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...

Games For A Wet Weekend

I did a lot more gaming than usual this weekend. For one thing, I wasn't working and for another the sun wasn't out. 

It was raining, in fact, which literally put a dampener on my natural inclination to be outdoors in the summer when the sun is shining. I think it's inbred in English people of a certain age, those of us who were brought up at a time when children old enough tie their own shoelaces were ushered out of the house after breakfast and expected to entertain themselves until at least lunch, if not tea. 

Even now I get that nagging feeling that I ought not to be "wasting the sunshine". Of course, it doesn't help that we see so little of it most of the time. It takes a good few fine days in a row before it starts to feel okay to stay inside. This is what happens when you live in a temperate climate.

The games I chose to play were interesting to me. I've been posting a fair amount about all the choices available and yet when I do find myself with both the time and the inclination to settle in for a few longer sessions, my choices often surprise me.

The steady, reliable pick is almost always EverQuest II, which I have been playing for more than two decades now with barely a break. I did drop the game  between 2012 and 2014, something I can date quite accurately because the two expansions for those years, Chains of Eternity and Tears of Veeshan, are the only ones I didn't buy and play on release. That was because I was full-time in Guild Wars 2 around then.

I came back with 2014's Altar of Malice, after which I played GW2 as my main MMORPG and EQII as my secondary, quite consistently, until I eventually dropped GW2 three years ago, at which point my involvement with EQII largely carried on unchanged. Maybe I play a little more of it these days but it certainly hasn't filled the space left by GW2's departure from the schedule.

At the moment, all I'm doing in EQII is Overseer dailies, which I've now managed to work up to the point where I only need to log in once in the morning to set all ten, then once again in the evening to collect the rewards. 

The recent news that the summer update will come with yet another free set of at-cap gear to encourage lapsed players to jump back into the game has to some extent made my efforts to catch up with Overseer seem unnecessary but that's a trap I don't intend to fall into again. It's how I got into this mess in the first place. I might not need the drops from Overseer but I need to level it up so it's capped when the expansion comes out because there will be things I need from it then and I won't be getting them until they, too, have been superseded if I don't do the hard grind now.

That all only takes a few minutes, though. With plenty of time and enthusiasm to play this weekend, I took the opportunity to return to Once Human, which has just received an absolutely huge update. Starry deem it so significant they've labelled it Once Human 2.0.

And they're not exaggerating. It has genuinely game-changing implications, with the new scenario, Endless Dream, opening up the whole map, North and South, for free play from the start and the update adding a completely new Class System and a whole new feature, almost a game mode, called Dreamland Fantasia. 

 

Up to now the game has been classless, Now, you can still choose to be a "Freelancer", which means you carry on the same as always, but you also have the choice of three Classes - Beastmaster, Chef or Gardener. Because this is Starry, they can't do anything in a normal way, so the Class system is in "public testing", by which they mean they've added it to the live servers as a work-in-progress with the intention of  "refining" it based on player feedback. That always works so well, doesn't it?

My feedback so far is that they ought to move the feeding trough a lot further back towards the start of the crafting tree. I picked Beastmaster (Well, of course I did.) but I have nothing to say about it yet because before you can use your whistle to get your pet to obey you, you have to tame the creature and to tame it you have to feed it and I can't.

It says in the description that you can either put food and water in a feeding trough or throw it on the ground but my wolf ignored anything I dropped next to it. I did a bit of research and it appears that method of feeding had already been proved not to work in animal breeding, a feature of the game I've never bothered with and from which some aspects of Beastmaster play have clearly been derived. 

 

Unfortunately, to make a feeding trough requires steel ingots and steel is several stages into the smelting process, meaning I need not only to have upgraded my smelting to that stage but also my ability to craft pickaxes. Steel is made from iron and you need a bronze pickax for that. 

Progression in Once Human is very fast so I had no issues with gaining the points required to open all the necessary nodes on the crafting tree but even with that done, I still have to go out, find some iron, mine enough of it, bring it back and smelt it (Along with some sintered bricks, also a few stages into the process.)  before I can make a trough to feed and water my wolf. Plus I need some metal parts from scavenging, which means either a lot of exploring or fighting...

Consequently, I am still a Beastmaster in name only, not yet having tamed a beast. It reminds me very much of becoming a Beastlord in EverQuest, when the class was first introduced and you had to slog through the first nine levels on your own before you were deemed fit to partner up with a pet. 

