Crystal Of Atlan: The Fleet's In!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Crystal Of Atlan: Further First Impressions

As you might surmise from the picture above, I have been making some progress in Crystal Of Atlan. I'm Level 27 now. This is as much a surprise to me as anyone. I didn't expect to be playing the game much at all after downloading it on a whim, especially since I'm currently not doing a lot of gaming. And anyway, if I was going to pick the pace back up, wouldn't there be a whole load of games more deserving of my time than this one? 

Well, yes, probably. For a start, Wuthering Waves is far more nuanced, sophisticated and aesthetically satisfying and don't I keep going on about how good the story is there? That game is getting a huge content drop in a few days and I haven't even started the storyline from the last one yet.

So, why am I playing CoA instead of WW? I don't think there's a very straightforward answer to that. It's new, of course, which always helps. It's linear and straightforward, which could be a problem later on but which, at the start, makes the game very accessible and easy to follow. 

It's pretty to look at at and while the visual style says anime, the writing feels a lot like a good old Saturday morning cartoon series. The story skips along cheerily and the characters are broadly drawn but with plenty of personality. 

The witch of the mines. She's a baddie. Or is she?

Structurally, there's just enough choice to make it feel as though you have some agency but really it's a straight through-line you're happy to follow. Everything progresses through a series of "dungeons" that a helpful bot teleports you to on request. There's no traveling as such but you can wander around the fairly large and very attractive non-combat areas to get a sense that you're somewhere with substance.

I'm not entirely sure that there isn't some kind of open-world element to the game, anyway. I was wandering around the city the other day, when I bumped into a zone line that popped up a warning about the next area being some kind of combat-enabled area. It made it sound as if there was an open-world area beyond, where PvP might happen, but I was too chicken to go through and find out. 

I could google it but for the moment I'm in that honeymoon phase, where I want everything to surprise me, so I haven't. That's always a sign of a well-designed game and CoA is nothing if not well-designed.

The most significant reason I find myself wanting to log into this game at the moment, rather than any of the dozen or more others I could be playing, is the torrent of new systems and mechanics that just keep on coming. This is true of most games and accounts for a great deal of the excitement and enthusiasm I have for starting over in new ones all the time. 

Classic example; the game told me how to change my appearance and I did but then I still looked the same after. Now I have to figure out how it works, which is my idea of a good time.

It's absolutely an Explorer Archetype thing and if there was ever any doubt that that's my segment of the pie chart, this blog, with its never-ending drip-feed of First Impressions and game reports from the early and mid-levels of games I never go on to play at endgame, proves it. 

I'm sure the exact same aspects of this and many other games, the long introductions where you learn how the game works and what you have to do to survive and prosper in the world that's being revealed, are the very parts that drive so many new players to give up and log out, never to return. A lot of people just want to get on and play the damn game, not fiddle-faddle about with ninety-seven different ways to do stuff they don't care about and never will but for me it's like unwrapping a huge pile of presents under the tree.

And modern F2P titles really do go nuts with the things they give you to do. After a while it does indeed become too much and I'm noticing almost as many burnout stories cropping up in blog posts over there being just too damn many things to do in games these days as there used to be about how much of our lives had to be given over to getting to the point where we could do anything much at all.

The big difference I see between the two eras is that for the most part, the filler developers use to keep us busy these days is far more avoidable than it used to be. The open-world RPGs that are broadly replacing MMOs scarcely seem to respect our time any more than EverQuest or the rest ever did but they also seem a lot more amenable to casual play. You can spend a ton of time and money on them, sure, but you can entertain yourself very nicely in short bursts for free, too.

Building up your vinyl collection: A lot cheaper here than in real life.

How long that will persist in Crystal of Atlan I'm not so sure. One of the main reasons I'm so positive about Wuthering Waves is that so far it's proved not just possible but quite easy to keep up with the main storyline simply by... playing through the main storyline. 

Unlike Genshin Impact, generally acknowledged as the founder of and trend-setter for the genre, a game I liked but had to give up after a few weeks because the fights just got too hard, or even Noah's Heart, where I lasted a lot longer but eventually fell off the main story for the same reason, combat in storyline instances in Wuthering Waves has actually gotten easier as time's gone on. I don't know how long that can last, especially given that the whole business model presumably relies on players wanting to get the latest Resonators for some practical purpose, not just to fill out their collections, but I'm very much there for it so long as it does.

