When Is A Door Not A Door?

Yesterday, I didn't post when I could have, which is very out of character of me. I blame Baldur's Gate 3. Mostly. Also a lot going on in real life but when isn't there?

According to Steam, I've already clocked over 25 hours in the game, which is ridiculous. I only started playing on Saturday! And that's an accurate record, too. I haven't left the client running, while I've been off doing other things. (Although there has been a bit of tabbing out to look stuff up, now and again.)

This is the problem - and I think it is a problem - that I've seen reported a few times; the game can start to consume your life, if you let it. In my case I suspect that effect will be relatively short-lived but it hasn't started to wear off quite yet.

As far as progress goes, I think I've made some but it's really quite hard to tell. My party is about half way through Level 4 and I have managed to wrap up several quests, although some of them don't end where you'd expect so there's more to do. 

This is where I think the experience of playing the game with and without guides and walk-throughs must be very different. Without hints from outside the game, some of the quests would be causing me difficulties because they look as though I could be working on them now, whereas in fact the areas where the next part happens is out of my reach. 

For example, I'd still be looking for Arabella's parents in Act 1 even though they apparently don't turn up until Act 2. I realize this is all good writing and strong narrative structure and all that literary jazz but the artistry doesn't help when you're looking at a quest journal that says the next step is to go talk to them. I'd rather have my surprise at the twist in the tale spoiled than my afternoon wasted wandering around the sodding Druid grove looking for NPCs who aren't there.

In general, I'm not following any sort of guide full time. I'm just drawing on the wisdom of crowds as and when needed. And I'm only reading as much as I need to get over whatever obstacle I'm hung up on. 

Scratch. Best companion of all.

Mainly, what I'm doing is wandering around, sorting out problems for random strangers like a typical MMORPG adventurer. I long ago gave up on trying to do anything about the tadpole in my head, the urgency of which seems curiously absent no matter what dire warnings people keep giving me. I imagine that will sort itself out in time and if not I'm going to have plenty of company. A lot of people seem to have tadpole-in-the-head syndrome.

The main reason I've found myself resorting to online guides hasn't had much to do with the substance of any of the quests, anyway. It's mostly not being able to find the specific people or locations that the quest text suggests shouldn't be anything like as hard to locate as I seem to be finding it.

The prime example so far is the Warg Pits in the Goblin Camp, as I said in my last post and about which I am still clearly rankling. I don't want to keep going on about it but... damn it!  Yes I do. 

My main complaint is that the game seems to make it quite plain they'll be easy to find when they really aren't anything of the kind. Several goblins mention the pits very casually, as though everyone knows where they are, which I imagine everyone does - if they're a goblin. Some of the goblins even give directions which, again, may well be useful - to another goblin. As a player, however, even with clear human-given directions taken from several guides, I still couldn't find the bloody pits.

I did eventually. They're behind two sets of doors, neither of which I thought to open at the first (Or probably fifth.) opportunity. 

The first is a pair of huge wooden doors guarded by an Ogre. I spoke to him very early on and he told me not go through them and anyway what was behind them was boring. I didn't want to argue with him (There was no dialog option so I'd have had to fight him.) Instead, I took him at his word and went looking elsewhere for about an hour until in the end I checked online and found I was supposed to go through those doors after all.

I think we came this way before, guys. I see one of our markers.

What was really galling was the way the Ogre didn't even try to stop me. Why he's even there beats me. He clearly isn't guarding the place. Anyone can just waltz in on a whim. 

Once inside, things don't get any clearer. I spent several hours in the Shattered Sanctum, the cavernous halls behind the doors, looking for those blasted Pits. All I wanted to do was find them but I ended up dealing with the Priestess instead, getting on the wrong side of her and having to fight her and then kill half the goblins in the place just so I could keep on searching. 

And I still couldn't find them. I poked into every corner but no Wargs popped out. I found the big boss and his cronies and had to make a quick exit. I made friends with some spiders (Handily, I had a Potion of Animal Speaking running at the time I bumped into them.) They came in very handy later, when I went back to have another round with the boss goblin. 

Over the course of several hours, I came in and out of the Sanctum a bunch of times, spent a couple of nights in my camp, wandered all over the map some more, then finally went back to the internet for advice because I still could not find the sodding Warg Pits.

Eventually I found something that said there was a door behind the Priestess's throne and that led to the Pits. I'd been past her stupid throne a dozen times and I didn't see any door but I went back for another look and there wasn't any door. There was a gate. A gate is not a door!

I'd seen that gate before. It was locked. I'd had a go at picking the lock but I failed and ihad no reason to waste lockpicks on it so I left it for later. Why would the Warg Pits, which all the goblins know about, be behind a huge, locked, iron gate?

Of course they wouldn't. They'd be out in the open. I mean, where else would you keep Wargs? Anyway, wouldn't pits be holes in the ground? 

Door? Door? That's not a fricken' door!

No, they would not. The "Pits" turned out to be more like "Cells". A couple of locked rooms in a cellar. I eventually found them, after I picked the lock on the gates, successfully this time, and explored the tunnels and corridors behind them, which were labyrinthine and confusing. 

All told, I must have spent easily six hours looking for those pits. And that's with a whole bunch of guides! If I'd carried on without looking it up I'd still be at it now.

This is the problem with open(ish) world games that allow for a lot of freedom, while providing minimal guidance. You can all too easily end up wandering around for a long time, never really getting anywhere. It's fun for a while but then it becomes frustrating and finally infuriating. 

The point at which I find my mood shifting from entertained to irritated seems to arrive earlier all the time. If I'm being honest with myself, as I've said before about both quests in MMORPGs and puzzles in point&click adventure games, I probably get more out of them when I admit defeat and bring up a walk-through. Working puzzles and mysteries out myself is satisfying, sure, but the satisfaction of working out the solution doesn't always compensate for the time spent doing it.