It doesn't help that, when I was playing yesterday, for some reason I still can't explain, I also picked two cooking specializations, which would very clearly have gone much better with the Chef class. It's all a bit of a mess and I'm wondering whether I might have to re-roll and start over. As I said, progress is really quick, so it wouldn't be very hard to catch up and at least I might have a better idea what I was doing this time.

The new scenario looks fun. It involves the dream plane invading reality and comes with a lot of hallucinogenic changes to the landscape, something Starry's artists seem to just love doing. It's one of the biggest attractions of the game for me because it means you barely have to touch the actual content itself to get the full impact of the spectacular visual changes. 

It's a very smart way of re-using the same zones over and over without either replacing them or removing the existing content. You're in the same place each time, with the same NPCs and quests and locations but there's a whole load of weird lighting effects or objects floating in the sky or bizarre weather and it freshens everything up no end.

It has a good deal to do with why I don't seem to mind having to start over all the time but I would still like to get settled on a permanent server so I didn't have to build a new house every time I come back. The 2.0 version of Once Human finally offers the combination I wanted all along - full map access and permanence - so hopefully this might be the endpoint for that journey.

There's an incredibly long and detailed set of patch notes covering the classes, the scenario and more that I won't even begin to try and summarize, let alone go through point by point. Once Human, always confusing structurally, now has so many twists and turns it's very hard to keep any of it straight.

It reminds me in a way of Fortnite, where the original concept was very simple and streamlined and then the developers just kept bolting more and more bits onto it until you couldn't tell what it was any more. I was put in mind of Epic's moneymaker when I clicked on a pop-up in Once Human yesterday, thinking it was going to take me to a dynamic event and it actually took me to the new Dreamland Wonder fairground, a large island instance filled with mini-games.

They're good games, too, some of them. I tried the jumping puzzle, which is visually spectacular and not impossibly difficult. I would have loved to take lots of pictures but I was pretty sure if I stopped to use the camera I'd have fallen off something so I only took a couple. Then I did a race, which was great fun and would have been better still if I'd realized it was a full-contact sport. I got knocked off my motorbike by another player not long after the start, which is my excuse for not finishing the course before the timer ran out.

What with all the scenarios running on separate servers and none of them ever going away and Eternaland and Dreamland and the seaside resort I forget the name of, Once Human is already starting to feel more like a game platform than a single, coherent game but I don't think that's a bad thing at all. 

Even though it sometimes seems it's been in spite of Starry's best efforts, I think Once Human is finally maturing into a very solid, entertaining, enjoyable experience. It has a large, stable population and a Very Positive rating from five thousand recent reviews on Steam, up from Mostly Positive from lifetime reviews. If you've wondered about trying it but have been concerned by the various, well-advertised issues, now might be a good time. 

When I wasn't playing Once Human this weekend, I was playing Crystal of Atlan. Why? Good question...

I suppose the obvious answer is "Because it's fun". And it is. It's cheerful, upbeat, colorful and fairly easy still, although not a complete cake-walk. Whatever the reason, it continues to be the icon my mouse pointer feels magnetically drawn towards every time I think I'd like to play something but don't quite know what.

Progress is trucking along comfortably. I dinged three times yesterday, finishing at Level 47. I now know there are sixty levels in total so a max level character doesn't feel out of the question. 

Not an awful lot happened while I was playing. The big news is I finally managed to get rid of the stupid maid outfit and replace it with something at least slightly less embarrassing. Now I look like I'm on a smoke break from the fortune-telling concession at the Renaissance Fayre but it's definitely an improvement. 

I bought the new outfit with one of the numerous in-game currencies. It was one of the most expensive items but I'd acquired enough coins without even trying so that's a positive for the way the game's been monetized.

Gameplay-wise, I finished Chapter Three of the MSQ and started Chapter Four. The storyline isn't very subtle or complex but it's entertaining enough to keep me engaged. 

I did get some laughs out of Conrad, a senior member of the Church, who I had pegged for a villain almost the moment he opened his mouth. His explanations for his experiments on an innocent bunny rabbit, which he was claiming were intended to heal the injuries said rabbit sustained while helping me in a dungeon (Don't ask...) were so obviously sociopathic I was literally shouting at the screen. I'd say the way no-one else saw through him beats me only it doesn't. I know exactly why that was - everyone is either gullible or innocent to the point of imbecility.

