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.

Heralding The Heralds

Jenn Chan, Darkpaw's "Head of Studio" dropped another Producer's Letter for EverQuest II yesterday. I imagine she posted one for the elder game, too, but I can't even pretend to be playing EverQuest any more so maybe I'll just skip that one. I wouldn't really understand what any of it was about, anyway.

Before I get started on the content, I have something to say about the nomenclature. Is Head of Studio" a new title? It's snappy. I like it. Although it kind of makes a nonsense of the whole "Producer's Letter" thing, doesn't it? Aren't they called that because the person writing them is the game's "Producer"? Shouldn't it be called the "Head's Letter" now? 

Except that sounds ridiculous. Like something your twelve year-old brings home from school to tell you the dates of the next school play and that the science block needs a new roof and would you like to help run a stall at the school fair to raise funds for repairs? 

Whatever she's calling it, Jenn Chan writes a good letter. She's affable, friendly, informative and she has a great line in what I think we're going to have to accept, much though we may not want to, are now generally known as "Dad Jokes". I'm minded to say she's the best Producer (Head of Studio.) the game's ever had although I'm not claiming I can remember all of them. She's certainly the least pretentious and most agreeable.

Her Producer's Letters are also very predictable, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. She's established a form and a structure and she's clearly happy to just keep going with it indefinitely. At least half of every letter is a recap of the previous one, detailing what she said was going to happen and confirming that it did or, if it didn't, which is rarely the case, why.

At this point I do have to wonder what the substantive difference is between a Producer's Letter and a Roadmap, other than that a Roadmap looks much flashier. In terms of content, they seem very similar. I don't in the least mind getting both but there does seem to be a deal of overlap.

According to the July letter, everything that was promised did indeed come to pass. There's an overview and a month-by-month breakdown of events since April, all with hyperlinks to the relevant press release or explanatory article on the official website. It really is about as well-documented a piece of reportage as you could hope to see. I would guess either Jenn is an excellent administrator herself or else she has one in her employ.

Following the studio's uninterrupted support for Pride Month this year, it perhaps shouldn't be a surprise to see the second paragraph of the letter celebrating Darkpaw's latest donation - $5,000 to the San Diego LGBT Community Center - but in the light of certain less admirable decisions made by other gaming companies (*cough* Jagex *cough*) it's more than usually heartening. 

I did manage to remember to pick up red pandas for all my characters on my main account although I'm not sure now if I got them on any of the others. Too late to worry about it now! Speaking of things you can have for (a given value of) nothing on every character, there's an odd promotion going on right now that gives you a Fabled Mount: Zhufeng, Harbinger of Mirth for every Krono you buy. 

Why they're specifically promoting the purchase of the "in-game objects that can be redeemed for 30 days of membership time" and also traded for Platinum within the game I'm not sure. They do cost $3 more than a regular monthly sub though, so I guess that would explain it. Presumably no-one actually uses Krono to pay for their subscription, only as a way to get the vast amounts of in-game currency needed to buy anything much on the broker in the age of hyper-inflation caused by people trading Krono...

You get one of those mounts for every Krono you buy, too, and twenty-five of them if you buy a twenty-five pack of Krono, which I did not even know was a thing you could do until I read the press release. Why anyone would want to buy 25 Krono at once is beyond me but apparently you can if you want. As to what you'd then do with 25 ugly flying fire-dragons... invade Freeport, maybe?

After recapping everything that's happened since the last time she wrote and reminding us of the current cash shop campaign, Jenn Chann goes on to tell us what to expect over the summer, which pretty much means recapping the roadmap and re-iterating what we can see in the handy in-game Events Calendar. I doubt anyone playing the game needs to told that after Tinker Fest comes Scorched Sky and Oceansfull any more than they need to know that after Thanksgiving comes Christmas and then New Year.

After all of that, we eventually come to something we didn't already know. Or that I didn't know, at least. 

Firstly, there's going to be "a Content Creator program" established later this year. What exactly that means we'll have to wait for the official announcement to find out but I'm assuming it means streamers. Not that I'd bother applying even if old-school blogs counted. I'm technically a "Content Creator" for Stars Reach and all that's done is make me feel uncomfortable posting about the game at all so I'd rather remain independent.

