Nightingale City - I Guess It's Not Going Anywhere...

There was a big surprise for me in today's gaming news - the sudden appearance of Nightingale City. I knew it was in the works but with Nightingale already receding into the nostalgic past (It happens so quickly these days.) I really wasn't expecting it to happen any time soon - if at all.

The update had actually been trailed but I have to admit it's been a while since I read any of the PR or watched any of the regular "Dev Bites" videos, where the two main voices left to talk up the game banter amiably and long-windedly with each other about how things are going.

It's here, though, whether I was expecting it or not, the missing piece without which the game always felt unfinished. Which, of course, it was. That's what Early Access means. 

Still, it always seemed like an error of judgment to hang an entire plot on getting to somewhere you couldn't ever go. I certainly wouldn't claim it was why I stopped playing but it was the main reason I felt unsatisfied when I did. It was like walking out half-way through the final act of a play.

Well, now the story has a proper ending at last. Or it might, at least. I'll tell you when I get there.

 Unfortunately, due to the bizarre and illogical way the game has fractured and split over its short life (The first anniversary only came around a few weeks ago.) I'm not in a position to just log in and go see what Nightingale City looks like. First I have to navigate the long and arduous path to get back to where I was when I gave up the first time.

The problem is that I started over when the Realms Rebuilt update soft-relaunched the game. As I recall it, you couldn't transfer existing characters into the new version and I wanted to see the new content so I could  post about it, so I re-rolled.

Which would be fine if I'd gotten that character as far as the first one but I didn't. I played through the new stuff until I hit the point where it was obvious I was going to have to repeat a lot of the same quests to carry on with the story and that didn't seem very appealing. So I stopped for the second time. And I haven't been back.

Inflexion Games is nothing if not accommodating so I didn't lose my old character. She's just immured behind the wall of what they call Legacy Mode. I'm pretty sure Legacy Mode doesn't get any updates but just to be sure I'm patching it up right now so I can log in and check Nightingale City hasn't made it back to the past. 

It would save me an awful lot of time if I was wrong and it would be very annoying to find out later I could have been where i needed to be in half an hour, not a few weeks. I can patch the old version back in the time it takes me to write this, so why not? It'll be nice to say Hi to my old character again, too. 

I did Google it first to see if I could save myself even that minimal effort but up-to-date information on Nightingale isn't that easy to come by. Not that it matters. It takes a while to swap between the two versions, since it relies on a kludge using Steam's beta testing process so the entire game needs to be re-patched each time you move one way or the other, but it's still a lot faster than leveling up is going to be. Might as well do it as not.

Assuming it isn't going to work, though (And I'm 99.9% sure it's not.) I'm guessing it's going to take me a good few hours of leveling to get to the point where I can take some screenshots of the rediscovered center of civilization. What's more, those hours are going to be spread across a number of weeks, if my current unwillingness to do any gaming at all is any guide. It might be summer before I get there. 

The real question is can I be bothered? I do want to see the place but there are other ways to do it. The update is less than a day old and there aren't any videos on YouTube yet, other than the official trailers, but no doubt there will be. Is there any game so obscure or unpopular that no-one uploads videos of them playing it?

Watching videos isn't the same as playing yourself but it's one hell of a lot quicker. I'm sure the time will come when I'm in a game-playing frame of mind and a few dozen more hours in Nightingale will seem like a rare treat. I'm certainly not there now, though.

I'm minded to wonder whether it wouldn't be better to save the whole thing for a time when I might actually appreciate it, rather than be mildly aggravated that it's turned up unexpectedly and demanded my attention. What's the opposite of FOMO? Because I think I might be suffering from it.

FOBO, I think it must be - Fear Of Being Obligated. I feel like I ought to want to go see Nightingale City. I was complaining for long enough about not being able to, after all. I feel I ought to do it just so I can post about it. Only I don't want to, not if it's going to be all this trouble.

The Legacy version patched while I was writing. I've been in and had a look around. Of course there's no Nightingale City there. How could there be? Legacy is time-locked. Nothing will ever change. 

So now I'm swapping back to the live build. That'll take a while and then I'll have to have a think about what to do next. 

If I do decide to carry on I imagine I'll post something about it soon enough. If I don't then I didn't, if you get my drift. Right now I feel like I won't but who knows? It's not like I ever really know what I'm going to be doing from one day to the next...

Friday's (Fail To) Grab Bag

  No nonsense. Just get on with it. Mostly games this time. A little music at the end.

Hope You Like Our New Lack Of Direction

I'm about ready to call the Nightingale: Realms Rebuilt revamp a bust. I have more than a hundred and sixty hours in the game since it went into Early Access, thirty-five hours since the new version arrived, benched my old character and mandated a re-start. 

It's the same game.

I suspected as much almost from the start but last night I beat the fourth boss to win access to the fifth "storied" realm and found myself back on the exact same path I was traveling months ago. There's Nellie Bly, standing on top of a spur of rock next to a decommissioned portal, explaining you'll never get to Nightingale so you might as well help her fix the machine so you can go to somewhere else, a place she's found called The Watch.

I was honestly hoping never to see The Watch again. It's where the old game ran into the buffers of a half-assed, unfinished "end game", in which a solo rpg morphed clumsily into a lobby MMO with no point or purpose. I was dearly hoping that would be the part of the game they'd fixed because it really, really needed it, whereas most of the parts they have changed didn't need it anything like as much but it looks like all the effort has gone into the crafting tidy-up. That and those so-called "stories", absolutely none of which I noticed as I followed a series of repetitive tasks and battled a series of tedious bosses.