One odd thing that happened was that for some reason I started clicking my mouse pointer on the hotbar icons for my skills instead of using the keyboard as I had been doing. CoA is one of those equal-opportunity games that has action controls and tab-target hotkeys and doesn't care which you use. 

In the old days I'd always have clicked but it's an indication of just how many action games I've played that I didn't even think of playing that way until yesterday. When I got to doing it, clicking felt... I don't know... the same? Maybe better but not really? It wasn't a big difference either way, that's about the only thing I'm sure of.

I did a lot of dungeons and beat all the bosses, except one, without having to use a Revive potion, which is a very good result for me. The game is clearly designed to allow you to brute force your way through dungeons, using a potion to get up every time the boss kills you, putting you back at full health but leaving them still wherever they were. There doesn't seem to be a limit on how many times you can do it in a single fight, although I haven't tested it. Three times is the most I've needed in the game so far. Once has mostly been enough.

If I can beat the boss without a revive, I call it a clean win. All but one of my wins yesterday were clean, even if some were very close calls. My feeling is that I would have died a couple more times if I'd been using the keys instead of clicking because I think I was timing my attacks better with a click and on those close fights even one good combo that might not have landed otherwise could have made the difference. 

Hard to be sure but I think I'll stick with the clicks for a while. It's all still at least 80% button-mashing, however I do it, so let's not get any ideas I know what I'm doing.

How much gaming I'll be doing this week remains to be seen. The weather forecast is very different. Lots of sunshine and getting hotter and hotter. I suspect that will mean less time at the PC although it's possible it might even get too hot to want to be outside for a while so my preferences might all loop round and come back in on themselves. 

Whatever the weather, one game will still get its due time every day. Those Overseer dailies have to be done, rain or shine.

Last First Impressions Of Crystal Of Atlan

When I posted my first impressions of Crystal of Atlan back at the end of May, I certainly didn't think I'd still be posting about it a month later. Let's face it, my record for sticking with new games is abysmal these days. It never was great but at least I used to manage a month or two before running off after the next new fad. 

This year, with my gaming time at what has to be an all-time low since I first started playing PC games somewhere around 1997 or1998, any new game I take a look at can consider itself lucky if I come back for a second session. If I was interested in self-flagellation, I could go back through this year's posts and tally up all the games I've posted about once or twice and never again. It'd be a lot.

Let's not run away with the idea that I've played a lot of Crystal of Atlan, though. This will be the fifth post I've written about the game and that won't be too far off the number of sessions I've played. I haven't been counting but I'd guess it's no more than seven or eight. Still, that's a lot more than I was expecting, when I downloaded the game on a whim.

Given that there are very many better games I could be playing, plenty of them as new and some of them already sitting on my hard drives, why is COA the one that keeps getting the nod? It's a more-than-decent anime-styled action RPG that looks good and tells a good story but there are literally dozens of those. Why this one?

I wish I knew. It's not just "because it's there". As I said, I have plenty of games already installed, just waiting for me to choose them, some even in the exact same genre. And yet somehow, when the mood comes over me to play a video game, something that happens less and less often as the sun keeps on shining and being outdoors seems like a much better plan than sitting in front of a screen, it's Crystal of Atlan that gets the nod.

There's the dopamine hit, of course. My one and only character dinged 42 yesterday. That's quite fast progress and it comes in spurts, often at the end of a dungeon, when all the accumulated xp is dumped on her at once and she jumps a level or two at a stroke. That feels good.

The game also employs my favorite method of gear upgrades, drops from mobs. That's not the only way they come but it's how I've been getting most of mine and it's a significant attraction and another dopamine hit. Why developers ever moved away from gear drops to points systems and quest rewards beats me.

Then there's the look and feel of the thing. In recent years there's been a torrent of very good-looking games, to the point where I feel the baseline for "acceptable" is now somewhere above what would have classed as "outstanding" just a few years ago. COA doesn't stand out as particularly impressive by those standards but it certainly meets them and more by dint of its unfussiness and concentration on making a big, splashy impression.

