What Does She Think She Looks Like?

I've said a lot of very positive things about Wuthering Waves since I began posting about the game back at the beginning of June. Sometimes strong first impressions like that fade and falter in the face of a fuller experience but I've had more than enough time now to firm up my thoughts on the game and I'm still very impressed with almost everything I've seen. 

The visuals are gorgeous. It's one of those games that doesn't look as good in screenshots as it does when you're playing so, since the screenshots look great, you can imagine how delightful the world looks when you're running around in it. 

On that theme, the exploration is first-class too. It's one of those games where, if you can see something, you can get to it. There's usually something interesting to investigate when you get there, too.

Getting around is one of the joys of the game. Wuthering Waves has a high-quality instant transport mechanic and it's my favorite kind; the one where there are lots of teleport points but you don't get to use them until you've visited them and opened them up for use via the map. 

Even though it's there and it's good, I don't use the instant transport option as much as I do in other games. People, especially explorer archetypes, often talk about the journey being more important than the destination. That may hold water as a metaphor but it rarely works as a literal description of getting from place to place in a game. In Wuthering Waves, though, traveling really is fun in and of itself.

That's down to movement, which is both highly kinetic and three-dimensional but also extremely comfortable and simple to use, a really satisfying combination. You can run, jump, swim, glide and swing from one high point to another, like Spider-Man, something that's common to many modern games, but what makes it special in this one is that you rarely run out of puff while you're doing it.

There is a stamina gauge but it's extremely generous. I have yet to run out of energy while swimming and in over a month I think I've only fallen off a mountain through lack of stamina a couple of times. And even then I was still able to glide to a soft landing. 

Best of all, you only use stamina when sprinting in a couple of circumstances: if you're in combat or if you're running straight up a vertical surface like The Flash. Running up sheer cliffs is a real rush, too. 

Outside of that, you can dash about as much as you want. You don't even have to hold a key down. Just tap it and it sticks that way until you stop running. 

I'm more than fine with that, although I do wonder why games that allow unlimited sprinting don't simply set sprint as the default, rather than getting you to press a button to make it happen. I played something the other day (I forget what it was.) where you always ran but if you hit Shift you'd slow to a walk, which seemed a far more sensible way of doing things.

I've complained on and off about the quality of the translation but really it's the variability that bugs me. The general quality is plenty good enough - it's the segments that are very good that cast shade on the rest. I should really be praising it for how good it can be rather than picking out the weaker moments.

One thing that really stands out for me is the combat. I generally find fighting the least appealing part of these kind of games, partly because I'm not a huge fan of action combat per se but mostly because they tend to be tuned for a considerably higher skill rating than I can manage. 

So far, Wuthering Waves has managed to balance very neatly on the dividing line between engaging and comfortable. Beating up regular mobs for quests and loot is fun and I have actually enjoyed most of the boss fights and set pieces. I don't know how long it can last but I'm optimistic.

I could go on with the positives but I actually wanted to post something about the one, big negative that slightly mitigates against the fun I know I could be having. I just wanted to take a run through the good stuff before I got to that part so as to make it quite clear how very much I like the game overall.

The thing I don't appreciate about Wuthering Waves applies to most gacha games. It's the extreme lack of character customization available. 

One of the biggest pleasures of most RPGs, whether on or offline, solo, co-op or massively multiple, is the control you have over what your character looks like. We've all heard the jokes and jibes about "playing Barbies" and "fashion wars". Everyone knows the real end-game of many MMORPGs isn't raiding - it's strutting around outside the bank in your finest. Entire games are funded mostly by the cosmetic items for sale in their cash shops. 

Leaving aside what you look like, being able to create a character is a fundemental expectation of the genre. It's so ingrained in the culture that even gacha games don't side-step it entirely. In the ones I've played, you do get a character that's supposedly your own at the start, even if you pretty much get a choice of two pre-mades.

With the exception of one game in the genre, though, that character has never truly been mine. The entire rationale of the gacha business model works against the concept of building a character and sticking with it. The whole purpose of gameplay is to keep acquiring new, better characters and using them to replace your old ones, so why would you want to spend time and money making any of them look good or feel permanent?

I find it very frustrating. It takes away all the fun of finding new items and seeing how they look on your character, something that has always been a primary motivator for me, going all the way back to when I commissioned a crafter to make my first set of reinforced leather armor in EverQuest a quarter of a century ago. There's no working on sets or trying to create a signature look. You just have to go with what you're given.

It also means that, when you get a character who's too powerful to turn down, you're stuck looking at whatever outfit someone else thought looked good, even if you think it looks terrible. I'm moderately happy with the pink-party-dress-and-bloomers look someone clearly got their ten year old daughter to design for Encore, the character I'm mostly playing at the moment, but it's not how I'd dress her, given the choice. 

At least it's better than the selection from the Victoria's Secrets nightwear collection I'm stuck with on my actual character. That one is just embarrassing but then Wuthering Waves is one of those games where every playable character and villain looks like they've come straight from a music video or a peep show. 

What really annoys me about it is that, although I've said it's almost a requisite of the gacha mechanics, it actually isn't. I have played a gacha game that both allowed for a great deal of character customization and let you decide how much skin you wanted your characters to show. 

That game was Noah's Heart and the main reason I stayed with it for more than a year was the way it allowed me to work on looks for my characters by acquiring lots of them through the gacha process and then persuading them to give me the patterns for their outfits so I could make them for myself. Better still, the outfits came in a number of pieces so they could be mixed and matched to make different, much more personalised looks.

Unfortunately, I suspect that and similar roleplaying-friendly elements like housing may have been what eventually sunk the game. I get the strong impression that the core audiences for RPGs and gacha games are quite different in their desires and expectations and having pets and homes and funny hats doesn't really excite gacha players the way it does even the most reluctant roleplayers in MMOs. 

