The Games I'm Playing Stay The Same

 

It's now clear to me that Wuthering Waves is an anime I watch, not a game I play. There is the minor inconvenience of having to press the space bar to move the dialog along every so often and the major nuisance of having to stop and fight something once in a while, but fundamentally, I log in when there's a new episode, watch it, then log out until the next one drops. There's a new one next week and I'm looking forward to it in just the way I would if it was a new season of a show I liked.

 

In theory, I ought to be doing much more than just the MSQ. There's a huge, open world, plenty of side-quests and companion stories and a whole raft of activities that would easily occupy my time for hours and hours. But I'm not doing any of them.

 

Instead, any time I feel like playing an anime-style MMORPG, I fire up Crystal of Atlan instead. CoA is nowhere near as good as Wuthering Waves. It doesn't have the storyline, the characters, the graphics or the game design to give WW a run for its money. By comparison it's paper-thin. And yet I keep choosing to play it instead.

 

Partly, as I've said before, it's the sheer number of things to do in Wuthering Waves that puts me off. Apparently you can indeed have too much of a good thing. Mostly, though, it's the way the story is delivered, which does feel extraordinarily like a tv show.

 

It takes me three or four hours each time to get through the new chapter, which is very comparable to the time it takes to watch the eight or ten episodes of a single season of a show. Then, when that's done, there's a month or two to wait before the next chapter, which feels like an accelerated version of the wait for the next season.

 

To complete the comparison, most of the time I really am doing nothing but watching a screen. The amount of interaction required seems to get smaller every time. It really has reached the point now, where I think I'd prefer it if there was an actual show I could watch instead.

 

This morning I sat through the full seven and a half minutes of the trailer for next week's update, Version 2.5, Unfading Melody of Life. Here it is so you can have the pleasure, too.

 

The main story is still the prime focus, insofar as it comes first, but it only takes up two and a half minutes of the run-time. The rest of the trailer, more than twice as long, goes through all the other new stuff that's coming, almost none of which I'm interested in and much of which I don't even understand.

 

I can see there are some changes to Echoes that I'm probably going to have to pay some attention to if and when the difficulty increases, although it's by no means certain that will happen. If anything, the game has gotten easier since I started playing. There's also something called "Special Story Experience" that caught my attention, but it's not explained in any way so I'm just going to have to wait and see if it's relevant to me.

 

I'm looking forward to seeing where the story goes next and I'll be happy to find out more about Phrolova and the Fractsidus. It's always entertaining when that mysterious organization turns up and causes trouble. Other than that, everything else, I imagine, I can and will ignore. 

 

Over in Crystal of Atlan, I dinged 50 earlier in the week. Only ten more levels to go and I'll be at the cap. I imagine it will happen. Nothing seems to getting much more difficult although I do need to keep upgrading my gear, something I rarely bother to do in Wuthering Waves, so I guess technically CoA is more challenging in terms of combat.

The reverse is very much true when it comes to the story. CoA is very straightforward. It reminds me a little of reading a children's picture-book sometimes, in that there are a lot of declarative statements, simple observations and didactic explanations. Nuance, subtlety and complexity are mostly absent.

 

That goes well with the art style, which also has a picture-book look about it, but the combat is comparatively convoluted, involving a lot of combos and dodging as well as a surprising amount of in-combat interaction with objects in the environment - ringing bells, climbing ladders, leaping on and off moving platforms and the like.

 

Consequently, it feels a lot more like playing a game, which I think may be why I choose it over Wuthering Waves every time I find myself thinking "Hmmm. I'd like to play a game now..." 

 

Falling between the two extremes on my current gaming calendar is Marvel's Midnight Suns. Actually, it doesn't so much fall between them as set them up as two opposite poles between which the player constantly needs to switch. 

 

I can see why there was so much pushback from players at launch. It's quite irritating to have to swap to what is effectively a completely different game every so often just to get to the point where you can go back and carry on playing the game you wanted to be playing in the first place.

 

The way it seems to work - I've only been through one cycle so far - is that you move through the storyline in a pedantically chronological and literal manner, constantly switching from one mode to the other. 

 

After the tutorial you move to a base, where all the characters either live or are staying as guests for the duration of the crisis. From there, you select missions, so far one at a time with no choice, to which you travel by portal. On arrival a fight starts almost immediately. That's the tactical RPG part of the game, which is what I "bought" it for and which would, I imagine, have been the reason most people did. 

 

The game lets you move back and forth, going on missions, throughout the course of a day and doing practical stuff back at base but when night comes you have to stay at the base for a "Hangout" or a "Club Meeting", something which mostly involves deep and meaningful conversations with other members of the team.

 

The conversations aren't bad but they definitely aren't so fascinating I look forward to them. Looking it up, I see that there is in fact a way to avoid Hangouts, although it's not recommended because you get good bonuses from doing them. Also that they don't seem happen as often as I imagined. There appear to be more complaints about too few Hangouts in the game than too many. Maybe Firaxis tweaked it post-launch or maybe the complaints at the start were from people over-reacting without really knowing how it all worked. Not like that ever happens...

 

The hangout part of the game has slightly put me off playing, though. I tend to play tactical RPGs quite specifically so I can enjoy some turn-based combat on demand, which makes having to plod through a bunch of conversations to get to the fights quite irritating. The actual fights thmselves are good fun though, so I will put up with the inconvenience. For now, anyway.

 

I can't help thinking it would have been a lot better if they'd picked more interesting characters, though. Then I might have wanted to talk to them. But then, post MCU, I'm increasingly finding Marvel characters very bland compared to their pre-MCU comic versions or, indeed, to just about any characters from DC, either pre- or post-DCU. They all seem to have a whiff of the corporate about them these days.

 

Finally on my gaming schedule, I'm still plugging away at Overseer in EverQuest II. Just before I started this post, I dinged Overseer 55, for which there's an Achievement, although it's still five more levels to the next tier. When I reach that, I'll finally be up-to-date. It'll have only taken me about six months...

 

With luck I should have it done by the end of the summer, so I'm well on track for the Autumn/Winter expansion.