It Changes Nothing : Phrolova Said So, So It Must Be True

Every post I write these days seems to begin with me talking about some "plan" or other that's either fallen apart or been abandoned or had to be changed to fit in with new circumstances. Once in a while I even open by saying I had a plan and now here it is, made real. When or why I started making all these plans escapes me, although I bet it had something to do with Blaugust...

And yes, I did have a plan for today. I mean, I didn't have it for long... Not that it's gone wrong, for once. No, it has come to fruition, which is something plans do according to convention, albeit not many of mine.

When I say I didn't have it for long, I don't mean I had it for a while then gave up on it. I'm back-projecting. I only came up with it a day and a half ago and now I'm done with it, so... I didn't have it for long. English is hard.

Although not as hard as biology. If you're a may-fly, I had that plan for a lifetime and then some. Any may-flies out there, reading this? No? Thought not.

So, what was this plan, then? I'm embarassed to tell you, now I've made all this fuss about it. It doesn't deserve to be dignified with the name "plan". It was just that I knew on Monday what I was going to post about on Wednesday, or at least what I wanted to post about then. Now. Whatever. Tenses are slippery.

Almost three weeks ago, I posted something about the latest update in Wuthering Waves. A week later I posted again to say I was finally, actually, for real this time, up to date with the storyline and ready for the next chapter. And now I'm posting to say I've done it. 

Well, I think I have. I got the "Quest Complete" screen for Rinascitta II: Act VIII, anyway. There's probably a coda or an afterword I haven't done yet and for all I know there might be a second installment coming before the next full update, like there was last time. But I've definitely finished the big storyline segment in the current update.

It took me over three hours, broken into three unequal session, and it was fricking amazing! Seriously, it was so good. Even though I kept getting interrupted by dogs and people at the door and Mrs Bhagpuss telling me lunch was ready and all kinds of real-world responsibilities, I was so deep into it it didn't break the spell. And what a spell it cast.

For once, I pretty nearly understood what was going on. Might be the first time since the original questline back in Jinzhou. I just about understand who everyone is now. I recognize all the factions and I have a general impression how each of them stands with the others.  I'm comfortable with the jargon and I get most of the lore references without having to look them up (Something you can do through in-game hyperlinks, an innovation I don't recall seeing anywhere else.)

Better yet, I'm finding I can follow the motivations of the characters, more often than not, which has certainly not always been the case. That's never been because their reasons for doing what they're doing are poorly explained. It's because most of them have secret agendas or multiple agendas, some of which they're keeping secret from some people but not others, or agendas they, the characters, do not fully understand or aren't even aware they have. Plus some of them are being mind-controlled, sometimes but not all the time, because of course they are.

To say there's some nuance involved would be like saying there's some vodka involved in a Russian wedding. (I don't know. I'm assuming? Anyone been to a Russian wedding? My first simile involved Ozzy Osbourne but I thought better of it. (It was complimentary so don't @ me!)) It's basically all nuance. Remember when we thought The Secret World had some elliptical writing? Bears and rats compared to this stuff.

After the current chapter, I think I do finally have some idea who The Fractsidus are. Is. Again, whatever. What they're up to still isn't entirely clear and neither do I know "who" they are as individuals yet, except for this episode's Guest Star - Phrolova.

Oh, I love Phrolova! It's not saying much because I love most of the characters in Wuthering Waves. Well, a lot of them. But Phrolova is especially wonderful because of her nihilistically monomaniacal dedication to a purely romantic cause. She's just... she'd burn down the world to have what she wants and all she wants is what she had when she had nothing. Nothing but love and a home, so, everything.

She gets some truly great lines and Rae Lim, the voice actor behind the English dub, delivers every one of them to absolute perfection. It's such a difficult read, too. Phrolova says things that on the page look to have "lack of affect" or "ennui" written all over them but which come freighted with a subtext of loss, defeat, depression and despair. 

Best I can figure it, Phrolova is a sociopathic empath. Or an empathic sociopath. She feels nothing except everything and none of it matters except at the core where it all matters too much. I screen-shotted some of her bleakest lines but I couldn't screenshot the delivery. 

Okay, I could have videoed it. But I didn't. I figured I'd steal a compilation of the best ones from YouTube. Only there aren't any. There are plenty of comps of her battle cries and lots of cut scenes and videos explaining why "JP VTubers can't stop crying during Phrolova's story" (Who can blame them?) and a ton of other stuff but nothing like I would have focused on. 

So you'll have to imagine the voicees for yourselves when you read her saying things like

or 

or maybe 

Or my absolute favorite

Phrolova stares into the void and the void won't make eye contact. Don't you just love it? 

Yes, well, maybe you don't. I'd have to admit it requires a certain sensibility. The whole game does.  One snarky YouTuber posted a nine-second video that sums up the WW gestalt very nicely:

And yes, there is an awful lot of that - the player-character standing very close to the guest star as they gaze meaningfully at - or more often past - each other. Also a very great deal of flirting on the part of the guest star, almost always received with complete incomprehension or just straight-up ignored by the PC. Except, to misquote Fcukers - Fuck, No. Phrolova Don't Flirt.

There's also a fair smattering of this:

The PC desperately and all too often unsuccessfully lunging towards the Guest Star as the Guest Star falls or sinks or vanishes into some portal.

And then there's the ever-popular 

Meaningful Hand-Clasp. 

Sometimes it's the Rassuring Hand on the Shoulder but the Clasp is More Meaningful.

I can see it might not be to everyone's taste but it is to mine, probably because, as Mrs Bhagpuss has so often informed me, I'm basically a teenage girl. Emotionally, anyway.

So much for the story and characters which are all A+ as usual. Plot, too, for a change. Also, for the record, my character made choices in this one that I wouldn't have made. And said things. Boy, she can be harsh, sometimes...

Gameplay continues to be all but non-existent although there were some good mini-games this time. All very easy but I found them entertaining. Less walking-and-talking than usual, more standing around and lots and lots of flashbacks, dream sequences, still images with voice-overs and various other engaging ways of presenting a passive narrative as if you had some say in the outcome.

As for combat, it genuinely does get less and less every time now. A handful of tiny fights with trash mobs, for which I always used the extremely OP Phrolova, so they lasted mere seconds. One final boss fight that came with a load of instructions about special abilities and how to counter them but which I aced on the first try, using nothing more skilled than some slightly enhanced button-mashing. I watched my cooldowns and swapped characters a few times to get some heals but other than that, no tactics used or required.