My feeling is that, while MMORPG players love to be powerful so they can win big fights with Boss mobs, they also love to work on their characters at inordinate length, just for the sake of it. The twin motivations are beating the game and building the character; the two go hand in hand. 

People frequently want to beat a Boss so they can loot an item it drops, be that a flashy weapon or a shiny helmet or a sparkly mount. That's why we have transmog and appearance systems up the wazoo and people kick up merry hell if they can't go back and solo old raids for cosmetics.

In gacha games, it often seems as though power is an end in itself. Beating bosses doesn't get you stuff you can wear; it gets you materials you can use to upgrade your power. And you want to keep doing it so you r characters can keep getting more powerful until you ditch them for better ones and so the whole thing just keeps rolling.

It's not to say there's no way to change your appearance in a gacha game. It's just no part of the core experience. It's an after-thought, at best.

If you google "can you change the look of characters in Genshin Impact", the huge majority of results will tell you that you can't, which is how I remember things being when I played. It seems that has changed. There are at least outfits in the cash shop and in holiday events, now. Even so, it seems like a drop in the ocean compared to what you'd find in just about any MMORPG.

To anyone who doesn't play games the differences I'm talking about are probably barely discernible. To anyone who's used to the MMO experience, though, while it's a similar gameplay loop, it's really very different indeed. The question is whether it has to be

Noah's Heart definitely tried to hybridize the process and it didn't work, commercially, at all. That doesn't mean someone couldn't do it more successfully.

I hope they do. The open world gameplay of the post-Genshin Impact games would make an ideal base for an MMORPG. But only if you could also play a character you could truly make your own.

A Tactical Choice

The Steam Summer Sale ends in a few days. Back when it started, I spent maybe an hour going through the offers. I spotted a number of decent bargains and no fewer than eighteen of the entries on my wishlist were on sale for anything up to seventy-five per cent off. Surely there had to be something I could buy?

Well, nope. Apparently there wasn't. I looked at everything, on and off the wishlist, trying to imagine myself playing any of them across the summer and I couldn't do it. I could see myself playing them at some point but I definitely didn't get the feeling that point would be any time soon.

That's the problem with sales. If you're not going to play a game tonight or tomorrow or next week or even next month, is there any point buying it today? 

I guess there could be. Games aren't perishable. They don't go off. You could, quite reasonably, buy a game in the summer with the intention of playing it in the autumn or the winter or next spring. If it seemed likely you might do that, and if the game was on sale right now at a good discount, it might even seem like a sensible thing to do.

Except that games on Steam go on sale all the time. Not only are there the big Summer and Winter sales, there are numerous publisher sales and themed events plus the perpetual drip drip drip of everyday discounts that just never stops. 

There's not even much of an argument in favor of nailing down a good discount when you see it, even on a game you're sure you'll play "one day", just in case it never comes up for sale at that price again. Game pricing doesn't work that way. Once the discounts begin, they tend to keep on coming and they have a habit of getting bigger as the game ages out of the market.

It's true that at some point the price might hit a floor and stop falling . It might well bounce around a bit between big sales. It's never going to go all the way back up. If you miss a bargain in one sale it doesn't matter; there may well be a better deal in the enxt.

It's a very different mechanism from what  I'm used to in the book trade. At work, over the years, I've frequently had to explain to bemused customers that the brand new books on sale at half-price aren't commercial disasters we're trying to get rid of - they're the most hotly-anticpated, keenly-selling successes of the moment. 

For some reason that still isn't entirely clear to me after the best part of thirty years in the business, very successful books are often at their cheapest on publication. If you want to buy a just-published novel at half price, don't hang about. The first couple of weeks is your beat bet for a bargain. You might be lucky and pick up the same book for half-price a year later, just before the paperback comes out, when booksellers will try to get rid of any final, few copies they might have lying around but chances are any that didn't sell will have been returned to the publishers by then.

Even less comprehensible is the way the better-known and more successful the author is, the bigger the
discount is likely to be. Regular, mid-range writers have to hope someone's willing to pay full price for their new book, even though it's had little publicity and there's not much demand. Famous authors latest efforts get piled high next to the tills at half-price on the day of publication.

It's not quite as ruthless as it was a few years ago. Reading is hot right now and has been at least since Tik-Tok became a thing. A lot more books go undiscounted. Even so, rule of thumb remains get in quick if you want to buy cheap. If there isn't any money off when the book comes out, it's unlikely there'll be a discount later. (Caveat: that's how it is in the UK. I have no idea if it works like that in other territories...)

With games, it's pretty much the exact opposite. Wait long enough and you'll be able to pick up not just the game you wanted but all the DLC, for a fraction of the original cost. You might even get it all neatly packaged up together in an Ultimate Edition, assuming the game was successful to merit one.

With all of that in mind, I'd about reached the stage of writing off the Steam Summer Sale altogether. I just couldn't justify buying anything, even for cheap. (I almost stumped up for Penny Larceny but once again the game fell at the last hurdle; I do want to play it but I don't want to play it now. Also, it's only £9.99 full price. A 30% discount taking it down to £6.99 barely makes a difference. Sometimes full price is already low enough that a discount just isn't much of an incentive.)

And then last night I bought a game after all!

It wasn't on a whim but it was an almost-instantaneous decision. The moment I saw the discount I didn't hesitate. So what was it and why was it different this time?

I'd played Wuthering Waves in the morning and EverQuest 2 in the afternoon and I felt like playing something different in the evening... but what? Nothing came to mind, so while I was thinking about it I passed the time checking my feeds, which was when I noticed Tipa had posted about her experiences playtesting The White Raven, a game I'd not heard of before. 

