Sure! I'll Just Add It To My List...

Since I have a ludicrous number of real-life issues going on that mitigate against me writing anything that requires effort or commitment right now, I'm going to grab onto a comment of Tipa's, spin five hundred words out of it and call it a post. I know. We all expected more but sometimes life disappoints

Here's what Tipa said, talking about my complaints about just how damn big Baldur's Gate 3 is:

"I really think this is not a game for completionists. You're not supposed to see everything and do every quest. It encourages quick but meandering playthroughs; two or three times and each time lots of new things."

I think that's good advice for a gamer but it doesn't really address the issues for anyone who's chosen to roleplay their character, even very lightly. And BG3 is, after all, a D&D game. Roleplaying is kind of the point, isn't it?

Like a lot of people, I generally try to avoid playing Evil characters. I also steer clear of playing jerks, blowhards, pompous asses and selfish gits. Mostly what I play are either trippy cartoonish characters for whom everything is one big gosh-wow life experience or pollyannish do-gooders who trek around the map like the Littlest Hobo on steroids.

Either approach means that if someone asks me to do something that doesn't sound positively sociopathic, the chances are that I'll do it. Or agree to, at least. It's a particular issue in BG3 because so many of the requests are so plausible.

Because I'm also anything but a completionist, not all the promises I blithely make get kept. I don't intentionally break them, I just get distracted and forget I made them. In every RPG I've ever played, on or offline, my quest journal is usually stuffed so full I have to delete unfinished quests just so I can keep adding new ones. Which I do.

That never bothers me as a player. I don't have any issues with not finishing quests or leaving them hanging. I don't often care how things turn out. Very few stories in RPGs are sufficiently interesting for not knowing the ending to feel like it's going to be a problem.

As a character, though, I do sometimes feel a degree of commitment. It's often when I come to make space in the Journal that I'm reminded of promises I made and that's when I feel like maybe I should go do something about them. 

The upshot is that in a game like BG3, where there are what seems like literally hundreds of NPCs asking me to do things for them, many of whom, for a change, could make a fairly convincing argument that they couldn't do those things for themselves, it's more than averagely likely that at some point I'm going to start feeling the pressure.

 

I mentioned in another post that almost all dialogs do have some kind of "Get lost, pal. I have better things to do than fix your dumb problems" option. I'm sure that works beautifully for people who love roleplaying bastards but it clearly isn't going to do much for me. Later in the game there may also be a few "I'd really love to help but I'm kind of busy saving the world right now" answers, which is obviously an improvement but, honestly, still feels much too rude (And self-aggrandizing.) for me to be comfortable saying it.

The inevitable result is that I agree to everything anyone asks me, then start trying to do it until I meet another NPC who asks me to do something else and I switch tracks to do that instead. This happens over and over again and pretty much describes my progress through all RPGs.

BG3 does have the advantage that many apparently unrelated questlines end up being connected after all, so dotting about between them doesn't always mean nothing's getting done. On the other hand, some of the interactions are so abstruse and unforeseeable that, when you run into one of those, it feels like a real bait&switch.

The prime example of that in my playthrough so far has been Korlach's clockwork heart. She's one of the numerous companions I have never invited to come adventuring with me but who hangs around in my camp anyway. All of them seem to think being a camp-follower means I have to fix their entire lives and of course I'm far too polite to tell them to sod off so I always promise to do my best. 

As an aside, all my three regular party-members love me. Well, two of them absolutely worship me and the third is only lukewarm because I refused to sleep with her, twice. Apparently the one thing every character I play has no issues saying a firm "No" to is any kind of sexual relationship.  

Other than that, though, she loves me too, and the reason they all think I'm so goddamn wonderful is because I agree with everything they say and promise to do everything they want. And since they're always with me, unlike the NPCs who watch me walk away, never to return, those are the promises I actually keep.

I fully intended to keep my promise to Korlach and find her a mechanic to fix her malfunctioning pump but before I even got going on that, there was a scripted incident that I'm fairly sure I couldn't do anything about and after the smoke cleared, the one person who could do the repairs was dead. I spent a while googling to see if there was any alternative but apparently this guy is literally the only smith in the whole of sodding Faerun capable of doing the job.

Which is obviously bollocks and bad writing. I imagine any competent Dwarven forge could have done the work for a very reasonable fee, not to mention about a gazillion other crafts-persons or magic-users, not to mention the infinity of clerics that could have brought the guy I needed back from the dead. But no. Get that sequence in the wrong order and you've had it.

Again, fine. Actions have consequences and all that. Win some, lose some. All the cliches. The thing is, if you have no real idea which quests are simple, which are complex and which have critical decision points, it's hard-to-impossible to triage them for efficiency or even sanity.

That's not a problem for me, either, generally. As I've said, what I mostly do is quite similar to what Tipa's suggesting. I meander through the plot, wandering back and forth across the landscape, picking up quests and dropping them again, only finishing any of them by chance. And for fifty or sixty hours, that's a lot fun.

Unfortunately, fifty or sixty hours barely scratches the surface. The one thing in Tipa's suggestion that really doesn't seem viable is the idea that anyone could have a "quick" playthrough. What would "quick" even mean in this context? Forty or fifty hours? 

I guess you could set some rules on what sort of quests you were willing to take. No helping refugees. No helping devils. No helping rude people. 

Or on how many - only speak to a couple of NPCs in each new area, for example, and completely snub the rest. Then, on your next playthrough, you could swap those rules around. You'd probably always have to hit certain nodal points in the main plot but I'm sure they can all be approached in various ways.

Even if that did indeed give you several playthroughs that felt quite different, though, it does nothing to address that awkward roleplaying problem. You'd either be roleplaying some kind of opinionated bigot, only willing to help those who "deserved" it or some spell-slinging time-and-motion inspector, willing to help but only according to a quota system.

If I'm finding this problematic, how must genuine completionists be feeling? Hard to imagine, since it's an alien mindset for me. It seems like they'd find it as abrasive as sand in a bathing costume but who knows? Maybe they love it. Maybe having a hundred and fifty hours of gameplay before they get every "i" dotted is the dream. Certainly, the game seems to be almost universally adored so I guess it must be.

BG3 is just an extreme example of the problem, anyway. I think AgingGamer is onto something when he comments that "80+ hours often seems too big". That's where I've felt the ennui set in before and it's happening again here, although I'd say things generally begin to feel stale after 60 hours.