In Crystal of Atlan, though, I can already see the fights becoming more challenging and requiring more skill and I'm not even out of the introductory phase just yet. I wouldn't say I was still in the tutorial but the lessons are still coming even though the story is fully engaged. 

NuVerse make a big thing of how their game isn't a Gacha but of course it is. The swerve is that you don't roll for characters to do the fighting for you, so in that respect I do think it's quite likely the impact of increased difficulty will fall on players' skill instead of  their wallets. 

I know it looks like one but that's not a skill tree. It's the gear progression table and there's a screen like that for every slot on the paper-doll. I mean... why??

Unfortunately for me, I don't have much in the way of skill when it comes to action RPGs and perhaps worse I have a very low tolerance indeed for skill trees, builds and all that kind of nonsense. I never liked it much but the longer I've had to put up with it, the more I'm beginning to see it in much the same way other players see slow leveling or lengthy travel or long blocks of quest text or endless cut scenes: an annoying waste of my time that I should be able to click through or that the game should just take over and do for me.

It's more than just a lack of interest or enthusiasm on my part. I actively dislike having to read skill descriptions and I really, really hate having to try and figure out which one has synergy with which other one. I just want to hit stuff with a big stick or shoot it with a gun and leave it at that. 

So long as I can get away with button-mashing I'll put up with it but once I have to start thinkiong about sequences and putting combos together it all starts to become work. And if I'm going to do work, I either want to get paid for it or have something solid to show for it at the end. 

Beating a boss, just so I can go on to beat the next boss, doesn't motivate me in the same way painting the kitchen wall does. I really don't want to paint the kitchen wall either but at least when I've done it I have a better-looking kitchen and the comfortable knowledge that I won't have to do it again for a few years.

Never mix it with the maid.

Given the way Crystal of Atlan is constructed, I would imagine my time with it will be short for that reason alone. I'm guessing that when the time comes that I can't beat a boss in a storyline dungeon my ability to progress will be put on hold until I figure out how to do it, which I won't because I'll just stop and play something else instead.

Or maybe that won't happen. Maybe I'm negatively projecting. Maybe the devs have already thought about that. There was this odd thing the other day when I was playing...

I was right in the middle of a very hectic fight in a dungeon when Beryl came bouncing in, barking and jumping up at me and instead of carrying on with the fight I stopped and took her out to play. When I came back, my character had died (I literally abandoned her in the middle of a fight so it would have been very odd if she hadn't.).

It was the first time I'd died in the game so I wasn't sure what would happen but I figured at least I'd have to start the instance over from the last save point. Instead, I just ended up back at the questgiver, who congratulated me on a job well done, as though I'd finished the whole dungeon, and the story just carried on. I haven't deliberately gotten myself killed again to test it but wouldn't it be nice if the game just patted you on the head every time you died and gave you a pass to the next stage?

Spoiler: She's down but she's not going to stay down.

Yeah, I doubt that's going to happen. I think the way it's supposed to go is that you start engaging with all the many improvement and enhancement mechanics they've been introuducing you to over the first twenty-five levels and learn to git gud.

I've been shown how to upgrade my armor with spare parts I can get by dis-assembling my old stuff. I've been shown how to socket circuits to make it more powerful. I've been shown how to spend points in the many talent trees. I've been tested to see which Class specialization I'd like to take up and given a whole new skill tree for that. 

I've been introduced to the idea of hiring pets to help me. Pets who have their own stats and skill trees and the whole shebang. You can collect pets and you can have two up at once. And then there are the "cosmetic" clothes, the outfits and what-not. Those turn out to have stats, too. And you can collect those as well. At least they don't seem to have talent trees.

Hmm. "Fleets"? I seem to have missed that one...

It's early days and there's a lot I don't understand yet but it does appear to me that the whole "We don't do Gacha" thing falls apart quite fast when you spot that both pets and costumes, for both of which there most definitely is a gacha mechanic, directly affect your combat-worthiness. Not that I care, since I won't be paying for pulls, but it does seem a tad shifty.

Then again, maybe if you can actually play the game - if you have the knowledge and motivation to figure out a good build and the speed and dexterity to use it effectively - the added boost from pets and cosmetics is just icing on the I Know What I'm Doing cake.

I don't know what I'm doing and I'm not afraid to admit it. But I'm having plenty of fun all the same. We'll see how long that lasts.