It didn't really sound like my sort of thing but Tipa compared aspects of TWR to Baldur's Gate 3, a game I definitely want to play. That one, I definitely would play right away but I'm waiting for a good deal. 

I realise it might take a while. BG3 is in the Steam Summer Sale but only at 20% off. Then again, last time it was only down 10% so the needle is moving in the right direction. I'm waiting until it hits at least 50% off, which I suspect could still be a while. Like years.

BG3 might be out of contention but what about something similar? I had a think about what it was about The White Raven and Baldur's Gate that was making me itchy to play and it occured to me pretty quickly it wasn't the the deep storytelling or the top-class voice acting so much as the magic-based tactical combat. That was the itch I was trying to scratch. I wanted to throw fireballs at goblins again.

The last game I played where I got to indulge that urge was The Dungeon of Naheulbeuk: Amulet of Chaos, which I got free with Amazon Prime. That one turned out to be much more entertaining than I expected, a common theme in reviews of the game, whose charms seemed to take everyone by surprise. Something like that would be perfect. 

Unfortunately I couldn't think of anything like that, although something exactly the same was an option. There's a confusing amount of DLC in the Naheulbeuk series, all of it relatively cheap, so that seemed like an obvious fix. What put me off was knowing there had to be a good chance most of it would eventually pitch up on Prime for free, since that's Amazon's established pattern with franchises once they start giving them away. It would be really annoying to buy a bunch of sequels now, only to have them appear in the Prime offer a month or two down the line.

I couldn't come up with anything else but I thought I might know someone who could. For a given value of "someone", that is. I thought I'd ask Gemini, Google's AI, to suggest something suitable. It would either solve my problem or give me something to laugh about. 

I was even hoping Gemini might come up with a hidden gem or two. It did not.

It did, however, give me five extremely solid recommendations: 

Baldur's Gate 3 
Divinity: Original Sin 2
XCom 2
Battle Brothers
Solasta: Crown of the Magister

The question I asked was "Please give me the names of some games similar to The Dungeon of Naheulbeuk." You can't really fault that for an answer.

I've covered why I'm not considering BG3 at this time. D:OS2 I've already played. The XCom series doesn't have magic-based combat. Battle Brothers has one of those names that make me think "Nope" without even bothering to find out any more about it.

Solasta, though...

I remember Tobold posting about that one a few times. He rated it highly and he plays a lot of these sorts of games. I remember him saying it might be as good as BG3, in terms of the tactical gameplay, even if the story and acting weren't on the same level. And since it was the tactical gameplay I was mostly interested in...

So I checked and guess what? It's in the Steam sale with a whopping 70% discount. 

I can take a hint. I bought it without hesitation.

Then, as if to prove a point but actually because I really wanted to, I played it. An hour last night and another this morning, which was all the time I had available.

So far, I'm enjoying it, although I can hardly comment on the tactical gameplay I bought it for because I've yet to encounter any. Also, again as if to prove a point, the voice acting is arguably less convinving than the AI in Ales and Tales. 

As far as getting my money's-worth goes, though... two hours in and I'm not only still in the Tutorial, I haven't even finished going round the shops yet!

At this rate, Solasta will probably last me until the Steam Winter Sale.

Wuthering Waves: First Encore

Time for another brief (!) update on where I am in Wuthering Waves. I know everyone's been on the edge of their seats, wondering whether I've been able to claw my way over the hump and beat that fight I was complaining about a week and a half ago. 

Remember I said I'd have to go away and "figure it all out"? It also seemed like there was a non-trivial chance I might actually have to l2p or git gud if I wanted to carry on with the main storyline, although it also seemed like that wasn't something I especially needed to do if all I wanted was to carry on having fun with the game?

Yeah, well. Overthinking, right? Bane of the age. 

So, I am not going to start explaining how the game works because

a) it's super complicated

b) there's still way more I don't understand than I do

and

c) no-one cares

But I can tell you I bumbled around and clicked on stuff until at least enough came clear that I was able to move forward. It's a method I use a lot.

As far as I see it, everything levels up or upgrades so you need to do some of that or its like you're fighting mid-level mobs in your starting gear. I mean, it isn't exactly that because one of the things I don't much like about Wuthering Waves and gacha games in general (Noah's Heart very much being the exception but I'm saving that for another post.) is that there isn't really any gear to speak of. In the case of WW it's basically weapons and that's it.

But those weapons really matter. You gotta not just get good ones but you have to keep on boosting them. It really makes a difference although not as much of a difference as getting better Resonators, which is another point of contention between the gacha game model and me that I'm not going to get into here. (Won't do that again, I promise. Mention stuff I could talk about and then not talk about it. It's really annoying, isn't it?)

So, anyway, what I mainly did was figure out how to do the "Pulls", where you spend the special currencies for a chance at a new Resonator, plus I used all the mats I'd been stashing (The ones I had no idea what they were for.) to upgrade anything they'd work on, something the game does for you if you let it, although you can do it yourself once you work out what goes where and that's definitely the better option because, left to itself, the game doesn't always make the best choices.

As with all the games like this I've played, you get a ton of free currency to make pulls. I suppose if you're being competitive you might want more and that's how the money gets made but if you're just plugging through the story I doubt it would come to that. Certainly never has for me. 

I only had to spend a fraction of the tokens I already had to get a couple of new Resonators, one of whom, Encore, was my first five-star pull. She looked pretty good. Actually, she looked like a ten year old girl, which there always seems to be at least one of in every game like this, but I'm talking about her stats. 

I stopped pulling Resonators and went to try Encore out, which meant making a new team. This, beyond everything, turned out to be where I'd been going wrong until now.