All of which makes it sound like I don't like the game, which isn't the case. My feeling is quite the opposite. I like Nightingale a lot, which is why I've played it for all those hours. I liked the original and I like the new version well enough, too. 

It was nice to come back for a second run and enjoy a slight variation over the first few sessions but much though I enjoyed the hunt for parts to fix Nellie's portal and all the side-quests that spring up along the way when I did them earlier this year, I don't particularly want to do them all again just now. I think I may have to give Nightingale a rest for a while. 

I'd still recommend the game to anyone who likes base-building rpgs with light survival trappings and who hasn't already tried it. It looks good, plays quite smoothly and the crafting and building are more than decent. It's very much an Early Access title in the sense that it isn't finished yet but what's there is sound and solid. 

If you're waiting until it is finished before jumping in, though, I wouldn't advise it. It's far from clear the whether the developers have any clear vision of what they want the finished game to look like and it seems less likely all the time that they'd have the resources to get there even if they did. Might as well play it now if you're going to play it at all. It might not be there later.

 

You've Lost Me Now

Off the back of that, I'd like to talk about something I've mentioned before: Steam Achievements. They can be quite instructive on the health of a game, especially taken in combination with Steam charts. 

Before Realms Rebuilt, Nightingale had just a few hundred players by Steam's count. That jumped to six thousand on the update but after a couple of weeks peak concurrency is down by a third and slowly falling. Still, it's a clear and definite improvement. 

The achievements tell a different tale. I have four post-revamp achievements. Each of them is for beating a boss and gaining access to the next Realm. The percentage of players who've managed any of them is tiny but that's because it's calculated against all the players who have the game in their Steam Library, not against those playing right now. 

Most people who ever played Nightingale no longer play, so the low numbers are to be expected. What's telling is the relative numbers that have completed each of those four Achievements. Since they were only added with the update and since they each represent completion of a mandatory step to progress through the storyline, the achievements record the degree to which that much-hyped new narrative approach has persuaded people.

The result is not encouraging. At time of writing, just over 9% of players completed all the tutorial
quests in the Abeyance realm but only half of those managed to get to the end of the Realm that followed, Sylvan's Cradle. By the end of the third realm, Welkin's Reach, the numbers had almost halved again and less than two percent have made it past the fourth realm, Magwytch Marshes. 

That is a serious problem for the new direction. If the story was compelling, it wouldn't be shedding almost half of its audience at the end of every chapter. Perhaps if there actually was a story, that would help. Maybe they should think about adding one. 

 

Meet New People. Then Kill Them.

For all its narrative shortcomings, Nightingale is doing a very much better job of holding my attention than Throne and Liberty. When I was posting about the new game yesterday, I was quite keen to get back to it and play some more. When I did, though, I found myself losing interest much sooner than I expected.

I did some more quests. They were okay, no more than that. Still, I was having a reasonably amusing time, running about doing things for people I didn't know or care about, which they could have been doing for themselves. 

The place was very busy and the server was struggling a little. I remember thinking a couple of times that I'd probably be having more fun if I waited until the crowds had moved on. Then I got disconnected and dumped to desktop, which I have to admit did break the flow and temper my enthusiasm a little.

Still, I came back to try again. A quest took me to the edge of the area I'd opened and on a whim I carried on to see what might be over the next hill. A lot fewer people, as it turned out, which felt better, so I kept going. 

I did some enjoyable exploring. The game sure is pretty to look at. I started searching for teleport stones to add to my map, it always being handy to have them opened before you need them for questing. That took me through a number of dangerous areas but nothing seemed to run as fast as my wolf travel form and aggro drops fast so I just kept running and everything was fine.

Until I ran past a player and they killed me, that is.

They were doing one of the many open-world events designed for guilds. These are everywhere and they seem to be highly competitive. A guild ranking of some sort gets broadcast when they end. 

The events also turn the area where they take place into a non-consensual PvP zone. I was well aware of that - it's clearly flagged - but I figured anyone doing the events would be too busy with their own stuff to bother with someone just passing through. 

Yeah, nope.

Being ganked as I ran past a guy looting a wagon marked my first and so far only death in Throne and Liberty. I stopped being bothered by being ganked sometime around 2002, so I just respawned and got on with it but once again it put a dent in my momentum. I decided to avoid the conflict zones and go around the coast but there wasn't to much to see down on the beach and when Beryl came bounding in looking for attention I was very happy to stop and give her some.

At the moment I don't feel especially motivated to log back in. It all seems a bit pointless when there are so many other games I'd rather play. Still, it is the new hotness, until the next new hotness comes along, so I imagine I'll give it another go. I don't think it'll be staying in the rotation for long, though. 

 

Alien Invasions 

What might take its place is X-Com. Or X-Com 2. I've been moaning on about wanting a good, turn-based, tactical RPG with a focus on team combat since I finished Solasta and decided I was too mean to stump up for Baldur's Gate 3. 

I've read so much about how good the X-Com series is that when I saw these two were on offer on Steam for 90% and 95% off it seemed silly not to buy them, so I did. I had a momentary feeling of dread that I might already have them in my Amazon Prime collection but no, I don't. I wouldn't be at all surprised if they turned up there in a month or two but that's a risk you have to take when you buy anything.

My question now is whether I should play them chronologically or whether the second is a significant improvement on the first, in which case maybe I should start there. I think there's some narrative continuity but I have no idea if the story is actually important. I mostly just want to do the fights. 

And now for the audio-visual section of our presentation... 

In A Dream, All In A Dream

That's Dreamworld. I read about it on MMOBomb and was surprised I hadn't heard about it before. It describes itself as "a groundbreaking Sandbox MMO, where all players create together in a single infinite world " but the part that interests me is the AI integration, which "allows players to generate their own 3D models in-game using a text prompt".