Where other games of its kind offer a mutiitude of small details to create their worlds, this one sticks with the big picture. Everything is oversized and most of it seems to be built out of slabs. The place feels solid. There's also no shortage of neon and stained glass and everything is brightly colored, often in single tones. It's not subtle but it works.

The game describes the setting as "Magitech" and the style as "anime" but for my money the overarching aesthetic is "children's picture-book". It has that illustrative look to it, designed to appeal to an audience not quite old enough to read all the words yet. I'm not saying COA is a children's game, though. Far from it. It's probably just as well if the little ones can't read the words here, given what those words are saying.

I'm not about to say Crystal of Atlan has a great plot or that the writing is inspired. It definitely doesn't and it certainly is not.  It is often charming, though, and quite often amusing. Most importantly, it's a pleasure to read. Mostly it will be reading, too. There's some voice acting but not that much.

There are also plenty of cut scenes but they're much shorter than in some games I could mention and seem to concentrate mostly on scene-setting and local color. One thing I found interesting was that when I looked at the screenshots I'd taken of a couple of cut scenes, I noticed there was a lot more going on than I'd realised as they played out in front of me. Whether that says more about the game or me is another question. 

The plot as far as I've followed it mostly revolves around drug dealing, corruption and child exploitation, which it has to be said is an unusual approach for a game of this nature. Of course, the drug in question is a magitech performance enhancer with side effects that turn people into monsters and the children are Dickensian street urchins with amazing thieving and combat skills, but still...

Speaking of combat, it's good fun so far. I read an opinion piece over at MMOBomb earlier, where the writer, Mathew D'Onofrio, tried his first gacha action RPG and was impressed with the look of the thing but much less so with the combat. "Looks Good, Plays Bad" was his tl;dr.

That game was yet another new anime-gacha-action RPG I'd never heard of: Mongil: Star Drive. You can't throw a stone without hitting one of the damn things nowadays. 

What he didn't like about the combat was that there wasn't enough to do: "all I was doing was left-clicking, occasionally dodging with the right mouse button, and spamming Q and E for skills and ultimates." He followed that up with another complaint: "It felt like I was brute-forcing my way through every fight."

I quoted that in full because it does a fair job of summing up what I like about combat in Crystal of Atlan. The less I have to do, the better I like it. That said, there's actually quite a bit more to COA's combat than Mathew found in M:SD. I can't quite remember what it is but I know I was hitting more than just two buttons. (1,2,3,4, for skills, 5 for the pet, R for potions, Q and E for specials/ultimates, shift for dodge...)

Whatever it is, it's manageable for the moment. No doubt it will spiral over my skill ceiling at some point but so far it's comfortably below it and I'm enjoying the fights. Just as well because it is pretty much a fighting game, with an inverse ratio of combat to dialog as Wuthering Waves. 

Perhaps the biggest draw so far is the set pieces. Some of those are very impressive. Last session, I had one of those classic fights on top of a moving train. It was visually thrilling, as I would have loved to have taken some screenshots to demonstrate, but it was take photos or don't fall off and I chose to keep my footing.

The current series of dungeons I'm enjoying give a nod to Alice in Wonderland but really seem more like a fairground. It's a big upgrade, visually, from the sewers and back alleys of the previous chapter. It's nicer to be fighting in a clocktower filled with stained glass windows or next to a whirling carousel with prancing painted horses rather than a tunnel filled with sludge, that's for sure.

There's a whole exploration side to the game that I haven't yet... erm... explored, where you can search for collectible cards and take photos in scenic areas. I'm a lot more likely to do that when there are attractive views all around. 

The animations are striking, too. I used not to be much of a one for animations but play enough action RPGs and you start to get a taste for them. I very much enjoy the way my character does leaps and flips and I spend as much time doing it as I can when there's a fight going on. Whether it helps I'm not sure but it feels good and if I could get a screenshot I bet it'd look good, too.

The thing I'm most displeased with is what my character's wearing. It's still that embarassing maid's outfit. I really need to look into how to get something less humiliating. Of course, I could always spend some money and buy an outfit in the cash shop. That'd be a first!

As that last paragraph suggests, I think I'm rapidly approaching the point where I'll need to do some proper research on how the game works, what there is to do and how to get the best out of it all. Otherwise I fear I'll just be funnelled down the main storyline into dungeon after dungeon, which will most likely cease to be fun as soon as the fights start to be in any way challenging.

