In The City

This is the second day in a row where I'm only posting because it's Blaugust. Do not expect a quality read! But then, as we were discussing during the opening skirmishes of the Blaugust AI Wars, we don't really have any standards for posting other than that it should be mostly your own work. Neither quality nor word count matters a jot when it comes to putting up something that's going to qualify as "a post" for the purposes of the award tally at the end of the month.

At least say I can say, with a straight face, that this was a post I was always going to write. Screenshot posts have long been a staple of this blog, so I'm not just bunging one in so as not to miss a day. Well, not only that...

I don't always need a reason for a screenshot post, other than that I've taken some and I think they look good, but in this case I do have a minor point to make. As I mentioned in passing, in a recent post about Wuthering Waves, I was taken by surprise on my return to the game by just how exceptionally lovely it is to look at.

I remembered it was good but I'd forgotten how good. I'd gotten used to thinking Neverness To Everness looked gorgeous, which it most certainly does, but WW could give it a good head start and still come in ahead. Given that delightful surprise, of course I took a whole boatload of screenshots on my return, as you would, when you'd seen something worth photographing. 

Even as I was taking those shots, I already had it mind to use a some for a post. This would seem to be the ideal opportunity.

 All of these shots were taken while I was working my way through the twelfth act of the second chapter of the main quest, a section cursed by some ironist at Kuro with the unappealing title Stagnant Dawn on Wastelands. Whatever image that summons up isn't going to bear much resemblance to what you're about to see.

Pretty much the whole act, which took me several hours to finish, takes place inside a Sonoro Sphere in which a city called Honami is trapped, in a kind of Groundhog Day-esque perpetual time loop. The real Honami was destroyed by the Lament decades ago but an image of it remains, complete with all the citizens, known as the Left Behind, going through the motions of their final hours over and over, not knowing anything is wrong and yet somehow knowing something isn't right..

 All of which could be quite depressing if the place wasn't so damn beautiful. It's a stunning creation, all pastel washes and blurred edges, as though seen through wet eyes. To say it was painterly would be underselling it. It has a three-dimensionality paint would struggle to match.

 It also has a surreal element that lifts the whole thing onto another plane. The writers at Kuro seem to be adept at combining elements that shouldn't work together at all, yet somehow making them seem like the most perfect of fits. In Honami, we have a convincingly realistic, albeit mildly futuristic, urban environment, populated by recognizably ordinary people doing and saying recognizably ordinary things, while all  around the surfaces of the city are melting, glowing and sometimes turning into bubbles and blowing away.

 And if that wasn't surreal enough, into this twisted reality intrudes a whole gang of cartoonish capybaras, the highly fanciful incarnations of the Guardian of the city. Previous guardians we've met have been mighty dragons. Honami has a funny animal straight out of a Saturday Morning Cartoon.

It absolutely should not work, particularly given the always bittersweet, occasionally bleak nature of the story, which revolves around loss, sacrifice, bigotry, bullying and despair. But somehow it does.

 In the later cut scenes, after the enemy has been vanquished and the Left Behind released from their eternal wheel, the aesthetic changes to an elegiac, evocative, cinematic style. With plenty of lens flare, which obviously I loved. 

The conversations are heartfelt and emotional and the visuals pick up the tone perfectly. I'm very much looking forward to the upcoming anime. Clearly Kuro has both the writers and the artists to make the transition.

 I'm also very much looking forward to reaching the point in the narrative where I can branch off and experience the permanent residue of the Edgerunners collab. Based on what I've just seen in Honami, it's easy to see why that potentially disastrous collision of worlds turned out to be so well received by fans from both sides. These people really know what they're doing.

 My only regret, having finished the Honami storyline, is that I didn't spend more time in the city. True, since it only existed as a backdrop, most of it was blocked off by invisible barriers, but there were plenty of opportunities to explore at least a little off the prescribed path and I failed to take any of them. I was too wrapped up in the story to go wandering off. Now I wish I had.

I don't think the area is there to visit freely outside the story. I may be wrong. I hope I am. 

As far as I can tell, though, most of the wonderfully imaginative, finely detailed places we get to visit as we follow the exciting and complex plot, exist only as long as they're needed. If that's true, it makes the sheer quality that hallmarks each and every one even more astonishing.  I think I'm going to have to give Kuro the nod when we get to Creator Appreciation Week.

Maybe I'll do another screenshot post... 

It's All Just A Little Bit Of History Repeating

Well, this is embarrassing... 