Unfortunately, I still retain a residual sense of commitment to the idea that I "ought" to be doing it the "right" way. I've largely cured myself of that vainglorious fantasy, helped enormously by the realization, at last, that the fundamental credibility of pretty much every RPG is fatally flawed the second you restart from a saved game file. Especially if it's after every character in the party is dead. 

I may have mentioned before that, for me, no narrative continues to hold credence after the first full party wipe. Unless, of course, as in almost all MMORPGs and too few single-player ones, there's a lore-appropriate explanation. I never have the same issues in games that provide even the skimpiest fig-leaf for credibility, the way almost every MMO has to, just to keep the whole thing rolling. 

In single-player RPGs, though, chances are when the last party member bleeds out and there's no-one left to read the Scroll of Revivification, an actual Game Over message will appear. There's no coming back from that. Except of course there is.

Anyone remember to bring the bucket and mop?

The first immersion-breaker came after only a few hours, when I wandered down a perfectly innocuous grassy path to the shore and found myself facing a gang of harpies far beyond my party's ability to handle. In that case, I stopped the fight before it ended because it was only ever going to end one way. 

A good while later I suffered a proper full party wipe when I foolishly believed four heavily armed and armored adults with numerous magical items and abilities would be able to handle a single, sickly tree-frog. That was just embarrassing.

Before that I was taking the whole thing quite seriously as an immersive adventure. Afterwards it became a game I was playing. Hard to maintain a sense of gravitas after a frog's just kicked your party's ass. From then on I not only looked things up when I was stuck, I also saved far more often and didn't hesitate to halt a fight or hit F5 if anything didn't feel right. 

Super-powered tree frogs are one thing but UI issues are entirely another, as are bizarre and unpredictable NPC reactions. One of the biggest problems I have with the game is that I take an action and it turns out the button I pressed doesn't do what I thought it did or the option I chose has a result I feel could not reasonably have been anticipated from the dialog. I consider that to be unfair play by the game, making it perfectly acceptable for me to halt the action and roll back time so I can do it again and do it right.

I'm not suggesting BG3 is particularly bad at this sort of thing, particularly in respect of the dialogs. It's a lot better there than some games I've played. On the other hand, it's not as good at avoiding mismatched actions and outcomes as something like Disco Elysium, which hardly put a foot wrong over the forty hours I played. 

Then again, I seem to remember even that exemplary game didn't entirely convince me back when I was playing it. Maybe I'm just really hard to please. As long as I keep remembering to play the game, not inhabit the world, it's not a problem. It's when I slip into taking the damn things seriously that I feel my blood pressure starting to rise.

As I said last time, it's just a game. And since I'm here, talking about the same issues all over again, I clearly still have some work to do, convincing myself of that simple truth.

Blue Protocol: Star Resonance - Death And Fractures

The elderly PC I'm limping along with until Black Friday arrives and I buy myself a new one is surprisingly happy to play most games I've tried, including a few I didn't expect it to be able to run. Most surprising of all is Blue Protocol: Star Resonance, a game that only came to the West a few weeks ago and which I thought would be well ouside my old PC's comfort range.

Instead, it runs beautifully. Smooth as ice cream and as cool. The fans don't even start up. Which is a good thing because BP:SR is my go-to game just now.

Not that that's saying much. My gaming time is still way down, although I expect that to change as soon as I get a new computer. But when I do decide to play something, Blue Protocol is what I choose.

There are a few reasons. One is indeed that it runs well but that's kind of a passive buff. It wouldn't be enough on its own. 

Another passive is that the world is very nice to look at. Better than I realised at first, when I thought the visuals looked a bit under-cooked compared to similar titles like Genshin Impact or Wuthering Waves. I still think there's less detail but the slightly washed-out, pastel color palette has grown on me and now I think it looks subtle and sophisticated rather than bland.

A third, more active reason I'm enjoying BP:SR is the gameplay. It's engaging but very low-key, a combination that suits me perfectly at the moment. 

I've noticed in recent times, when I'm doing First Impressions posts or generally recounting my experiences with newer games, that I quite often make mention of there not being all that much combat in them. I'm not sitting here with a stop-watch and an abacus, counting and timing the fights I have in every session, but my strong feeling is that since I started the game I've hardly had to do any fighting at all.

That leads me on to the main reason I'm playing and enjoying Blue Protocol, which is the story. It isn't original or even particularly compelling but it makes sense and it's linear, meaning I can follow it both literally and metaphorically. And while it may not be a great story, it's entertaining enough for me to want to know what happens next.

The narrative also takes some unexpected turns once in a while. Disturbingly enough in one case that there probably ought to be a trigger warning.

This next part is going to get pretty spoilery so it might be time to quit reading if you plan on playing and care about plot twists and the like. Also, I wouldn't even look at the screenshots in the rest of the post if I was you. Just in case.

Okay, now those folks have left us, let's get to it.

Fairly early on in the plot, as the player character, you run into a brash and mouthy kid called Narulo, who claims to be a hero. He challenges you to a competition and gets roundly beaten because you are a hero and he's just a kid but he still claims you ought to be his sidekick rather than the other way around.

This goes on for a while, with the kid popping up numerous times to make brash or outrageous claims, but as the story moves along he starts to realize how outclassed he is and what a mistake he made by thinking he could match up to you in the first place. The two of you then start to develop a very comfortable kind of big sister/little brother relationship, aided and abetted by some of the other NPCs, and the whole thing gets to feel very cosy.