The game is running a "public test" next week and all you need to do is ask for access through Steam, which I have done. I'm very curious to see how those AI tools work. I did try another game in development that purported to use something similar and it did not impress but this one looks a lot more sophisticated. It'll be interesting to see how it works - or doesn't. 

Cue Outro

Can't have a grab bag with no music. And what sort of music do we like around here? Well, let's see. Among other things, we like smart, intelligent indie bands, we like cover versions, we like Lana del Rey. Put them all together and what have you got?

Say Yes To Heaven - Fontaines D.C.
(Original Lana del Rey)

Not the most obvious choice, is it? I see they're not dressing like EMF any more, either. Maybe Liam got to them. He does that. It's his gift.

Past, Present and Future

Thinking of Lana, which I pretty much always am, I watched a couple of old interviews recently, from back when she was Lizzie Grant. They're like music all in themselves. I thought I'd share just one really short clip...

"I just wanna do something I can be the best at."

Mission accomplished, then.

Nothing Has Changed : Nightingale, Realms Rebuilt And Early Access

With more than twenty hours play in Nightingale: Realms Rebuilt, the update that was meant to reset the entire game, and having beaten the bosses required to gain access to the second and third zones, I feel ready to give my provisional judgment on the revamp. So here it is:

"Huh?"

Or maybe:

"Is that all?"

As far as I understand it, the game didn't receive the reception its developers were hoping for when it went into Early Access earlier this year. It didn't attract players in the numbers that flocked to similar games around the same time (Particularly Palworld and Enshrouded.) and it wasn't able to retain most of the players who did give it a try. The hope for Realms Rebuilt was that, by relaunching the game, at least some of that failure could be mitigated, some of that decline reversed.

Immediately prior to the rebuild, concurrency on Steam had fallen to the low hundreds from a peak of just under fifty thousand at launch, itself not a particularly impressive figure. The relaunch, if that's what we're calling it, did result in a significant bump, with concurrency rising to around six thousand in the first week although it's already dropped to more like half of that.

I can't say I'm all that surprised. I put more than a hundred hours into the first version of the game and while it would be disingenuous to say I couldn't tell the difference between that iteration and the current one, I find it hard to see how anything like enough has been improved to make anyone who didn't like it the first time around change their mind, let alone for Nightingale to gain and hold the attention of anyone who wasn't interested to begin with.

The pre-publicity for the update seemed to suggest a pivot to structured narrative with a linear storyline that would play out in "handcrafted" zones known as "storied realms". The collective content contained within all of these new areas was described as a "campaign", which at least to me suggests some sort of coherent and continuous story. After those twenty-some hours, I'm still waiting to see any of it.

From my perspective, having completed just about all of the content in the original build, I'd have to say it feels like Realms Rebuilt has even less in the way of a through-line than before. I thought the old version told a somewhat consistent and reasonably convincing story that led the player through each of the biomes available at a steady, manageable and enjoyable pace. Lack of story was not one of the problems I'd have said Nightingale had anyway, but if anyone did, I'm pretty sure this is not going to convince them that problem's been fixed.

Here's the Main Story as I've experienced it so far:

First Realm: Abeyance. 

Walk around the map and pick up some stuff other Realmwalkers have left behind to get free recipes to craft those things.

Talk to some people in a cave to get a breadcrumb quest to the next Realm

Fight a boss to open a portal.

Second Realm: Sylvan's Cradle

Talk to some people in a village to get a couple of quests to clear some mobs from a building and a cave and get some hints about who to speak to about opening the next portal.

Speak to that person and do a couple of jobs for them so they open the gateway to the building where the portal is.

Fight a boss.

Third Realm: Welkin's Reach

Complete three Bastilles of Agility to open the Empyrean Observatory to reach the third portal.

That's as far as I've got. It doesn't seem like a lot but I'm working from memory here so I might be missing something.. 

Nope. I went and checked my Journal, which handily keeps a record of completed quests, and if anything I'm making it sound more impressive than it was. 

The Abeyance Realm chapter records seven Main Story quests but when I read them through they were pretty much all just listening to Puck explain how things work then doing something basic so he'd believe I was capable of surviving in the Faewilds. In other words, it's just a series of tutorial tasks. 

It also lists five "Side Quests", one of which is the picking up left-behind trifles one, so that isn't even in the main sequence. Neither is the one where the NPC tells you where to go next. In fact, the official "Main Quest" in Abeyance is literally doing those tutorial tasks for Puck and nothing else at all.

Worse, I remember doing the tutorial the first time around and I'm pretty sure there was actually quite a lot more to it then. Puck had more to say and he made everything sound more exciting, plus there was a sense of urgency and adventure that's wholly absent now. I also seem to remember there being more conversation with the journalist Wilhelmina Sasse, who stood out as a character worth remembering. She doesn't any more. I feel she's had some of her lines cut, too.

On inspection, Sylvan's Cradle turns out have an eight-part Main Quest sequence that was so memorable I had entirely forgotten it until I re-read my journal, even though I only finished it a few days ago. It involves talking to a woman by the name of Desma Valavani about the corruption in the region and helping her test a possible cure. 

That entire sequence of eight quests amounts to about the same amount of narrative content as a run-of-the-mill EverQuest II or World of Warcraft side quest. It doesn't begin to come close to anything in one of those games you might call a zone storyline, let alone anything anyone would ever label a "main quest". 

I cannot imagine how anyone could think this is an improvement on what was there before. At the most generous interpretation it's a side-grade; largely the same as before but swapped about a bit. I'm almost convinced by what I've seen up to now that it's actually a downgrade, with significantly less story than there was in the version I played a few months back. I suppose that might be down to a poor memory on my part plus the excitement of everything being entirely new back then but still.