Follow The Money

 

After I finished playing Wuthering Waves this afternoon I found myself thinking about a couple of things I remembered Naithin and Nimgimli saying about the game. 

In a comment on the post about how good the story is, Nimgimli, astutely observing that it never seems like I spend any money on Wuthering Waves and yet still seem to get an enormous amount of entertainment out of it, wondered "where is the "gacha" incentive in all this?"

Naithin, meanwhile, mentioned on his blog that he's "done with the main story but recently increased my ‘Union Level’ (aka, account level) high enough that I can max out my characters and weapons to 90."

I am not quite done with the story in Riniscita. I'm nearer the end than the beginning, but my "Union Level" is just 35. As for the gacha part of the game, far from spending money on a chance of getting new Resonators or better weapons, I have barely even touched the free pulls they hand out.

By almost any standard, I am bad at Wuthering Waves. I make minimal efforts to upgrade my team and I have only the most basic understanding of what any of their attacks or abilities do. As for the combos you're supposed to build from interactions between the abilities of different Resonators, I don't even have the basics.

I did figure out how to heal my team, finally. You have to have a healer! Who knew?! I didn't even have one in the team until I got to the Black Shores. No wonder I kept dying.

One thing I do know how to do is knock opponents into the air and keep them there like juggling balls. That's basically a stun-lock so it helps me take less damage, even if it is a drag on DPS.

I've also worked out out that if I swap team members in and out of combat all the time it's better than sticking with just one but anything more subtle than that is beyond me. I don't really have a clue. And yet, even though my level is less than half of Naithin's and my skill probably less than half that again, it seems the game is happy to let me see the same content without either learning to play or spending money.

I'm all too aware that could stop at any moment, particularly when I run up against the inevitable "bosses". My minimal research tells me there are four in the Riniscita storyline and so far I've only had to deal with the first: Lorelei. That went very well. 

There are a lot of guides to the fight online but I didn't read any of them until after I beat her on my first attempt. I wanted to see if I'd missed anything and it seems I did.

Apparently, all the bosses in the new update have "a lot more going on than anything from the 1.0 content." You could have fooled me. I just button-mashed as usual and it went better than many of the bosses I recall having considerably more trouble with, much earlier in the game. 

It wasn't a complete cakewalk. One of my team died early on but it wasn't the healer and it didn't seem to make all that much difference, mostly because it was Sanhua, who I only added to the squad because a guide I read suggested she would synergize well with Rover, the default player-character. 

She didn't, particularly, mostly because I didn't really know what to do with her. Also, I think she was supposed to go well with the Spectro version of Rover, which I was playing at the time, but now I've swapped to o the Havoc version so I ought to rethink the whole thing. 

I've never gotten on with her. She's always the first to die, even though she's supposed to be a tank. I'll be happy to see the back of her. I'll keep her for now but I'm going to drop her for someone else the moment I run into a boss I can't beat.

The fight itself wasn't much fun but then none of the boss fights ever have been in any gacha game I've played. They're clearly designed for people who enjoy a lot more complicated dancing and dodging about than I do. I like to stand in one place and thump things or, failing that, keep my distance and shoot stuff. All that fancy footwork gives me cramp.

The fact that I'm somehow still able to progress comfortably through the storyline despite being both temperamentally unsuited to the mechanics and fundamentally unwilling to do anything much to change that suggests, as Nimgimli says, " the content [in other gacha games] gets harder and you need better characters or better gear to tone down the difficulty, and both of those you often get via the gacha mechanics, but that doesn't seem to be the case here."

As the difference in level between myself and Naithin as we move (At very different paces, it has to be said.) through the same content attests, it's not a case of leveling up to make things easier on yourself, either. If it was, that would be a way for the game to make money, since raising just about any stat or attribute requires a ton of materials, all of which you can farm but might well prefer to buy for cash. Nearly all of them are for sale in the store. 

I guess a lot of people must be doing just that because it seems Wuthering Waves is highly profitable. If you google "how commercially successful is Wuthering Waves?", you'll get a slew of articles about the huge amount of money the game is making. There's a website that keeps track of such things (Or tries to - there's some guesstimating.) and according to their figures, WW made $28m in January.

That was a huge bump up on the back of the update because December brought in just $7.75m, down from November's $18.25m. Those are just the mobile numbers, though. Who knows how much the desktop client adds?

And really, even at just under $8m a month, its a lot of money, isn't it? I do have to wonder, like Nimgimli, where it's all coming from. Apart from those mats I mentioned, they barely seem to sell anything in the store. 