And that, I imagine, except for cleaning up whatever decompression and debriefing mini-quests may remain, will be it until the next, big content drop in a few weeks. I feel emotionally drained. I'll need that long to recover. 

As for the Gacha elements... there are none. Seriously, I don't even use the free draws. I did ding Union 40 today, which got me some message about having to do a quest before I can level up any more but I'm not convinced even that will be needed for the story. If it is, I'll handle it when I have to but no money will change hands.

I mean, I would pay for this game. It's totally worth paying for. But so far I haven't needed to and I'm sure Kuro can manage just fine without my contribution. In Phrolova's words (Or nearly...), Gacha rolls "aren't of concern to someone like me".

Wouldn't mind having her on my team, all the same. Maybe I'll at least have a few free pulls and see if I can get her...

#17= Magmia - Born 4 May 2003 - 101 Days 12 Hours

And so we come to Magmia. As should be obvious by her excessively long Played Time, she's one of my most important characters. Remember, too, that those numbers are actual hours logged into the game, which means that - if we say an average, full session in EverQuest takes about three hours - I must have played her, at a minimum, more than eight hundred times.

Of course, MMORPGs don't really work like that. Magmia's been around long enough that there would have been plenty of times when I spent all day with her and also long enough that she'll have been woken up for an hour here, an hour there before disappearing back into whatever quiet limbo game characters inhabit when they're not being played.

As we'll hear later, there was a full year when all she did was Overseer dailies, which meant she was online for only about fifteen minutes every day and never left the Guild Lobby. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Magmia was the character I made to play on Stromm when it became obvious Magmus wasn't cutting it. Apparently that took me a day to decide. I made him on the third of May and Magmia on the fourth. 

I was hedging my bets, too, because as you'll have noticed, Magmia has an equals sign by her numeral in the title. That's because I made two characters on the second day Stromm was up, clearly not having figured out what class I wanted to play yet. 

The other character, who we'll meet next time, was a Druid (Still is, in fact...), which suggests I was looking for someone with both utility in a group and also strong solo potential, a description that fits both Magicians and Druids well. 

That makes perfect sense. Mrs. Bhagpuss and I got off to a flying start on Stromm, meeting a bunch of new people, starting a guild, running around in a gang having fun, so classes welcome in groups, especially at low levels, were ideal. Even in 2003, though, Stromm was very far from being my first new server rodeo and I would have been well aware of the likelihood that almost all the new people we were adding to our friends lists and inviting into the guild wouldn't be there in a few weeks' time.

Attrition on new servers was ferocious back then. Hordes of players descended on every launch like a flock of sightseeing locusts, most of them playing throwaway characters they had little intention of sticking with for longer than it took for the new server smell to wear off. I should know. I was one of them. Consequently, anyone planing on sticking around had probably better be ready either to join up with one of the guilds that was planning on making a name for itself or have a plan for going solo. 

The Stromm server itself was pretty successful, off the back of being a genuine, fresh start server, to which transfers were not permitted. It went on to have a long life before it was eventually rolled into Luclin. Lots of people did make it their permanent home but not many of them were the people we'd been cultivating. I can't remember how long we lasted on Stromm that first time around except that it was long enough for almost everyone we'd met to leave before us. 

Before then, though, we had a lot of fun. I remember doing a great deal in the Luclin early zones, particularly the infamous Paludal Caverns, which at one time had a much higher Zone Experience Modifier than most, leading to every possible grinding spot being camped 24/7. The trains were legendary and I can still hear those awful echoing screams - sound samples that looped constantly in the dark, dismal caves.

Oh, yes... we know how to make our own fun in those days!

Well, I did. And one one way I did it was running a one-gnome trading service. I figured out that there were tradable items you could buy from vendors in Katta Castellum that you couldn't get in Luclin's main city, Shadow Haven, so I started running out there to buy them and bring them back to sell in the Bazaar.

I can't remember what they were any more - probably either crafting mats or reagents I imagine - but I do remember the route; Paludal Caverns>Hollowshade Moor>Grimling Forest>Tenebrous Mountains>Katta Castellum. That took me through a whole series of dark, confusing, extremely dangerous zones and although Magmia could make herself invisible that didn't help much with all the vampires along the way.

It was the sort of thing I really loved to do back then, though. Long journeys alone through treacherous territory, always at the risk of sudden death and a difficult corpse recovery. I prided myself on my ability to get to places characters of my level shouldn't go and if I could use that to turn a profit I liked it even better.

In Magmia's case it all went so well I made a small fortune or what seemed like it at the time. She made enough money to buy herself a horse before anyone in her social group and indeed before most of the rest of the server. That was when even having a mount was still something of a status symbol and Magmia certainly made the most of it. She was never off that pony and she reveled in the attention it brought her. It was her one moment of fame.

But I already told that story (Rather better, too) back in 2014, when I was writing about the first time SOE gave away a Level 85 Booster. Free level-jumps were new and exciting then, not ho-hum like they are now, and I had a good, long think about who to give it to. Magmia was the one I chose and I have not regretted that decision, even once, since.

Backtracking a little, as I recall, we held out on Stromm until we were in the low thirties, not an
insignificant achievement back in EQ in 2003, but then we moved on to somewhere else. Looking at the timings on my list I think it must have been back to Antonius Bayle, where we did the core of our serious guild and group play for a couple of years.

Magmia went into semi-retirement after that, coming back now and then, whenever I felt like having some time on my own, away from the never-ending guild drama that dogged those social years. And that might have remained her fate, had Mrs Bhagpuss and I not then come back to Stromm much later for what turned out to be our swan-song as an EverQuest duo. 

That, though, is more Ratha's story than Magmia's. We haven't met Ratha yet. Don't worry. She'll be along soon enough.

On that return to Stromm we brought characters with us, so we didn't strictly need our old ones but Magmia got plenty of play anyway. According to that 2014 post, she was Level 69 when I boosted her and I can remember wrecking around with Mrs Bhagpuss's Necromancer through a whole load of Planes of Power, Gates of Discord and Omens of War zones, having enormous fun for a while. Two mildly over-levelled, highly over-geared (Thanks to expansion-led power creep.) pet classes with a healer mercenary apiece can do a whole lot in EverQuest and make great xp while they're doing it.