What I am completely sure about is that Realms Rebuilt has not turned Nightingale into any kind of story-led experience. It's still a survival game with some generic quests bolted on, seemingly as an afterthought. 

As for the expanded and revised Progression path, there's certainly more evidence of that than there is of any new narrative. Crafting has been tidied up and organized into the kind of tree you find in many games. That's not something I'd have asked for or wanted but it's certainly something that's happened. I don't think it's a particularly well-designed or intuitive layout but it is more structured than than what came before. If anyone gave up on the game last time because they found the crafting too disorganized to deal with, I suppose it might be worth another look.

In terms of content, though, I don't think much has changed. Azuriel has an excellent post up, where he goes over the potential of the system in detail but as far as a I can remember, all of that functionality was already in the game already and I don't think the new system even makes the complexity any more accessible. Possibly less so, given the tendency of the new UI to overwrite itself as you use it, a reminder this is still Early Access.

I believe there may now be slightly fewer crafting stations and Augmentations to deal with although there are also some new ones so that might come out equal. You can now make short and longbows as well as guns, which I don't recall being possible before. Magic (Or Magick as the game irritatingly spells it.) also got a minor upgrade but it's still a very low-magic environment all the same.

Once again, I don't feel any of this is a substantial change to what went before, let alone a major improvement. It is better. It's just not better enough to make anyone who turned the game down last time decide to give it a second chance now.

Then there are the new bosses. I am not impressed. Well, not with the two I've seen so far, anyway. They manage to be both very annoying but also completely trivial, which is a good trick if you can pull it off. 

The reason they're annoying is that someone has tried to make them "challenging". Apparently the developers had "seen how much players have enjoyed some of the more formidable creature encounters in Nightingale" and "wanted to expand those types of encounters". Since I would very much have been one of the players who did not enjoy those encounters and would have liked to see a lot less of them in the revamp, this was never an approach likely to endear itself to me.

For that reason I am quite pleased to find they've made a total hash of it. Yes, the bosses are "challenging" in that they have some of the most unwelcome special abilities of any mob, namely teleporting all over the place and healing themselves back to full health. Fortunately, any advantage they gain from these cheat-mode tricks is largely negated by the fact that they can be worn down by attrition using the tried-and-trusted endless respawn method. With no meaningful death penalty the only barrier to success is tedium.

That was how I beat the first boss. The second was even easier. It's a very large bear that can only attack from the front and it's in a cavern with corridors too small for it to turn around in. Once I figured that out, it was cake. (Okay, technically the bear can turn around but it takes so long to do it and its so easy to just skip round the back again that it might as well be stuck. It certainly doesn't require any skill from the player, which is just as well because I don't have any.)

The thing that puzzles me most about this isn't the unsuccessful implementation. God forbid they get that sorted out and make the encounters genuinely challenging. That really would be an "I quit!" moment for me. No, it's the idea that this is substantively different from what was there already.

Didn't we have to open each new biome with a fight with a Boss last time? Or am I getting mixed up with the half-dozen other games I've played recently where I had to do that? It's pretty much baked into the survival game model by now, isn't it? Although, now I come to think about it, I can't actually remember a single one of the original bosses in Nightingale so maybe there weren't any.

Or maybe they just weren't very memorable. I will say that this time around I can at least remember Jabberwock and the Bear (Azazel or something like that I think he's called.) so maybe that's a sign that something has improved. Then again, it's only been two weeks. Ask me in six months and see how much I can remember about them then.

One final note concerning combat and general mechanics. Azuriel mentioned in a reply to a comment I left on his previous post about Nightingale that he's already stopped playing due to the Early Access nature of the game. When I read that, I was a little surprised because the game has never seemed all that rough around the edges to me. After a few recent incidents, though, I'm beginning to see what he means.

There are the usual bugs, of course, like my entire house disappearing the other night (It came back when I relogged.) and that flickering UI I mentioned earlier but there are some things I can't quite decide whether to put down to an Early Access build or some very peculiar design choices. If it is the former then it might actually be more fun to play now before they fix them.

Here are a couple of the more egregious examples I've noticed. The first was only revealed to me when Beryl ran in and started jumping up at me and pawing at my mouse hand when I was in the middle of a big fight. I got killed as a result of her exuberance but for once, instead of using the revive option, I just logged straight out. That's how I discovered that if you simply quit to Character Select when you die, when you log back in you reappear just where you died instead of halfway across the zone, which is a huge advantage and made any number of potentially tough fights trivial once I'd discovered it. 

Just as well, too, because one thing that does seem to have changed is the overall difficulty level of the game, which seems much higher, at least when it comes to fighting regular mobs. It's particularly horrible in Sylvan's Cradle, which for some inexplicable reason (Sadistic tendencies on the part of whoever designed it being the only rational explanation I can come up with.) has been lumbered with a massive debuff to health regeneration, making it extremely difficult to recover from any fight at all. 

I realise there's something of a fad for "challenging" content right now but I don't think that having to go into every fight at low health is the kind of challenge most people are looking for. Also, being killed repeatedly by boars that charge you from behind while you're trying to talk to NPCs in a fricken' settlement probably doesn't figure prominently on most players' dance cards either. None of this seems likely to expand the audience for Nightingale as far as I can see.

My second example of something that may or may not be working as intended comes from crafting. In the old build, you could always set up a bunch of crafting stations with some recipes that had long run-times, then go to sleep and wake up with them all finished. In that build, though, you couldn't go to sleep until dusk so it was a once a day bonus.