I have a naive tendency to stick with the character I started with. I think of that one as "me". Or "my character". I mean, it would be in any other game but it's not how gacha games work. 

In Wuthering Waves it's even more confusing because that is your character for the main story, the one that appears in all the cut-scenes, but it doesn't have to be in the fights. And if you picked the one I did at the start then it really shouldn't be because she's... not very good.

The way it works is you can have a bunch of teams set up, each with three Resonators, drawn from your pool of however many it is you've got and you're supposed to swap them in and out whenever, for whatever reason. 

I can't be any clearer than that because I have no clue about the finer points but at least now I know it categorically does not work if you just keep going with the character you started with plus the next two NPCs she happened to meet. That is not a good team. Not even if you upgrade them all as best you can. 

I know because I did try it that way first out of misguided loyalty and although the upgrades meant I was doing twice as well as before in that tough fight, I was still only doing half as well as I needed. I really should have saved the mats.

When I swapped "my" character out for the new one I'd pulled, though, and another for one of the others, suddenly everything changed.

It was categorically not because I became any more skilled. I did not learn to play or get good or any of that. I just button-mashed as I always do but now it felt like I was on EZ-Mode..

Okay, that isn't entirely fair on me. I did read up on some of the mechanics I hadn't bothered to pay the slightest attention to before. I found out that every Resonator has Intro and Outro skills which means as you swap between them in combat they buff the others or do AE damage or all sorts of things as they come onto the battlefield or retire from it. So I started swapping between them a lot more actively. Not exactly randomly but not with any real understanding either.

And it seemed to help a lot. If I was going to play the game seriously, I'd take the trouble to remember what each of those effects did and use them tactically. I guess at some point I still might have to do that but not yet. For now, just making sure they keep happening in any old order seems to make a big enough difference.

So does not letting the game auto-select your Echoes, a tip I came across while reading about something else entirely. Echoes are the after-images of mobs you kill. You can collect them and use them like pets to fight or heal or buff. You can have up to five at once and only the first one is active. I'd been using that live one a lot but I hadn't even thought about the others.

It turns out the rest combine to give a bonus effect that I think is called a Sonata although please don't quote me on that. (Also I just now realise combat mechanics all seems to use musical descriptors. I wonder if that's significant...?)

There's an auto-select button to fill all five slots that I'd been using but if it follows any logic I have no clue what it would be. I just let it fill the slots and forgot about it. After I read that was a bad idea I kicked out all my Echoes and hand-picked new sets for all my Resonators, making sure they got all the bonuses they were missing and that seemed to make a big difference too.

I had my new team set up, a team in which the character I'd been thinking of as me didn't even rate a place. I had everyone and their weapons upgraded as far as I could get them. I had all my Echoes in a row. I went out into the world and started picking fights with random mobs to see if I felt any tougher. 

Oh boy, did I!

The improvement was so major I thought I might as well go try the tough fight again right away. I ate some kebabs I'd made and drank some tea to buff up my team's attack power and health and in we went. And we fricken' wiped the floor with them! 

Here's how it went:

Before: Best run - half the mobs killed before the timer ran out.

After: All the mobs killed before the timer hit halfway.

You do the math. I'm an Eng. Lit. grad. I just tell stories.

As I said last time, one of the rewards for winning that fight is everything in the outside world suddenly gains about fifteen levels. (I gained five myself, just from all the XP I'd been storing away while I was stuck at UL 20.) I was wary of what a levelled-up world might mean for my fun but the new team handle the higher stuff about the same as the old team handled the lower, so it all worked out fine.

The other reward is slipping the lock on the next chapter of the MSQ plus a whole bunch of side quests that were waiting for my UL to go up before they'd trigger. Looks like I won't be short of stuff to do for quite a while.

For example, as soon as I dinged, Grandpa Jingzhu got in touch again, wanting Chixia and Rover to help him some more in his amorous pursuit of his elderly neighbor Linghan. We did and it all worked out about as well as could be hoped.

The whole thing also turned out to be a more nuanced, complex story than I was expecting. A very unusual one for a game aimed at teens and twenty-somethings, all about aging and failing faculties and the way life stutters to an end. I do wish the translations were better sometimes. I'm not one hundred per cent sure I got all the implications. I think I did.

Either way, the meaning and the emotional impact of the quests, of which there's often a lot more than you'd expect, always comes through, even if some of the finer details get lost occasionally. And the quests can be packed with stuff so it's easy to miss things.

Case in point: that particular quest has a small sidebar about Chixia's real name and why she doesn't want anyone to use it because it's dorky. Her real name, when you learn it, is Chinese. I have no clue what would be embarassing about it but maybe to a Chinese person it would be obvious. I'm not even sure how you'd translate a joke like that so maybe it's asking too much to expect anyone to try.

Despite all that, the upshot is that the game is great, I'm loving it and now I can carry on with the story, which I was finding kinda interesting. Plus no doubt there'll be a million little stories along the way. 

And the little ones are usually the best. Just like Encore.

Old Men, Cats And Emily Bronte

I've had a bunch of ideas for posts about Wuthering Waves bumping around in the back of my mind for a while now, all waiting their turn to be spun up into posts of their own but instead I think I'll just stuff a few into a Friday Grab-Bag get them out there before they go stale.

Before I do, though, I'd like to thank Naithin once again for introducing me to the game, which quite honestly I doubt I'd even have heard of, had he not mentioned it in passing. I've played every day since then and it's been a joy.

I'd also like to thank whoever it was at Kuro Games who thought of naming it Wuthering Waves. Without that, I doubt Naithin's nudge would have moved the dial on my interest.