At Level 42 I really ought to be past the First Impressions stage anyway, so I think this is going to be the final post in that line. Next time - if there is a next time - I might have to start talking about the game as a game, not just a novelty. 

If I ever get that far, I'd call it a win for Crystal of Atlan. 

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. 

Crystal Of Atlan: The Fleet's In!

I was out for much of the day and I didn't have any particular ideas for a post so I was going to skip a day but then I thought why not just do something quick about Crystal of Atlan? So here it is.

Last time I wrote about the game I was level 27. Now I'm Level 32. I did notice that the last level took about as long as the three before it, so maybe the pace is slowing down. Or maybe I just wasn't doing anything that gave much xp. 

In the caption to one of the screenshots last time, I mentioned I hadn't found out what the Fleet thing was about yet. Well, I have now. A Fleet is CoA's version of a Guild. There's a short quest that explains it and sends you to look at a notice board where Fleets recruit. 

Being an antisocial git, I usually don't bother with guilds or clans or whatever the local jargon is but if the game allows me to make one and keep it to myself, I always take advantage. CoA does that, so I made my regular guild of one and with it I got an airship.

I was quite excited about that. Who wouldn't be? It turned out to be a bit of an anticlimax though. The airship consists of the upper deck and that's about all. It's in a private instance and you can wander about the deck and look at the view, which is nice, but you can't go inside. 

As far as I can tell, you can't decorate it either, so it isn't what I'd call housing. The little room you get in the starting town is more of a home than the airship. At least that has a bed youcan lie down on and a gramaphone that actually works.

The airship does have some facilities. There's an NPC that gives Fleet missions and another that runs a shop where you can spend the currency you get for doing them. Since they most likely are tuned for actual fleets with more than one member, I don't imagine I'll be doing many, but who knows?

As you can see from the screenshots above, the in-game camera doesn't seem to work on the airship or in dungeons, either, so I'm thinking it may not work in any instances. If they offer me the chance to give feedback on any of the surveys (I've already completed two of those.) then that's the first thing I'll be asking them to fix.

It's a shame because the dungeons are really rather nice to look at, even the sewers. I do find Crystal of Atlan very pleasant company visually. 

The story is better than I initially gave it credit for, too. It's nothing out of the ordinary but it does zip along and the plot, entirely unoriginal though it is, has its moments. The character writing is decent, too, which makes the whole thing feel quite jolly. 

As for combat, the difficulty for a mostly unskilled player who's not willing to put in much effort to get any better, as I was describing last time, is somewhat mitigated by the option to revive yourself at full health every time you die. Your opponents don't get the same option, thank heaven, so you can just throw yourself at them and keep getting up every time they knock you down until eventually you just wear them out.

That takes a consumable every time so I imagine it's not a viable, long-term strategy but it's working for me at the moment. I wouldn't need to be doing it at all if I could remember to get my pet fox to heal me in ample time but I keep forgetting until it's too late.

That certainly seems to put the mockers on the idea that CoA isn't a Gacha game. "Premium" pets are Gacha pulls and they have a big part to play in combat. It seems like a fairly arbitrary line to draw, saying your game isn't gacha because there are no gacha characters when there other key systems use the mechanic but fine lines are what these distinctions are all about.

I have yet to get the hang of swapping between my two pets in a fight. Or more to the point, I know the game swaps them for me but I don't really know what either of them can do apart from heal. The fox does that. I think the rabbit is DPS but I really need to look into it.

The rabbit also talks but not in any language you can understand. The fox doesn't seem to talk at all. Lots of NPCs have dialog options if you go up to them and start a conversation, just like they do in Wuthering Waves, although what they have to say isn't as complex and detailed as in the older game. Still, it does make the place feel a bit more lived in, knowing you can strike up a conversation with pretty much anyone.

As you can see from the screenshots, CoA comes with the typical visual clutter of its peers. The last game I played that placed quite so much emphasis on huge overhead titles in over-dramatic fonts was Noah's Heart. 

Strangely, as someone who habitually turns off almost every overhead name and title in any game, I kind of enjoy these. They're so over-the-top I find it endearing. In Noah's Heart, I put some considerable effort into getting the titles I liked and I may well do the same here. 