There always comes a time when I just want to be done with the damn thing. That's when I realize I'm not even thinking about the quests any more, just slogging through them without taking in much of the detail. 

I hit that point in BG3 at start of the weekend. I haven't played for a couple of days, mostly for unrelated reasons. The longer I'm away, the less I feel like going back, although I'm not yet so fed up with it I'm going to quit altogether. I'll keep picking away at it but, as often happens with MMORPGs, it's starting to feel more like a habit than a pleasure. (It's worth pointing out that MMOs seem to manage to delay this sort of reaction for orders of magnitude longer than other genres, which presumably is why developers keep insisting on making more of them...)

As for playing Baldur's Gate 3 more than once. Well, maybe in a few years. 

Throne And Liberty: More First Impressions

It took a long time and a lot of work but I finally managed to get off the starter island, out of the solo instance and into Throne and Liberty for real. The issue turned out not to be with the server after all but with my installation which, despite Steam telling me it had validated and repaired it, was still corrupted in some way.

In the end I uninstalled the whole thing and downloaded it again, this time on an external SSD and since then I've had no problems at all. I was able to pat Lunar-O, the little stone golem, on the head and start the very long cut-scene that ended with my arrival in the port city of Kastleton alongside hundreds of other players, most of whom were standing around motionless and each of whom had, for some inexplicable reason, a small, grey lozenge floating over their head.

Kastleton. And about flaming time!

I'm going to take this opportunity to complain yet again about the default settings in so many MMORPGs. I understand why developers feel the need to flag up absolutely everything any new player might conceivably need to find or know. I also understand that many, quite possibly most, players prefer to have practical, game-mechanic-related information instantly available, in natural line of sight, while they play.

But it looks fricken' terrible! When you've made what may very well be the best-looking game in the genre we're likely to see this year, why ruin any good first impression it's likely to make by cluttering the entire screen with crap? It would be really nice, just for once, to be able to log into a new MMORPG without having to go immediately into Settings to switch it all off.

Speaking of Settings - and game mechanics for that matter - Throne and Liberty is a prime example of why traditional MMORPGs remain a relatively niche genre. Yes, I know millions of people play them but billions of people play video games. There's no MMORPG equivalent of Candy Crush or Fortnite or even Call of Duty and for good reason.

There are literally dozens of separate items of information on this one screen...

Wilhelm's recently posted on Raph Koster's latest pronouncements on his Stars Reach project. Raph very clearly wants to target a much broader demographic than the PC-based MMORPG crowd and he's identified the kind of complexity and clutter I'm talking about as one of the key problems in doing so. 

Mostly he seems to be talking about having fewer buttons to press but he also mentions choosing "elegance over visual cruft". I really hope by that he also means the kind of thing I'm talking about here, most specifically all those words and symbols hanging over NPCs and players' heads, but also floating damage numbers and similar aesthetic horrors. 

There's an interesting discussion thread following the post, in which I made some rather cynical comments about Stars Reach obviously being designed as a mobile game first and foremost. On reflection, I'm not at all sure that's a bad thing. 

Oh, great. Something else to learn.

Most of the games I've played on PC recently and really enjoyed have either been mobile ports or were developed as cross-platform titles to be released on both PC and Mobile. Those games play more fluidly and feel more natural than the new, PC-native MMORPGs I've tried this year, first Tarisland and now Throne and Liberty.

Heartless Gamer, in Wilhelm's comment thread, says of the current beta "There is so much going on in the T&L interface and I spend more time in the UI than the world. " I can't help but agree with him. It's a trope of MMORPGs in general but in this one it's off the scale. 

The menus are vast and numerous and even the relatively few game mechanics I've been introduced to so far are offputting in their complexity. When a tutorial prompt has to lead you through half a dozen separate button presses just to show you how to use an upgrade item, there has to be something wrong in the basic design.

No wonder everyone's standing around looking dazed.

That said, I also recognize there's a great desire for exactly this kind of "depth" in systems among the subset of players who flock to games like this. Most of the Chinese, Korean and Japanese imports I've played have positively revelled in the complexity of their systems and mechanics. It's clearly something the audience they're addressing either wants or expects or both. Western-made MMORPGs might be a little less fussy but surely not by much.

Throne and Liberty is very much that game. It feels weirdly old-fashioned, almost nostalgic. It's very comfortable and familiar, to use another of Raph's buzz-words. Mrs Bhagpuss hasn't played an MMORPG in a couple of years and this is the first new one I've seen in that time that I've thought might be worth mentioning to her. I did think about Tarisland but, ironically, that one feels almost too old-fashioned. 

Throne and Liberty looks modern but feels quite the opposite. It also has the considerable advantage of a very much better English translation than we've been used to seeing. With the caveat that translations all too often deteriorate the further into the game you get, this one so far has been pretty much flawless. 

By that, I'm not saying the prose is great. It's not. It's perfectly fine by MMORPG standards but that's really not a high bar. What I mean is that everything reads as though it's been written by a fluent speaker of English, not someone with a basic understanding and access to Google Translate.

It's hard to say why this is something worth mentioning. It really shouldn't be. If there's one thing most MMORPGs have in common it's that they expect players to read a lot of text. It's a shockingly text-heavy genre, what with all the endless questing, the eternally evolving narrative and the aforementioned deep and complex systems, each with its own extensive notation and instruction. 

On top of all that there's also, quite frequently, a vast amount of in-game collectable lore in the form of diary pages, journals, letters and notes scattered far and wide across the landscape. Throne and Liberty leans hard into the found social history trope right from the start with papers glowing purple all over the place, just begging to picked up and read. 

It's easy to forget, as you skim-read or simply skip another page filled with inconsequential trivia, that someone had to come into work every day, sit down at their desk and write all this stuff. You'd think they'd at least want it to be reproduced in the game in a comprehensible, recognizeable form. We all know most players are going to nope right past it but surely the people creating all that imaginary history have to believe it's going to be of genuine interest to someone or why even bother? If it was worth taking the trouble to write it and put it into the game, why wouldn't the translation merit the same degree of care and attention?

In T&L, that professional courtesy does appear to have been paid. And it makes sense that it has because the whole game looks like a labor of love, at least by the creatives on the team. The world is stunningly visualised. I haven't been this taken aback by the sheer attention to detail in a game's visuals since Black Desert, which shows how hard it it is to push that kind of graphical boundary forward any further.

Can't help but feel I'm over-dressed for the climate.