It's only in 2025 that you've been able to buy cosmetic outfits and so far there are only two of them, although I suspect here may be more soon. While I was playing, I spotted yet another survey in the in-game mail. The developers send out a lot of surveys and they pay in-game currency for filling them out. I always fill them in but they don't need to bribe me. I love completing surveys.

This one began with some general questions on the Riniscita update then moved to specifics about those two outfits. There were a lot of quite questions and I'd have liked to have answered them all but I had to stick with Unable To Comment for the lot. I haven't even looked at the get-ups in the shop, let alone bought them to see how they look an actual character. 

I would, though, if I could wear them on characters of my choosing. Annoyingly, that's not generally how gacha games work. The characters are all individuals, separate from "your" character, who you might very well not even include in your team, and you can't usually dress them up in each others' clothes.

You could in Noah's Heart. That was the main reason I spent so long with the game. It's the only gacha game I've played where you could have your character wear clothes normally worn by other members of your team. Even better, they came as Outfits but also as separates you could mix and match. And you could craft some of them in game, without having to buy them in the store. And Noah's Heart had housing! How did it fail?

Once again, I used the feedback section at the end to suggest they consider adding clothes, pets and housing. At this point, I wouldn't even mind if it was only in the store. I really like Wuthering Waves and I'd be willing to pay cash for some added cosmetic value - if only they'd sell me something I wanted.

Given the nature of the survey, maybe they're thinking about it. I hope so. I would certainly prefer a shop full of frocks to one full of things I can already get as drops in the game and don't much want when I do. 

And I certainly hope they don't get any bright ideas about turning the screw on difficulty. I'm enjoying this easy-mode playstyle and I'd like to keep it going as long as possible. I'd far rather they made money by playing on our vanity rather than our frustration.

For now, though, I'm keeping my fingers crossed they 're making enough money out of whoever it is who's paying however much it is for whatever they're buying already.

Be Careful What You Wish For: Gacha Mechanics In Once Human

It's been a while since I last found myself playing a new game that others in this part of the blogosphere were also playing - and writing about. I'm going to have rate the experience "Mixed", as Steam would have it. On the one hand, it's great to read other peoples' takes on the gameplay, the story and the setting but things can get way too spoilerific for my taste, even just in screenshots.

Every time someone posts about Once Human I'm torn between wanting to know what they think about the stuff I've already seen and not wanting to know what they've found that I don't know about yet. I haven't even opened Heartless Gamer's post on Once Human Surprises because I know he's much further into the storyline than I am and I'm scared of what I might learn. 

Ditto Scopique, who I'm sure has also progressed much faster through the storyline than me. Also the title of his latest post on the game - Once Human, Twice Shy, makes me think he's going to tear it apart and I don't really want the negativity. (Apologies to Scopique if that's a misinterpretation but titles are there to do a job and that's the job that one did on me. Great title, though.)

I did read Azuriel's Impressions post because I figured - it's a first impressions post! How spoilery could it be? Well, quite spoilery as it turns out, although in an interesting and useful way.

In the post Azuriel compares the game to the Fallout series, specifically Fallout 76, an impression shared by Nimgimli in a comment here. As I've said, I've never really gotten on with the Fallout games for a variety of aesthetic, conceptual and gameplay reasons but the similarity is fairly apparent just from what I've read. 

That didn't surprise me but something Azuriel said in a reply to a comment I made did. He referred to a "gacha arcade game" within Once Human, which I initially misread as a description of Once human itself but by which he was actually referring to the Wish Machine, something I'd encountered in beta but completely forgotten.

I thought I'd posted something about the Wish Machine back then but if I did I can't find it now. Just a picture in the Mid-Beta Review to prove I knew about it. From memory, at that time the machine was just a fun mini-game that gave trivial rewards. I seem to recall trying it a couple of times then not bothering any more.

From things I've read since, it appears the functionality changed in later testing until we get to the current Live situation, where the Wish Machine becomes a very important tool of progression. As Azuriel puts it "the Wish machine unlocks gun blueprints that are absolutely stronger than I have access to currently."

It certainly does and a lot more, too. It unlocks Legendary weapons and Armor sets. The machine is very clearly not a toy any more. Is it a gacha game, though?