Then some bad stuff happens and, as they say, shit gets real. A war starts and the part of town where the kid lives gets reduced to rubble. He steps up and becomes the hero he pretended to be, helping the refugees to safety, which is what he's doing when you arrive.

You makes several attempts to persuade him to get somewhere safe himself, while you go off to deal with the crisis, what with you being a true and actual hero and all, and he tells you he will. But then, of course, he doesn't. He finishef getting everyone out of the danger area, then doubles back and tags along behind you, keeping out of sight until eventually you discover him, hiding in a barrel.

By this time it's too late for him to get out of the combat area. You're too deep in and it would be more dangerous for him to go back on his own than to stay, so you very reluctantly agree to let him stick around, so long as he stays close, does what he's told and keeps out of trouble.

And he kind of does. At least, he's well back when the big fight with the boss starts. Just not far back enough. 

I wasn't even sure what happened, to be honest. It was very fast. I think he heroically but idiotically rushed in to save me from being struck  by lightning from behind, only to be burned to a crisp himself but some of the dialog later suggested he was just too close and got hit by sheer bad luck. 

Either way, he's dead. Which was a shock. I certainly wasn't expecting it.  And it had some impact. The narrative tends to be thin, as in there isn't a great wealth of detail and discussion the way there is in Wuthering Waves, but what there is absolutely hits all the nodal points it needs to establish an emotional reaction. The writers do the work and the effect they're going for lands.

It's not unusual in a game like this. Setting up a sympathetic character to reap the emotional payoff when you kill them is Storytelling 101 for RPGs. 

What doesn't tend to happen is having to deal with the fallout. It felt a lot less like a cliche when I met a middle-aged couple later a short while later, in the course of what seemed like an entirely unrelated sequence, and found out in the course of a conversation about something else that they were the kid's parents. 

And that they didn't know he was dead. And that I had to decide whether or not to tell them. It didn't help that the parents had just been talking about how their son was late and how worried they were about him. 

It occurred to me about then that the slightly etiolated nature of the prose was a good thing. It offered some protection against getting too emotionally evolved. Otherwise that part really might not have been much fun at all.

All of which is just an example of why I'm finding the story worth paying some attention. When something like that crops up it does make you wonder what might be coming next. 

Although what actually did come next, or pretty soon after, was a comedy moment that made me laugh out loud. It also worked well as a counterpoint to the tragedy the PC and her friends had just witnessed, which was clearly the writers' intention. 

What happens is that there's another big fight, during which another of your new friends gets crushed by the boss, rushing in to save you. He ends up flat on his back on the grass. He's lying there, saying his last emotional goodbyes and making something of a meal of it, when another of your pals points out  he's just broken a bone or two and  he's going to be fine as soon as the healers get their hands on him. Bathos as catharsis. Clever writing.

I bet it works even better in the original Japanese. The translations in BP:SR are decent but not entirely idiomatic. I've seen much, much worse, though. Whoever's behind these is doing more than enough to bring the emotional weight across. Still, I bet it's better in the ur-text.

So much for the quality of the story, which I would describe as being consistently at least as good as it needs to be and frequently quite a lot better. How's it for quantity, though?

Pretty good. There's a lot more story than I was expecting. I seem to remember reading it was short but it's not feeling that way. Steam says I have more than eleven hours played and I can't actually remember doing anything other than following the MSQ.  

I really haven't done any exploring other than what I've had to do to get from one story location to the next. I haven't done any crafting. I learned how to fish but I doubt I've spent more than ten minutes doing it. 

I haven't even spent any significant time on upgrading my gear or spending my talent points. As I said earlier, combat has featured so rarely up to now that I've not felt the need to improve anything. The few fights there have been seem either to be with trash mobs that pose no challenge or with bosses where the result is scripted anyway. Why bother upgrading when you don't need to?

There's a boatload of other things I could be doing, as in all these sorts of games, but so far I've found more than enough to keep me occupied just following the plot. I'm happy to carry on like that for now, although at some point I'm sure the game will have other ideas.

When I last logged out I left Floradelle standing outside a pair of huge gates, disguised as a member of an isolated, secretive tribe, waiting  to go through them into a Forbidden Zone. Maybe that'll be a dungeon with a lot of fighting and I'll finally have to sort out her gear and spend her talent points.

I'm betting it won't, though. I bet it'll be a lot more chatting and maybe some sneaking and eavesdropping, with a little light puzzle-solving on the side. 

And that will suit me just fine.

It's Beautiful... But What Does It Mean?

I had a very simple plan for today. I was going to patch up Wuthering Waves, log in and do as much of the new story content as I could cope with, then stop and have lunch. After lunch, I was going to write a post about it. The story, not the lunch.

And that's still the plan, except for one very slight variation. I won't be writing about the new story any more. I'll be writing about the old one.

I thought I'd finished the main story quest last time. I thought I was ready to jump straight into whatever came next as soon as it appeared. I even said so in print. Confidently. Definitively. 

And as I also said then, I even had the screenshot to prove it. A screenshot that read 

"No Content. No New Quest". 

I'm just going to have to take your word for that, Lupa.

Under the Main Quests category in the quest journal.

I don't know... seems pretty conclusive, doesn't it?

Except for one thing I'd missed...

Kuro, in their wisdom, decided to split the story content in Update 2.4 into two parts. I had indeed finished the first one but there was a Part Two I didn't even know about. 

Chapter II Act VI - Flames of Heart dropped on 3 July. 

I didn't spot it because I haven't logged in since I finished Chapter II Act V - Shadow of Glory back in June. I also didn't read anything about it in any of my gaming feeds, which is a bit worrying. I imagine it was covered, WW being a very popular game, but either I just didn't see it or I didn't bother to read past the headline.