I said at the time that the villages and countryside in BDO looked like parts of Mediterranean Europe I'd visited. So does Throne and Liberty. It's not just the architecture, although some of that looks like it's been taken from photographs. It's the texture of the roads and paths, the way the plants grow up between the cobbles, the convincing realisation of aridity and dessication in a land that sees far more sun than rain.

This looks very much like one of those games I might end up playing for a while mostly because it feels like being on holiday. That happens more than you might imagine and accounts for some of my affection for a number of MMORPGs that, in objective gameplay terms, probably weren't all that good.

I remember when it was all fields around here...

Whether the gameplay in T&L is good or not I can't really say. After almost four hours I've barely seen any yet. All I've done is follow some very directive instructions, almost all of which involve going from one NPC to another, listening to what they have to say, doing what they tell me, then being passed along to the next in line to do something extremely similar.

There has been a small amount of trivial combat but I still have no clue what any of the abilities on my hot bars do because button mashing works every time. At some point, presumably, I'll run up against something that requires some basic understanding of the character I'm playing and her abilities but that time has not yet arrived.

If this was a launch, I would very definitely be carrying on until I reached the moment when I'd have to make a decision on whether to invest the time and effort required to learn how to play. It's often surprising how long that can take and in some games it never seems to come at all. 

Adventure awaits!

However long that's likely to be for Throne and Liberty, I don't see much percentage for me in getting anywhere close during a five day beta. I'll be doing all of this again, when the game goes live in a couple of months because, in case it hasn't been clear, I've been enjoying myself quite a lot so far. The game looks good, reads well, feels comfortable. What, as they say, is there not to like?

For that reason, I don't think I'll be pressing very much further ahead for now. With launch so near that would seem both a waste of energy and also a slight risk. Why make the real thing feel any less fresh than it needs to be?

Still, I probably won't entirely be able to resist the temptation to have a bit more of a poke around so this might not be the last time I write about it. For now I'll just say Throne and Liberty has made a good first impression and I definitely want to see more and leave it that. If anything worth writing about comes up before the beta ends, so be it. If not, everyone meet back here in September and we'll do it again for real.

On Momentum

In recent times there's been much discussion in the blogosphere and elsewhere around the benefits and drawbacks of releasing games into Early Acess. There are obviously lots of pros and cons but I'm only interested in one today: momentum.

It occured to me yesterday, when I was deciding what I wanted to do with my morning, that the decision is often taken out of my hands by momentum. Unless something actively stops me, I'm more likely to carry on playing the game I'm already playing than move to another. 

When I shift across it's usually either from a sense of duty or a craving for novelty. Novelty doesn't require much in the way of momentum. It has an energy all its own. New games come to me on a whim but I occasionally feel something more like an obligation to log into a game I haven't played for a while.

Mostly I resist. Obligation lacks the momentum to overcome inertia when the object is something as trivial as a video game.  Even if I feel the drag sufficiently to make the effort, there are so many snags to catch on and bring me to a stop. 

I'll get as far as clicking on the icon on the desktop but then I have to remember my login details. I might give up right there but I'll usually at least try to find them. If it takes longer than a few seconds, that's another out. 

Say I get past that hurdle. I might even get as far as letting the patcher update the game. If that goes quickly and smoothly, there's a better than even chance I'll log in. Or it could be Lord of the Rings Online, which has been patching on my machine now for well over an hour and is still nowhere near done. I've already lost what slight interest I had for that today.

If I get as far as the game itself, and if there's not too much in the way of a flood of new information and if my bags are reasonably clear and if I can remember what I was doing last time I was there, I might spend an hour pottering around, doing some quests, getting some xp. If everything goes absolutely perfectly, I might even come back the next day, the day after that.

Best case scenario? I'll play for couple of weeks. At the very outside a month. Then I'm gone again.

The history of this blog is proof. Pick a game from the long tail of tags and follow my progress backwards. There are so many posts where I talk about revisiting some game or other, enthusing about how much I'm enjoying it, claiming I'll likely be there for a while. 

Often a flurry of posts will follow, as I get all excited about the game as if it was something new. Then the posts stop and I never mention the game again. until the next time, when the whole dumb cycle begins all over again.

That's how it goes with old games. It's how it's always gone, as long as this blog's been running. 

What used also to happen, though, was there'd be another game, sometimes a couple of them, that I just kept playing and writing about week in, week out. Some of the games for months at a stretch, a few for years.

For much of the life of the blog you could rely on regular posts about Guild Wars 2. I played that one almost every day for the best part of a decade. Since I stopped, though, nothing's really taken its place. These days the only possible contender for that role is EverQuest II and I haven't played or posted about that one for almost a month. It's more of a slow-burning back-up plan than a compulsion.

Occasionally I make noises here about having cooled on off on playing video games as a hobby. I say things that suggest I don't do it nearly as much as I used to, which is true but only because I used to do it so damn much. Realistically, I still play video games almost every day of my life, usually for at least a couple of hours, which I think definitely qualifies as an obsession, even if it's no longer a pathology.

What I don't seem to be doing much any more is playing the same video game for extended periods of time. And by "extended" I guess I mean months or even years. Instead, what I mostly do is hop around between games until a new one comes along, then play that one like there's no other until either I stop finding it fun or run out of new things to do there. If those are even two different things.

When I've thought about this at all, I've been putting it down to changes in me. I'm older. I have more free time. Beryl needs many walks. All kinds of circumstances are different. Also, I've been playing online games for almost a quarter of a century now. Everything stales eventually, doesn't it?

Well, maybe. But I'm starting to wonder if the main reason I don't get stuck into - or perhaps I should say stuck on - games the way I once did has more to do with the way they're being made and managed than how I might have changed. It seems much harder to build that steady, year-long momentum now. Game momentum comes in shorter bursts, just a weeks, maybe even only a few days. I'm not at all sure the shift is down to me.

A new game used to be very much an experience. An event. There used to be a long run-up to launch, sometimes years, during which the developer would ceaselessly attempt to build interest and anticipation through press releases, competitions and conversations.

Nearer release there'd often be a chance to try the game out, briefly, in a beta or a pre-launch event, like those weekends that were so popular once. Unless you were fortnate enough to get an invite to the year-long closed beta, though, which most did not, whatever you were able to see of the game in action wouldn't be enough to give more than a taste of what lay ahead for you at launch. 