Hell yes! It is precisely what Azuriel said it was: a gacha arcade game. I'm so used to hearing the term "gacha game" used to describe a specific genre of online video games, largely popularized in the West by the enormous success of Genshin Impact, that I didn't realize he was being entirely literal.

For the one or two people reading this who might not know (Actually, I did know and could swear I'd written about it already...) but had forgotten, the term "gacha", as used in online gaming, is a loan-word borrowed from Japanese, where it refers to those machines you often see outside supermarkets, (Where I live, at least.) that dispense small toys randomly when you insert a coin and turn a handle.

Apparently you can also get arcade versions, where you play a simple game and the same thing happens, although I have to say I'm finding that surprisingly hard to verify. None of the photos or descriptions I've found shows toys being delivered by those kinds of devices.

That's exactly what the Wish Machine is like though. It's a Whack-A-Mole game in a classic arcade cabinet that you can get through a quest in Deadsville or simply craft by spending the necessary mimetics to open the option on the tree. I made mine last night and almost immediately, in fact possibly as a direct result, also received the quest, the main purpose of which appears to be to give some lore-related context to the whole thing.

The Wish Machine in the quest is a Deviant by the name of Mr. Wish, who turns up outside Deadsville and freaks out the guards. As the local Mayfly, a status extraordinarily similar to being one of the A-Team, namely an itinerant do-gooder recognized by those in the know and called upon to fix pretty much any local problem, naturally the guards want you to go talk to the thing because, yes, it can talk...

I quite like the lore element although like most things in the game (And indeed most lore in most games...) it's hand-waving nonsense. There's a lot of stuff about Space and Time but in the end it comes down to loot, just like always.

And it's good loot, too. I'm not up to speed with all the color-coded qualities in Once Human but I've played more than enough games to know Purple is always good and Orange is usually even better. There are lots of purple and orange items you can win and that ought to be encouragement enough for anyone to drop some coins and pull the handle.

At this point I ought to make it quite clear that no actual money is changing hands here - or at least not necessarily. This might be a gacha machine but Once human is not a gacha game per se. The Wish machine takes an in-game currency called Starchrom and there are numerous ways to get some. I'd list them all but GameRant already did an exemplary job of that, along with a very clear description of how to spend it in the Wish Machine, so I'm just going to link to their excellent guide.

As they explain, if you have the patience of a five-year old and the disposable income of a trust fund brat you can just pony up for the inevitable Battle Pass, which comes with a Starchrom stipend. Otherwise, just play the game and the necessary coins will rain down. I didn't even know what they were for and I certainly didn't go looking for them and yet, by the time I made my Wish Machine, I already had over three thousand of the damn things.

After my first pull I had a thousand fewer. Not because it's a thousand a pull (I think it's 500 but I got a 90% discount for my first ten pulls. Or something) but because I had no clue what I was doing so I just picked what looked like the most obvious buttons to press and that's what it cost. I've read several guides since and frankly I still don't really understand the intricacies but the gist is spend Starchrom, get blueprints, get more Starchrom, repeat.

First time out, I got a Purple rifle (In more ways than one.) along with a bunch of lesser items. Then I went off to do something else, ran into a world event, had a couple of people join me, beat it and ended up with more Starchrom than I started with - so I immediately went and had another go.

If I had the patience I was taking other people to task for not having earlier, I'd stop playing the gacha game and just save my Starchrom for the things I really want. Always assuming I had any idea what those might be. That's because, if you prefer, you can opt right out of the gacha part and just buy what you want straight from the machine.

The Wish Machine is really just a gacha skin for a game system much more familiar to Western players: a Token shop. The Blueprint Store, accessible from the Wish Machine, contains all the same items you can win, at prices that, while fairly steep, are by no means unaffordable, especially given you don't have to waste any currency on things you neither need nor want. 

I have to say that for me rolling the dice and seeing what comes up is usually more fun than just buying stuff from a storefront, something I remember first seeing introduced in Dark Age of Camelot, much to my displeasure at the time. I'm a long-standing supporter of most kinds of randomized loot systems provided they only require in-game resources and getting to hit things with a mallet while I'm spinning the wheel just adds to the entertainment. Still, it's always nice to know you have the choice.

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.

Just Browsing

One thing I rarely cover in any real detail when posting about the many Free To Play titles I enjoy is the monetization that keeps them going. Not that they get any money from me. I am the absolute definition of a leech when it comes to these things. 