Luckily, it only took me a few seconds to figure out I still had another chapter to do before I could take a look at the new stuff. And anyway, the old stuff was still new stuff to me, so I was fine with having to take a bit of a run-up to get to the current chapter, Dreamcatchers in the Secret Gardens. 

Looking at some of the commentary around Kuro's decision to split the last drop into two episodes, I see there was speculation that the second part might be more combat-focused, presumably fueled by the fact that the first part very much wasn't. If anyone was hoping that prediction would turn out to be correct, they'll have been disappointed.

I can't remember exactly how long the first installment took me back in June but today's session, in which I did nothing but the aforementioned Flames of Heart, lasted a couple of hours. I did have to stop once to play with a very insistent Beryl, so maybe it was about an hour and a half to an hour and three-quarters of actual gameplay.

Don't mind us, We just live here.

Or, to be more accurate, about fifteen minutes of pressing buttons. The rest of the time I was watching a movie. 

A very absorbing and enjoyable movie with some excellent acting, skilled direction and superb set design but also with a plot that was very hard to follow. 

I mentioned last time, how the plot in Wuthering Waves is generally "so arcane and abstruse I can barely follow it". It's really not getting any easier, even now more of the mysteries have been revealed.

In fact, forget the plot... I couldn't even claim I understand the setting. I imagine we're all used to games and books and movies and TV that relies heavily on the audience's preconceptions and prior experience and which draws extensively from a huge corpus of long-established tropes, symbols and devices? Well, Wuthering Waves doesn't do a lot of that.

It's not a Western fantasy with dwarves and gnomes and elves and orcs but it's not strictly an Eastern fantasy with dragons and demons and spirits either, although there are a few dragons or dragon-like creatures, now and then. 

It's not science fiction in the familiar aliens, rayguns and spaceships mode, but there are plenty of robots and one hell of a lot of advanced technology. It sometimes has an urban-fantasy or cyberpunk moment but mostly its just hard to place, exactly.

I guess it might fit uncomfortably within the ill-defined parameters of science-fantasy but then doesn't everything? That's a tag that never feels like it's telling you much, anyway. 

Oh, right... that makes everything clear...

It's post-apocalyptic in a  sense, in that there was some sort of catastrophe called The Lament in the near-past, but that seems like it must have been either a very metaphysical event or longer ago than you'd think from the way everyone talks about it because there's very little sign of devastation in the urban areas and not much in the hinterlands. You have to go a fair way into the boondocks to see the remnants of the disaster, whatever it was.

There are superior beings in the world but they aren't gods or deities per se. They're "Sentinels" or "Guardians", usually tied to a locale like some kind of genius loci. There's an evil version called the Threnodian but your guess is as good as mine what sort of entity that is.

There are Tacit Discords,  aggressive mobs that come in industrial quantities. They're the grunts of the game, filling the roles orcs or demons might take in other settings.  And then there are Echoes, which are like the TDs but on your side. Mostly. Except when they're trying to kill you.

Somewhere behind all of this is some network of what I can only take to be AIs: sentient supercomputers that run everything but frequently have issues or need assistance for reasons I could not begin to explain. They seem to be fairly universal in a world made up of city states, each with its own form of government - monarchies, technocracies, theocracies and so on.  

And everything is sound or music-themed, from the Resonators and Echoes to the Frequencies that make up everything in the entire world. That's not confusing at all...

How all of this ever came to be I have no clue, although I'm more than willing to believe it's explained somewhere in the narrative. That's part of the problem - everything is explained in the narrative. So much is explained so often, in such detail and by so many characters, many of whom are written to novelistic standards, meaning there are unreliable narrators and limited narrators and subjective narrators and first-person and third-person and omniscient... that in the end the sheer wealth of information isn't just confusing but overwhelming and, I find, impossible to remember, even if I feel like I understood it at the time.

The game also uses any number of visual and gameplay devices to tell its story. I tend to dwell on the cinematic elements but there are sections told in stained-glass panels, in picture-books, by holograms and malfunctioning robots, in pages torn out of notebooks, on computer screens, in flowcharts and over com-links. Significant plot and narrative elements are sometimes conveyed by way of mini-games, where the whole game becomes a 2D scroller or a platformer, something that really doesn't add to my ability to follow what's going on in the story.

And of course there's the ever-popular developers favorite - key speeches on major plot points delivered by significant NPCs in the middle of a pitched battle. Always fun, that one.

Somewhere in the back of all of this lies one of the most meta-fictional devices I've ever encountered, namely the ability of some of the characters to place other characters and even the player-character, inside a fictional reality within the game-world, sometimes without the game giving any indication it's happened. Awareness is then leaked in ways that are familiar from novels and movies but even when the artifice is revealed it persists, stubbornly, as though just knowing something isn't real isn't enough to stop it being real.

And there's a lot more besides. Not least, The Fractsidus.

The Fractsidus might be the real arch-villains. Or they might be just another faction. At one point I thought they might be anti-heroes or even The Good Guys.  And maybe some of them are. Who's to say they all have the same agenda?

The Fractsidus have been in it almost from the start and they keep coming back. In the next chapter it looks like we might find out something more material about the mysterious organization or at least one of its members, Phrolova, because she's set to be the next playable Resonator and therefore is presumably the player's ally for the meanwhile, at least.

I was very keen to find out more when I logged in this morning but now I guess I'll have to wait a little longer. I have a full slate of things to do through into the middle of next week so it's going to be a while before I can clear the necessary morning or afternoon to watch the next Wuthering Waves movie. 

Pretty sure I won't be any the wiser about what's really going on by the end. But that's how I like it.

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.