In Realms Rebuilt, not only can you go to sleep at any time, you can nap as many times a day as you like and you can set your alarm for morning, noon or night. This means every time you have a combine running that's likely to take more than a few seconds, you can just lie down and have it done in a moment. 

There's no penalty for this whatsoever other than the mild inconvenience of having to do it at all. If it's a quirk of Early Access then I think Azuriel has a point. If it isn't, though, and it's intentional behavior, then I can't see any reason to have timers on the recipes at all. They might as well all auto-complete instantly, which would certainly be my preference. 

The final aspect of the revamp that I'm going to mention - briefly - is the way it looks. Nightingale was always a very good-looking game but now it's even more gorgeous. I remain to be convinced just how "hand-crafted" these new Realms really are but I have no complaints about the eye-candy. It's spectacular.

All in all I'm happy enough with the new Nightingale but then I was pretty content with the old one. They haven't wrecked or ruined any of the things I liked and even if I'm not all that impressed by the changes they have made, I'm finding enough that feels slightly different to want to make a second run at the game. If they were expecting a huge revival of fortunes from the work they've done, though, I think they're going to be disappointed. 

It would be easy to conclude that this is another example of why developers shouldn't rush into Early Access before the game is ready. It's very hard indeed to get a second bite at that cherry. In the case of Nightingale, though, I'm not even convinced Inflexion know what game they want to make. Waiting longer might just have meant more work to undo when they realized they'd taken a wrong turning.

Against any criticism of Early Access, as a commercial choice at least, you have to set the successful examples such as those against which I'm sure Inflexion have been bench-marking. Games like the aforementioned Palworld and Enshrouded, both of which went the Early Access route and seemed to fare pretty well by doing so.

Intriguingly, though, while both those titles outsold Nightingale hugely when they entered EA, all of them have experienced a similar decline, with Enshrouded being the most successful at holding the audience it won. Looked at from that angle, perhaps Nightingale isn't under-performing quite as badly as it seemed. In fact, with the boost Nightingale got from Realms Rebuilt, it currently has about the same concurrency as Enshrouded, which suddenly lost fully half its remaining players over the last thirty days, having been stable for months prior. What's that all about?

And, looking on the bright side, at least Nightingale isn't being sued for patent infringement. That silver lining is always there. You just have to look hard enough!

Looking for Nightingale : More First Impressions Of Realms Rebuilt

Anyone remember the original trailer for Nightingale? I didn't, not until I went looking back at my old posts for confirmation that the game we got wasn't the game we were promised. Which was when I watched the trailer again and discovered it more or less was.

Here. Take a look if you don't believe me.

With the possible exception of the big dinosaur thing at the beginning, just about everything in that video is in the game I played earlier this year. So why did it feel like something quite different when I got to play it?

Partly it was because the UI and the mechanics were (Mostly still are, I think.) kinda clunky. Everything feels just a tad more laborious than it should, which makes the whole thing feel a little more like playing a game than a really slick game does. There can be bit too much thinking about how you're going to do something, sometimes, as opposed to just doing it. It can take you out of the world for a moment.

Partly it was the procedural generation that some said made the Realms feel a little generic. That was a frequent complaint I saw. I didn't think it became as obvious as all that until maybe fifty or sixty hours in, which would have been fine, had it been a straight-up RPG with an ending. Not so great for a live service game you might spend months or years with. 

And then there was the whole "There's no Nightingale in Nightingale" thing...

Nightingale is the name of the game but also the name of a mysterious city, de facto chuman capital of the Realms and quite possibly the one remaining center of human civilization, now the Pale has spread to Earth. You get glimpses of it and every NPC tells you about it but you never get to go there yourself. 

The whole thrust of the narrative in the original version of the game was that the player character was seeking a way to get to Nightingale. That premise has been retained in the revised edition. The biggest question I have about the new build is whether that goal will ever be attained.

The gates to the city? Not a chance.

There is supposed to be a much stronger storyline this time around, although as of yet I've seen precious little sign of it. Granted, you sometimes don't get much of the narrative in a tutorial zone but I made it through the first dungeon today, beat the first boss and opened the first portal to one of the new, hand-crafted Realms but the story seems as elusive as ever.

However the story turns out, I really would like to get to Nightingale this time. If I knew for certain that the tale, or at least the opening chapter, ended with my character freely able to walk the streets of the fabled city, that would be all the motivation I'd need to make it through. If, on the other hand, we're  all going to finish up in that not-all-that-glorified mission hub like last time, then I'm not sure I'd want to bother.

I did expect that by this time - I've played for more than six hours now - I might have seen at least some sign of the new, narrative-driven direction. Instead it's been a very enjoyable but largely disconnected series of minor tasks and tutorials. I get that the game needs to introduce its mechanics slowly enough for the often confusing complexities to be understood but I do feel there ought to be some narrative hook other than Puck's gnomic, disdainful hints of adventures to come. 

Mechanically, the new game feels, by and large, much the same as the old. Some of the really rough edges have been sanded down a little but there are still a lot of loose ends to trip over. I'm not sure whether I would really want them all to be tied up too neatly - one of the attractions of the game for me has always been its endearing funkiness - but if the goal is to make it as accessible as possible to players used to the kinds of games that do most of the behind the scenes heavy lifting for you, I'm not convinced it's mission accomplished just yet.

Visually I do think there's been a significant upgrade. I always thought the Realms were beautiful but there did seem to be quite a lot of fairly obvious asset re-use. There still is some of that but at least there are more assets now and the environments definitely have more of a hand-crafted feel to them. There's a palpable sense that exploration might be rewarding, not just in terms of the mats you might gather but for the new sights you might see. 

Wouldn't want to waste the day in bed.