That was Magmia's second act and it was a good one but after Mrs Bhagpuss finally gave up on EverQuest for good in favor first of EverQuest II and later Guild Wars 2, I mostly dropped the game as well. It wasn't until much later - specifically 2014 and that level boost -  that I came back for the first of several moderately intensive stints in the elder game. 

Level 85 was higher than I'd ever been in EQ and it opened up the prospect of several expansions-worth of new content. Magmia's third act consisted of some quite serious solo play as I slowly and carefully edged my way up into the 90s, eventually topping out at 92, by when zones giving good xp had become too dangerous and difficult to be fun any more.

Some of that seven-level journey is told in sporadic posts here on the blog although you'd have to have more gumption than I do right now to go dig the details out. I do remember having a lot of fun in Secrets of Faydwer and Seeds of Destruction, though, which brought me up to Norrath circa 2009. And that's where she'd have stopped, either forever or at least until Daybreak saw fit to increase the level range on the boost program (Something they eventually got around to only last year.), had it not been for the Overseer feature.

In my opinion, Overseer for EverQuest (And to a lesser extent EQII.) ranks second in significance only to Mercenaries, when talking about game-changing innovations, for the simple reason that both allow a casual player access to far more of the content of the game than they otherwise might get. 

Mercenaries give you a healer or a tank on tap, letting you kill mobs that would otherwise wipe the floor with you. Overseer lets you level up without having to kill any mobs at all.

When the Overseer system was added just over five years ago it didn't immediately seem like anything very impressive or even useful. That's because it takes a good while to wind up before you let it go. Once you've got it primed, though, it can make you casual-rich and push you up the level ladder like nothing else outside of a decent group.

This isn't a post about Overseer so I'll leave it at that. The reason for bringing it up at all is that for about a year I "played" Magmia just about every day and she never moved off the spot where I logged her in. I set her Overseer dailies, concentrating on missions with xp rewards and in that way she went from 92 to the then level-cap of 115 in... well, not in no time but at a considerably faster rate than I would have been able to level her in the conventional manner, at no risk whatsoever, in a fraction of the session time.

The only problem was that it was so efficient it spoiled me for the real thing. I did actually take her out a few times to take a look at a few of the new zones her new levels had opened up but although she was able to hunt quite safely there, the xp-per-hour was so slow compared to staying home and doing the Overseer missions, it felt like a bit of a fool's move leaving the lobby.

In the end I just left her where she was, safe and comfy, and plugged away until she hit the cap. After that I kept on doing missions for quite a while, shifting my focus to those that gave rewards she could pass to my Bazaar trader to sell for good money to other players with less patience and business acumen. That made me a lot of platinum for a while, until I finally lost interest and stopped logging in.

And that's where Magmia stands now. The level cap moved on to 120 and then to 125 and will most likely go to 130 with this year's expansion. I keep thinking of starting up on Overseer again to catch her up but it's certainly not going to happen before I finish doing the same in EQII. I can't face setting two lots of missions every day for a year...

You might well ask what would be the point anyway? There's no realistic chance I'll ever play EverQuest with serious intent again. Not only has that ship sailed, it's come back to port, hung about for a while, gone back out and come in again. Several times. I've given the game a good go but time moves on. 

All of which doesn't mean I won't ever play again - I just won't play even slightly seriously. I might do some sightseeing, though. Another ten or fifteen levels would open up at least two more expansions, probably more, with zones I've never visited and content I've never seen, all of which would make for prime tourist opportunities. The last expansion I really know to any meaningful degree is probably 2013's Call of the Forsaken so the potential for seeing new things is huge.

And if anyone's going to realize that potential it's surely going to be Magmia. It was never planned and for a long time it wasn't even dreamed of but somehow she's ended up being my EverQuest "main". 

It couldn't have happened to a more deserving gnome! 

Sweet Poison or A Girl's Story

In writing about Wuthering Waves, I find it very hard to avoid repeating myself endlessly. It's staggeringly gorgeous to look at, the storytelling is excellent and the voice acting is top-notch. There's an extraordinary amount to do, the gameplay is varied and wide-ranging and the whole game feels welcoming and comfortable throughout. Yada yada yada...

Also, as I say every time, I find it exhausting and overwhelming to the point where I need a good lie down to get over it every time I indulge. It's like a delicious but extremely rich dessert, something you crave but know, for your own good, you can only indulge in every so often.

That cadence makes it very tough to write about, too. Because I've fallen into this pattern of leaving a couple of weeks between each session, biting off a complete chunk of story every time, I'm stuck with reviewing each chapter without trying to get too spoilery, while using a selection of screenshots I took along the way as illustrations and maybe dropping in a critical comment or two about anything that strikes me as being particularly notable, unusual or well done.

I'd add "or that could have been done better" to that last but honestly, there's not very often much that I feel could be improved and there seems to be less every time I play. Wuthering Waves feels very "finished" compared to just about all the games I'm used to or that I've played over the years.

It wasn't always that way or I don't believe so. I seem to remember at the start there were a lot more translation issues and plenty of times when what the voice actors were saying didn't match what I was reading in the subtitles. This morning I saw just one example of that and even then it was only a single word that differed.

Contrast that to Once Human, another relatively slick, well-funded and successful game which, as I recently noted, gets a five star rating from me in most departments. Even there, the tendency, as it is in many games I've played, is for the words you're hearing not to match the ones you see. 

I was playing OH last night. I did a couple of new quests and the words the voice actors were speaking barely resembled the text at all. The weirdest part about that wasn't that the production team couldn't get it right, it was that both versions were coherent and well-written, so either of them would have been fine. How they ended up using both is the mystery. Just pick one, guys!

I suppose it's a minor issue anyway. There's no real reason to read along with the actors after all, even if having subtitles on for everything, all the time, is the current fashion. I do find it distracting, all the same. I wish production teams would talk to each other now and again and settle on a final version. Or at least listen to the QA reports when they tell them "The words don't match the voices". I mean, it's not like its a hard error to spot. Maybe it's intentional, I don't know...

As I said, that wasn't a problem for me this morning, as I played through the quest that came up top of the list when I logged into Wuthering Waves for the first time in a fortnight. I had kind of half promised myself I wouldn't do that - just blindly follow the prompts. I was going to go off and do some exploring, open up the map a bit, do my own thing but it's so easy to just slip into the old habit of going where the quest-marker tells you. And when what you find when you get there is often so compelling, why would you want to stop?