Remember when I complained about not being able to remember my login details for Wuthering Waves? I wrote a whole post about it under the (entirely intentionally) click-baity title "Wuthering Waves Is Dead To Me Now." Remember how, in that post, I said "I've tried everything and every account I can think of and nothing works"?

Yes. Well. About that...

It turns out either I didn't try every account after all or else my capacity for thinking is so diminished I probably shouldn't be allowed out on my own. Either way, I now have my account back. 

So that's good.

This morning, for absolutely no good reason other than that I was idly fiddling around on the desktop while I was trying to come up with something to write about today, my attention settled on the Wuthering Waves icon. Since it was there, I thought I might as well update the game, just in case I decided to start over from the beginning again some day or something crazy like that.

I figured there might be a biggish update waiting but it couldn't be very big, surely, given I'd patched up about six weeks ago. I was half right. 

There was an update and it was huge. 56GB. WW (I refuse to call it WuWa. It reminds me too much of Al Pacino going "Hoo-ah!" in Scent of a Woman.) seems to be one of those annoying titles that insists on re-downloading the entire game every time it patches. 

That annoyed me a little but what it mostly did was remind me that even if I could play the game, which I couldn't, I'd be playing it on GeForce Now anyway, not on my own PC, so  I wouldn't need to update it at all. Let some NVidia technician worry about that. Otherwise what am I paying my £6.99 a month for, right? 

I logged into GFN and started WW going and then I noticed a link that said something about registering your character to see more. Well, you always want to see more, don't you? Unless it's body horror...

The link, when I clicked it, opened a dialog that offered me two accounts that were both, apparently, logged in already. I could tell by the names which email addresses they were using and it momentarily made me think one of them might be my original account to which I'd lost access. 

I went through the various stages to log each of them in and of course neither of them was The One. They were the two new accounts I'd made the last time I did this, each with a single, unplayed Level One character and nothing else. 

In the process of logging them in to check, though, I reminded myself which two email addresses they were. And neither of them was the one I'd say was the most obvious choice. The one I'd have been likely to use when starting a new game I wasn't planning to play for long.

Imagine the screen going all misty as we wind back to how I got started in Wuthering Waves in the first place. It was all because of a passing mention by Naithin, who'd tried the game and not thought all that much of it, mostly because of certain issues he had with the quality of the sound recording as I recall. For some reason. that spurred me to take a look at this oddly-named gacha title and the rest is... well, it's forty posts about the game on this blog for a start.

Back then, I wouldn't have been expecting to do much more than take a quick a look, which is why I didn't bother to set up a proper account. I just used Google's very convenient handshake protocol, the one UltrViolet has just implemented to handle comments on his blog. I tend to use it wherever it's offered because it's so easy and saves so much time. This is how billionaires groom us, isn't it? (Adjusts tin-foil hat...)

And I'm sure it's very nearly foolproof - if you just use the one gmail address for everything, like a normal person. As I'm only just beginning to realize, though, it's a lot less reliable if you have a couple of dozen of them. I'm really going to need to make a note of which address I use for which application in future and if I'm going to have to do that, I might as well just make a regular account the old-fashioned way.

All of this is there and thereabouts a repeat of the process I went through back in June. The one I wrote about in excruciating detail back then. So why am I repeating myself, other than for the sheer, visceral joy of listening to myself talk, of course, always a given on this blog. (I throw that in for any New Blaugustians that may still be plowing through this wall of text in the fading hope some point or purpose might eventually emerge. It won't. Or if it does, it won't be for a while.)

Sidebar - New Blaugustians sounds either like the name of a second-tier superhero team, likely made up of characters who never managed to hold down their own title or if they did it only lasted a dozen or so issues. They'd be based in a city like Denver or Omaha, a good way from either coast, which is where all the action in super-hero comics always happens. 

Or it could be an acid-jazz outfit from the '90s...

At this point, if I had any sense, I'd have admitted I was just repeating the same exact steps as last time and I was going to waste another morning on the hopeless task if I didn't accept the loss and move on. It's that saying about not learning from the mistakes of the past, isn't it? You keep on making them. And that other saying about people doing the same things over and over and expecting them to turn out differently...

 

Yeah, well, that's a bunch of crap. And I can prove it. I didn't learn the lesson and I did do the same thing again and it turned out differently!

Okay, maybe I didn't do exactly the same thing. Maybe, when  I said last time I'd tried "every account", what I really meant was "Every account except the most likely one. The one I should have tired first. The frickin' obvious one."