When the game finally went live, there'd be a huge flurry of interest and excitement, followed by a much longer, slower release of pleasure as you worked your way through the plethora of content contained in the game at release. It would take everyone a good while to get through all of that but I took even longer. Far from burning through the whole thing in a matter of days or weeks, I'd generally find myself left behind the bubble of players rising towards the endgame. I'd meander along slowly, immersed in the richness of the game but taking it all at my own pace.

In most cases I never caught up with the pack. New content would enter the game well before I was done with the old. The whole business model relied on keeping players occupied if not entertained. By the time I finally decided to move on I'd have been there long enough to feel like it was I who needed to take a break, not that there was nothing left for me to do.

That tended to apply even to games that weren't all that well-baked to begin with, theose that had clearly come out of the development oven a little too soon. There might be a lot of buggy content  - for the first year or so GW2 was stuffed to bursting with Dynamic Events that got stuck or bugged out or just plain didn't work at all - but you couldn't say the content wasn't there. 

It might seem counter-intuitive, but broken and buggy content now can be better than perfect content later. Waiting for fixes can be sticky, too. When the game is live and the updates are rolling in week by week, the focus is on when stuff is going to get fixed, not if, and that leaves playersd invested in the outcome. It might be negative investment but it's investment all the same.

Early Access turns all of that on its head. The game gets sold to you on an as-is basis. It comes with big warnings that it's not finished, lots of it is missing, bits of it might not work very well. If you can't cope with that, it's your problem, not the developer's. Nothing really needs to work properly right away. Chances are it's going to change more than once before it's done, anyway. Everything feels temporary, as-hoc, cobbled together, even your characters. Any commitment you might make feels less significant, less important, less permanent.

That doesn't mitigate against the intensity with which you play; not at all. The impermanence and mutabilty can even make it all feel more intense, like a live performance or a limited-time event. 

And if there's only so much content, you might just be able to consume it all. Completion could be achievable. There's certainly no reason to pace yourself. It's not like there's going to be an endgame or not the endgame. When it's over, it's over. You feel done. You may even feel satisfied.

I started thinking about all of this because I was looking at my Steam library and I realised I still hadn't done anything about the new quests in Nightingale. I hadn't even gone to look for the quest-givers.

I posted about it a couple of weeks ago and until yesterday I think that may have been the last time I thought about the game. I concluded that post with an observation: "The curse of Early Access: you get to the end of what there is so far and you feel like it's all there's going to be and maybe all there needs to be." Then, trying not to draw conclusions from a single instance, I said "Or maybe I just wasn't in the mood." 

Now I've had time to consider, I realize it wasn't my mood. It was lack of momentum. I stopped playing Nightingale and now it's hard to start again.

It didn't used to be like that. While I was playing, I couldn't wait to find out what was going to happen next. I bulled through the main quest and piled right into what passed for an endgame before I finally straightened up, looked around and decided to take a break. 

And that was that. Momentum lost. Game over.

Now, it feels like just too much of an effort to pick it up again. There's too much inertia. I look at the Play button on Steam and imagine having to sort myself out, work out which realm the new quests are in, find the right portal or make a new one, roam across the map to find the NPCs. Even though all of that would likely only take a few minutes, it still feels like too much,. So I go play something else instead.

And what do I play? Whatever game I'm already playing, naturally. That's where the momentum lies so it's easy. The ball is already rolling.

At the moment the game with the most momentum happens to be Wuthering Waves. It begs the question how did that momentum build from nowhere and so quickly, too?

That's easy. Starting a new game is all down hill. Gravity carries you along. All you do is have to let it. Starting a new game is the easiest of all options (Well, it is for me. I've heard others tell it differently.). The game wants you to build momentum or it does if it's anything like well-designed. It gets behind you and pushes. If you let it, a game will do most of the work, even if it's not that great a game.

It doesn't have to be a full game, either. Even a demo can do it and surely any Early Access game that's more than a shameless cash grab can too. They just can't keep it up for long.

The hook is always baited. While there may not be a whole game, there'll always be plenty to get started on. The problem comes later, when you hit the empty regions, the parts the developer warned you weren't ready. The parts that might not be ready for a year or two. Or ever.

As a quick hit it's fine but more than that is asking is more than many players are going to be able to give, even if they want to. By the time the whole game's ready, almost everyone who cared will long since have moved on. New games roll off the production line every day. Who's going to wait? Or come back for a second go round?

All of which might make it sound like I'm going sour on Early Access. I'm not. It works for me. I think it's the developers who need to reconsider, at least if they're making MMORPGs or long-term Live Service games. These days, EA amounts to launch in many players' eyes. Even if it goes well, how will that EA windfall stack up against the players who pay a reduced fee now then don't come back? 

Then again, as we were discussing a while back, every game seems to lose 95% of its audience in a few weeks these days, no matter how it comes to market. Games can gain momentum too - just look at Albion Online - but there's no simple blueprint to follow that tells developers how to build it.

As a player, though, I'm sanguine. It all loops back to the scenario I laid out at the beginning. I may have bought and played a few games for months at a stretch in the past, a handful even for years, but the vast majority I really spent no longer with than I have with these new-fangled EAs.

I bought those games - or in the age of Free To Play just downloaded and installed them - mostly because I was excited to try something new. Most of them didn't stick. I never built up the necessary momentum to keep playing past the initial thrill of the new. I left long before I got to the level cap let alone the endgame. Those old school launches may have come with a ton more content than you'd get in an Early Access title but I still bailed long before I got to see much of it. 

It may be that Early Access, like the F2P payment model before it, works quite well for me because I'm not looking for that elusive One Game any more. I'm learning to appreciate not having a fixed commitment to one title. I'm enjoying being able to look forward to the next game I'm going to play without having to ask myself whether I'm ready to give up on the one I'm playing now.

As to which game I play at any given moment, it really comes down to that forward momentum. While it's there, I don't want to play anything else. When it falters, I fall off the ride.

MMORPGs used be designed so that players would build up so huge momentum almost without noticing. Working their way through all the content that was there from launch, climbing up those vertical progression ladders, made it so much harder to stop, even when other factors like interest and enthusiasm began to wane. There was a time when quitting was seen as a really big deal. 

Not so much any more. Outside of social ties, any stigma that used to adhere to game-hopping seems long-gone. Why commit when there's so much choice? And Early Access doubles down on that lack of commitment by telling you the game isn't even ready yet. 