In this case what I was being led towards turned out to be a Companion Story. There's one of those for all the main Resonators, I think, not just the leads but the co-stars, too. I haven't done very many of them. I think this might have been the fourth. Maybe the fifth. I should check sometime because they've all been excellent so far.

This was no exception. Cantarella's horror-inflected tale is chilling, even disturbing, but ultimately joyous. It also stands well inside the boundaries of the primary storyline, adding some depth and texture to the core narrative, rather than simply filling out the biography of the character herself.

And it's long! Boy, is it ever! It took me at least two hours which, judging by the full play-throughs on YouTube, seems to be about average. The huge majority of my time was spent, as always, watching animated characters act and listening to their voice-actors speak. I watched an anime movie, basically. 

I doubt that if you cut all the gameplay and just strung the cut-scenes together you'd get a cut lasting less than seventy-five minutes, a very decent length for an animated film. There was a fair amount of fighting this time but it was all so easy, none of it took very long. Ditto the puzzles, which mostly involved not too much more than following the visual prompts and pressing a few buttons at the appropriate moment. There's even a potentially terrifying jumping puzzle that the game just takes over and does for you.

In keeping with what has been the very welcome trend in the past sessions I've played, even the final boss fight is both easy and partially completed through cut scenes. I sincerely hope it's a trend that continues. As for the narrative, without giving any spoilers, I'd say 90% of Cantarella's story was clarity itself, without any of the confusing technobabble just about all the characters are prone to. 

The wrap-up, though, did its best to make up for that with a flurry of lines about frequencies and sonoro spheres that I'm a little concerned to say I mostly understood. I worry I may have been assimilated.

And then there was very final coda, because no Wuthering Waves story is ever complete without at least three or four false endings. That was... odd. One aspect of the game I do my best not to mention is the ever-present, free-floating sexual charge that seems to hang in the air around some of the main characters like the opiated miasma across the poppy fields in the Wizard of Oz. 

Nervously passing over Cantarella's distracting personal appearance, which gives me disturbing of Eurotrash as presented by Antoine de Caunes and Jean-Paul Gautier back in the 'nineties, in this case I'm talking about the almost predatory way she looks at, talks to and occasionally even touches the player-character. She's by no means the only NPC to have clear and obvious designs on "Rover" but she's the first one to try to put her intentions on a co-habitational basis.

All of which might be uncomfortable if my character wasn't so very much the alpha in every situation. I'm used, as we all must be now, to having the character I'm playing be treated as some kind of famous hero or maybe even a demi-god but in Wuthering Waves it's quite self-evidently true. When NPCs act awe-struck or honored to meet her, it's with palpably good reason and they, frankly, do not know the half of it. 

With that level of authority, I'm pretty sure she can handle a few over-familiar flirtations, not that she ever seems to notice there's even a subtext. She tends to look, at most, slightly baffled by the attention but by and large it just seems to fly straight over her head. 

As I've often said, if I'm going to stick with a game for long, I really need to feel an affinity for my character, something that's almost inevitably going to be harder to achieve in a game where the player gets no choice at all in who they play, other than to pick a gender. Add to that a complete inability to affect what your character looks like (Seriously, are there no cosmetics in the game at all outside the cash shop?) and then to add insult to injury, dress the main character in the worst outfit of anyone on the team and it's surprising I've been able to bond with her at all.

That I have owes a significant amount to the skill of the actor who voices her and also to the way that vocalization is handled in production and writing. I generally prefer the good old "Silent Protagonst" approach, so I was happy enough when all my character did was nod and gesture, which was all she did for a long time after I started playing.  When she suddenly began to speak, I was first astonished and then delighted at how much I enjoyed hearing the sound of her voice.

There are two reasons for that. Firstly, I really appreciate the way she doesn't speak in every scene, only when she has something worth saying or to give her internal monologue an airing. It makes the times when she does speak up feel much more significant. Secondly, and much more importantly, I love the way the actor voicing my character handles the dialog. I like her voice, which obviously helps, but mostly I love her phrasing, which is reliably close to the way I hear the lines in my head. 

You'd be surprised how often that doesn't happen. Lots of actors seem to have very different ideas to me about cadence, emphasis and even interpretation. It's jarring to hear them stressing the wrong syllables or drawing attention away from the subtext, which is why, on balance, I like my characters not to speak. If they all spoke up as eloquently and authoritatively as this, though, I'd be happy to sit back and enjoy the show rather than imagining I could do a better job myself.

With Cantarella's story told I imagine a return to the main storyline will be next. As usual, I'm going to need a while to decompress before I take that on. I'll at least try to make it a shorter break than last time. It's hard enough to remember the plot as it is.

Church, State And Family In Rinascita Today

Having said only yesterday that I find it hard to play more than a session of Wuthering Waves every few days, of course I immediately found myself playing for two days in a row. In my defense, there were extenuating circumstances, mainly involving me being woken up at 5.30am by Mrs. Bhagpuss and Beryl, both of whom wanted to let me know we'd caught a mouse in the live trap under the sink and also what was I going to do about it? 

That led to me sitting down at the PC just after seven, having already had breakfast and walked Beryl for an hour. Even so, and with all the day ahead of me and not much else to do with it, after an hour in Wuthering Waves I was, once again, sated with story. 

In the time I spent there, the plot moved on apace. There was much skullduggery and several twists as well as  the expected confirmation that what's rotten in the church-state of Rinascita is mostly the church. This is turning out to be a highly anti-clerical episode.

The actor playing Priest Alessio is determined to make sure everyone knows just who the bad guys are. He plays the arch-villain card so hard I can almost see him there in the sound booth, twirling an imaginary mustache. 

To be fair, the corruption of the church hierarchy has hardly been a close-kept secret up to now, which is why I'm not handing out spoiler warnings. It was telegraphed pretty clearly the moment a church official asked Rover to show her papers before she'd even shaken the sea-spray from her silk stockings as she stepped onto the dock. 

If I recall correctly, that official was Phoebe, now about to become one of the latest additions to the Resonator team in the new update. The normally tempered and even-handed Chris Neal  unfairly and inaccurately labelled her a "walking devoted priestess trope " in an unnecessarily snide news item at MassivelyOP yesterday, making me feel he had to be working purely from press releases and promotional videos. No-one who'd actually played the game could dismiss the complex and nuanced Phoebe, a lifelong believer, now forced to confront the hollow sham of her faith, as a "trope". 