I certainly don't want to be running around forever with "We're Scaling" over my head, that being the only title I have at the moment. What the heck does it even mean?

I also don't want to spend a moment longer than I have to dressed as a kind of Whitehall farce version of French maid. It's embarassing. Unfortunately, although I do have another, much more suitable outfit I could wear, these "cosmetic" outfits are bursting with combat stats and the maid one is a lot better, so I'm stuck with it. There may be some way to tweak appearance so I don't have to see it. I ought to look into that as well. Or just work on getting something else that's not so dodgy.

Anyway, that's about all I have to say for now. I said it was going to be short and for once it really was! 

Genshin Impact: First Impressions

Genshin Impact is a Breath of the Wild clone. That seems to be widely accepted. And word has it it's a good one. Belghast says it "improves upon that formula in so many ways that it feels iterative".

I wouldn't know. I never played Breath of the Wild. I've never played any Zelda game. I've never even watched anyone play a Zelda game. Any opinions I have about Genshin Impact are based purely on the game itself. Well, that and a comparison with the couple hundred other MMORPGs I have played, of course.

Is Genshin Impact an MMORPG, though? Depends who you ask. Some people are quite clear on that: "Genshin Impact is a beautiful new free-to-play MMORPG". But not all of them: "... the answer is a simple... No. It is not". 

The truth, like just about everything in the game I've seen so far, is confusing. As PCGamer puts it: "It isn't massively multiplayer... but expect your time with Genshin Impact to feel... like playing an MMORPG". In other words, it's a single-player game that plays like an MMORPG. Kind of like Kingdoms of Amalur.

Except it isn't a single-player game, either. Once you reach a certain level in the game, you can start inviting friends in for four-player co-op. Or maybe you can play with random strangers. Just only three of them at a time. Belghast thinks you can. I wouldn't know. I haven't got that far yet. I'll let you know when I get there. 

And I will get there, because there's one thing I'm not confused about. Call it whatever you want - Genshin Impact is a very good game and a whole lot of fun. 

So much for set-up. Let's get to those bullet points.

• Download, Registration, Installation - Clean, simple, quick. No hoops to jump through, no hanging around. Took me less than fifteen minutes, total. Apparently there were some issues with slow downloads on launch day. I guess there would be , what with ten million people trying to download the same thing all at once. No slowdowns for me, though.

• Character Creation - There is none. Well, you get to pick a gender and a name. That's it.

• Introduction - Brief and to the point. A short cut scene tells you you're one of a pair of twins who travelled between worlds together until some god snatched your sibling and left you trapped on Teyvat, yet another fantasy land begining with "T". And that's all the backstory you're getting.

• Tutorial - What tutorial? A sprinkling of pop-ups tell you some basics on the order of WASD to move. If you needed to be told that you're in deep trouble because the game is going to throw a whole lot of less familiar systems at you in short order and you're going to have to sort them out for yourself. Exactly how I like it.
  

• Graphics - Gorgeous. Anime style, so everyone says. I'm ignorant to the point of embarassment on anime. Looks like good comic art to me. Colors a lovely balance of bright and subtle. Edges sharp, surfaces soft. Animations fluid and natural. Ok, not natural. Stylized. Natural-feeling is what I mean. A huge amount of detail, particularly once you reach the town. Lush, sensuous, welcoming. Like I said, the art's gorgeous.

• On my aging PC the quality defaults to "Medium", which sounds bad, but there's only one setting above it: "High". None of this Ultra nonsense. The game runs like mercury on Medium so I might crank it up some time and see how it handles. For now, I'm more than happy with what I'm seeing.

• User Interface - Minimal. Clean. Intuitive. They really don't want much to get in the way of the art while you play and it doesn't. The back end is complex, though. Lots and lots of menus and sub-menus. All very clearly labelled, mostly with well-designed icons that are easy to interpret without explanation.

• Screenshots - I'm pulling this out as a separate part of the UI because it was just about the one thing in the game I found awkward. One of the first things I do in any new game is re-set HideUI to F10 and Screenshot to the minus key on the numpad. You can't do that in Genshin Impact because keys are not re-assignable. To take screenshots you have to hit Escape to open the main menu, then click a camera icon. Hide UI is Ctrl-H, which is awkward. Screenshot is Enter, also weird.