One thing I do find hard to parse is the difficulty. I found the original game largely consistent and logical in terms of challenge but the new one feels all over the place.

Some of that is manageable through the UI. The game now has four optional difficulty settings, Explorer, Balanced, Champion and Nightmare, which translate to Easy, Normal, Hard and Very Hard. The default is Balanced. I haven't changed mine but I could, any time.

It's not a one-time choice. You can switch difficulty without even logging out. All four appear as options every time you sleep. You can also now decide whether to wake at Dawn or Noon or Evening, the last of which would have been a very odd choice before, when darkness brought an endless series of attacks but it seems that dubious pleasure may have been curtailed. The warnings about it certainly have. I haven't tested it by staying up all night yet but, given the beauty of the night sky, I hope I'm right. It's a great game for star-gazing.

Travel has been simplified and streamlined. There's no longer any need (Or indeed option, so far as I've seen.) to make your own portals, something that was a huge part of the game before. There's now a ring of statues, which turn into portals as you progress through the storyline. You can port to that ring at any time so it acts as a sort of terminus for travel across the Realms. Or it will, when I get them all working. I only have one lit up so far.

All of that speaks to changes intended to make things as convenient as possible, sometimes by giving more control to the player, sometimes by taking potentially confusing options away. As Azuriel observed in a reply to a comment I left on his first impressions post, the pivot to a more structured, narrative-led direction doesn't always seem to sit comfortably with the survival mechanics, which ramian largely as they were. Indeed, they may have actually been made somewhat more onerous with the addition of a new condition, Hunger.  If that was in the game last time I don't remember it at all.

Just need one good hit!

 

After my time with the new build so far, though, I'm beginning to wonder not so much about whether the survival tropes fit the new Nightingale as whether they really matter at all. I'm starting think they may be little more than decoration. Hunger, for example, seems to be removed as a factor entirely just by gorging, so all I do is stuff myself until the bar fills then forget about it. As for item degradation and repair, so often a real nuisance in survival games, here it's barely an issue.

Items wear out quite quickly but they can be repaired instantly with a single click from the UI, anywhere, at any time, all of them at once, using a resource that is in plentiful supply. It may be that this gets more taxing later but at the moment I'm finding it hard to see the point of having item decay at all when it can be fixed immediately at no meaningful cost in either time or resources.

And then there's the death penalty. Unless I'm misremembering, in the original, when you died, you had to do a corpse recovery to get most of your stuff back. That could be very challenging indeed. I remember one particular incident that took me two sessions to recover from. Maybe that was later in the game but I'm already fighting Tier Two mobs and when I die, which is often, I still wake up with all my stuff. As far as I can tell, there are only three tiers so if corpse recovery is in the game at all any more, it's going to have to make a fairly late appearance.

In order to get to where I could die to Tier Two mobs, though, I first had to die to a Tier One boss. And I died a lot. The boss is called Jabberwock (Because of course he is...) and he appears at the end of a long dungeon that was itself quite draining of resources to get through, meaning I was pretty low on food and health when I reached the final room.

Jabberwock waited for me there, standing on a platform on the far side of the very large room, the floor of which was filled with explosive traps. From his perch, he peppered me with an endless stream of magical  missiles from the moment he spotted me. When I managed to snipe him to about 90% health he took to teleporting all over the room, blasting me all the while.

Unsurprisingly, I did not get the better of him that first time. Or the second. Or the third. After several deaths decided to regroup. I ported back to my camp and upgraded all my gear as far as I could, which wasn't far. Then I went back and tried again with much the same result.

I considered dropping the difficulty but although I talk a good game about wanting things as easy as possible, I have a fairly strong dislike of changing the settings once I've started. No logic to it but there you go.

One thing that I hadn't done at that point was to hire an assistant, something you can do almost immediately and which costs you nothing. A companion would give me some extra dps but more importantly they'd pick me up you when I  fell over. 

I went and hired the first one I saw, made her some gear, gave her a slingbow (Which it turned out she couldn't use so I had to swap her to axe half-way through the fight, which was fun.) and went back for a third try.

That went much better. It turns out the combination of a very lax death penalty and an endless series of free rezzes completely trivializes the encounter. It no longer mattered how many times I died. I just let it happen, waited for my pal Janie get me up, took my chance to hit the boss once or twice before he knocked me down me again and on we went like that until he was dead.

Or, put another way,
97.6% of players
have not completed the Tutorial

It helped that for no apparent reason Janie seemed to take far less damage than me and that Jabberwock didn't regain any health, even if we both died and had to respawn. Since the respawn point was maybe fifty meters away, even a wipe was barely an inconvenience The whole fight felt extremely sloppy and inelegant but that's how the mechanics work and you get no bonus points for style so why try harder?

I'm not complaining. Once I'd figured it how it worked, I was fine with it,ugly though it was. It just took me a while to realize it really didn't matter if I was any good at fighting or not. The game doesn't care. It's possible that this approach won't always work when I progress to more dangerous Realms and more challenging opponents but I feel a precedent has been set. 

That first boss battle suggests it's not worth trying too hard because the game doesn't care how you win, just that you win. It wants you to progress and it's going to let you do it no matter what. I don't have a problem with the intent but I'm not so sure about the execution. I am absolutely not suggesting I would prefer the Big Fights to be harder in any way - that's the last thing I'd want - but I do feel I might quite like them to be easy in a more aesthetically pleasing fashion.

All of which is a long-winded way of saying I'd be quite surprised if this version of Nightingale turns out to be massively more successful than the last one. It feels very much as though the same thinking is still being applied and the results are just as - shall we say idiosyncratic? - as before. 