This is one of the many things I really appreciate about the game. It's melodrama, sure, but it's top-class melodrama. The baddies aren't pantomime villains; they're properly sinister. A palpable air of entitled arrogance surrounds most of them like a funk. Equally, the good guys aren't just cardboard cut-outs, either. Most of them are quite scary, too.

Carlotta, the Morelli Family's "Executor" certainly is. She offers a great line in understated menace, lending her official job title a distinctly razor-like edge. The fact that she appears to have forgotten to change out of her nightdress before coming to work, along with the soft-spoken way she somehow manages to make even the most innocuous observation sound like a veiled threat, just adds to a sense of gleeful violence, barely contained, that accompanies almost everything she says and does. 

Wuthering Waves is a rare game in that I find I like almost every character I meet there. Much of the visual design seems highly original to me and also frequently wildly idiosyncratic. I already talked about the Resonator who ends every fight hanging from a sex swing. Now we meet one who spends most of her time willingly locked inside a box!

Of course, when I say I like them, I don't always like them. I find them entertaining.  I certainly don't actually like all of the bad guys, especially not the religious fascists, but some of them can be quite persuasive. There are a few highly engaging bad boys and girls who make a pretty good case for changing sides, something I thought, at one point, might be genuinely be on the cards for Rover. 

That seems unlikely now. The Fractsidus, whoever they are, now appear to be the actual master-villains behind most of the really bad stuff that happens not, as I once suspected, merely a very cool gang of impetuous and irresponsible rebels. The plot twists and turns so wickedly, though, I still wouldn't be entirely surprised if they turned out to be not quite so dastardly after all at some point down the line.

The story is a joy but it has its drawbacks, the main one being that following it exclusively makes 90% of the game disappear. Before I became hell-bent on catching up to the current content, I spent a great deal of time wandering around the gorgeous world, opening up the huge maps and glorying in the amazingly beautiful scenery. Now I find myself sprinting through landscapes I would dearly love to stop and savor, barely taking the time to register the broad sweep of the aesthetic, far less take in the exquisite detail. 

When I do, finally, get myself up to current content, something that can't now be too far off, seeing I'm now in the final act of what came before, I plan on stepping away from the main questline for a while to go exploring. Played that way, Wuthering Waves should revert to being a game I can relax and kick back in, rather than one where I have to lean forward to give it my full attention. 

I might also take some time and make some effort to acquire a couple of the newer Resonators. I can't help but notice how very much more powerful the new characters seem, compared to my own team, when they join them as "Guests". The difference is every bit as pronounced as it is between my Berseker and Necromancer in EverQuest II, something I discussed in some detail yesterday. 

I'm thinking this might be a path I could usefully follow in a number of games, now it's belatedly occurred to me. I do have to wonder to what extent I've been making things harder for myself by side-stepping upgrade paths and ignoring specific abilities and aptitudes of different classes or characters. Maybe just barrelling ahead with whatever character I happen to start with, while never really learning what it is that they do or even bothering to look at their gear, until they start to feel unsatisfying to play, might not quite be the low-effort strategy I took it for.

Something to think about, at least. 

#10 - Osterberg - Born 13 May 2000 - 6 days 16 hours

Before we get started, I feel I really ought to apologize for the abomination you see directly above. I have no idea what Osterberg is wearing but clearly he ought not to be allowed out in public dressed like that. He looks like a still from a slasher flick with the polarities reversed.

And he's such a nice chap, too - for an Iksar Shadowknight. Arguably the most evil class and race combo you can get in EverQuest, although I wouldn't say it out loud anywhere near Neriak. Dark Elves have a rep to keep up.

It might be quite surprising, looking back, to hear it took me exactly a month after the launch of EQ's first expansion, Ruins of Kunark, to get around to making an Iksar, the new race that came with it. I can remember exactly why it happened. It was because I was worried that if I made one right away I'd find it too distracting. At the time, I was on a break from Rachel, my druid, after her disastrous introduction to the new continent but I was planning on getting back on the Druid horse and I felt having a whole new city and no fewer than four fresh starting zones to explore might pull focus from that plan.

Ruins of Kunark is considered by some to be the best expansion for any MMORPG ever and while there's always going to be a great deal of partiality in any such assessment, it's hard to argue with the sheer scale of the thing. Arriving less than a year after the launch of EverQuest itself, RoK all but doubled the size of the game. It came so feature-complete it could have operated quite effectively as a sequel, let alone an expansion.

Instead of bolting the new content on to the top of the level range, as has become the custom for most expansions in most MMORPgs ever since, Kunark simply duplicated the entire base game in a different setting; specifically a jungle. It came with a huge, new city, Cabilis, big enough to need splitting into two separate zones, East and West, in which lived a new, playable race, the reptilian Iksar. 

In the classic language of Dungeons and Dragons, Iksar were Lawful Evil, with a complicated, hierarchical society largely dominated by Necromancers and Shadowknights. There were other class choices available to them, most notably the new Monk class, which turned out to be extremely popular, but I kept my own monkish experiments for the PvP server, Rallos Zek, about which we will hear no more, mostly because whoever my character there was, he no longer exists.

I decided to make an Iksar SK rather than a Monk because... No, at this remove, your guess is as good as mine. Possibly I'd enjoyed the Necromancer and fancied something similar but more robust. Who knows?

One thing I do remember is that I was very impressed by the starting options available to new Iksars. They had four full-size starting zones! What the heck were the devs thinking?

The zones were Field of Bone, Swamp of No Hope, Warsliks Woods and Lake of Ill Omen. Strictly speaking, I suppose only the first was a pure starter zone, with mobs tapping out around level 20. The others all had content that went right into the low 30s. But all four could be accessed directly from Cabilis and all began at Level 1. It was perfectly possible to level up in any one of them or in any combination.

If you could find your way out of the damned city, that is. I never could, not without going wrong half a dozen times first. 

Eventually I became quite fond of Cabilis but for a long time I found it extremely frustrating. Not only was it a confusing maze of streets, it also had canals everywhere and more three-dimensionality than any of the original cities, even treetop Kelethin. There were ladders in Cabilis and you could climb them, which was just as well because when you fell in the canals that was the only way you were going to get out.