To Cut A Long Story Short - A Day Of Reckoning For DCUO's New Narrative-Led Approach

Following on from yesterday's post, where I talked about how reliable Daybreak's patcher is and finished up promising I'd say something about the actual content of what I'd downloaded with it, namely DCUO's latest update, Light and Rain: Day of Reckoning, I thought I'd probably better go play the thing. So I tried. I managed about half of it.

The first part was fine, although I can point you to a forum thread where 98% of the posters would beg to differ. No-one had any problems with the setting, a snowy town in the Balkan state of Kaznia. Most people agreed the snow looked great and there was lots of detail. The art department was clearly having a good day.

Unfortunately, no-one really plays DCUO for the scenery. The game engine is getting quite elderly now so even a good-looking map only looks good relatively speaking. None of them are going to be winning any prizes for looks in 2025. I don't think it would be controversial to say no-one plays DCUO for the story, either, which could be a tad more of a problem, given the whole, new, narrative-first rebrand. 

Okay, I'm sure someone plays DCUO for the story. Someone probably plays it for the music. Speaking of which, the music in Day of Reckoning is probably the best I can recall hearing in the game. In fact, it's the only time I can remember noticing music in the game at all, except when I've turned it down in combat because it was too loud.

Again, though, no-one's here for the music and Dimensional Ink isn't pretending otherwise. They are, however, trying to sell players on the concept of more story than they've been used to getting and this update is the first practical evidence we've seen of how that change of direction is going to look. So far, it seems to be going down about as well as Spinal Tap's pivot into free jazz.

As I said, I've only seen maybe half the first installment so my judgment is necessarily incomplete. It's  likely to remain that way, too, because the reason I had to stop halfway through is that I can't even come close to beating the first of the two storyline bosses, Felix Faust. 

I'd say she has to be freezing in that costume but then, y'know... magic.

This is entirely down to my complete incompetence as a DCUO player. I can't play my own character - as in I literally don't know what most of her powers or abilities are, let alone which sequence of key-presses activate them. Ironically, after playing a ton of FPS and action rpgs these last few years, I no longer have any real issues with keyboard dexterity. I can press the buttons now - I just have no clue which buttons I ought to be pressing.

I tried to beat Faust three times and the closest I got him was halfway. I'm reasonably confident I could learn and improve enough to beat him in a few more attempts but I'm neither interested or motivated enough to try. The only reason to do it, other than to be able to write a more complete and balanced post about it, would be to see the story through to the end and sadly that's no motivation at all.

Coming to Day of Reckoning off the back of the Riniscita storyline in Wuthering Waves feels a bit like putting down Animal Farm to go read a three-year old their Peppa Pig book. I mean, they both have pigs in but otherwise...

Okay, that's a bit harsh. I'll make a fairer comparison. Yesterday, I played a fair bit more of the Scars of Destruction storyline in EverQuest II. There's a lot of narrative to get through there. EQII NPCs are chatty as hell but generally I enjoy the house style, verbose and off-topic though it often is.

Scars of Discord, though, feels like one of the weakest expansion storylines to date. The plot is the main problem but the writing in general feels a little tired, as though whoever was responsible knew they didn't have a lot to work with. Even so, SoD is orders of magnitude more interesting and entertaining than what I had to plow through in DCUO yesterday and today.

They grow 'em big around these parts, it seems.

The writing in the game has always been terse, to put it politely. I think it must be someone's very misguided idea of how DC comic books work. As a lifetime reader, I'd say they were never that basic, even in the glory days of Bob Haney, but it's been the game's house style since launch so I don't expect anything different.

At least, I didn't until DI started to hype the new, narrative-driven approach by issuing press releases about it and posting short stories on the website. That does kind of raise expectations, which is unfortunate because this goes nowhere at all towards meeting them.

The players complaining bitterly in the thread I linked seem to object mostly to the story being there at all, although a minority would like more story in their game, just not this one. I had a slightly different take. Had I not read about in advance, I would have had no idea this update was any different to any of the others I've played in recent years.

I found the story, such as it is, to be so slight it risked slipping my notice altogether. If I hadn't been looking for it I'm not sure I'd have spotted there was one, or at least not any more than usual. 

Every chapter I remember from the old format began with a message over the communicator sending you to a new map where some questgivers would be all standing close to each other, handing out a bunch of combat or collect quests. This one does have an introduction of some sort, although I've forgotten it already. It probably also came via communicator but it was even shorter than usual. 

Then came the inevitable new map with its combat and collect quests, same as always. The only notable difference I could see was that instead of a bunch of superheroes all standing around like greeters at the mall, handing out quests, I had to keep running in and out of the Laughing Hound pub to get them from John Considine.

The cavernous interior of Considine's local.

The voice actor playing Considine spoke in a stilted and unconvincing way and employed a hard-to-define accent that was probably supposed to suggest London but occasionally sounded closer to Sydney. After a bit Zatanna turned up outdoors to hand out more quests and a local hero called Voivode, also hanging out in the pub for no obvious reason, added a few more. After just about every quest I had to leg it back to the pub and talk to Considine again.

All of this felt pretty normal to me but on reflection that's probably because it's how questing in most MMORPGs works. I'm so used to it, I don't even think about it any more. 

I'd not really thought about the way DCUO does it differently either. Or used to, I guess. Judging by the many comments complaining about the utter pointlessness of having to keep going back to the pub to get the next quest instead of just picking it up on location via the communicator, I don't get the feeling many players appreciate the old-school legwork.

The quests themselves were not popular either and for good reason. There's a lot of "talking" to NPCs that comes down to nothing more than listening to them spout the same handful of phrases over and over. Which, to be fair, is what NPCs in DCUO have always done, only until now they did it mostly while you were killing them. You didn't generally have to stand around waiting for them to finish before your quest would update.