Personally, I like it. I think it makes the game feel both original and peculiar and that's a combination that works for me. I'm just not sure it's going to bring in the numbers they need. As yet, I sill don't feel as though either I or Inflexion have found the real Nightingale. And I'm not just talking about the city this time.

Nightingale: Realms Rebuilt - First Impressions

So, who's up for some more First Impressions posts on Nightingale then? Nobody? Tough luck! They're coming. Why, look! Here's one now!

I think it's fair enough. The Realms Rebuilt update is about as close to a relaunch as you get in live games - the cute callback to Final Fantasy XIV's "A Realm Reborn" being no co-incidence - so a re-review is entirely justified.

There's supposed to be a whole raft of entirely new content but as yet I've seen almost none of it so this is going to be a very first impression: character creation, the opening scenario and the basic tutorial up to the point when Puck (For it is he.) deems you ready to step into the first new, handcrafted, story-rich realm. 

That's about it so far, even though Steam tells me I've played for just over three hours, which seems really high. It felt more like two but I don't think it was because the gameplay was so scintillating the hours just zipped by. The difference is more likely accounted for by the length of time it took me to get my "old" character copied to the offline client. It looks as though Steam was counting every minute of that little escapade.

Anyone got a torch?

I could easily fill a whole post with all the fuss and bother but I don't see why anyone else should have to suffer, even vicariously. All I'll say is that the process is convoluted and messy and really ought to have been made much simpler. It does at least work, though, so there's that.

After I'd managed to get my character successfully transferred to what's now known as "Legacy Mode", the client-based, offline version of the former game that will never receive any more updates, I found myself wondering why I'd bothered. I stopped playing that character because I'd lost interest in what there was left to do in the game. If there's never going to be anything else, why should I care if I can still play that version of the game or not?

I guess the reason rests in those hundred-plus hours I spent there. It just seems wasteful to throw it all away. I might not ever play that character again but I'll probably log her in now and then just to say Hi so I appreciate that Inflexion took the trouble to make that possible. They very easily could have not bothered. This is still Early Access, after all. Wipes were always a possibility. I'm sure it'll be in the EULA somewhere.

Once I had my past safely archived, I swapped back to the present (And maybe the future.) with the regular client, something that was also more awkward than it should have bee. I suspect that's a function of Steam that Inflexion can't do a lot about, though. It looks like they've had to finesse thngs just to get two versions of the game up at the same time. Legacy Mode is masquerading as a beta. 

Then I set about making a new character. That took a while but not for any problematic reasons.

They shall not pass! For a given value of "they", that is.

I couldn't see much different in character creation but I thought I probably ought to go back and refresh my memory by reading what I said last time. Just about everything I said then applies now so I won't rehash it all except to say I still have no clue why there's all that rigmarole about birthdays and ancestors. It never did seem to mean anything but it's all still there. 

Whether it will have any added significance in the new, narrative-focused Nightingale I guess we'll just have to wait and see. I bet it doesn't, though. It looks to me like someone's clever idea they just won't give up on even though it never quite went anywhere. Kill your darlings. It's sound advice.

There was one thing that went differently this time but it was entirely by chance. The first step in character creation gives you a basic face to work with and the one I got reminded me a little of Sabrina Teitelbaum (Aka Blondshell, if you want to go the Blondie/Debbie Harry singer-is-the-band route.) It might just have been because I watched the Deceptacon video from Friday's post immediately before I logged in. Or possibly it was because I'd watched it about half a dozen times in the last twenty-four hours. Not that I'm obsessed with it or anything...

Whatever the reason, I decided I'd try to make my character look as much like her as possible, which took a while. I couldn't get the chin right - there just didn't seem to be a slider that would do it - and none of the longer hair styles came with a central parting but overall I wasn't displeased with the final result. 

My photo-reference and the final result. That's the closest together the eyes will go, the roundest I could get the chin and one of only two longer hairstyles available, neither of which has a central parting. I actually forgot about the eyebrows altogether and the eyes ought to be a darker blue. Other than that...

I did consider naming her Sabrina Teitelbaum, which would be an excellent name for a Nightingale character, given it sounds like it is one already, but I thought that really might be crossing a line . So I called her Califa Mortensen instead. She looks both Californian and Scandinavian so it seemed to fit.

Once that was all sorted out, I logged in and found myself in a very dark cave. I don't remember it  from the original game but I suppose it might have been there. If it was, though, it must have been a lot better-lit because I definitely don't remember being completely blind at the start of the game. I couldn't see a bloody thing!

Puck, our unreliable narrator with the orotund vowels, popped up and told me to follow the sound of his voice but then he immediately stopped talking, which I thought was very unlike him. I blundered around in the dark trying to find where he'd gone, got jumped by a bunch of Bound (Zombies to the uninitiated.), got confused in the dark trying to turn around in the narrow corridors to fight them off and promptly got clawed to death. 

Not the most encouraging of starts but possibly not entirely unintended either, given what happened next. After I'd revived, exacted revenge on my killers and managed through sheer luck to stumble into Puck, he pointed me at a portal he told me would take me out of the cave. Thank god! Daylight at last!

Don't tempt me...

Yeah... nope.  I was very annoyed to find myself ported to somewhere just as gloomy if not more so. I was about to curse all developers who think darkness equals atmosphere when Puck handed me a card and told me to put it in the machine next to him. I did as he said and suddenly the gloom vanished, the sky turned blue and the sun came out.

Granted, it was an impressive piece of scene-setting and a clever way to demonstrate how cards can be used to change the environment but was it worth fifteen minutes of frustration in the dark? I don't think so. If this was a brand-new game I might well have consigned it to the recycle bin before I got to the punchline.