Or, I guess, maybe I did try that one but something else changed since I did it. I'll leave myself an out because who knows what happened? Not me. I won't say I don't care - it would be nice to know for sure - but I will say I'll never find out so there's no point worrying about it.

Whatever it was, I'm back in Wuthering Waves on my old character, Califlora. She's level 40 and almost at the end of the Riniscitta storyline. To be precise, she has the final Act and the Segue left to do before starting the next big chunk of main storyline, the one I've missed, which itself is the chapter before the current one, which has just begun.

I'm about an update and a quarter behind, I think. Not much further than I was the last time I had to catch up. It's doable.

And I've already started. After I spent what felt like half an hour opening a hundred windows to read about dozens of events I didn't understand and clicking on all the rewards that had been patiently awaiting my return, I looked up how to access the content I was trying to play through back in June, the Edgerunners Collab.

That event is over now but I thought I remembered reading somewhere that the Night City adventure itself was permanent content. I also seemed to recall you can jump straight into it without having done the MSQ first. 

It is and you can. It took me some googling to find out how, though. I couldn't figure it out in-game. And even when I did figure it out, I didn't do it.

I was about to and then I noticed you can get to Night City more organically by progressing the main story to the point where you reach "the transport dock" in a quest called "What Burns Beneath The Frostlands". I checked how much I'd have to do to get there and it was "only" four quests down the line, in the first Act of "To The Stars Yet To Shine". It's not like I'm in a mad rush. I thought I might as well walk there. 

Of course, first I'll need to remember how to play. To that end, I worked my way through an exploration quest Califlora had up. She must have been doing it when I last played her although I don't remember it. 

By the time I'd finished it, I had a vague idea of how things worked. Who I had in my team. Which buttons to press. That sort of thing. Annoyingly, the combat controls are just very slightly different from Neverness To Everness but it didn't seem to make too much difference. It was surprising how fast it all came back. 

Whether I can juggle two story-heavy gacha games at once is another question. That's a lot of cut-scenes and voice-overs to get through. But I ought to be able to get to Night City, at least. If I buckle down, I might even be there before the next big content drop in NTE, which ought to be in about two to three weeks. 

If nothing else, it'll give me something new to write about for Blaugust. Always provided I don't forget my login details again...  

Wuthering Waves Is Dead To Me Now

This is going to be a very short post. I know I say that a lot and then run on for several thousand words but that won't be happening today. I had a specific post in mind and I haven't been able to write it so this is the "what would have been" version.

It was going to be about the Wuthering Waves/Edgerunners collab that started this week. I'd been trying to pretend it wasn't happening so I wouldn't start fomoing at the mouth about it but yesterday I saw the trailer in my YouTube subs and couldn't resist. And it was excellent.

 So, I watched that and I read a whole bunch of people saying how good it was, not just in the comment thread but in articles like this one and I thought, well, maybe I'll just check to see if you really have to be all up to date in the game to see the story. And it turns out you don't. 

Kuro recommends you do it in sequence to get the most out of it but they also realize a lot of people might be coming back just for the Edgerunners content because that's one of the main reasons companies do collabs like this in the first place. With that in mind, they've made it a standalone episode you can access immediately or as part of the storyline, as you prefer.

I haven't played Wuthering Waves for a while. A good while. Last September in fact. I didn't stop because I got bored or lost interest. I stopped because it got to be too intense and I found myself taking it too seriously, which is very much not what I want from my gaming. I did plan on watching the story content on YouTube instead, since it felt like I was watching a movie every time I played, but in the event I just drifted out of thinking about it at all. Until now.

The next thing was to check if I had the game installed on this PC. I didn't think I did because I bought it after i stopped playing but as it happens I moved the relevant SDD across and although I removed a few things, Wuthering Waves wasn't one of them.

Great! No need to download the whole thing again, then. I can just patch it up. Yeah... nope. I had to download a new launcher from the website because the old one no longer worked and the new launcher insisted on downloading the entire game, all 100+GB of it before it installed it in the same directory. It took a couple of hours and by the end I had a fresh 108GB client, up about 20GB from where it had been.

That took me past the time I had available to play the thing so I left it for this morning. After breakfast I opened the launcher and hit Play and the damn thing downloaded another massive update. The client now weighs in at an enormous 133GB!

Phew! Still, at least I can finally play the game, right? Ahahahahaha! No!

I can't play Wuthering Waves because I do not have my account details any more. In the quarter of a century I've been playing online games this has barely ever happened to me. I almost always keep a note of my account details for everything - games, services, forums, you name it. And if I don't, I can always at the very least work out what email address I used and recover them.