Developers must hate me. I've enjoyed many hundreds of hours of absolutely free entertainment at their expense. I don't believe I've ever spent a single penny on a fully F2P title. In almost all cases I've never even been tempted. It hardly ever feels like anything I'd want, let alone need, to do.

Very occasionally I toy with the idea of spending a small amount of money - five or ten dollars perhaps - almost as much to show willing as for any practical purpose. In every case, though, the feeling swiftly passes and I keep my credit card in my wallet.

The thing that really surprises me about all these games is that they can make money using these methods at all. It seems to me that F2P titles are, almost by definition, likely to attract people who either don't have the disposable income to buy higher-quality titles or who are, like me, simply too mean to spend money when they don't have to.

I'm aware there are those individuals we sometimes call "whales" who, either because they literally have more money than they know what to do with or because they have psychological issues that mitigate against self-control, are willing to spend extremely large amounts of money to get what they want, even when most of that money, thanks to the various lockbox and gacha mechanics the games employ, goes to waste.

I'm also aware there are people who budget their expenditure in video games in the same way they budget for eating out or going to the movies; people for whom spending ten or twenty dollars a week on a game they enjoy is a rational and reasonable expense. 

All of this I understand intellectually but emotionally it makes no sense to me. My experience of every F2P game I've found worth playing for any significant amount of time has always been that I get more free stuff given me than I'm able to use and that everything I need to fully enjoy my time is available purely by playing the game. 

When I look at the cash shops in most games, F2P or otherwise, I do wonder occasionally what it is that other people are seeing that I'm not. I played Guild Wars 2 for a decade and one of my constant complaints was that there was pretty much nothing in the cash shop I wanted. It's full of ugly outfits I wouldn't wear on a bet and utilities that offer no real convenience. I am very clearly not the target market for whoever designs these things.

Even when the cash shop is pretty good, which is the case with EverQuest II, I still find it hard to spend much money there. Experience tells me that when I do buy things like the Prestige Homes I never use them, so why bother? I'd have to decorate them and then live in them and I already have two huge homes I can barely keep in order, as it is.

A few years ago there seemed to be something of a convention among F2P titles to make at least some of their money by selling not just convenient shortcuts or fancy clothes but the bare necessities required to play the game at all. Allods Online, an excellent game in many ways and one of the early WoW clones deemed most likely to succeed, famously scuppered its considerable chances by employing a punishing death mechanic that required cash shop items to mitigate.

Allods also played the inconvenience card hard with some of the meagrest inventory allocation I've ever seen. Making players get their wallets out to solve the ever-annoying problem of running out of storage space has been a classic money-spinner for a long time and not just in F2P titles either, but it finally seems to be going out of fashion.

It's been a good while since I've found myself struggling to manage my inventory in a F2P game. The last three titles I've spent a lot of time playing - Chimeraland, Noah's Heart and now Dawnlands - all offer far more storage for free than I'm ever likely to use. Neither do any of them restrict instant travel or put up annoying barriers that need real cash payments to remove.

They don't use lockboxes, either. It's a while since I've seen one of those drop in any game I play. They're still very prevalent in older titles but the newer ones don't seem to bother with them at all.  

The current fashion seems to be for Gacha mechanics that are supposedly tied directly to progression. It's a mechanic that most Western players probably knew little about a few years ago but with which, thanks to global success of titles like Genshin Impact, we're all now quite familiar.

When I first encountered the draw mechanic I found it quite exciting, although never so much so that I wanted to pay for the thrill. Still, making my free rolls, watching the explosive animations and finding out what I'd won kept me happily entertained until the novelty wore off. 

The problem with a system that relies on building teams of characters and powering them up, at least from my point of view, is that I hugely prefer to stick with one set of characters that I know. I strongly dislike swapping characters in a team in and out as though they were weapons - I don't even much like swapping actual weapons ffs.

I am very much a set-and-forget player. I like to put in quite a lot of effort to get my character or team just right and then leave them to get on with their job, preferably for the entire time I play the game from then on. If I want to try another character I would much prefer to roll another character and start over. I'm on board with the old adage that you shouldn't change horses in the middle of a stream.

That makes me a particularly bad bet for making money out of when you rely on gacha mechanics, although as I think I've made clear, I'm a pretty bad bet in most other respects as well. If you want my money as a game developer you're most likely going to need to make me pay for content, which these days seems to be the one thing all developers are happiest to hand out for free.