I don't remember a huge amount about hunting in any of the starting zones other than Field of Bone, where I spent most of the first ten or twelve levels. As you might guess from the name, FoB is full of undead, which worked out very nicely for a Shadowknight - or at least it did when they got spells at level 9. Until then it was all straight-up melee combat much like a warrior.

I know I got spells well before I decided I needed a change of scene. In fact, I got to the second set at level 15. By then, xp in Field of Bone was slowing down somewhat and it was a few years later because I hardly played Osterberg most of the time. He quickly became one of the many characters I was "working on", which meant I logged him in now and again, when I remembered, for bit of leveling before I rested him for another few months.

For most of my first decade in EverQuest I didn't just make a lot of characters, I played several in every session. I would routinely spend two or three hours on whoever I was supposed to be leveling at the time, then another thirty minutes or an hour or so each on  two or three others, often on different servers. It's no wonder it took me years to get any of them to the cap.

Osterberg got played non-stop for about two weeks, which seems to have been the limit of my attention span back then, after which he was mostly forgotten. He was stuck at level 15 for a very long time until finally I decided I'd had enough of Kunark and moved him to Antonica. In a way, it was a repeat of the Tarquinn episode, undertaken for much the same reason and with much the same result. 

I don't have any clear memories of the trip except that it was a lot easier because by then we'd had the Plane of Power expansion so getting from one continent to another was very straightforward. You just clicked on one of the new books that popped up on pedestals all across Norrath, particularly in starting zones, and ported yourself up to the Plane of knowledge. From there, you just needed to find the Portal for the city or zone you needed and port yourself back down again.

That got Osterberg out of Kunark but it didn't endear him to anyone in the old world, where Iksars are even more reviled than Trolls. Even Dark Elves won't tolerate them, mostly for reasons of religion, I believe. 

Unlike a Troll Shaman, though, an Iksar SK does have some options. They can use the bank by feigning death next to it - apparently even dead people can use a safety deposit box. Even better, they can turn into a skeleton, at which point most Dark Elves become quite comfortable with them and are more than happy to trade.

Or so the rumor has it. Osterberg wouldn't know. Back when he was in the leveling business, SKs didn't get Feign Death until level 30 and Shroud of Death not until fifty-five. But it didn't matter. He could always jog back to the book and port himself up to Plane of Knowledge, where everyone's money is good. Or use the Spires to go to the moon of Luclin, another egalitarian society.

One of the defining factors of Norrath is how its inhabitants became progressively less psychotic, less ready to kill strangers on sight, as the years rolled by. With the exception of the xenophobic Iksar, just about every subsequent outpost of civilization that revealed itself in an expansion was happy to open, if not its arms, then at least its banks and stores to outsiders. 

If I wanted to go back and play Osterberg now, which having written this I feel I just might, I could do it with little more difficulty than any of my more broadly-tolerated characters, always provided I took care not to stray into any of the unreconstructed pits of bigotry that pass for towns and cities in Antonica. Or the strongholds of Faydwer, either, obviously, although no-one goes where there are that many elves, not if they have any sense.

There's only one thing left to say about Osterberg and that's to tell how he got his name. I named him after Iggy Pop because Iggy does look kind of like a lizard and "Iggy" just sounds reptilian. Then, having thought of it, I decided Iggy was too obvious. Everyone would know why I'd picked it and I couldn't be having that!  So I borrowed from Iggy's real name, James Jewel Osterberg, instead.

Even then,I was sure someone would spot the reference and ask me about it. Of course, they never did. No-one ever does with any of the names I pick. In all the time I've played EQ, a few people have sent me tells saying they like the name of a character I'm playing but only one person has ever asked me why I chose it. 

That was when I was playing Osterberg but it had nothing to do with Iggy Pop. I got a message one day while I was playing him, asking me aout the name and when I explained how I'd come up with it, they clearly had no idea who I was talking about.

"Oh, I thought you might be a friend of mine. That's his name. Osterberg" was all they said and I never heard from them again. 

Social gaming, eh? It's so overrated.

#9 - Maggottypie - Born 5 May 2000 - 17 days 11 hours

First of all, doesn't he look great? No-one would have to tell you he's a magic-user. He really looks the part. He also looks pretty darn scary with that austere expression and those eyebrows. How many people's eyebrows turn grey before their hair does? Unless maybe he dyes it...

And look at what he's holding. Some kind of voodoo doll in his left hand and a serrated dagger in the right. A jagged blade says you're serious about gutting your enemies. Those things are banned for a reason.

All of which goes to show just how misleading looks can be. Maggottypie was always one of my sweeter characters despite his forbidding appearance and frankly disturbing name.

Ah, yes, the name... At the time I chose it I was under the impression it was a relatively familiar folk term for a magpie. I'd seen it in Shakespeare and quite possibly in Pratchett but I also thought I'd heard my grandmother use it.

No-one else seemed to have come across it. Certainly no-one playing EverQuest in 2000. I got a few comments about it, mostly along the line of wouldn't it look better on a Necro? Googling it now, I see the actual Shakespearian expression is maggot-pie, which is even worse. Lucky I didn't go with that. I think I wanted to but couldn't because EQ doesn't allow punctuation in character names.

Maggotty, as everyone called him ("Everyone" being Mrs Bhagpuss and one or two others.) is a Magician. Not a Mage, as I confess I have fallen into the habit of calling the class these days. Back then, people would happily correct you if you used the shortened version of the name. I think it might have had something to do with another game using the term, although I was never really sure just why some people disliked it so much.

At that time, EverQuest had two classes that could summon "pets": Necromancers and Magicians. In theory, this made them more suitable for soloing since, in effect, there were two of you. One of the two wasn't very proactive and didn't have any initiative, sure, but then that could happen with any group.

Necromancers, however, were in direct competition with Bards for the Swiss Army Knife of Norrath title, whereas Magicians were very much a one-trick pony. Well, they were then. Now, not so much, as we'll find out later, when we get to #17.

I'd been soloing a Necromancer with some success, on and off, but I'd read a lot about how much more powerful a well-played Magician could be and by "powerful", what people generally meant was faster at killing stuff. Necros mostly employed damage over time spells to rot and poison things to death and DoTs, by absolute definition, take a while to do their wicked work.

Magicians, in contrast, deal their damage up front. They blow stuff up. Not as spectacularly as Wizards, the kings and queens of devestation, but quite spectacularly enough. Plus Magicians have the pet to take the hits while they're doing it, which is a crucial advantage.