Not for this one. I almost certainly used the extremely tempting and convenient "Sign in with Google" option. I use it a lot because I'm lazy. It's a bad idea and I know it's a bad idea but I do it anyway because what could go wrong?

Apparently what could go wrong is I could not be able to figure out which google account I used. I have a lot. At least a dozen I use regularly and probably as many more that I've made and then forgotten about. There are only about five or six I regularly use for something like this, though, so again, how hard could it be just to go through them all and find the right one by trial and error?

Harder than I expected. In fact, impossible. 

I tried the obvious two or three and they weren't right. Then I had the clever idea of checking my email to see which one had been sending me the press releases. I have all my in-use email addresses set to forward to one central address so I don't have to keep logging in to all of them.

It was then that it occurred to me that I don't seem to get any emails from Kuro about Wuthering Waves. None at all. I did a search and I never have. Not a single one, ever. Which is very weird. Surely they send them? They'd be the only gaming company ever if they didn't.

Just in case the mail was going to an address I hadn't set to forward, I went through the laborious process of logging them all in. None of them had ever heard from Kuro. While I was at it, I even checked some of the more obscure addresses I haven't used in years. It was a useful hour in that at least I've reset the timers on those so Google won't delete them for a bit longer but it didn't get me any further.

I went through my Little Black Book of Logins page by page. Nothing. It seems I never wrote down anything about Wuthering Waves at all. I don't keep as many handwritten notes about this sort of thing as I once did but I do usually at least make a note of which email address I've used for a new game. Not this time.

Even if I don't keep a note of it, Google must or how would it work? I googled that and found out how to check what apps you've given permissions to, which is a handy piece of information to have. Then I checked all of them and none of them showed "Wuthering Waves" or "Kuro" in the list. 

By this point I was pretty much stumped. I tried checking my laptop, where I once tried to play the game and found it wouldn't run, and my old PC, which meant connecting everything back up, which was a pain. No joy with either of them. And that was the last, worst idea I had.

Reading around the web, it seems there are some quirks with Kuro's login process that mean accounts set up by typing in an email address are registered independently of the same email address selected through "Play with Google" but either way you'd think there'd be a stream of promotions going to that address, which as far as I can see there never has been.

There's also an issue where your account is specific to the Region where you chose to play. If you pick the wrong one on login, the game acts as if you never played before. I tried Europe and America, the only two I'd ever have chosen. Nothing on either. 

I do have a blog though. I know I would never have mentioned a specific email address in a post because I am not completely irresponsible but I do sometimes mention other useful details. So I checked my First Impressions and came up with this potentially telling piece of information: "Downloading and installing the game (It's something like an 18GB footprint.) took just a couple of clicks.... There was no time wasted registering an account. It accepts a Google login, which it doesn't even bother to confirm with an email to the Gmail address you give it." 

Hmm. First, it's grown like Topsy, hasn't it? Second, it never sent a confirmation email. Now that is odd because, while I was trying to get in this morning, I used Google to start a new account and that did send me a confirmation, although it didn't ask for any response. Not that it helps at all but it's a data point.

I'm in on that account now and I see there's an option to "Link Email". Maybe I never took it on the real account. That would explain why I never got any emails. 

Anyway, I've tried everything and every account I can think of and nothing works so the only other option is to contact Kuro Customer Service and see if they can restore access. Thanks to screenshots, I do have the name of my character and the User Id but I never spent any money in the cash shop so I don't have that crucial piece of evidence, without which I'm not sure they'll be all that interested.

I could start over from the beginning. As one person advising someone else with a similar issue helpfully pointed out, if you skip all the dialog it wouldn't take long. Or I could go back to Plan A and watch it all on YouTube.

That sounds like the better option. I'm not convinced pressing the buttons adds anything much to the experience.

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...

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.

The Games I'm Playing Stay The Same

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

When In Rome...

As of now, I am officially up-to-date with the main storyline in Wuthering Waves. I have the screenshot to prove it, too, but it's a really boring screenshot, so I'm going to make it super-tiny so it doesn't spoil the look of the post.

There it is. Get your magnifying glasses out. Of course, I'm absolutely nowhere with the rest of the bazillion side quests, which would probably take me the rest of the summer to finish , if I did nothing else, but that's not the point. My goal in the game, in so far as I've ever had one, is to follow the really very good main story and that I am just about managing. Let's not get ambitious.