MMORPG developers were always in a race to add content faster than players could use it up but at least by starting with a full game already in place they were giving themselves a head start. By putting up a big warning sign saying "Game Not Finished", EA gives players an easy out. Any momentum an EA title is able to build is dissipated when players hit that content vacuum.

And maybe that's a good thing. It's not like the old ways were the healthy option, after all. A quick blast of fun then on to the next game. Where's the problem in that?

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go play Wuthering Waves for a while. It feels like I have enough momentum there right now to carry me through 'til August. 

Probably means I'll be done with the game by next week.

It's Like That And That's The Way It Is

When I went to log into EverQuest II this morning so I could carry on with the new, excellent, awkward and frustrating Darkpaw Rising update, I spotted a link in the launcher to the transcript of a recent AMA by the EQII team on the new, excellent, not at all awkward or frustrating forums. I thought I'd have a quck look at it while the game loaded so here I am, nearly an hour later, not having played at all.

It's a long and very interesting read although much of that interest applies only to people who might actually play the game. A few of the topics and answers, though, I felt had some wider resonance so I've pulled them out for consideration here. I recommend anyone who currently plays the game, or used to and still cares about it, take a glance at the whole thing but for everyone else, this will probably be more than enough.

Since I can't keep my opinions to myself, I've added my thoughts as well. It's my blog so I can! 

 Q: Is there a possibility of opening up some art assets for community contributions as well?
Caith: Nope.The player studio project that many of the Daybreak games had going for a long time were both legal headaches as well as not viable financially. The amount of art resources (hours) required to work with a contributor far exceeded the amount of resources the teams could have simply allocated to an artist to complete the same work.

The thing I like most about this AMA is the way no-one balks at giving the real reasons for why things are done the way they are. Answer after answer comes down to some combination of not enough people, not enough time, much more complicated than it sounds, causes more problems than it solves or players didn't like it. Almost nothing is sugar-coated. It's like there was no marketing rep guiding the conversation and the Head of Studio, who was, actually wanted players to understand how game development works.

That said, I imagine the part Caith left out was that under SOE's ownership a whole load of projects were greenlighted that clearly couldn't have been profitable. They were presumably underwritten by Sony, a company that has long seemed quite comfortable with losing huge amounts of money. Perks of being a rounding error on the account sheet of a global multinational I guess.

Cut to the chase. You want me to kill 'em, right?

Q: Are there any plans or discussions involving a game wide stat/number squish? Is it just too much work for the team you have now or is it something that may possibly happen in the future?
Caith: There has been much discussion, but there are no plans for a game wide stat reduction for a variety of reasons. One of the primary reasons it is unlikely to happen is how content is designed in the game. EverQuest 2 was designed in a way that gives developers a lot of freedom in how they implement content, which allows them to make the content more flexible and unique. The downside of this is that developers can implement things in innumerable ways, and any rebalance of that content would be a manual process. So in short, a stat reduction would require hand tuning of almost every encounter in the game.

It might have worked for WoW, although the jury is still out on that, but it will never work for EQII. The part Caith left out is that EQII players fricken' love their big numbers. There'd be an outcry if DPS wasn't measured in trillions per second. 

At least, the folks still playing on the Live servers like it that way. Everyone else long since migrated to TLE, where the numbers are so much smaller and smaller numbers and simpler stats is one of the tentpole features of the upcoming Origins server, so someone at Darkpaw reckons on having cake and eating it too.

Q: Are the "suburbs" ever going to be returned to at launch state?
Caith: This is extremely unlikely to happen on a live server due to the amount of quest and NPC updates that have been made over the years, NPC’s have been moved and quest dialog updated to reflect the move, much less the quests themselves updated to function in the new zones they are in, etc.
Kaitheel: Our newly announced Origins server will allow you to step back in time and experience the cozy neighborhoods and all of the quests they had to offer!

There's some hard information about the upcoming Origins server buried in the AMA. The above answer confirms the long-lost neighborhood quests will be included, which is something I wouldn't have bet on. Elsewhere, it's also strongly suggested the intention is to get as close as possible to the original game as it was at that time and that the motivation for doing the server is to encourage both former players and brand new ones to take a look.

It is odd to think that the best way to get people to consider playing a game in 2024 is to make it look and feel like one from 2006 but I guess WoW Classic is proof that it works. Pretty soon everyone wil be doing it, if they aren't already.

Q: Will you bring back LoN?
JChan: Legends of Norrath was great when it was here, but we have no plans to bring it back currently. Spinning back up a whole new development team or taking away current developers to work on it would put stressors on the team right now that are just plain unhealthy for our long-term future. That being said, there's always the possibility that our situations will change in the future.

The answers to many of the questions boil down to some variation on "We're a small team and we're already at full stretch doing live events, expansions and updates." and that's the context of Jen Chan's answer here but that last sentence is intriguing in a couple of ways. Firstly it hints at a potential change for the better in terms of resources at Darkpaw and I don't see any sign elsewhere in the AMA of general feel-good platitudes so maybe she knows something...

Secondly, it doesn't explicitly rule out a return for Legends of Norrath, the EQ-themed collectable card game that shuttered eight years ago. I only recently deleted the game files from my PC on the final assumption it was gone forever, not that I actually played it when it was around anyway. I wouldn't have thought there was a chance in a billion it would ever return but given that plenty of other questions in the AMA received a firm, unequivocal "No, never", I guess now we can't rule it out.

Watch in amazement as I battle two bosses at the same time!

Q: Finally, when is DBG/DarkPaw going to seriously address tradeskilling. You know how long it has been since there has been new craftable bags or boxes, or totems? Not to mention, at one point in time we could craft the beginning gear and Jewelry needed and make a bit of change. Other than food/drink, spells, not much else anyone wants.
Caith: Bag space is a DB and systems issue, a ton of the functions in the game iterate over every single item that a player has in their inventory, including every bank slot, every house slot, etc. We are, and will remain, extremely stingy when it comes to increasing inventory space, because as soon as we do the next question becomes “when are you going to fix lag and decrease loading times”.

Ah, inventory! How we love to hate you and hate to lose you. I'm fairly sure EQII actually has the most generous inventory allocation of any game I've ever played, so clearly Darkpaw's definition of "extremely stingy" is a little different than mine, although I realise Caith here is talking about the parsimonious present and future, not the profligate past.

In general, though, this answer is a great example of the way giving in to the demands of one set of players is always likely to cause problems for another or, in this case, for everyone. Who'd be a game developer, eh?