Next, we get to the really interesting part - some information about the upcoming expansion. Well, actually about the pre-expansion event, which has a name of its own - Heralds of Oblivion. We don't know what the expansion itself is called but that at least sets the tone.

In my experience, pre-expansion events, or "Preludes" as Jen calls this one, for any MMORPG fall into one of two categories - low-key and trivial or hyperactive and essential. There doesn't seem to be much of a middle ground. Either you're doing some busy work for a bunch of tedious NPCs who hand out rewards barely worth the bag space or the entire server is howling around in a huge gang, descending on every event like a swarm of locusts, desperate to hoover up the insane XP and/or huge upgrades.

As Jenn halfway acknowledges in the letter, we haven't had one of the good ones since 2018, when I described the rewards as "fantastic". Here's hoping this one at least matches it. It certainly seems to have some depth with "5 tradeskill quests, 5 adventure quests, 2 public quests, 2 collections". Pre-expansion PQs tend to be very popular and profitable in the first couple of weeks, until everyone has what they want, so I'm going to try and make sure I get in on the action early this year instead of leaving it to the end with all the other lazy bums.

As for what the expansion itself migh be about or where it might take us... no clue, really.  Jenn often ends with a pun that's supposed to offer a clue but this time there's just a picture of her standing in some kind of crater or hole and the tagline "No Bones about it, this is going to be good!", which I'm not even sure refers to the expansion.

It might just as easily refer to Game Update 129, also discussed in the letter and due to arrive in August. That one's called Fear of Eternity and includes Solo and Heroic versions of some of the dungeons or instances from the Chains of Eternity expansion from 2012.

I would have said I wouldn't be doing any of that, since I can't do very much of the instance that came with GU128 yet. That, however, should be fixed with the new one because it comes with a "Gear Catch-up Crate" designed to "get you straight into the GU action".

I'm probably going to do a separate post on this, for which I'll wait until I've been able to see the gear and the stats, but welcome though all this free stuff is, I can't help thinking the whole gear-ladder-catch-up thing in EQII is getting out of hand. It looks like we're going to get three complete new sets of upgrades to all our gear given to us for free in just four months - the GU Catch-Up crate in August, the Panda gear in September and then the Tishan's Box with the expansion in November. Is that overkill? Certainly starting to look like it.

The Herald's of Oblivion Catch-Up Crate is, however, only available to All Access members and the Tishan's only for those who buy the expansion, while anyone at all can get the panda gear just for the trouble of doing some very quick and easy quests, so there is an argument for all three, I guess. Best not to be inspecting the dental records of any gift horses too closely.

And that's about it. Another letter sent, received, read and discussed. Let's all meet back here in three months and we'll do it all over again.

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. 

A Question Of Gravity

If there's another developer half as keen as Starry on asking players what they think about the game they're playing, I certainly haven't come across them. The number of surveys Starry puts up for Once Human verges on the absurd. I mean, I'm all for taking a sounding but come on!

Yesterday I noticed, a couple of days late as usual, that there'd been a major update to the game. And when I say "major" I'm not ladling it on for effect the way publishers do with that "Soon to be a major motion picture" line they slap on any book that's even been optioned.

Just take a look at the details on the official website... no, wait, don't do that. You'll go blind!

Have you ever tried to find anything on there? It's like someone hired an advertising agency to produce fifty campaigns at once and then chucked a bomb into the office and filmed the explosion. Try the Steam Community Page instead. That's a lot easier to follow.

Or if you're pushed for time you could watch the trailer. Here it is.

 Wait, though... there's another

And a third!

 This is all for the one update, mind you. There's a lot going on. I could break it down but we'd be here all day. The tl:dr is 

• New PvE Scenario
• New Vision Wheel 
• New PvP Mode

It's like three expansions one on top of another in a way, although the PVP "Raidzone" is being touted as a spin-off game in its own right.  

To get back to those surveys, last night I completed three of them. It's been about two weeks since the last time I played and I did two then. So that's five surveys this month I've filled out. They duplicate heavily but no two are exactly the same. 