Back-tracking for a moment, "pet" was what we called any creature you could either stand behind while a mob battered on it instead of you or any creature you could sic on a target like a (Very badly-trained.) attack dog. In these early days, both pet pathing and pet aggro were huge issues, particularly in dungeons. Misbehaving pets would frequently bring the entire contents of a wing or a floor back to an unprepared, soon to be extremely angry and mostly dead group. The Magician always got the blame even though there was often nothing much they could do to stop it.

It certainly put some groups off taking Magicians, who would often be asked to dismiss their pets if the group needed to move from its pull spot. Since summoning pets cost money in the form of reagents, having to re-summon several times in a session was not a trivial expense and no-one ever re-imbursed you for it the way they fell over themselves to give peridots to clerics for buffs. 

Non-summoning pet classes like Enchanters and Druids were even worse liabilities, since they had to make do with charming mobs. Charm spells had a tendency to break at inconvenient times, meaning their so-called pets could - and regularly did - turn around and try to kill their masters. Woe betide the group who suddenly found themselves having to deal with an enraged former pet mid-fight, especially one that had been buffed to the eyeballs by its erstwhile owner.

We may get to that in more detail when we meet my first Enchanter. For now, let's stick with the real pet classes, the ones who summoned their pets, loyal servants who would stay with them until death or dismissal and who would at least attempt to follow the orders they were given. 

At low levels, Necros got relatively weak skeleton pets that didn't do a lot of damage or take a lot of hits. They improved radically later on but it was a long slog to get to the good ones. Magicians, however, got great pets from the start, one for each of the traditional elements - Earth, Air, Fire and Water 

Their roles in a group were generally clear but the debate over which was best for soloing was furious. The easiest, safest option was Earth. The Earth elemental grabbed aggro and held on to it like velcro, not least because it kept casting Root on whatever it was fighting. It also had a ton of hit points and could take a real beating. 

Earth made a serviceable tank even in groups and solo it was like fighting from behind a wall. It could easily hold the mob's attention even while you nuked the stuffing out of it. The Earth Ele didn't hit very hard, so while using one made for a safe option, it could also feel slow.

Water was the all-rounder. It did more damage than Earth and healed itself so it was also quite robust but it wasn't quite as good at keeping the mob's attention and if it lost it, there was no Root to get it back. It was also immune to poison, which could be handy.

Fire did the most damage by far but had the lowest hit points and could often die before the mob did, leaving the Magician exposed. There was a technique for chain-summoning Fire Eles but it was both high risk and high maintenance. I never really got the hang of the rhythm required.

The Air elemental had the best chance of not being hit and also procced a stun fairly reliably, making it a decent option for tanking. It also did quite a lot more damage than Earth, about on a par with Water but not up to the standard of Fire. At higher levels, a lot of Magicians swore by Air for soloing and I eventually came to understand why.

All the elements had their advocates but Earth was by far the most common choice with players new to the class, even though quite a few guides recommended Water.  Air, as I said, was often the choice of more experienced Magicians and Fire was for the real high-rollers as well as being the first choice in groups, when the Magician had been hired to do DPS.

I mostly used Earth at first. After a while, following some guide or other, I tried Water, which I remember not going so well, although it was good for mobs like rattlesnakes which, without their poison attack, turned out to be pretty easy prey. Or maybe I was just better at hunting by then. I mean, you'd have to hope so.

After a while, though, I went back to Earth and stuck with it. I tried Air but Maggotty never really trusted it to keep mobs off him. I don't believe I really got to grips with the Air pet until I played my second Magician a few years later. Back in 2000 I wasn't in that much of a hurry anyway. I was a lot more concerned about not dying than scraping every last point of XP out of each session. Earth kept me safe so I was happy with that.

Other than summoning pets to fight for them, the thing Magicians were best at was playing Quartermaster and that seemed like it might be a good way to get groups. Everyone was always running out of something and Magicians could pull all kinds of stuff out of thin air, from food and drink to weapons and bags. In practice, though, most people I grouped with didn't want much of what I had to offer. The good stuff didn't come until quite a bit later.

Post Kunark, at high level Magicians also got a spell that made them very popular with groups hunting in far-flung places, which in Norrath is just about everywhere. Call of the Hero allows the Magician to summon a group member to them: just the thing when your tank leaves and their replacement is on the far side of the zone.

Needless to say, Maggotty never got to summon anybody. He didn't even get to the level where he could scribe the spell and anyway he rarely grouped. I did actually enjoy grouping as a Magician - it was just that no-one seemed all that keen to take one. Maybe that name put them off. 

Mostly I soloed him, always hoping to see the fast kills and easy xp Magicians were supposedly known for. It never appeared.

Instead, I either ended up spending to much time summoning new pets to replace the ones that had died or going so carefully, trying to make sure that didn't happen, that I hardly killed anything at all. In the early days, your pets would kill themselves if you crossed a zone line, too, so that was another limitation. 

I found playing a Magician a lot fiddlier than playing a Necro. There seemed to be far more reagents to cast the spells and a lot more set-up time in general. I didn't really mind re-summoning a skeleton. It was just a couple of bone chips and a rusty weapon. For a Magician it was a gem and maybe armor and weapons and there was a small random element to how powerful a summoned pet might be, which meant when I got one of the good ones I really didn't want to waste it.

I also found the summoned items annoying in that they were all No Rent, meaning they vanished forever when I logged out so next time I had to start all over again. Worst of all, the extreme reliance on the pet tended to counterbalance any advantage it gave.

And yet, despite all of that, my highest character today is a Magician and I wouldn't, from choice, play anything else now. But we'll get to her later. 

I remember Maggottypie fondly as a cheerful fellow, who rarely lost patience with what was quite often a difficult role. He was fun to play in small doses and on the rare occasions when he managed to get a group I could see why some people rated the class so highly. Maybe now I know how to play a Magician better than I did back then I ought to get him out for a run sometime. He deserves it.

#1 - Daline - Born 27 November 1999 - Time Played, 2 days 4 hours

Daline is my oldest surviving EverQuest character but she wasn't my first. That, somewhat inevitably, was a Wood Elf Ranger, name long forgotten, who stepped off the platforms in Kelethin a few minutes after I made him and was never seen again. From memory, I believe he may have survived the fall but it was night and I couldn't find the elevator (Or more likely had no idea it existed.) so, after wandering around in the dark for a while, I decided to delete him and start again.