Q: Could you all please bring back the map help for npcs, quest items and such?
Kaitheel: We have no plans to remove the current map system in game, where the quest givers and quest update conversations are given specific quest icons, but the short-lived blue regions on the maps that give direct locations of quest steps are not something we plan to bring back. They were useful, we agree, but they had some significant downsides. Downsides that outweighed the usefulness.

These blue regions presented every active quest target possible at that moment on your map, naturally drawing your attention to the map. We observed how little attention was being paid to the dialogue, the story, even the characters to fight and the world one was traveling through. It was not helpful for building the world, telling the stories of the world, or your immersion therein. Even I found myself paying more attention to the blue splotches on my map than I was to the quest journals or NPC conversations. The quest I was doing, my motivation, the quest givers – all of it was buried behind the ease of these blue regions on the map. So, coupled with the significant amount of time that they took to create, we chose instead to give more helpful journal text, with more specific points of interest, and labeled sections of the zone on the maps.

Kaitheel is the epitome of the quest guy. He loves writing quests and he wants everyone to appreciate them. Answer after answer in the AMA reflect it, just as answer after answer from Caith suggest he'd really rather be honing his stand-up at an open mic night somewhere. 

I tend to agree with Kaitheel on this although I did quite like the big, blue splotches when they were around. They were added in the era when all MMORPGs were backpedalling as fast as they could away from the origins and traditions of the genre. In attempting to remove all the obstacles and put in all the labor-saving devices, most of them cut-and-pasted ideas and mechanics from the wave of imports sweeping in from the East. That's when every older game added flying mounts, too. 

We still have those but now we're not allowed to use them until we've been everywhere on foot. So swings the pendulum.

This isn't the time to start another debate about immersion but I'd just mention that I wouldn't be enjoying each new expansion in EQII half as much if I couldn't open the wiki and copy the co-ordinates for every quest target into EQIIMaps to get a glowing trail and a map marker. If Kaitheel believes most players are finding their way by in-game landmarks, he's fooling himself. All that really happened when they took out the in-game quest markers was that the trade passed to a third party provider.

And now with the UI

Q: The exp gain in zimara went from one extreme to the next, could you all please balance that some?
Caith: The experience gain in Zimara is an example of where we would prefer it to be. It takes actual work to level up, and you have multiple routes to obtain experience, some requiring more attention (questing) and giving larger rewards, some requiring little attention (grinding mobs) and giving much lower rewards.

While we're on the subject of old chestnuts and dead horses... Is anyone ever satisfied with the rate of xp or leveling in any MMORPG? I very much doubt it. It's the Goldilocks story without Baby Bear. 

I'm almost at the end of the signature quest line for Ballads of Zimara with my Berserker and he's 10% into 128. I very much doubt he's going to hit the 130 cap before he runs out of quests. He might not even hit 129. I'll have to do repeatables or else try and finish the Collects, if those even give xp any more. 

I'm broadly in favor of relatively slower progress but this puts me right off  levelling another character, even with the suppposed 50% bonus for characters on an account where one character has finished the Sig Line. As for the future, when this becomes a step on the levelling ladder that has to be taken before you get to current content, you can forget it. It was fine having to revisit older expansions when it took a couple of sessions at most to hit the cap but a couple of weeks is too much by a lot. I guess I'll be finding a use for all those level boosts I stashed after all.

Also, how could the phrase "actual work" ever belong in any description of a process in a video game? I fear that, when the act of creating something other people use for entertainment becomes too closely tied to your own sense of identity, it's possible to find yourself losing perspective...

Q: Do you have any plans to reduce the number of spells? we have to use 3rd party addons to get an additional hot bar because of the honestly absurd amount of spells/clickies/buffs some classes have? Maybe allow us to combine some buffs to 1 button?
Caith: We’ve talked about it, and introduced some ways to reduce the amount of spells players need on their hotbar or rotation, but the resulting pushback from the playerbase has always been more negative than positive. Everyone wants less abilities, but not this ability, or that ability, or any of MY classes abilities. Ultimately, with the amount of UI performance degradation, less abilities on hotbars showing cooldowns, etc, the better as far as I am concerned.

As above, here's another great example of how giving in to one group's demands just exacerbates complaints from another. It's akin to Wilhelm's Law, which states that every feature in an MMORPG, no matter how widely despised, will prove to have been someone's favorite when removed.

Personally, I love my ten hotbars, at least six of them filled with spells I might and usually do use in combat. I can't remember what all of them are called - I can't even remember what some of them do - but I wouldn't want to be without any of them.

Q: I know it is impossible to make everyone happy and I love that H3 is difficult and not for everyone. Can we get a raid equivalent?
Caith: It is comparatively easy to find six likeminded players that enjoy an extreme challenge to get them into a challenging heroic dungeon, when compared to the task of finding a raid guild who all agree that they want the same level of challenge, failure, regroup, retry. The larger number of players seem to drastically increase the likelyhood of a player or subset of the players are frustrated and angry and only here because they feel like they have to be, thus leading to overall dissatisfaction with the content.

And finally, a word of pure common sense from Caith. I never liked raiding and never did much of it but when I did, back in EverQuest, raids could have as many as 72 people. Can you imagine the time it took just to get everyone facing the right way? Is it any wonder I decided it wasn't for me?

Stockholm Syndrome doesn't actually exist but if it did it sure would explain why some people say they enjoy raiding.

And on that not at all controversial note, I'm off to do what I meant to do four hours ago, namely play EQII.

It's A Long Story...

I had every intention of posting a Katie Jane Garside retrospective today but then I got up this morning and finished what looks to be the First Book of Nightingale, so I thought I'd better write about that instead, while it's still fresh in my mind. Katie Jane has waited more than thirty years for me to recognize her talent. I don't suppose she'll mind waiting a little longer.

So, here's the thing about Nightingale I don't see anyone talking about: it has a really strong story. Certainly the best I've seen in a survival game, which may be damning it with the faintest of praise, but even extending the reach to MMOs, it's right up there with the best. 

Again, not really selling it, am I?

Let me be more specific. As far as I'm aware, Nightingale has just one, single narrative thread. It's crisp, clear, coherent and meaningful. If you follow it, it takes you through the whole game, up to the point where you arrive at The Watch, whereupon the game stops being a solo survival RPG and turns into a lobby MMO.

As you advance through the game, it looks for a while as if you're just picking up the usual fetch quests from those various NPCs developers employ to guide you towards new explorable areas or quest hubs. After a while, though, you begin to realise that none of these are just breadcrumb quests. Nor are any of them either optional or independent of the others.