I still don't know why the game is called what it is. As Redbeard pointed out in the comments, there's really only one association anyone is going to make when they see it and that's Emily Bronte's novel. (Okay, I suppose someone might think of the Genesis album, Wind and Wuthering, but I very much doubt it. And anyway, even that title was inspired by the book.)

At first blush it seems like a bizarre choice, given the game's obvious skew towards a younger audience and the fact that it's, well, a video game made in China but it isn't such an outlandish idea as all that. I don't know how things are elsewhere but where I live the classics are very big with a certain youthful demographic right now. At work, we've hugely expanded our Classic Fiction section and the substantive majority of customers browsing it are teens and twenty-somethings, seemingly buying the books to read for pleasure as much as to study. 

Whether it has anything to do with Tik-Tok I'm not sure, although most trends in bookselling do these days. Among the black spines, though, there have always been certain titles that seem to hold an innate fascination for adolescent and college-age readers. Wuthering Heights holds a prime position on that list.

You might think, if there was a connection of some kind, there'd be evidence of it in the theme or setting but if there is, I haven't been able to spot it. I'm not a big fan of the Brontes but I do know the plots of just about all the novels and I don't recall a lot of magic, guns, monsters or swinging from rooftop to rooftop on a grappling-hook in any of them. 

There is some romance in Wuthering Waves but it's far from central to any of the plots. Most of it so far involves the middle-aged and elderly, of which more later. Pretty-boy villain (Or is he the anti-hero?) Scar does have a little of Heathcliff's smoldering arrogance about him but if it's having the traditional effect on any character in the game they're not on my team. 

However the name came about, I do get the feeling someone at Kuro must have studied Eng. Lit. at college. I just finished a side-quest where I had to go stand in for a guard who hadn't turned up for his shift. I had to hang around at the top of a tower until he turned up, which he did not. The quest was called Wait for Godo.

It's the kind of detail which contributes significantly to my affection for the game, unsurprisingly. If we're going to have irrelevant cultural icons casually shoe-horned into our fantasy roleplaying games, I'd sooner have have Emily Bronte and Samuel Beckett than Haris Pilton any day. And I like Paris Hilton...

Since I mentioned the possible intended age profile of the audience, I feel I ought to offer a retraction of something I said in my Very First Impressions post. I described Wuthering Waves as "an anime world, where no-one looks much over eighteen even if they turn out to be the Magistrate in charge of the city." 

This doesn't give a fair or true impression of the population of Jinzhou and its hinterlands. There are a lot of fresh-faced young folk, for sure, but also a good number of citizens of middle years and more than a sprinkling of elders. Perhaps more surprisingly, senior citizens, particularly retirees, feature prominently in a number of side quests.

In one such quest I enjoyed, my pal Chixia asked me to have a word with her grandfather, who was having some kind of problem. It turned out he was infatuated with a very elegant elderly neighbor, who sadly seemed resistant to his charms. 

The sprightly old fellow wanted to come hunting with us so he could add some more daunting "Echoes" (Hologramatic images of defeated monsters.) to his somewhat feeble collection. For some reason he thought this would influence the woman to receive his attentions favorably. 

It did not. She was singularly unimpressed. I think she thought he was an embarrassment, frankly, and who could blame her? I was embarrassed for him. He, however, seemed perfectly fine about it all. Ah, the resilience of age.

That quest was mostly played for laughs. Another, centering on a retired photo-journalist, who wanted to take some final photographs of locations in the city that held special meaning for him, but who was no longer spry and agile enough to climb up to the vantage points he'd reached in his youth, had a much more elegaic tone. 

Another, lengthy questline involved a senior executive at a mining installation who was beginning to suffer from age-related memory loss. The topic was handled with surprising delicacy, although the translation did it no favors.

All the quests came with a wealth of back-story, revealing something about the lives these old men had led in their younger days. The writing in Wuthering Waves employs a lot of those kinds of textures, making the world feel more substantial and grounded than can often be the case in free to play games and mobile ports. 

The occasionally shaky translation makes the nuances harder to appreciate at times but the sentiment usually makes it through, as do some very revealing cultural differences and assumptions. In some less obvious ways, I think this feels like the one of the most Chinese games I've played.

Another somewhat atypical aspect of Wuthering Waves is the way quests recur in varying forms. The one I wrote about, concerning learning the languages of animals, turned out to be the first in an ongoing series. I've talked to dogs and rabbits so far and I hope there will be more. It's a fun sequence.

I also wrote a while back about a quest I was given to find a missing cat. That turned out to be part of a set of dailies in which the person who persuaded me to find the first one kept calling me up on my communicator and asking me to go look for more.

It wasn't just lost cats or cats stuck up trees. There were also kittens to find homes for and at one point I even met some guy who told me he was a member of the Kitty Rescue Team. The only member, as it turned out and also the "better half" of the crazy cat lady who keeps calling me. I was very surprised to find she had a partner, to be honest...

The cat dailies went on for a while. Each time I found and returned a cat I got to give it a name, which was the best reward of all. The cats I named are still strolling around the little park where I left them. I go visit them sometimes. 

After a while the dailies stopped being about cats and started to be about a very bad portrait painter instead. Then it was a guy who was trying to perfect some kind of sales pitch and wanted to try out his material on me. 

Each of these sequences lasted several days, with roughly the same task (Find cat/Sit for portrait/Listen to jokes.) but completely new dialog each time. Two of the three had a continuing narrative while the third was more of a social construct but they were all very different from the kinds of dailies I'm used to. In fact, if the game hadn't told me, I'd just have thought they were regular side-quests.

Every activity in Wuthering Waves comes freighted with story. I can't think of anything I've done in the game that wasn't. It's a notable feature of the game and it's something I very much appreciate, although it's not hard to imagine others finding it equally annoying. Not everyone wants to have to wade through several screens of fundamentally meaningless chatter just to get a daily done.