How did I reach this welcome but largely unexpected position? The latest update, gloriously named Lightly We Toss The Crown (Whoever it is at Kuro Games that keeps coming up with these titles deserves a raise.) arrived two weeks ago, a week after the eight-minute (!) promotional video.

As you can see, it's taken me a while to get around either to writing about or playing it but I've now done one and here I am doing the other so that's all good. Of course, as I've suggested already, "doing" the update only means I've made my way through the latest chapter of the MSQ. 

As you can see, if you're crazy enough to sit through the full eight minutes of the video, that's just a very small part of the new content. I continue to be completely in awe of the sheer amount of gameplay added with every update but then I did play Guild Wars 2 for a decade. My benchmarks are shot. 

Some of it only sticks around until the next one but most of it is flagged "Permanent" so the total size of the game increases significantly every six weeks or so. How long that's going to be sustainable is another question. I'd seriously hate to be starting now and the game's only been out for a year.

Same picture but bigger in case you didn't click

Speaking of which, when I logged in a few days ago to try and get caught up, I was expecting to have to go through whatever was added to the MSQ with the Anniversary because I'd been running one update behind for a long time. I was surprised and very pleased when the game took me straight to the start of the current chapter. It seems whatever happened in the Anniversary celebrations wasn't part of the main storyline at all. 

I still don't actually know what it was, only that it generally wasn't well-received. Naithin at Time To Loot, the only other blogger around these parts who writes about WW, mentioned  a couple of times that he was unimpressed by whatever it was and expressed some curiosity about what I might think about it, when I got around to doing it, but I'm going to have to disappoint him there because I haven't and now I probably never will.

Unless, of course, it was the thing with Encore and the video game sponsored by the Pioneer Association... If it was, I can see the problem. After I finished the latest chapter of the MSQ, I went back to see if I could figure out what I'd missed and that looked like the most likely candidate so I went to give it a go.

You may well ask, Abby...

It started out well but it ended badly. The conceit is really similar to GW2's Super Adventure Box, a gimmick I never much liked. In both cases a character in the game you're playing creates a video game inside the game your playing for the characters in that video game to play for fun. And also in both cases that video game looks much more like what a video game would look like if you asked someone who doesn't play video games and has no particular love for them would imagine all video games probably look like, namely childish and dumb.

Aesthetically I prefer the one in Wuthering Waves, which is called... no, I've already forgotten. Super Adventure Box has it beaten hands-down on the naming front. SAB is a great name and very easy to remember - it's three years since I last played GW2 and I remembered it instantly, whereas it's about half an hour since I played this one and I'm going to have to look it up... Second Coming of Solaris. That's it. Not very catchy, is it? Must have given the job of naming it to an intern, I guess.

Anyway, it starts out quite charmingly but soon devolves into some huge arena fight where you play a character that isn't you, which we all love so much, don't we?  I got a warning at the start that all my resonators were too low for it but I carried on anyway because they were the best ones I had so what else was I going to do? 

There has to be an easier way to travel.

The warning was on the money. Unsurprisingly, my team, all 40-60, couldn't make much of a dent in the level 90 mobs they had to fight and pretty soon everyone was dead. I tried to exit the arena but there was no way to do it without spending a Revive token to get someone up, so I force-quit the game and rebooted... and came back in exactly the same position. So I had to revive and then quit, which annoyed me.

If that was the thing you didn't like much, Naithin, I didn't like it either. I'm not surprised people were up in arms about it.

The current update, though... SO much better! I really loved it, actually. It's spectacular but also subtle, with a throughline from previous chapters but also plenty of new and different elements of its own. I found the plot involving, the setting evocative, the new characters engaging and the gameplay satisfying. Pretty much straight As all round from me.

I'm not going to do any plot summaries. Frankly, the plot is now so arcane and abstruse I can barely follow it while I'm playing, so it's going to make no sense to anyone who isn't. And that, you'd think, would be a negative but it's far from being that.

There are inns?

It's true that I do, in general, enjoy narratives that I can't unravel but they also have to be stuffed full of interesting or exciting details and moments to keep me engaged and this one really is. So much is going on all the time it's impossible to follow but instead of feeling confusing it successfully creates a sensation that there are huge, hidden forces moving beneath the surface, creating ripples strong enough to knock you off your feet. 

And that's quite thrilling. I'd be happy never to learn what's really going on. Indeed, I might prefer it that way. I'm happy just watching the ripples spread.