All of them, without exception, relate directly to your one, central purpose, which is to get back to Nightingale. In that respect the game has a clarity of intent rarely seen even in single-player RPGs. If you want to play Nightingale as anything other than a freeform building game, you have to do the main storyline quest. All of it.

To be strictly accurate, I can't say for absolute certain that there are no side-quests. There is that one involving Bass Reeves that I talked about before. I still haven't been able to finish it because I'm not willing to break the promise I gave him, not to talk to Wilhelmina about his mission in the Realms. I'm reasonably sure, however, that if I did tell her what he's up to, it would only feed back into that central narrative, not spiral off into some unrelated escapade.

Although the storyline is effectively single-minded, it never feels linear. The path to The Watch continually splits into byways then loops back around. By the time you find Nellie Bly on top of her sandstone massif, you have effectively reached the geographical end-point of the questline. Not to be too spoilery about it, she's standing next to the portal that will take you to The Watch. All you have to do is help her get it working.

Doing that took me about half of the seventy hours I've put into the game so far. It could have taken me a lot less, had I opted to go down the traditional murder-hobo route, which is offered as an option. Getting the portal machine into a stable condition requires items from three creatures it would not be too innacurate to call Boss Mobs. I imagine if you opt simply to find and kill them you could get it done in an hour or so, especially if you also make the charm you can use to take you straight to them.

If you listen to reason, though, and opt for trade instead of assassination, you'll find yourself enmeshed in a series of fascinating conversations with remarkable individuals concerning the lore and mores of the Fae realms. They will tell you what you need to do to get the things you need from the powerful creatures who have them, but first, naturally, they 'll want you to do something for them.

When you satisfy their needs, they'll give you a list of ingredients and you'll spend many more hours searching for rare materials to craft the ritual oferings you'll eventually hand over to the various Elders you otherwise would have had to kill. In return, those Elders will give you what Nellie needs to work her engineering magic so she can send you through the portal to meet her boss, Allan Quatermain, greatest of all the Realmwalkers and the one man who might actually know a way to get you back to Nightingale.

All of this takes a long time. I think it probably took me about thirty hours from finding Nellie Bly to speaking with Quatermain this morning. That thirty hours sits on top of another thirty or so during which I needed to raise my powers to a height where I could master the six Sites of Power, access to all of which is necessary before you can complete Nellie's quests. 

In this fashion, every aspect of the game is dependent on every other. The game tells you from the very start that getting back to Nightingale is the be-all and end-all of your existence and so long as you accept that premise, everything you're tasked with doing makes absolute and perfect sense. It's one of the most focused gaming experiences I can remember outside of a point and click adventure game, which at times is what I felt as though I was playing.

That in itself would be enough to make Nightingale's storytelling stand out but there's another layer. Remember Puck? He's the impish and mysterious Fae, who introduces himself at the beginning of the Tutorial and keeps popping up ever afterwards. He's also the only character with a voice actor, so you know he's important.

Puck, it will surprise no-one to hear, has an agenda and as a Fae he is not to be bargained with lightly. If only you had a choice about that. It would be very inappropriate of me to give away what he has to tell or  to reveal what the consequences of listening to him might be, but I will say that what Puck reveals sets up the future of the game in a way I found both enticing and intriguing. The story is just beginning, it seems.

The structure and the plotting, then, feel exemplary for a game of this kind, so it would be as well the writing and dialog were up to the same standard. And they are.

I'm picky about these things. I cut imported games with shaky translations a huge amount of slack because I love whimsy and their infelicities and mistakes frequently make me laugh. For game written in English, however, I don't always show the same leniency. I react strongly against anything that smacks of Fantasy Blockbuster Novel writing for a start and neither do I react well to maudlin sentimentality, worthy earnestness, leaden, lumpen prose or sophomoric "wit".

The writing in Nightingale mostly avoids all of these traps and tropes. Its main fault is verbosity, something I'm hardly in a position to criticise, but for the most part the dialog feels very much in keeping with the supposed nineteenth century setting, without straying into the uncomfortable hinterlands of pastiche or parody. 

That, at least, applies to almost all of the quest dialog which, it should be said, can be extensive. There are many ancillary conversations to be explored before you get to the inevitable acceptance of the task on offer. 

Most of those conversations are optional, so if you don't care to dig into motivations and circumstances, the choice to take the job, no questions asked, is usually there. You will miss a lot of interesting back-story that way but at least you'll be done in time for tea.

As for the many letters, notes, journal entries and other scraps of paper you'll come across, scattered around the Realms, there I'm not quite as convinced. Having the private journal of a nineteenth century adventure seem over-written to the point of incomprehensibility may well be an authentic representation of the form but it doesn't make for much of a fun read in a video game.

That, though, is about my only negative criticism of the writing in Nightingale. Other than that, I found the story involving, entertaining and informative throughout. I'm very keen to find out where it goes next, although I'm not even sure if the next chapter is in game yet. As for the way the narrative informs and gives purpose to the gameplay, I can't remember when - or if - I've seen it done better.

All of which would be a storming recommendation for a single-player RPG. Whether it's such an unalloyed compliment for a game sometimes described as a sandbox is another matter. It is extremely directive, after all and taken as a purely narrative experience it might also be a little dry.

Where it shines is in the combination of its various strands and the harmonious way in which they come together to weave a singular experience. After seventy hours and what feels like a satisfying conclusion, I could almost stop playing now. 

I'm not going to, of course.

An Inconvenient Truth

After more than sixty hours, I'm now fairly convinced that the key to Nightingale's stickiness - for me, anyway, as with Valheim before it - lies as much in its inconvenience as in its undeniable wonder and beauty. Inconvenience and, it has to be said, risk. 

I always say I don't enjoy risk in games. On the whole I don't, but the need to be constantly aware, to be always fully engaged in what I'm doing, is paramount when it comes to holding my attention in a survival game. Unlike MMORPGs, I don't generally play survival games to relax.

In all the time I played Valheim, I could never truly let my concentration lapse. There was always the possibility, however remote, that something unexpected would happen and things would escalate faster than I could respond.

It used to be like that in MMORPGs. That same underlying tension fueled the infamous addictive quality that drove the success of EverQuest. There, despite the longueurs, the tedium and the repetition, an awareness that, with one wrong decision, everything could fall apart, made the whole experience feel more significant than a video game had any right to be.