For most of the questions that ask for a 1-5 rating, I gave the game five stars. Story, lore, graphics, gameplay, combat, you name it, I'm Very Satisfied with it. Would I recommend it to my friends? Yes, I would. Why? because it's the best game of its kind I've played. I am the model of a satisfied customer.

There is one aspect of Once Human that I'm Very Disatisfied with, though, and I'm happy to take every opportunity to tell the developers about it. That's the ludicrous and wholly unnecessary complexity of the Server/Scenario/Vision Wheel set-up. It's the main thing that puts me off playing more than I do.

Take the last couple of days. I wanted to try the new Vision Wheel event. It sounded like it was going to be a lot of fun. Here's how it works:

"The inverted star will generate gravitational tides from 9:00 AM to 9:00 PM (server time) daily, during which players will enter a unique low-gravity state known as Stellar Levity, allowing for higher jumps, extended airtime, immunity to fall damage, and significantly increased Load capacity."

Basically, for half the time you're playing, you'll be able to jump around like a kangaroo on a pogo stick and goof about in the air like one of the Flying Wallendas with a jetpack. Or something.

I only recently made a new character but I started her on a Novice server and those don't get Vision Wheels or any new events, so she was out. Luckily, my original character was idling away in Eternaland with nothing better to do so I thought I'd wake her up, pick a server running the new scenario (Endless Dream), which also looks interesting, and that way I could try both the new things at once.

Seems simple enough, doesn't it? Hah! Doesn't work that way as I found out but only after I'd moved her.

Because Starry can never do anything the way anyone else does, the new PvE Scenario, which is technically still in "Early Access", is nevertheless available via exactly the same procedure as any other scenario. You don't have to use Steam's Beta process or sign up for anything. It's just there on the list with all the rest.

What I didn't know then was that EA servers don't get the Vision Wheel. I guess if you're testing you want to stay focused That makes sense. What I also didn't know, at least until this morning, was that lots of servers don't get the Vision Wheel either, not just the EA and Novice ones.

As I now understand, before you to pick a server, you need to check a whole bunch of things: the region, the population, the current scenario stage the server's at, which scenario it's running and whether it has access to the Vision Wheel or not. Probably some other stuff I don't know too, I shouldn't wonder.

Some of this is obvious, some of it isn't. Some of it requires you to click for further information or read a mouse-over. Most of this, last night, I did not do. I just picked a server running Endless Dream and signed my older character up for it. 

And that started very well. The new scenario begins with an excellent intro movie that I watched with enjoyment. Then I glided down, grabbed a spot for my base and jogged over to Meyer's Market to talk to the woman with the old-school TV for a head. She hands out the quests for the new storyline.

So far, so good. Except I really wanted to do the anti-gravity thing and there was no sign of it. So I opened up the map to have a look, which was when I discovered a couple of awkward facts about my new home. 

One was that, as I've already explained, the Starfall Inversion event isn't available at all on Endless Dream servers. The other is that the Endless Dream content itself starts at around Level 18. Or at least it appears that way. I could be wrong. I hope I am.

I'm probably not, though. As far as I can tell, it takes place mostly, maybe entirely, in instances and although there are plenty of them, the lowest Recommended Level for any I could see on the  map was 18. And that was in the starting area so I doubt there are any lower anywhere else. 

I was clearly going to have to buckle down and level up before I could even poke my nose in for a look. Which was annoying because I just leveled one character to 15 a couple of weeks ago. I didn't really want to do it all again quite so soon. And in any case, it was the other new stuff I wanted to see first.

And that's how I came to spend the rest of the session filling out surveys instead of playing. This morning I started over yet again with a third character. I have some Free Move tokens left over, I think, so I could have moved someone to a server running a scenario with the Vision Wheel but I still wanted to see the Endless Dream too so that didn't seem like the best plan. 

Instead, I spent a fair amount of time checking all the servers carefully until I was sure I  knew what content was available on which. When I was positive I had it right, I realized I was going to have to make another new character to get onto the one I wanted, so that's what I did.

And then I had to run that character through the unskippable tutorial. Seriously, why do unskippable tutorials for characters after the first on an account even exist? 

All of that took me an hour or so, plus the inevitable setting up of the base, after which I was finally able to go look for the new up-in-the-air stuff. Only it was four in the morning, game time, and the gravity doesn't switch off until nine. 

