Well, this is embarrassing... Remember when I complained about not being able to remember my login details for Wuthering Waves? I wrote a whole post about it under the (entirely intentionally) click-baity title "Wuthering Waves Is Dead To Me Now." Remember how, in that post, I said "I've tried everything and every account I can think of and nothing works"? Yes. Well. About that... It turns out either I didn't try every account after all or else my capacity for thinking is so diminished I probably shouldn't be allowed out on my own. Either way, I now have my account back. So that's good. This morning, for absolutely no good reason other than that I was idly fiddling around on the desktop while I was trying to come up with something to write about today, my attention settled on the Wuthering Waves icon. Since it was there, I thought I might as well update the game, just in case I decided to start over from the beginning again some day or something crazy like that. I figured there might be a biggish update waiting but it couldn't be very big, surely, given I'd patched up about six weeks ago. I was half right. There was an update and it was huge. 56GB. WW (I refuse to call it WuWa. It reminds me too much of Al Pacino going "Hoo-ah!" in Scent of a Woman.) seems to be one of those annoying titles that insists on re-downloading the entire game every time it patches. That annoyed me a little but what it mostly did was remind me that even if I could play the game, which I couldn't, I'd be playing it on GeForce Now anyway, not on my own PC, so I wouldn't need to update it at all. Let some NVidia technician worry about that. Otherwise what am I paying my £6.99 a month for, right? I logged into GFN and started WW going and then I noticed a link that said something about registering your character to see more. Well, you always want to see more, don't you? Unless it's body horror... The link, when I clicked it, opened a dialog that offered me two accounts that were both, apparently, logged in already. I could tell by the names which email addresses they were using and it momentarily made me think one of them might be my original account to which I'd lost access. I went through the various stages to log each of them in and of course neither of them was The One. They were the two new accounts I'd made the last time I did this, each with a single, unplayed Level One character and nothing else. In the process of logging them in to check, though, I reminded myself which two email addresses they were. And neither of them was the one I'd say was the most obvious choice. The one I'd have been likely to use when starting a new game I wasn't planning to play for long. Imagine the screen going all misty as we wind back to how I got started in Wuthering Waves in the first place. It was all because of a passing mention by Naithin, who'd tried the game and not thought all that much of it, mostly because of certain issues he had with the quality of the sound recording as I recall. For some reason. that spurred me to take a look at this oddly-named gacha title and the rest is... well, it's forty posts about the game on this blog for a start. Back then, I wouldn't have been expecting to do much more than take a quick a look, which is why I didn't bother to set up a proper account. I just used Google's very convenient handshake protocol, the one UltrViolet has just implemented to handle comments on his blog. I tend to use it wherever it's offered because it's so easy and saves so much time. This is how billionaires groom us, isn't it? (Adjusts tin-foil hat...) And I'm sure it's very nearly foolproof - if you just use the one gmail address for everything, like a normal person. As I'm only just beginning to realize, though, it's a lot less reliable if you have a couple of dozen of them. I'm really going to need to make a note of which address I use for which application in future and if I'm going to have to do that, I might as well just make a regular account the old-fashioned way. All of this is there and thereabouts a repeat of the process I went through back in June. The one I wrote about in excruciating detail back then. So why am I repeating myself, other than for the sheer, visceral joy of listening to myself talk, of course, always a given on this blog. (I throw that in for any New Blaugustians that may still be plowing through this wall of text in the fading hope some point or purpose might eventually emerge. It won't. Or if it does, it won't be for a while.) Sidebar - New Blaugustians sounds either like the name of a second-tier superhero team, likely made up of characters who never managed to hold down their own title or if they did it only lasted a dozen or so issues. They'd be based in a city like Denver or Omaha, a good way from either coast, which is where all the action in super-hero comics always happens. Or it could be an acid-jazz outfit from the '90s... At this point, if I had any sense, I'd have admitted I was just repeating the same exact steps as last time and I was going to waste another morning on the hopeless task if I didn't accept the loss and move on. It's that saying about not learning from the mistakes of the past, isn't it? You keep on making them. And that other saying about people doing the same things over and over and expecting them to turn out differently... Yeah, well, that's a bunch of crap. And I can prove it. I didn't learn the lesson and I did do the same thing again and it turned out differently! Okay, maybe I didn't do exactly the same thing. Maybe, when I said last time I'd tried "every account", what I really meant was "Every account except the most likely one. The one I should have tired first. The frickin' obvious one." Or, I guess, maybe I did try that one but something else changed since I did it. I'll leave myself an out because who knows what happened? Not me. I won't say I don't care - it would be nice to know for sure - but I will say I'll never find out so there's no point worrying about it. Whatever it was, I'm back in Wuthering Waves on my old character, Califlora. She's level 40 and almost at the end of the Riniscitta storyline. To be precise, she has the final Act and the Segue left to do before starting the next big chunk of main storyline, the one I've missed, which itself is the chapter before the current one, which has just begun. I'm about an update and a quarter behind, I think. Not much further than I was the last time I had to catch up. It's doable. And I've already started. After I spent what felt like half an hour opening a hundred windows to read about dozens of events I didn't understand and clicking on all the rewards that had been patiently awaiting my return, I looked up how to access the content I was trying to play through back in June, the Edgerunners Collab. That event is over now but I thought I remembered reading somewhere that the Night City adventure itself was permanent content. I also seemed to recall you can jump straight into it without having done the MSQ first. It is and you can. It took me some googling to find out how, though. I couldn't figure it out in-game. And even when I did figure it out, I didn't do it. I was about to and then I noticed you can get to Night City more organically by progressing the main story to the point where you reach "the transport dock" in a quest called "What Burns Beneath The Frostlands". I checked how much I'd have to do to get there and it was "only" four quests down the line, in the first Act of "To The Stars Yet To Shine". It's not like I'm in a mad rush. I thought I might as well walk there. Of course, first I'll need to remember how to play. To that end, I worked my way through an exploration quest Califlora had up. She must have been doing it when I last played her although I don't remember it. By the time I'd finished it, I had a vague idea of how things worked. Who I had in my team. Which buttons to press. That sort of thing. Annoyingly, the combat controls are just very slightly different from Neverness To Everness but it didn't seem to make too much difference. It was surprising how fast it all came back. Whether I can juggle two story-heavy gacha games at once is another question. That's a lot of cut-scenes and voice-overs to get through. But I ought to be able to get to Night City, at least. If I buckle down, I might even be there before the next big content drop in NTE, which ought to be in about two to three weeks. If nothing else, it'll give me something new to write about for Blaugust. Always provided I don't forget my login details again...