Much of the gameplay, if that's what we're going to call it, involves the player-character walking - or riding or flying or sailing - from one place to another, all the while engaging in ceaseless conversation with one or more NPCs - or, on a handful of occasions, with her own interior monologue.

As she walks and talks, she's frequently required to "do" something - steer a vehicle, manipulate a device, open a door and so on, activities which often seem to be things other games would hand off to the engine. At one point, in a vaguely meta-fictional moment, the PC even questions another NPC on the necessity of all the levers and devices needed to open doors and portals, only to receive a perfecly sensible, practical explanation. and yet the feeling remains that most of this activity can only really be there to give the player a notional sense of agency, when in fact their primary role is that of audience.

The superannuation even extends to the actual action, such as it is. There are numerous "puzzles" to be solved but in every case the solution is explained in advance and  pointers, markers and all kinds of indicators are provided to make it clear exactly where to go and what to do at every stage. It's as though someone gave you a jigsaw puzzle and instead of leaving you to get on with it, as you tried to fit the pieces together they helpfully leant over your shoulder and told you exactly which to put where - and then pointed out to you that all the pieces were, in any case, numbered on the reverse.

It might sound as though I'm complaining but I'm very much not. I like it, personally. It'd suit me if all games were as helpful. 

More importantly, in Wuthering Waves it's just as well most of the thinking is done for you. If it wasn't you'd never be able to concentrate on the important part - the conversations. Even if I wanted to solve all those puzzles by myself, I wouldn't be able to concentrate doing that and following the plot at the same time. The characters never stop talking just because they have something practical to do.

And I wouldn't want to miss any of it. It's all very interesting. There's an incredible amount of detailed backstory to take in, along with a wealth of nuanced and quite subtle characterisation. The writing is supple and complex and the voice acting is nuanced and expressive. A lot is being conveyed by the language and the tone. It's hard to imagine taking much of it in, while also trying to figure out where to go and what to press. 

Even with all the hand-holdiong, there were still plenty times when I had to stop and stand still just so I didn't miss something someone was saying. I find it frustrating when I'm trying to listen to what someone's telling me and the boat we're in suddenly shoots up a waterfall, jumping the conversation on to the next nodal point. After that happened a couple of times, I took to hanging back until everyone had finished talking, whenever it looked like we might be about to move into a new area.

If there's precious little thinking to be done - outside of the considerable thought required just to unfold the complexities of the narrative itself - there's even less fighting required. It seems to me that with every update, Wuthering Waves is moving further away from being an action rpg, coming closer to becoming a visual novel, at least as far as the main storyline is concerned.

I'm sure I remember that, back at the start, just following the plot involved a lot more unavoidable combat, not to mention a great deal more travel that involved numerous unscripted fights along the way. I seem to recall battling endless Tacit Discords just to get from one location to another and numerous mini-bosses when I got there. And then there were the full-on boss fights, sometimes several times in a single chapter.

Now, several hours into the current one, I have yet to see, far less fight, a boss of any size or description. The perambulations of the main character and her allies are only infrequently interrupted by small groups of Tacit Discords, none of whom pose any kind of threat, let alone a significant one. 

Most of those fights so far have lasted all of ten or fifteen seconds, if even that, and all of them have been completely arbitrary, serving no narrative function whatsoever. It's the equivalent of pushing a few annoying branches out of the way as you make your way along an overgrown forest path. 

I can only assume they're there to make the player feel like they're doing something, even if it's nothing very important. It's the character who does all the actual heavy lifting when it comes to action, with anything that might possibly require technique or skill being rendered in cut scenes so as to avoid any embarassment.

Once again, I appreciate that approach. I have never placed a high value on player skill in RPGs. As far as I'm concerned, it's always the character who's meant to have the leet skillz, not me. 

Sadly, I doubt this trivial level of combat will continue for the whole chapter. I've noticed the mobs are getting stronger the deeper we go and I'm sure there will eventually be some sort of set-piece fight with a key villain or arch villain. Even if that turns out to be a tough one, though, it doesn't change the fact that it will have been preceded by some four or five hours of largely risk-and-challenge-free storytelling.

And honestly, I'm not even wholly certain there will be a boss fight worthy of the name. Last time I wrote about the storyline in Wuthering Waves, I seem to remember saying something about how the big climactic fight was mostly taken out of my hands by the game itself. Already in this chapter, in key parts of the puzzles, moments when it looked as if I was about to be asked to perform some action that required at least a nominal level of player skill, what actually occurred was yet another cut-scene, this time of my character doing whatever was needed, without any input from me.

I can see how many players, possibly most players, might not be all that keen on being relegated to a walk-on role in their own story but Wuthering Waves is a very successful and popular game so clearly it hasn't put everyone off. And that, I imagine, is largely because of all that other content I alluded to earlier.

One of the best features of the game, as far as I'm concerned, is the way the story content is increasingly being distanced from the RPG elements. There's a huge amount of vertical progression available in the game, most of which is, I assume, essential, if you want to take part in the many, many non-storyline activities; all those arenas and towers and challenges and trials that form a huge part of every content drop and which are almost certainly the main reason a lot of people are playing.

All of it is there if you want it. It's also the main reason you might want to spend money on the game, buying tokens to throw the gacha dice, chasing those five-star weapons and Resonators that make you so much more powerful, then paying more as you burn through the vast quantity of consumables needed for the endless upgrades.

As far as the story is concerned, though, so far it all seems perfectly accessible without any of that. I've just been describing how easy it is and I have a very basic build and gear set-up. There was one step-change moment a few months back, when I had to do some upgrading to get over a hump in the story, but I haven't done any more since and things seem to be getting easier rather than more challenging. Long may it go on that way.

As for the question I started with, whether all this story, high-quality as it, is too much... I'm not entirely sure, yet. It certainly isn't in principle: who doesn't want more of a good thing? In practice, though, I'm finding following the continual narrative for hours at a stretch takes more out of me than the equivalent time spent mindlessly bashing monsters over the head. My wrists may not ache but my brain does!

I need quite a lengthy cooldown after each session, sometimes several days. The intellectual and emotional effort involved has, so far, kept me from doing much more than keeping pace with the central storyline. I haven't had the mental resources to delve very far into the numerous side- and back-stories, much though I'd like to. Some of them are easily as long as full chapters of the MSQ and equally well-written and enjoyable but I've been skipping most of them because I just haven't got the energy - or the time, for that matter.

It seems, then, that in the context of a game at least, it may be possible for there to be too much story, inasmuch as there does seem to be more than I'm ever going to be able to handle. That, though, says more about my stamina and persistence than the design of the game itself. 

And as Don Covay so wisely put it, it's better to have and don't need than to need and don't have. So long as I can cope with the main storyline, I'm happy to know there's more in reserve, should I get the time and the desire to see it.