Luckily, time passes fairly quickly in game so it didn't feel like too long before I saw the message that things were about to change. And it was worth the wait.

I might - probably will - do a whole post on the Starfall Inversion, when I've been able to give it a couple more sessions, but my initial impressions are very favorable. For a start, it looks great. When the gravity goes, a blue haze appears that makes the whole world look ethereal and somehow cleaner, so that's nice. Then there's the huge sphere hanging in the sky that might remind you of the Death Star or Warworld depending on your personal points of reference. It's hard not to notice things have changed.

I'm guessing that sphere is responsible for the disruption to local physics although it could just be a very large chunk of space detritus. There are certainly plenty of disused satellites and space capsules drifting about, along with all kinds of free-floating junk. Everything from billboards and bits of building to loose rowing boats and cars.

The temptation to try to get up to them is enormous but at the start, even with the hugely increased jump height and no risk of falling damage if you miss, most of them are too high to reach. That can be fixed through the acquisition of a new gear set that, among other things,  gives you the ability to jump even higher. 

I already have the boots. I got them from a Gear Crate guarded by a very impressive new elite mob and his many lackeys and hench-creatures. I spotted him as I was trying to gain enough height to find out what the glowing rings in the sky might be (They increase your gliding speed if you fly through them, just like similar ones in several other games I could name.),

Since I had nothing to lose, playing a brand new character, I thought I'd take him on. It was a chaotic fight, what with the excessive use of the z-axis, and a long one, mostly because although I'd made a pistol, I'd forgotten to equip it, so I had to chop away at the thing's tentacles with a machete. In the end, I came out the winner and those boots, among other goodies, were my reward.

I carried on leaping and gliding until the clock ticked round to 9pm game time and the gravity came back on. That would be a nasty surprise if it happened while you were high in the air. Maybe there should be a klaxon. 

I was on the ground so I was fine but by then I'd been playing for a couple of hours, about my limit for a session these days, so I thought it would be a suitable place to stop. All in all I was very impressed with the new event. If nothing else it's great for goofing about, just like I hoped it would be.

I'm not sure I'll pursue whatever the storyline is with any great diligence but I would like to take advantage of the advertised "Build a Home in the Sky" feature so I will definitely be giving it some more time. As for the Endless Dream, I may have to consider my options again. 

I really don't want to be leveling three characters at once.

Two In A Tower

I saw an opinion piece over at MMOBomb yesterday that asked how much story would be too much in a game. The experience that apparently provoked author QuintLyn Bowers into print about it happened in Honkai: Star Rail but it could easily have been any number of post-Genshin Impact open-world RPGs. It's certainly something anyone who plays Wuthering Waves is going to find themselves asking themselves, eventually.

At the risk of de-railing myself before I've even got going, I could go on to ask how much content is too much, as well. I think we're a lot more familiar with the problems caused by content droughts than content floods but as far as Wuthering Waves is concerned, I'm beginning to wonder if the sheer quantity of things to do might not go some way to explain why I don't log in anything like as often as you might expect, given how much I profess to enjoy the game.

There, at least, it's a two-fold glut- content and story. Taking the story first, as I've said before, it's very good and I always enjoy it enormously but there really is one hell of a lot of it. Sometimes, the sheer volume can seem daunting.

Take the new chapter, the typically poetically-named "Tangled Truth in Inverted Tower". I am, technically anyway, up to date with Wuthering Waves just now, by which I mean I've played through all of the storyline quests from the base game and the previous updates. 

As of today I'm also a fair way into the current chapter, which arrived with the update on 27 March, but I didn't jump straight in when it dropped. It took me a couple of weeks before I felt ready to tackle it. I knew it would be a big job and I wasn't convinced I had the spoons for it until very recently.

A few days ago, I finally felt ready to make a start. I watched the trailer, then logged in to have a look at all this new stuff there was for me to do. When I saw the sheer number of options in front of me inside the game itself it almost made me log straight out again. I won't go through the full list of additions to the game that arrived with the update but let's just say there's much more than I'm ever going to see, far less finish.