• There are other aspects to the screenshot function, like a slider for distance, which sometimes appears and other times doesn't. You get to see your shot before you save it. That's good. It goes into a folder in the game directory, which I like. The quality of the images is fantastic. 

• And I yet still fired up FRAPS. Pictures aren't as good there but I can take them on the fly without having to fiddle around in menus. Also, the in-game camera wants you to pose. If you try to take shots when you're swimming or climbing it balks. That's no use for a roving reporter!

• Movement - Fantastic! Seriously wonderful. This is one of the impressions I'm pretty sure all Breath of the Wild vets are going to smile at but I have never played a game with such seamless movement over obstacles and up vertical surfaces. If something can be climbed, and most things can, your character just climbs it. It's incredibly satisfying. 

• You can swim, although only on the surface. Early on someone gives you a glider, which works exactly like the ones in Guild Wars 2. There are even updrafts. It all felt immensely familiar. Once I'd worked out I could climb up buildings and jump-glde across rooftops in Mondstadt you couldn't get me down. Telwyn would love it.
  

• Combat - Possibly the most naturalistic and intuitive action combat I've encountered. Tobold, no action fan, called it "not overly complicated or difficult to execute" and I can't argue with that. As far as I can gather, combat gameplay revolves around controlling a team of several characters, swapping between them to use different abilities and create synergies. It sounds complicated and fiddly, just the kind of thing I don't like, but so far it seems the opposite. Granted I only have two characters but moving between them to change from ranged to melee or to set things on fire feels natural. That word's coming up a lot, isn't it?

• I did a couple of quests that involved combat, cleared several hilichurl camps (the local goblin/kobold analogs) and finished up by completing the first storyline instance. Fights felt tactical and involving. It reminded me oddly of classic EverQuest or World of Warcraft, not in execution so much as in intent. I suspect it may be a game where fighting stuff involves as much thinking as thumping but I'll have to get a lot further to find out. Never wise to draw conclusions about combat from the very low levels. It so often changes out of recognition later.
  

• Progression Mechanics - Oh, no! I'm not going there. Not in a First Impressions piece. Let's just say there are a lot of them and they're ferocious and leave it at that. I might have more to say when I begin to understand the basics, which I very definitely do not, yet.

• Story, Dialog, Writing, Voice-Acting - This is where Genshin Impact really impresses. I mean, we've seen plenty of gorgeous-looking imports but in how many of them did it seem like someone had given the original text a pass through Google translate and called it a day? GI is well above the solid, professional standard set by something like Blade and Soul. It's up there with Final Fantasy XIV or any quality title written and voiced by articulate, imaginative native speakers.

• It's not just that all the text, without exception, comes in grammatically correct, idiomatic English. It's that it's witty, funny, amusing and smart. I laughed out loud four or five times in a couple of two-hour sessions. I'm not saying it would win any Emmys but judged by the standards of triple-A MMORPGs, it very much holds its own. 

• Here's an example of what I mean. You know how lots of games have books you can collect and read and how most of those books are very, very dull? Or just badly written? Genshin Impact has a library full of books like that but they're genuinely interesting. I collected as many as I could find, which was a lot and read about a dozen of them before I had to stop myself so I could actually get some adventuring in. It's not literature but it's not just filler, either.
  

• As for the voiceover work, it's not at all bad. Everyone I've met so far speaks like a teenager on helium but that kind of goes with what they look like. More importantly, all the line readings are spot on. It bugs me when voice actors obviously don't understand the meaning of the lines or the director hasn't directed them appropriately. That's not the case here. 

• Music - Lovely. I don't have much to say about it but it's in keeping with the milieu and pleasant to have in the background.

• Overall Impression - Exceptionally favorable. If there's a word that comes to mind it's "polished". We're so used to games that feel barely started, let alone finished, it can be a low bar to clear but Genshin Impact really does feel fully-baked, at least in the opening areas that I've seen so far. It's as though miHoYo actually completed the game before they tried to sell anything to anyone. What a radical approach!
  

Since the game is free to play and genuinely so as far as I can tell, I can't see any reason not to give it a try. Other than the issues I discussed yesterday, that is, but frankly, if you let those concerns dictate your actions you're probably best not being on the internet to begin with. 

Expect a few more posts on this one, at least until the Shadowlands pre-patch drops in two weeks time and I follow the herd to the next watering hole.