Yeah that there is a tortured title.
Last month I caught up in Neverness to Everness but playing it had given me the gacha itch, leading me back to Wuthering Waves, which I played while I waited for NTE version 1.2 to drop. It was a pleasant enough interlude and I enjoyed refamiliarizing myself with the characters and gameplay.
Then NTE 1.2 dropped, and even though it added a whole game-within-a-game (999 Nights) it didn’t take too long to get through it all. I finished it on “Story Mode” and started a second playthrough, played that enough to get all the limited Event rewards and then I was ready to set that game mode aside for a bit. And the ‘real’ game didn’t have much new content, leaving me with not much to do other than grind bosses to level up characters I’m not really using. Oh and I already have the “battle pass” beyond level 50 which is where the interesting rewards end (battle pass levels 51-70 just give currency for every level).
So again, it was back to Wuthering Waves. I am WAY behind on the story content of WW so I’m playing it as if it was a narrative game, not a gacha. I’m using my standard max-level team that I was using when I last played, and I’m focused on just the main story quests (which means often I’m using characters the quest provides anyway).
Playing this way, Wuthering Waves is barely a game. It’s more like a long and intricate anime series with some interactive sections. Wednesday night I started a new quest and played for about an hour. I was still locked into that quest when I had to quit for the night. Thursday when I logged in I was standing next to a portal that took me back to the same quest. I played for just shy of two hours, finally completing the quest. Let that sink in… almost 3 hours on a single quest, nearly all of which took place ‘outside’ of the game world. And most of that 3 hours — I’m going to guestimate at 2.5 hours of it — was basically passive watching. Clicking through dialog, running towards quest markers. Very little combat.
The strange part is: I was totally OK with this. The story was that good. The artwork is that good. The characters are that likable. It maybe helped that I was playing on PC in a dark room, on a wide screen monitor and with my govee lights projecting the colors on-screen across the wall behind my monitor. It was all very immersive!
This was the Rinascita quest (“Dawn Breaks on Dark Tides”) and it came out last October, so I have 9 months of content (I’m guessing that’s 3 or 4 updates) worth of content still to go. I’m psyched. Heck if I catch this up maybe I’ll go try to catch up in Genshin Impact next!
This is why I love these Genshin-like gacha games. They’re my new MMO, essentially. Big, open worlds with tons of things to do, everything from epic questlines to exploration and ‘hobby’ tasks like fishing. Combat of course. Characters to collect and improve on. You can play these games for a LONG time once they’re up and established. I love ’em!
Granted, it’d be nice if we could get a bigger variety of art styles. They’re all pretty heavily anime influenced. Fortunately I still am enjoying that style; I know some friends who are getting rather tired of it, though. But… Galbrena…
I’m sure this is also exactly what other folks don’t like about these games. “If I wanted to watch a TV show, I’d be watching a TV show” is a perfectly valid and justified complaint one might aim at them. Or at Wuthering Waves, anyway. I do think it takes storytelling to extremes that most other games don’t reach.
We still have a few weeks before NTE version 1.3 is expected, so we’ll see if that’s enough time for me to get caught up in Wuthering Waves. Of course I’ve also been giving Diablo IV another go. I finished the base campaign last night.. it was quite a gaming night, defeating both Lilith and Leviathan in the same evening!
Yeah, I don’t have any real point to make other than Wuthering Waves has a great story and just basically… I’m in the mood to express my love of video games. Oh, did I mention I’m still enjoying Solarpunk, too? 🙂
[Notes on AI used in this post: I used AI to remove some subtitling from the portrait of Galbrena]