Rather than attempt to check it all out, I decided to concentrate on the parts that most interest me, first and foremost among them the main story. Since, for once, I had all the necessary progress and flags required, I got right to it and even more surprisngly kept at it. I've only played two sessions so far but they've both been long ones by my modern standards. I didn't time anything, so this is an estimate, but I believe that first session lasted a couple of hours and my second, this morning, was nearer three. 

In all, I've definitely put in between four and five hours so far, during which I've done absolutely nothing except push through the storyline. I haven't looked it up to see how far in I am but based on context I would guess it can't be more than two-thirds. It could well be significantly less. For someone trained by Guild Wars 2 to expect to run out of narrative road no more than an hour or two after every update, this kind of fictional fecundity takes some getting used to.

Quantitively, Wuthering Waves trounces GW2 on all fronts but qualitatively it's streets ahead, too, at least if the yardstick is time spent watching the story unfold. For almost all of those four or five hours, it would be hard to say if  I've been playing a game or watching a movie. Pretty much the entire thing is cut-scenes, although even that suggests cutting away from something and for the most part there's been little to cut away from. It's been one continuous, unbroken narrative. 

There have been plenty of times when I've watched my character standing in one place as the camera moving around her in the cinematic way I described in a previous post and more when I've watched her watching and listening to other characters talking. I guess all of those could be described as traditional "cut scenes", except that for the most part all they're cutting away from is more of the same rather than from any action I've been taking. 

There have been far more occasions, however, when what's happening has been a combination of narrative and action, in the broadest sense of that word, where I've nominally been active, pressing buttons and so on, while all around me the talking went on and on. Much of the gameplay, if that's what we're going to call it, involves the player-character walking - or riding or flying or sailing - from one place to another, all the while engaging in ceaseless conversation with one or more NPCs - or, on a handful of occasions, with her own interior monologue.

As she walks and talks, she's frequently required to "do" something - steer a vehicle, manipulate a device, open a door and so on, activities which often seem to be things other games would hand off to the engine. At one point, in a vaguely meta-fictional moment, the PC even questions another NPC on the necessity of all the levers and devices needed to open doors and portals, only to receive a perfecly sensible, practical explanation. and yet the feeling remains that most of this activity can only really be there to give the player a notional sense of agency, when in fact their primary role is that of audience.

The superannuation even extends to the actual action, such as it is. There are numerous "puzzles" to be solved but in every case the solution is explained in advance and  pointers, markers and all kinds of indicators are provided to make it clear exactly where to go and what to do at every stage. It's as though someone gave you a jigsaw puzzle and instead of leaving you to get on with it, as you tried to fit the pieces together they helpfully leant over your shoulder and told you exactly which to put where - and then pointed out to you that all the pieces were, in any case, numbered on the reverse.

It might sound as though I'm complaining but I'm very much not. I like it, personally. It'd suit me if all games were as helpful. 

More importantly, in Wuthering Waves it's just as well most of the thinking is done for you. If it wasn't you'd never be able to concentrate on the important part - the conversations. Even if I wanted to solve all those puzzles by myself, I wouldn't be able to concentrate doing that and following the plot at the same time. The characters never stop talking just because they have something practical to do.

And I wouldn't want to miss any of it. It's all very interesting. There's an incredible amount of detailed backstory to take in, along with a wealth of nuanced and quite subtle characterisation. The writing is supple and complex and the voice acting is nuanced and expressive. A lot is being conveyed by the language and the tone. It's hard to imagine taking much of it in, while also trying to figure out where to go and what to press. 

Even with all the hand-holdiong, there were still plenty times when I had to stop and stand still just so I didn't miss something someone was saying. I find it frustrating when I'm trying to listen to what someone's telling me and the boat we're in suddenly shoots up a waterfall, jumping the conversation on to the next nodal point. After that happened a couple of times, I took to hanging back until everyone had finished talking, whenever it looked like we might be about to move into a new area.

If there's precious little thinking to be done - outside of the considerable thought required just to unfold the complexities of the narrative itself - there's even less fighting required. It seems to me that with every update, Wuthering Waves is moving further away from being an action rpg, coming closer to becoming a visual novel, at least as far as the main storyline is concerned.