Second time around, I chose a Human Warrior because clearly this new game I'd bought had quite a learning curve and it sounded like I needed to take the simplest option while I learned the ropes. Humans had no weird racial traits to consider, were hated by the fewest other races and all I'd have to do was hit things with a sword. How hard could it be?

At the time Humans could start in Freeport or Qeynos. I have no memory of why I picked Freeport but it was most likely because the name was easier to remember. That was certainly my logic in choosing Prexus as my first server. Most of the server names looked like someone made them up by tossing a bunch of Scrabble letters on the floor. At least I could pronounce Prexus.

I also decided to make my character female, a choice I had no idea would be controversial. Back when I was in a table-top role-playing group, several players chopped and changed between gender as we moved from game to game and no-one ever really even mentioned it. I had no idea playing a character who didn't match my real-life gender was going to be problematic.

Finally, there was the name. EverQuest had a moderately strict naming convention back then, although many players ignored it, until they got reported and found they had to pay attention after all. There were actual GMs online and they would cheerfully rename you to something of their choosing, leaving you to petition to try and get it changed again to something you could live with. 

I largely endorsed that bit of petty tyranny, as I think did most players who stuck to the rules, even if right at the beginning I was willing to stretch the rules just a little myself.

Daline and a gnome skulking in a tower.

One of the things that was forbidden was naming characters after anyone in real-life fiction, which mostly meant "Don't call your ranger Aragorn because we don't want to get sued." I avoided the obvious fantasy staples but I wasn't averse to borrowing names from books or shows I liked.

I named Daline after Darlene Conner from Roseanne, a show I would have been watching at the time. Whether "Darlene" was already taken or I thought it would be too obvious, I can't remember. Maybe I just thought it sounded better, because it definitely does.

A quarter of a century later, I'm watching The Conners on Netflix, Darlene is still on TV and I'm still here, writing about EverQuest. Even playing it once in a while. Nothing changes much, does it?

As will rapidly become apparent in these posts, all my characters below the level cap are wearing whatever gear they happen to have stumbled on in the course of their adventures. I tend not to work on a look until I know it's going to last for a while and for the longest time EQ had no kind of appearance or cosmetic options at all, so most people looked like they'd dressed themselves from a dumpster, in the dark. 

The weird triangle in Daline's right hand in the picture at the top of the post isn't some kind of wooden pointer or measuring device. It's a leather whip. She has a sword in the other hand because Warriors can dual wield. She was sword-and-board for a while but soloing a warrior is slow enough without that.

She's level 16 but half of those levels were done much later in her career. I believe her first run took her to about level 6 although honestly I can't remember much about it except that it was really, really slow, which is hardly surprising because I did all of it on my own.

Warriors in EverQuest are meant to group but I didn't really begin grouping until the Ruins of Kunark expansion, by which time Daline was back on the bench. In any case, I was only comfortable grouping as a healer at first. I did end up tanking for groups eventually but as a Shadowknight, not a Warrior.

Daline never did anything especially memorable. Level 16 warriors tend not to. I do have one adventure worth recording from her early days in EQ, though. It started when she would have been maybe Level 3 or 4, killing bats and orc pawns in the little strip of desert just outside Freeport's West Gate. 

It was getting dark but visibility was decent there, which was more than I could say for the XP at that level, That was why I decided to take a huge risk and cross the zone line into East Commonlands, something I'd been to nervous to try up to then. 

I had no idea what was out there but I didn't expect it to be pitch black.

Humans in EQ have no night vision and back in 1999, night-time in Norrath was dark. As I remember it, I got spooked by something I could hear but not see, ran for the zone line but went the wrong way, panicked and headed for the only source of light I could see, which turned out to be a small hut with a torch outside. 

I scuttled into the hut and cowered there while creatures snuffled and scuffled outside. I thought I might make it safely to dawn if I just stayed still... then something attacked me. Through the wall! 

I had no idea what it was. I couldn't see it, only hear it. I blindly hacked away in the dark, all the time expecting to die, which made me come out in  sweat. Death was A Big Deal to me back then in EQ and remained so for the next several years, at least until they added the afterlife zone where you could go to find your lost corpses. What was that one called?

Screenshot taken in North Karana at night, just after it began to get slightly lighter. Human night vision still not a thing.

After a while the attacks stopped. I'd thought maybe driven the creature off or even killed it. I'm sure there must have been a message telling me what had happened but either I had that channel switched off or I'd been too shaken up to notice. 

I carried on cowering inside the hut until it got light although why I thought it would help I can't imagine. Obviously stone walls were no obstacle to these mysterious, mystical, magical creatures, whatever they were.

It worked, anyway. Nothing else came for me. When I ventured outside, I found the corpse of a Black Wolf next to the hut. One of the weakest creatures in the game and completely non-magical. As I would learn, in Norrath not all walls are equal. Some stop mobs from coming in, some don't. 

I felt pretty proud of myself for not only surviving the night but killing a wolf. Turned out to be the weakest wolf in the whole of Norrath but again I didn't know thatt yet. I headed straight back to the safety of Freeport and it was a good long time before Daline went anywhere after dark again.

In fact, it wasn't long before she wasn't going anywhere, day or night, because playing a Warrior turned out to be considerably less fun than I'd been hoping. I did manage to learn some of the basics playing her but it wasn't long before I started to look for other options for my EQ future.

Even so, I didn't give up on her entirely. She has managed to rack up two days and four hours, which means I've played her for more than fifty hours altogether. That's how long it took to get her to Level 16, which sounds about right. 

Soloing Daline was certainly slow but also kind of zen. I used to get her out last thing of an evening and do a little on her just to relax. That worked until she got into double figures, after which the time it took her to heal up after every fight became too tedious to enjoy. 

I seem to recall that healing back to full used to take her over five minutes at Level 10, so she was good for maybe nine or ten fights an hour, which might have gotten her five per cent of a level on a good day. Maybe not as much as that.

Eventually the rules were changed and melee characters healed up in a minute or so out of combat. That's when I picked her up again and got her to where she is now. What the heck she's doing in North Karana, though, I have no idea. 

She's probably going to stay there. It's a nice zone. I hope she'll be happy. At least she has the guards to talk to. And the occasional passing gnome.