That said, it seems quite likely that the cave isn't supposed to be quite as dark as I found it. A while later, when I reached the settlement where the NPCs stand around waiting to hand out the missions, I was more than somewhat irked to find they'd chosen another subterranean pit of gloom to hang out in. They gave me some spiel about it being safer down there but it cut no ice with me.

Those caves were even darker than the last lot, so dark I literally couldn't see where to go. I couldn't even see the steps leading down. Frustration sent me to the Settings to see if there was anything I could do to make it lighter. 

I wasn't expecting much joy there. I haven't seen a gamma slider in a very long time. But Nightingale has one.

Gamma to the max.

I slammed it all the way to the right and suddenly I could see normally again. I think that's probably what underground is supposed to look like. Unfortunately, when I emerged from the cavern back into the sunlight it was like someone had let off a magnesium flare in my face so I had to push the slider a ways back to the left again. I suspect that slider is going to be doing a lot of work in the days ahead.

Lighting aside, the rest of the visuals seemed much the same. Character models stil feel slightly off and no-one seems to have thought about adding any idling animations yet, which sometimes makes me feel I'm looking at a very clever automaton rather than an actual human being. 

There was some evidence of the new, hand-crafted scenery off in the distance but the bits I was walking around in felt very familiar. The game now sets you down in an Abeyance realm, meaning it's relatively safe to go exploring. It's a large zone with a lot of points of interest marked on the map, so I guess if you wanted to go off script and ignore the story prompts you could settle down and amuse yourself there for quite a while.

Speaking of the map, it seems to have had a quality-of-life pass. There's annotation now to tell you what some of the POIs are for, not just where they are. It also has the relevant locations for at least some of the missions marked on it.

I know where the bodies are buried.

The first thing the new main questline asks you to do is go find some tools. They're all handily marked on the map but since they're also all right next to the only obvious path that isn't quite the boon it first seems. There are a dozen "treasures" you're supposed to go find as well, which I thought, somewhat goulishly, were going to be on the corpses of Realmwalkers who didn't make it home. They're actually just lying about and they're all marked on the map too, or they appear there once you get the quest. It's defintely an improvement

Everything I've done so far has been pretty much a tutorial and at these very early stages it's all been extremely straightforward. Puck pretty much tells you he isn't going to let you go anywhere until you've learned the absolute basics so that's what I've been doing. Gathering mats, making tools, claiming a base. All the traditional tropes of the genre.

As I said the last time, the basic survival gameplay loop is pretty much bullet-proof by now. If you ever enjoyed it at all, chances are you'll enjoy it again, whenever and wherever you encounter it. It's obvious why these games have been so overwhelmingly successful - they pare that old Skinner Box/Dopamine hit combo down to its core and then absolutely ladle it on. It just works, at a back-brain level that's very hard to resist.

The last thing you'd call it, though, would be exciting. Compelling, immersive, addictive, any of those but thrilling, exhillarating, surprisng? Nope. Not a chance.

Maybe a little more of this, a little less "Go pick up that second-hand mining pick"?

The original introduction, as I remember it, did go a little further in that direction. I seem to recall Puck instilling some sense of urgency into the process as he insisted you experience all three major biomes before choosing one to settle down in. I seem to remember there being some actual plot and an element of danger that did something to pull me into the game.

There's none of that here. This time it's all far more streamlined and considerably less intense. I spent a couple of hours doing pretty much nothing and it's clear I could double or treble that without gettin the feeling I'm going to miss out on anything important or that anything rests on my getting my act together.

Maybe Nightingale is going to re-pitch itself as some kind of cosy base-builder. It certainly has the chops for it. Or maybe once I follow Puck's next instruction and cross the Abeyance realm in search of a way out into the Realms the narrative will pick up pace and I'll start to feel like something's actually happening. 

As for the structural changes, I'm not wholly on top of all of them as yet. I haven't encountered any of the new pets, for example, just the good old dachsund, who I made it a priority to invite into my home. (No sign of my old Twitch drop dog or any of my other Twitch rewards, though. I asume those didn't make it through to the New Nightingale.)

As for the crafting revamp, rather baldly re-badged as "Progression", it seems like a sideways move at best but maybe it'll grow on me. It is certainly a lot tidier and better-presented but also quite a bit less evocative. The original may have been chaotic but it also felt aspirational. This new one looks a bit too much like a work schedule for my tastes.

An example from the new crafting Progression tree.

I think they must also have done away with the system whereby you had to visit all kinds of NPCs scattered throughout the realms to buy most of the blueprints. Now it looks like all of that happens in the UI which, once again, is a lot tidier and more convenient but also considerably less interesting.

The one new addition I was really keen to try out doesn't appear to be available at this early stage of the game at all. I couldn't find the "Glamour Station", the new device that lets you swap the stats of one piece of gear onto the look of another (So you don't have to go around looking like one of those scarecrows even Wurzel Gummidge wouldn't be seen with.) anywhere in the Progression tree at all. [Edit: I found it! It's in the Structures tab, Tier Two. It requires a whole bunch of stuff I won't be able to get for quite a while but it's a worthwhile goal to aim for.]

There seems to be very little information available as yet but from the little I was able to glean I have the impression it relies on tokens dropped by mobs, which seems like an unecessary complication. Changing your appearance seems like something that really ought to be a UI option.

Anyway, there's no need to speculate further on things I haven't had the chance to try out for myself yet. I already know I'm going to be carrying on with the game. It feels both familiar and fresh, which is a nice combination. I wasn't expecting to be playing Nightingale again but it looks like that's what's going to happen.

If I do, you can expect to read about it here. You can take that as either a threat or a promise. Up to you!