The update adds a whole new playable area, which I have yet to explore to any meaningful extent. In fact, when I look at my map in the game and at the achievements associated with exploration, I see that I have yet to explore almost everywhere other than the territory that came with the original launch and wherever the story's taken me since. I really am letting the explorer archetype down.

How about one of those inns I was hearing about?

The new city is called Septimont and it has a vaguely Roman theme inasmuch as everyone wears either a toga or roman legionary armor and the big ticket in entertainment is gladiatorial combat in the arena. A good deal of the chapter involves pairing up with one of the locals and competing in the four-yearly Agon, a knockout competition for gladiators. 

That's very clever. A previous chapter had us competing in similar competition that was culturally inflected. It shows just how rounded a personality the player-character must be, that they can beat entire populations at both the arts and in combat. But then, if you've been following the plot, you'll know that the PC, for once, really is superhuman. I know all games tell you your character is the Big Kahuna but in Wuthering Waves the lore and the storyline back that up with evidence.

The writing and the voice acting is excellent as always. I particularly liked the thoughtful observations on the effects of fame and the relationship between performers and fans. That seemed extremely up with the zeitgeist. 

Are you looking at my tail?

The new character you pair up with, Lupa, I found both delightful and fascinating. She's full of nuance. I couldn't entirely figure out either her motivation or her trustworthiness for a long while. In the end I decided she was - mostly - what she a) said she was and b) believed she was but there's definitely some part of her that's neither. 

Her name, of course, means Wolf, which is fine... except she apparently is a wolf. I mean, she has a tail and she keeps sniffing people. Yes, really. I am not sure exactly how that goes in Solaris-3. 

There was that whole side-quest ages ago, with the guy who was a wolf, and he had a tail like hers but as far as I remember he had to pretend he wasn't really a wolf, just a boy with a false tail pinned to his pants or else he'd have been lynched. Maybe I'm misremembering or maybe Septimont is just more socially advanced and wolf-people there don't suffer the same type of prejudice.

Lupa's voice actor, like most of them, does a bang-up job but I do feel I ought to call attention to a rare case where that... erm... isn't exactly true. If you watch  the first couple of minutes of the promo video I linked earlier, you'll soon see what I mean.

I'm sorry? I didn't quite catch that. Did you know you have quite an accent?

Yes, it's Augusta. What is that accent she's doing? I honestly can't even tell what it's supposed to be, let alone what it is. Sometimes it sounds Scottish - or rather it sounds like someone who once saw a phonetic version of a Scottish accent one one of those amusing seaside postcards but has never heard an actual Scottish person speak. Quite often it sounds Welsh but as if whoever's talking is trying, unsuccessfully, to pretend they don't have a Welsh accent. Mostly, though, it sounds like nothing on Earth.

Arguably, that could be okay. Solaris-3 isn't Earth. There could be plenty of accents there that no-one here has. If so, it's just weird only Augusta has this one. But then, I bet the actor playing her is the only one that could do it...

As you'd expect from a plotline involving trying to win a knock-out competition for gladiators, there's a fair amount of combat in this chapter, although even then not so much as you might expect. Once again, I'm extremely pleased to say, all the fights are well within the capability of an under-geared, under-prepared, casual player with minimal skills and a tendency to button-mash.

A girl's gotta make a buck, right?

The only time I lost a fight was the Final, on my first attempt, at which point the game popped up a window to suggest that before I tried again I might do something about my Echoes. That was good advice. I had five of them slotted as I should but only one had been upgraded. The others were all zero level. 

Once I'd swapped some of them around, adding a healer, which seemed like a pretty crucial omission, and upgraded them all, my second attempt was cake. And anyway, I didn't even need to finish the fight, which changes for story reasons several times, at what seem to be set points, into different fights with bigger bosses, all of whom also turned out to be quite manageable.

Most of the gameplay, as usual, isn't fighting at all. It's watching a rather good movie, this time one with a spectacular ending, stuffed to bursting with special effects. It was very impressive. And also satisfying. I had a really great time.

Lupa is great but it's Buling I really want to see more of next time.

I didn't have a stopwatch running but the whole chapter (And I did nothing else in the game until I'd finished it.) took me three sessions. I don't play very lengthy sessions these days but all three were well over an hour, so I'd guess the whole thing must have been at least four hours long.

And now, for once, I'm technically up with the story. Well, the MSQ, at least. It'll be another month before the next update, if past cadence is a guide, so I've got time to go do some exploring on my own time, without pointers telling me where to go.

I think I'd better make the effort or they'll throw me out of the Explorer's Guild.