If you feel that way, this is probably not the game for you. Nothing happens without some NPC giving you their life story, explaining their reasoning, offering some historical background or telling a lengthy anecdote. Every time I go questing I spend considerably more time reading about why I'm doing it and what other characters think about it than I spend actually doing anything to fix whatever the problem might be.

This is where I really wish the translation was better than it is. Not that it's bad. Not at all. By the standards of imported F2P games it's actually pretty good. 

It isn't consistently good enough, however, to land all of these stories with the impact they deserve. Given how involving and entertaining I find them despite the variable quality of the translation, I can't help wondering how much more satisfying they'd be if they were rendered in fully fluent and demotic English throughout.

Translation is a complex and contentious issue that deserves a full post of its own. I'll have to write one some time. Until then, I'll just say I'd rather read good dialog in a less than perfect translation than poor dialog in perfect English any day. It's only when I literally can't figure out what the characters are supposed to be saying that I lose patience.

Finally, on the topic of things in the game being generally just more than they necessarily needed to be, let me introduce you to Maqi, the Pioneer Association Receptionist. She's really keen to tell you what a great organization it is. Boy, is she ever!

The Pioneer Association, previously known as the Universal Geographic Society, is an organization dedicated to exploring and understanding the world. You can get rewards for doing tasks, something that could easily be handled through the UI and explained via a tutorial tip, a process the game makes extensive use of elsewhere. 

In this case, it doesn't. Instead, you have to go to the Association's plush offices in the city and talk to Maqi. 

Maqi is full of information about the Association and its many public-spirited and commercial activities. She was so convincing, I actually went looking around the reception area to see if I could find copies of Wutherium Geographic or Post-Lament Anthropocene. If there'd been a way to sign up for them to be delivered to my mailbox every month, I'd have subscribed on the spot.

Sadly, this all appears to be flavor text. Still, top marks for effort to whoever wrote it. It's this kind of commitment that makes Wuthering Waves such a pleasure to play. How much longer it will continue is another issue. I've been spoiled by launch content then let down by updates before.

Fortunately, the game appears to be somewhat more successful than other recent favorites of mine, so there's an outside chance more content in this vein could follow. 

I won't count on it but it would be nice...

Why We Fight

Wuthering Waves continues to entertain me very well and for no cost whatsoever. I am starting to wonder how much longer that can go on. I'm at something of an impasse with the game just now.

It's nothing to do with lack of content. There's no shortage of new, interesting things to do and even if there was, there's a major update with a whole new region due to drop tomorrow. I'm not losing interest, either. I'm more than happy to keep playing. I'm having a fine old time.

The problem lies in progression. I'm stuck.

Wuthering Waves is not dissimilar to Genshin Impact in a number of ways, a design choice that's absolutely fine by me. There's nothing whatsoever wrong in taking inspiration from the best. And, as Palworld's creator Takuro Mizobe said in a recent interview, "To make new things is very hard. In game development, of course, sometimes we have to do it, but, as much as possible, I try to avoid creating new things." 

Sound counsel. In most cases, originality isn't all it's cracked up to be. That's not the issue here. The problem is that, much though I enjoyed Genshin Impact, fairly swiftly the skill level required to progress proved to be higher than my personal ceiling. In plain language, the game got too hard and I quit.

I would prefer not to quit Wuthering Waves. I'm enjoying it too much. Considerably more than I ever enjoyed Genshin Impact, in fact, and probably more than I enjoyed Noah's Heart, although I have another post in mind to write about that.

The world is beautiful, charming and fascinating to explore. I like the characters. The quests are varied and often amusing. There are plenty of puzzles, games and non-combat activities, most of which I find fun. Even the main story has managed to hold my interest, despite being basically the same one I've heard in a dozen games I've played over the last ten years.

Even the combat is okay. I do like to kick a little ass in-between all the cat rescues, portrait sittings, improv and match-making. Unfortunately, when it comes to the set-piece, instanced boss fights that gate-keep both story and levels, I'm not having such a great time as all that.

It's mostly my fault. Wuthering Waves is an action rpg and by most accounts I've read, a fairly simple one. Combat relies on timing and observation. You need to read visual cues to know when to dodge so as to minimize the damage you take. You need to build chains and swap team members to maximize the damage you deal. That's about it.

All very straightforward and certainly within my capabilities to learn and execute successfully, given  sufficient practice. The question isn't whether I can do it; it's whether I want to. And thinking about it carefully, I find I don't.

Over the last couple of years two, distinct, apparently contradictory trends in gaming have emerged: coziness and difficulty. The success of the Elden Ring series has revitalized the once-common idea that games should be hard and players should learn to play them. Conversely, titles like Animal Crossing and Stardew Valley have popularized the concept of chilling out in a peaceful environment as a legitimate way to play video games. 

My problem, as I've only recently come to realize, is that what I'm looking for is a combination of both. I want a cozy world with friendly characters and homely activities, but I don't want to faff around farming or romancing. I want to punch monsters in the snoot. 

Except I want that to be cozy, too, and as easy as everything else. Cozy combat. What's so hard to understand about that?

In quite a lot of games I've played there have been ways to manage those kinds of expectations. Some games actually come with difficulty settings. Failing that, you can out-level the fights and come back when they've been reduced to a difficulty you find manageable. You can improve your gear without fighting (Crafting it, buying it...) until you're able to stroll through the fights with little trouble. You can call on friends (Or willing strangers.) to come help.

None of those worked for me in Genshin Impact and I'm pretty sure they won't work in Wuthering Waves either. It's a single-player game for a start, at least at the level I'm at, although I believe it does open up to co-op play later on, Bringing in more people isn't an option, even if I knew anyone who played or I was willing to start making new in-game friends, something I've shown no inclination to do for well over a decade.