I'm sure I remember that, back at the start, just following the plot involved a lot more unavoidable combat, not to mention a great deal more travel that involved numerous unscripted fights along the way. I seem to recall battling endless Tacit Discords just to get from one location to another and numerous mini-bosses when I got there. And then there were the full-on boss fights, sometimes several times in a single chapter.

Now, several hours into the current one, I have yet to see, far less fight, a boss of any size or description. The perambulations of the main character and her allies are only infrequently interrupted by small groups of Tacit Discords, none of whom pose any kind of threat, let alone a significant one. 

Most of those fights so far have lasted all of ten or fifteen seconds, if even that, and all of them have been completely arbitrary, serving no narrative function whatsoever. It's the equivalent of pushing a few annoying branches out of the way as you make your way along an overgrown forest path. 

I can only assume they're there to make the player feel like they're doing something, even if it's nothing very important. It's the character who does all the actual heavy lifting when it comes to action, with anything that might possibly require technique or skill being rendered in cut scenes so as to avoid any embarassment.

Once again, I appreciate that approach. I have never placed a high value on player skill in RPGs. As far as I'm concerned, it's always the character who's meant to have the leet skillz, not me. 

Sadly, I doubt this trivial level of combat will continue for the whole chapter. I've noticed the mobs are getting stronger the deeper we go and I'm sure there will eventually be some sort of set-piece fight with a key villain or arch villain. Even if that turns out to be a tough one, though, it doesn't change the fact that it will have been preceded by some four or five hours of largely risk-and-challenge-free storytelling.

And honestly, I'm not even wholly certain there will be a boss fight worthy of the name. Last time I wrote about the storyline in Wuthering Waves, I seem to remember saying something about how the big climactic fight was mostly taken out of my hands by the game itself. Already in this chapter, in key parts of the puzzles, moments when it looked as if I was about to be asked to perform some action that required at least a nominal level of player skill, what actually occurred was yet another cut-scene, this time of my character doing whatever was needed, without any input from me.

I can see how many players, possibly most players, might not be all that keen on being relegated to a walk-on role in their own story but Wuthering Waves is a very successful and popular game so clearly it hasn't put everyone off. And that, I imagine, is largely because of all that other content I alluded to earlier.

One of the best features of the game, as far as I'm concerned, is the way the story content is increasingly being distanced from the RPG elements. There's a huge amount of vertical progression available in the game, most of which is, I assume, essential, if you want to take part in the many, many non-storyline activities; all those arenas and towers and challenges and trials that form a huge part of every content drop and which are almost certainly the main reason a lot of people are playing.

All of it is there if you want it. It's also the main reason you might want to spend money on the game, buying tokens to throw the gacha dice, chasing those five-star weapons and Resonators that make you so much more powerful, then paying more as you burn through the vast quantity of consumables needed for the endless upgrades.

As far as the story is concerned, though, so far it all seems perfectly accessible without any of that. I've just been describing how easy it is and I have a very basic build and gear set-up. There was one step-change moment a few months back, when I had to do some upgrading to get over a hump in the story, but I haven't done any more since and things seem to be getting easier rather than more challenging. Long may it go on that way.

As for the question I started with, whether all this story, high-quality as it, is too much... I'm not entirely sure, yet. It certainly isn't in principle: who doesn't want more of a good thing? In practice, though, I'm finding following the continual narrative for hours at a stretch takes more out of me than the equivalent time spent mindlessly bashing monsters over the head. My wrists may not ache but my brain does!

I need quite a lengthy cooldown after each session, sometimes several days. The intellectual and emotional effort involved has, so far, kept me from doing much more than keeping pace with the central storyline. I haven't had the mental resources to delve very far into the numerous side- and back-stories, much though I'd like to. Some of them are easily as long as full chapters of the MSQ and equally well-written and enjoyable but I've been skipping most of them because I just haven't got the energy - or the time, for that matter.

It seems, then, that in the context of a game at least, it may be possible for there to be too much story, inasmuch as there does seem to be more than I'm ever going to be able to handle. That, though, says more about my stamina and persistence than the design of the game itself. 

And as Don Covay so wisely put it, it's better to have and don't need than to need and don't have. So long as I can cope with the main storyline, I'm happy to know there's more in reserve, should I get the time and the desire to see it.