As several people mention in the thread, there was also a lot of lag and the quests had a nasty tendency not to notice you'd done them. I had to speak to a lot of witnesses before I got all my updates. I do find it a little ironic that the forum, as it always is, is full of people claiming the update is so bad everyone is going to quit, while at the same time moaning about the lag caused by the servers being full of people throwing themselves at the new content...

It took me the best part of an hour to finish the first map and it wasn't always a fun time. It was okay, for the most part. Not terrible. The story was all over the place and hard to follow, the dialog was dull, Considine was annoying and everything felt undercooked but it was no worse than average for an MMORPG. It reminded me a lot of Guild Wars 2 at times in that there seemed to be about a quarter as much actual story as the time it took to see it play out suggested there should be.

Meet Voivode. Makes you wonder about the drinking laws in Kaznia, doesn't it?

Once that was out the way, it was on to the first solo instance. It takes place in a sprawling graveyard which , once again, looks very good, given the limitations of the game engine. The first part of the story there involved wresting control of an obelisk from Felix Faust by playing king of the hill with his lackeys. I enjoyed that part.

It was followed by an escort quest. Oh goody! No, wait, three escort quests. Even better!

You can imagine how well that went down with the regulars. And with me. No-one likes an escort quest, let alone the same one three times in a row. I failed it the first time but I soon got it figured out so I only had to do it four times in total, which was three times more than I wanted. And that's being generous.

After that it was straight to the throw-down with Faust which, as I said, did not go my way. He wiped the floor with me and Considine did nothing to help. As things stand, I can't imagine wanting to git gud so I can go back and finish the story. It isn't anywhere near interesting enough for that.

This is part one of the four-part arc that forms the spearhead of the new narrative-driven approach. It's not an auspicious start. I really hope the other three parts are a lot better than this one, especially since as it stands right now you have to do the whole thing on every character you play if you want to get to what most players think of as the meat of the game - the repeatable content.

I'm quite glad I don't have to deal with that although I'd bet it gets changed to Account access pretty quickly. If there's one thing that might really get people to quit it's having to play through this storyline on every alt they've got.

And So The Story Goes

I took a break from Scars of Destruction in EverQuest II yesterday so I could carry on with the Rinascita storyline in Wuthering Waves. It really is very good indeed and for a number of reasons.

It's extremely well-paced. There are four parts, a prologue and three acts, all with titles that appear to be quotes, although from what I couldn't say:

Prologue: Through the Sea Thou Break
Act I: The Sacred Breeze So Often Breathes
Act II: Veils Off in Sun or Shadow
Act III: What Yesterday Wept, Today Doth Sing

I'm now a little less than halfway through Act II, so presumably more than halfway through the whole thing, and there have been no slow spots, no dull passages and no frenetic, rushed moments either. The story feels as if it's progressing organically, each scene a natural development of the last.

Both the direction and cinematography are quite possibly the best I've seen in any game I've played. I use the terms advisedly because although we often say that certain passages in games "feel like being in a movie", this really does. A huge amount of time is spent in what I suppose we have to call cut-scenes but the experience is very different from the comparatively static, mannered approach I associate with this kind of storytelling.

There's no set cut scene mechanic or style. Sometimes conversations happen in the world with everything going on around, sometimes there are full, cinematic inserts but mostly the characters talk to each other while the camera moves around according to the needs of the narrative. There are pans and close-ups and medium shots. There are birds-eye views and ground-level and over-the-shoulder and knee-level and pretty much you name it.

There are reaction shots, too, where characters reveal something of their inner thoughts by the way they move their heads or change their expression. Sometimes there are visual metaphors, where the camera cuts away to an object or a view to add nuance to what's just been said.

And it all works. It's never fancy or fussy or awkward or distracting, or at least no more than good film-making ever is, by which I mean that there are moments when it's so good it's hard not to find yourself appreciating the artistry instead of following the dialog.

Fortunately, the consistently excellent voice acting means focus never wavers for more than the occasional moment. Every sentence earns your attention as much for the way it's spoken as for what's being said.

All the new characters are good but one, Zani, is outstanding, which is just as well because she's in it a lot. She's the bank executive assigned to guide and assist the player character during their visit to Ragunna and for some reason she seems to be the only person in this Italianate city to have an Italian accent.

Or maybe it's Greek. Or Spanish. Opinions differ. It's definitely Mediterranean, though, and it's musical as hell. It's a real pleasure to listen to, whatever the origin. And in the end it's good that it can't be nailed down precisely to a real-world location. It is, presumably, a Ragunnan accent. Although that does raise the question of why no-one else in the city speaks the same way...

Zani also exemplifies another of the strengths in Wuthering Waves' storytelling: she's a genuine adult, something all too rare in video games or at least the ones I play. By that I mean she not only uses adult cadences in her speech and has an adult-sounding voice, she also expresses the kind of concerns and talks about the kind of topics I associate with a certain kind of adulthood.

Even though she lives in a magical, fantasy city, surrounded by the trappings of a child's storybook come to life, Zani works at management level in a bank and she sounds like she does. She also has a secondary role as a trusted functionary with a significant power grouping in the local political structure and she sounds like that, too. And to top it all, when encouraged by the player-character to relax and be more herself, Zani convincingly reveals a private self that seems equally grown-up.

This isn't a unique situation within the game. There were grown-ups in earlier storylines, not least the stiff and formal Baizhi, who always seemed weighed down with responsibilities, and some of the side-stories featured minor characters worrying about very adult topics, like problems at their place of work or in their extended friend and family groups. Even so, much as I appreciated it at the time, those feel like preparatory sketches compared to this. 