It is possible to upgrade gear to a some extent but not enough to make a big difference as far as I can tell. As far as out-leveling the fight I'm having trouble with goes, it just so happens to be same fight that unlocks the next twenty levels, so that's a bit of a Catch 22...

Still, there must be some way to deal with it. After I failed the fight (To be fair, I've only tried once, so for all I know I might have just had some bad rolls. I could win quite easily on a second attempt. That's what happened when I fought Scar, which I think may have been a tougher battle.) I did some research to see if there was a way around it. 

Most of the advice focused on how to play better. I knew immediately I didn't want to play better to beat it. I didn't want to have to deal with it at all. I didn't want to change myself so I could beat the game. I wanted the game to change so I didn't need to.

I realize this is neither a realistic nor a reasonable expectation, although it might well be what drives the economic engine that makes Wuthering Waves a commercial proposition. It is a Gacha game, after all, even though I haven't been playing it as one up to now. 

I think what you're supposed to do, when you get stuck like this, is to spend money in the cash shop in the hope of getting better Resonators. Then, when you get some, you spend more money buying the materials you need to upgrade them.

Do all of that and then, presumably, your team gets stronger and the fights get easier. Except that in my experience it doesn't work that way. I had some very strong characters in Genshin Impact and I remember them doing me not much good at all because, in the end, player skill was still the most important factor and you can't buy that in the cash shop, more's the pity.

Even if I was willing to spend money on Resonators in Wuthering Waves, and even if I thought it would do me any good, there is one more, rather unusual problem: I haven't figured out how to buy them. 

In both Genshin Impact and Noah's Heart, the games constantly pushed you towards ways to obtain new characters. They were both big boosters of the first hit comes free principle. Not so in Wuthering Waves, where the developers seem to want to keep the whole process as much of a secret as possible.

I've been playing Wuthering Waves for close on a month now and I have a grand total of five Resonators, four of which I had by the end of my second session. One is the original character I started with and two are the NPCs I met as soon as I logged into the game. The fourth is an NPC the first two took me to meet immediately afterwards and the fifth is someone I met a little further on in the story, who was given to me as a reward for logging in for five days straight.

Since WW is a gacha game, I have to assume there's some way to buy draws to win Resonators from a pool but as I write this, I still have no idea what it is. I've seen nothing in my packs that opens up to give a free draw. No windows have popped up trying to sell me a bundle. I haven't even been offered one of those starter missions, where you have to go "buy" something for free from the cash shop, just so you know there is one and where to find it. 

I googled but I couldn't find a straightforward explanation of how the gacha process works in this game. In fact, the only way I was able to figure it out so I could write about it was by logging in and clicking on every icon to see what they all did. Thanks to that, I can now claim I know how to use the gacha system in this gacha game I've been playing for a month. I'm not sure that's indicative of a sound marketing strategy.

Just in case anyone cares, this is how it works. There's a system called Convene, which is accessible through an icon like a four-pointed star inside a circle that's always on display at the top left of the screen, alongside several others. I do now very vaguely recall the game demonstrating it at some point but that was when a new mechanic was being introduced every few minutes. I paid no attention and it was never mentioned again.

If you press the icon, a window a menu with several more options appears. Two of those let you draw for Resonators. One is a "Targeted Convene" for weapons and the fourth is the same but for Resonators. What a Targeted Convene might be is not explained.

The draws use a currency called Lustrous Tides. Somehow, I appear to have acquired 72 of those, I have no clue when or how. Each draw costs ten Lustrous Tides but there's a 20% off sale on at the moment so that makes it eight. I just tried it and got a gun, not a Resonator, so weapons would seem to be in the same pool. I wonder if that means they're equally important?

I could go on - there's a button that brings up some very extensive rules and drop chances - but I won't bother with any of that because the points I'm trying to make are unaffected by the minutiae.

My main arguments are that a) I've managed to play very happily for a month so far, without even seeing the gacha system in action and b) I still wouldn't be bothering with it if I hadn't gotten stuck on that boss fight, which from all I've read isn't even considered much of a speed bump by most players.

It started me thinking about what I wanted out of the game. I'm not sure it's what the developers want me to want, which would appear to be to keep spending money to become more powerful. But to what end? I can't even claim to be able to see what the point of getting more powerful in this game is any more. 

If I do, several things will happen. It will allow me to carry on raising my Union Level from 20 to 40, after which I'll need to do another, similar fight, followed by a third at 60, opening the path to the Union Level cap of 80. 

Granted, that has a certain attraction; some instanced content is capped to various Union Levels but, most importantly, it so are some of the chapters of the main story. Less helpfully, it will cause all the mobs in the open world to level up to the new Union Level tier, making fights across the board that much harder. 

On the plus side, it will also alter the loot tables so those mobs drop the correct mats and upgrades for the new tier but that, too, is something of an escalator to nowhere. Why get tougher to fight tougher mobs to get drops so you can get tougher to fight tougher mobs if they're all still the same mobs in the same places?

As must be obvious, that isn't much of an incentive for me. I don't see the appeal of things getting harder so they can keep on getting harder still. And it's not as though I even need to do it. When I stop and think about it, I can enjoy most of what I really like about Wuthering Waves without getting caught in that endless loop.

I'd like to see how the story turns out but I can watch it on YouTube if I want. I already have it bookmarked.  I can carry on exploring the world just as I am and I won't have to worry about the mobs getting tougher. I mostly only fight the ones that aggro on me as I'm exploring, anyway. 

As for all the side quests, regional quest lines, character story arcs and so on, which are the ones I'm enjoying the most, they all seem unaffected by Union Level. As far as I know, I can just keep on doing them. There's no shortage, either. There should be plenty to keep me entertained for a good while yet.