All of this makes it very hard for me to understand when game games like Dawnlands receive such virulent criticism for employing monetization practices derived from the mobile market, where selling overpriced cosmetics, inconvenience and power have long been considered normal. It always seems to me that even if such practices have been imported to the PC versions of the games, PC gamers ought to be able just to ignore them.

It's something I find very easy to do for reasons other than my personal preferences. For the most part, the promotions are sequestered in separate segments of the UI. If you aren't interested then it's quite simple not to click on the icons. It's like walking through a market; you're not obligated to stop and buy something every time a stallholder catches your eye. You can just walk on.

Of course, if you do have the willpower to resist completely, you'll miss out on a bunch of freebies. Most of the many events designed to separate you from your savings come with some kind of sweetener to get your attention. Increasingly, I'm finding that they also offer considerable opportunities to indulge while spending only in-game coin, too.

That's obviously intended as a lead-in to spending real money but in-game coin is where I stop. I spent much of the last twelve months doing all kinds of events in Noah's Heart, most of which could have led me on to buying premium currency so I could carry on, except of course I didn't. I just stopped when it wasn't free any more. 

It was noticeable that after a few months most of the free events in that game converted to payment-only, a move that merely highlighted what dull events they were and emphasized what a bad idea it would be to spend money on any of them. At the same time, my stash of unused Gacha cards for summoning Phantoms grew and grew. By the time I drifted away from the game I had more than seven hundred unused pulls. 

One thing all the newer games do is tell you the odds. No-one can claim they didn't know their chances of getting the exact thing they wanted were slim. Dawnlands has a very elegant and detailed breakdown of the exact percentages involved. As is common with these systems, it also tells you just how many times you have to fail before the game takes pity on you and throws you a bone.

Where the game differs from most is that the range of highly desirable items on offer is both very limited and worth having, although I realize the latter is a  matter of taste and opinion. This is probably a function of the age of the game. It's very new. Even so, a cash shop with only two outfits seems extremely restrained. 

Yesterday we got a new Event, the third since launch. The first event, which is still running, involves making a video about the game and publishing it on YouTube although, as I found out a couple of days ago, you get fifty Diamonds just for clicking through to the web page that tells you how it works.

The second event, also still running, features a friendly creature called Carromu who, as the event title tells you, is always hungry. Carromu doesn't like to eat Diamonds (Who does?) so he's happy to swap his for all kinds of stuff you probably already have lying about. He just turns up in your camp one day and sits there, waiting for you to feed him. If there's any way for that event to generate income for the developer I can't see what it is. I think it's just a clean, fun event.

The new event is the game's first try at persuading you to part with some cash. It's a Gacha sale. 

As a survival/crafting game with no PvP or PvE ladder competitions, Dawnlands doesn't really have the kind of structure that supports the gacha mechanics I've seen elsewhere. On the basis of the first event, it looks like the solution is to randomize access to the kinds of things that would otherwise be straightforward premium purchases in the cash shop.

It doesn't really feel like a Gacha mechanic so much as a lockbox with out the box. It even has a fricken key as the Gacha item! You can buy the keys with Diamonds, which are an in-game currency, so I bought one to try it out. Having read the odds, I wasn't expecting much and not much is what I got.

Protected by my psychology as already described, I will not be bankrupting myself trying to win any of the admittedly rather spiffy prizes. Not even the really rather fetching bunny costume, complete with carrot holster and carrots. Nor Dodo, the cute-looking, catlike Follower, who is, apparently, "a great helper when exploring unknown lands"

Those two plus a very fancy piece of furniture are the big ticket items, although I'd be pretty pissed off if I made the required 2% roll and got a glorified garden bench. Someone obviously believes home-makers are a major demographic in the game because the second tier (10% chance.) is all furniture too, as is more than half of the bottom tier (88%. Oh, you figured that out already...)

As with everything in Dawnlands, the whole event is beautifully presented. The game has a consistently delightful aesthetic. It makes browsing the menu a pleasure in itself even when you know you're not going to sit down for the meal.

I might indulge in the occasional snack, all the same but it won't be often with keys costing 80 Diamonds a time. That feels quite steep, even with the 10% discount you get on your first ten puchases. As for paying real money, forget it.

As an indication of the way monetization in the game is headed, though, I find it perfectly acceptable. I'm enjoying just looking at the items and admiring the designs and the images. In real life, I can usually get at least as much satisfaction from window shopping as from buying the stuff. In games I'm equally happy just to look.

God, those devs must really hate players like me...