The main reason I mention it is because this kind of grown-up texture in storytelling seems quite unusual for something of this style, an anime-inflected gacha game set in a high-fantasy world. There are plenty of very un-grown-up characters in Wuthering Waves - precocious children, angsty teenagers, insecure young adults and cute, non-human creatures - and they're also both written and acted with exemplary skill, but those kinds of characters are frequently met and done well in these kinds of games. Grown-ups with full-time jobs and adult attitudes and concerns - they're a lot rarer.

Kuro, the developer responsible for Wuthering Waves, seems to be acutely aware of the path they're taking here and it's potential risk because they've included a lengthy, detailed questionnaire on exactly that topic. I filled it out the other day and the whole thing was question after question about the preferred age, attitude, personality and emotional frame of mind of characters you'd like to see in future. 

I've never seen anything quite like it in a game before. I hope enough people ticked the "adult" options to keep the ship sailing in the right direction although if not I trust the writers and artists to give us worthwhile stories, whoever they pick as protagonists.

Then there's the plot. It makes sense! Or it does so far, anyway. That ought to be a low bar but it's one so few games manage to clear that it feels like an achievement when any of them do. 

Wuthering Waves makes things harder for itself than it needs to by using a lot of jargon that makes it tough to understand what's going on until you attune your ear to it all. When you do, though, it's worth it. It's taken me this long to reach the point where words like "frequency" and "echo" mean what the game wants them to mean rather than what they usually would but I'm there now and it opens the story out significantly.

While you're getting used to all the pseudo-technical talk, it helps that, as well as the over-arcing, mystical through-line, there are much more down-to-earth sub-plots to hang onto. In Ragunna, there's a mystery to be investigated and a traitor to be exposed. A cabal of them, in fact. It's absorbing and entertaining stuff.

And there's a lot of it. There are several full playthrough videos on YouTube and none of them is less than six hours long. While there is some fighting, puzzle-solving and travel in there, the huge majority of your time will be spent watching or listening to NPCs talk, occasionally hearing your own character speak, and now and again selecting one of two responses that, as far as I can tell, make no material difference to what happens next.

Put like that, it sounds tedious but it's never that. It's six hours very well-spent. Or at least it's been about three and a half hours very well-spent for me, so far. I have every confidence it's going to go on that way until the end. 

One thing I do find it somewhat counter-intuitive is how I seem to be willing to spend as long watching this quasi-movie run as it would take me to watch three or four actual movies, when I can't generally talk myself into watching even one. It definitely doesn't feel all that much like playing a game at times.

I believe this, along with my recent experience with Cloudpunk, has finally chipped away the last of my resistance to video games as a narrative platform. Even though I've been playing these things for most of my life, I've always felt there were better ways of telling the stories; that the constant interruption of having to press a key hindered rather than helped immersion. If I have any lingering doubts, they mostly revolve around the eternal question of whether we really ought to be calling some of these experiences "games" at all.

It's still a difficult trick to pull off, all the same. I'm aware that almost everything I'm praising Wuthering Waves for here is uncomfortably similar to the things I most disliked about Final Fantasy XIV. All those endless cut scenes! All that talking! 

As the Funboy Three so wisely put it, though, it's not what you do, it's the way that you do it. And this is how you do it right.

On Narrative Continuity, Fiction, Metafiction And Games No-One Plays.

I should save this for Blaugust, really, but who has the patience for that? And anyway, I already have twenty-five posts about EverQuest to write before August. I really should get on that sometime soon.

What we have here is an object lesson on why there's never an optimum time to write a a post and why you might just as well go ahead and publish whenever you're done. The future is always going to roll you over, whatever you do.

On Saturday I put up a lengthy post, telling the tale of how I climbed a mountain and how good it felt to have done it all on my own, with no-one telling me I should. Okay, maybe that last part was subtext but it was in there, somewhere.

Two days before that, I posted about a new narrative event that had just been added to the game, saying how well-written, what fun it was and expressing satisfaction that such quality content had been added to the game so quickly. Alright, more subtext, maybe. But heavily implied. 

The day before that I wrote something about how there were loads of cats in the game and how I'd done a quest involving one of them and rescued another from the top of a tree. I think that one was subtext-free but maybe there was some subconscious subtext. Can't ever rule it out.

Almost immediately after I published the most recent of those posts I was back playing Wuthering Waves again. When am I not, these days? I was in the city, looking for something to do next, when I spotted a quest marker on the map close by.

It took me to the rear of the theater, where a girl was hanging around looking like she was at a bit of a loss. I went over and asked her what was up, as you do if you're the lead character in a TV show about some wandering do-gooder who breezes into town and fixes everyone's problems, once a week on a Friday at seven in the evening, which, let's face it, is basically the elevator pitch for the entire RPG genre. 

She told me her elder sister had joined the army and gone off to the front lines but before she went, she'd left a kind of treasure hunt for her younger sister to follow. The younger sister, Shixia, was some kind of prodigy, who'd been admitted to a prestigious academy but had trouble keeping up with the intellectual pace there, so she had some stuff of her own going on. Also she was worried about her sister, as you would be, what with the war and all.

Naturally, having only just met and nothing in common, we ended up doing the whole thing together. It turned out to be not so much of a treasure hunt, more like some kind of sororial bonding exercise crossed with a motivational mental workout. And the means by which all of this was going to be achieved? Climbing a mountain!

Actually, climbing two mountains, one of which was the exact same mountain I'd just climbed all on my own just a few hours earlier. So much for doing it on my own initiative.

At the start, I didn't realize what was happening because the first part of the quest-line involved the other mountain, the one I didn't already climb. It turns out the two are next to each other. They look over the city, one giant peak split in two. I had noticed the landmark - you can hardly miss it - but at that point I hadn't yet connected it to my own mountain-climbing exploits. 