The really weird part, though, is that the game does even have a sort of difficulty setting although it doesn't become available until you win that fight. Once you begin to raise the Union Level cap, you can always go into the settings and reset it back to an earlier tier if you want, even though doing so doesn't stop your own Union Level from rising. 

If I did the fight again and won, I could reset the world to the previous tier and carry on leveling. That way, I'd end up overpowered for everything in the open world, which I admit does have some appeal.

All of this leaves me in a state of confusion about how to carry on, which is the main reason I wrote this post. I'm basically talking out loud to myself as I try to figure it all out.

Thanks for listening. I'll let you know what I decide.

The Revolving Door Into Summer

Somewhat to my surprise, I don't appear to have posted about Wuthering Waves for a couple of weeks. I don't want to give the impression I'm not playing the game any more or even that I've forgotten about it altogether. That would be entirely incorrect. I've just had too much else to write about. There's so much going on in gaming this summer.

Seriously, though, isn't there? Syp posted about it last week, name-checking expansions for Final Fantasy XIV, Elder Scrolls Online, Guild Wars 2 and World of Warcraft. He also mentioned the Tarisland launch, as did both I and Wilhelm (Who was less than impressed.)

Wilhelm also reminded us of another major MMORPG getting a global launch this summer, namely Throne and Liberty, the not-a-sequel to whatever version of Lineage came out last. That one doesn't actually launch until the middle of September but there's a short open beta in July and anyway September is still summer, the way some people reckon it.

Then there's the Anashti Sul server Darkpaw just spun up for EverQuest II and not one but two fresh "Legendary" servers arriving in Lord of the Rings Online next month, all aimed at the surprisingly large number of people still interested in starting over for the umpteenth time in the same games they played years ago, a demographic that apparently no longer includes either Wilhelm or me, at least as far as EQII is concerned.

I could go on. For example, there's Pax Dei, a game I have no interest in but which a lot of people seemed to be very excited about, at least until the developers made the mistake of letting people play it. So many games make that cardinal error. Palworld has its first really big update scheduled to land just three days from now, the same day as the Steam Summer Sale...

Had enough? Because there's plenty more. EVE just launched an expansion. Once Human goes live on 9 July. Even Raph Koster is up to something...

What is it with the summer? Looking just at the games and events I've mentioned, I get the point of a summer launch window for some of them. I'm guessing the demographic interested in playing Tarisland, Throne and Liberty and maybe Palworld probably skews towards school and college age. 

The rest, though? Don't these people have jobs? Do they really take the summer off to play games?

It's almost as though the developers think it's still the 'nineties or the early 2000s, when most people over twenty-five couldn't have told you the name of any video game, unless Hollywood had made a movie out of it. And even then all they'd really be able to say about it would be that the movie was terrible. 

Back then, it probably did make sense to push everything at kids on their long summer break. Catch them when they were all sitting at home, the empty weeks stretching out ahead, nothing to do to kill the boredom but play video games... not to mention their parents, frazzled and flustered, ready to throw a few dollars at anything that might keep the little darlings off their backs for a while.

The world isn't like that any more, is it? Everyone plays games now, grown-ups included. Gaming's not just kids' stuff any more. Or so I'm led to believe.

Yesterday, I watched a recent episode of a mainstream TV quz show in which two contestants in their sixties were asked to identify famous video games from the name of one of the main characters and the initial  letters of the words in the game's title. They couldn't do it but the mere fact the producers thought it was a reasonable question to ask shows how far towards the mainstream video-gaming has moved over the last twenty years.

Some of it is just perception bias, of course. Games don't all come out in the summer. New games and expansions arrive year-round. The carousel never stops spinning. Still, there does seem to be some old thinking behind a lot of the scheduling choices. 

It's long seemed like an odd practice to me and this current glut really draws attention to it. As an adult in employment, I've often thought the time I'd really appreciate some good, new titles and expansions would be the long, dark, inhospitable evenings of winter and early spring. From the New Year until Easter. That's when I get home from work and fins myself with time on my  hands. 

It's also the very slot that did so well for Valheim and Palworld, neither of which I might have found time for had they arrived in the summer. Is it a co-incidence there've been so many unexpected hits around that time of year?

The other big launch window of the year, late November through early December, is even worse for me, although that does have a lot to do with the commercial sector in which I work. It's when I'm at my busiest, with the least interest in - and time for - playing games. Summer may not be ideal for staying inside staring at a screen - at least not when we get some decent weather as we are right now - but it's certainly better for me than right before Christmas.

Then again, if I lived in one of the parts of the world where it's too hot to go outdoors in the summer until after dark and I had good-quality air-conditioning, I guess I might be happy to have something to keep me entertained while I hid from the big burning ball in the sky. 

Where I live, warm, dry sunny days are so rare it feels positively ungrateful to sit indoors when one happens to come along, let alone if there's a whole week of good weather (Fanciful idea, I know...) I sometimes forget it's not like that for everyone. We all look at things from our own perspective too much, sometimes.

And that was a somewhat over-extended introduction to the post about Wuthering Waves I was planning to write but no longer have time for. I ought to keep it in mind for that bit of Blaugust where we share our blogging tips, the specific tip in this case being "Don't do what I just did".

Had I stuck to the script, I would have extemporized on how I'm still playing WW and on what a very good game it's turning out to be. I even had some specific examples in mind, drawn from my many hours of play, ready to drive the point home.

Now I guess all of that will have to wait for next time, assuming I can keep my mind on the job then.

At least I got to use a few of the hundreds of screenshots I've taken so far so I guess my afternoon hasn't been entirely wasted...