The girl and I worked our way up the first mountain, largely by way of various paths, although with some free-climbing up sheer cliff faces along the way. There were some puzzles to solve, a couple of easy fights and a surprising amount of cooking. It was good fun and the views were beautiful.

When we'd gotten to the top of one mountain, of course we had to do the other. The treasure hunt was over but it seemed the elder sister had once climbed to the top of the Western mountain, in the rain, just before dawn, so we had to do the same in the name of sisterly solidarity or something.

It seems Wuthering Waves has quite a lot of quests and events that only happen at specific times of day or night. I really did have to wait until just before in-game dawn the next morning, when I got a message from Shixia saying she was ready and oh look, how lucky, it's even raining!

Long story short, we climbed all the way to the top of the same mountain I'd already climbed, only we went the sensible way, following the paths and the remains of that dilapidated wooden walkway I mentioned, which turned out to be more passable than I'd thought, especially with the aid of a couple of grapple-cannons we found along the way.

It was another very strong, involving and enjoyable quest and if I'd waited a day I could have incorporated it into my post about mountaineering. Wouldn't that have tied everything up neatly?

Well, no, not really. The same day I was doing all of that, another, new narrative event was added to the game, another Companion Story, this one featuring what absolutely appears to be the first non-human character we've seen, Lingyang.

Lingyang is a lion-dancer, which is a job, not a race or class or species. Maybe a calling. A vocation.

He has a long tail and lion-like ears. It's possible these are part of his costume but if so he wears his costume all the time. I'm fairly sure his animalistic attributes are natural, if only because at one point in the story someone makes a point about how dangerous he is when his tail starts to wave from side to side, which is not something I think anyone would say about someone wearing a fake tail.

If he is some kind of hybrid or separate species, however, there's no explanation for it even in passing. He seems to be treated just the same as anyone else, possibly because he seems to be the nicest person in the world. Seriously, he could win prizes for it. 

As with Yinlin's Companion Story, I hadn't planned on jumping straight into this one but Wuthering Waves is exceptionally good at lead-ins. There's some excellent in-character use of in-game technology and some effective meta-fictional prompting that make it very easy to find yourself on a quest before you've even stopped to think about whether you want to go questing right now.

It helps a lot that the stories are so well-constructed. Once you're going you don't want to stop. Again, in this one there's mystery, plenty of detail and enough background to make you care about the characters and the stakes. Plus a big helping of excitement and adventure as you figure it all out. I certainly wouldn't claim any of it was original but it's highly entertaining.

The tl:dr is that a bunch of bad guys are running a scam that's causing issues with the food supplies to the city and also incidentally scaring a girl who was just about to join an adventuring association. The scam involves a monster with a really silly name that makes it hard to take seriously as a threat although everyone in the game seems to manage it, somehow. 

The girl's brother, with whom she's had a huge argument, goes off to try and eliminate the monster or the gang or both so as to get back in his sister's good books, which inevitably leads to her being scared something bad has happened to him (She's not wrong.) and eventually to Lingyang and the player character setting off to sort it all out and set it all right.

Well, we did all of that and it was great fun and took a couple of hours of quality time to finish, with some 2D platforming and a few big fights along the way. If I'd have waited a couple of days, I could have portmanteaued the two Companion quests together for a much stronger post. That would have wrapped everything up nicely.

Ehhh... would it, though?

Much of the story takes place a long way out of the city, in the middle of a region completely unexplored on my map. The big surprise was that, although we were teleported to the final instance, I was allowed to exit the cave normally and find my own way back.

I spent a long time exploring the new area, which was fascinating, colorful and very weird. I was hoping to open some teleport towers for future adventures but I couldn't find a single one. I don't know if that's because there's some kind of level or story lock on them appearing or if I was just unlucky not to bump into any as I wandered around in circles. 

Eventually I ended up in the sea, swimming up against one of those invisible barriers that say Go No Further, so I ported back to Zinzhou, but before then, while I was wandering around the countryside, I got a phone-call from Xiaoju, the quite possibly crazy cat-lady from Wednesday's post. 

She said she'd she was having another cat-related problem and since I was so good at dealing with those, maybe I'd like to come over and sort this one out for her. Once you get a reputation it's so hard to shift perceptions, isn't it?

Why fight it? As soon as I'd finished my exploring I got right on the cat thing. Catching the noisy stray and getting it back to Xiaoju was simple enough. I delivered the somewhat unwilling feline and Xiaoju said she'd find it a good home but first she asked me what we should call it. I went with Xixi. (Hey, I could have called it Insomniac! That was one of the options.) 

Xiaoju went off with the animal and I went back to the city thinking if only I'd waited I could have tied all these storylines up with a nice, neat bow and delivered them in a single post. Except if I'd done that, next time I logged in, some other dangling thread would have caught in the ever-turning gears of the game's unusually complex narrative engine and I'd be right back where I started.

It's a little too early to make declarative statements about the extent and reach of Wuthering Waves' intertextuality but there does seem to be a little more in the way of connectivity and resonance than I'd expect. I like it. 

It does make it harder to work out when to start posting about stuff that happens to me in the game. If I leave it more than a day, I can barely even remember what order things happened. I had to revise this post three times after I looked at the screenshots I'd taken because I had it all in the wrong order. If I post right away, though, I risk missing out on a whole raft of consequences and implications.

Still, I'll take the hit. It's not like anyone else is going to pick me up on any narrative anachronisms, is it? That's one advantage of writing about a game no-one else is playing. No-one can say you're doing it wrong.

That should be my Blogging Advice for Blaugust 2024. Pick a game no-one else plays and then no-one can call you on it if it turns out you don't know what you're talking about. 

Of course, you won't have any readers but hey, omelettes, eggs! Amirite?

You know I am.