It's an addictive quality famously based on the risk of loss, the concentration required to avoid it and the effort needed to recover from it, should the worst happen. More positively, it's also about luck, chance, fortune and surprise and the ability to react to the unexpected as it happens.

The most obvious of inconveniences, the one everyone worries about the most, is what happens to your stuff when you die. One thing original EverQuest, Valheim and Nightingale all have in common is that when you die - and you will - you lose all your stuff and have to go get it back.

 It's actually not as harsh in Nightingale in that you get to keep what you're wearing but it's still bad enough. You still have your clothes and whatever you had on your hotbar but you don't have the rest of your gear any more and you do have a hefty debuff for being so remiss as to die in the first place. Getting your things back is going to be tough but if your bags were full you sure as heck aren't going to write it off to experience. 

Problem is, the thing that killed you will still be there and you will be weaker. If you couldn't beat it last time, how are you going to do it now?

That's where the interest lies. I say "interest" rather than "fun" because I am not going to pretend this is fun. Although, as Mrs Bhagpuss will confirm, there was a time when I did like to tell people how much I enjoyed corpse recoveries. 

Boy, that used to annoy them. Annoyed Mrs Bhagpuss, too, come to think of it. Especially when I said it when she was in the middle of getting her own corpse back.

But  I did. And I do still, in a way. Getting your stuff back in a video game can be an interesting puzzle. It takes thought and planning and tactics and strategy and some thinking on your feet when it all goes wrong again. It also takes patience and determination because you'll be lucky if you only have to do it once. When it works, it can be very satisfying. 

When it doesn't, though.... that's when people log out and don't come back. Which is why very, very few games stick with mandatory corpse recovery and item loss in the long term. MMORPGs that start with it inevitably tone it down and usually end up removing it altogether. Corpse recovery hasn't been unavoidable even in EQ for more than twenty years.

In MMORPGs these are design decisions but survival games tend to delegate these kinds of  choices to the player, or at least to whomever has control of the server. Palworld, for example,  allows you switch the death penalty off altogether so you respawn at a place of your choosing with all your stuff. 

I made that change to my private Palworld and although I don't regret it, I suspect that decision had more than a little to do with the sense of disconnection I had with that game. I enjoyed my time there but it didn't always feel completely convincing as a place and I think that complete abnegation of risk was a factor.

Risk, of course, plays a widely-recognized and acknowledged role in the appeal of many games. We hear a lot about "Risk vs Reward" as a design concept. It's generally accepted that there has to be some measure of perceived risk in order make players feel there's some weight to what they're doing. The debate revolves around how much risk there should be, not whether there needs to be any at all.

Inconvenience, though, is rarely seen as any sort of positive in a game. Players demand and developers strive to provide quality of life improvements to make inconveniences go away, tweaks that often continue throughout the life of the game. Even games coming up to their twentieth anniversaries still list QoL improvements in their patch notes.

For some players, though, and it appears I'm one of them, inconvenience can be weirdly appealing. The bulk of potential customers are looking for a clean, polished experience, but for a significant minority who get considerably more pleasure from figuring out how things work than they do from "playing the game", what others call inconvenience qualifies as content.

Even in Early Access, Nightingale has plenty of content. It has exploration, puzzles, crafting and building as well as quests and a story-line. None of them are what I'd call "convenient". 

Let me briefly take you through some of the reasons why.

Exploration

• The possible range of biomes is large but all of them have to be created by the player through a combination of crafting and interaction with in-game devices.
• Some of which you also have to craft.
• After you've discovered the recipes, that is.
• And found the machines.
  
• It's a highly complex system that takes a good deal of learning and even more tuning to provide the desired results.
• Once you make them and travel to them, all of the maps are huge
• But travel is slow. 
• There are no mounts. 
• You can sprint but it uses stamina.
  
• So do climbing, gliding and swimming.
• You can die from falling.
• And from drowning.
• Consequently, stamina management is a constant concern. 
• As are environmental conditions like rain, hail or polluted water, all of which have negative consequences that need to be avoided, prevented or cured. 
• You also get exhausted if you don't rest. 
• If you're exhausted you can't run, swim, jump or climb.
• Plus you can sprain an ankle or break a leg.
• Or an arm.
• Try climbing with a broken arm.
• Or sprinting with a broken leg.
  

Puzzles

• There are "Intellect", "Agility" and "Combat" puzzles but all of them require aspects of the others.
• There are few, if any, explanations of how any puzzle works.
• Some are nested.
• Some are mazes.
• Some are very simple.
• Some aren't.
• Even when it's clear how a puzzle works, it's frequently not easy to see how it works. 
• I mean that literally.
• Some puzzles require you to observe a number of things that aren't all visible on screen at once from the same perspective.
• Some puzzles don't play fair.
•  Agility puzzles, for example, cannot always be solved without building scaffolds or ramps.
• That's not agility, is it?
  

Crafting

• There are very many crafting stations, most of which make intermediate items that can be used in others.
• All stations come in different qualities so there's progression.
• Some stations require fuel.
• Some stations can set you on fire.
  
• All stations can be crafted by the player. 
• Most of them need to be, although there are NPC stations dotted around.
  
• There are "Augmentations", subsidiary devices which enhance the stations. 
• Augmentations, which also have to be crafted, can affect multiple stations at once but have to be placed appropriately to reach them all.
  
• Environmental effects such as lighting or shelter also affect crafting stations.
• All crafted items, including the Augmentations and Stations, can be made from multiple materials.
• All materials have varieties, qualities and stats. 
• Lots of stats, in some cases.
  
• Materials affect outcomes, although it is not always clear how or when.
• Recipes are not automatically granted. 
• They can be found as drops or rewards and also bought from vendors. 
• There are a lot of recipes.
• And a lot of vendors.
• Getting all your recipes takes a lot of work. 
• And also some luck.
  
• Finished items frequently require many sub-combines, some of which require sub-combines of their own. 
• Making anything takes time. 
• Often a lot of time, at least in gaming terms.
• Crafting is far too inconvenient in far too many ways to sum up all of those inconveniences in a bullet point list like this.
• Seriously, it's really, really inconvenient.
• But hella fun!
  

Building

• OK, building isn't that bad.. 
• It's snap-together prefab parts.
• And they fit pretty well.
  
• How bad could it be?
  
• There are a lot of parts, though.
• And a number of styles.
• And you have to craft them all.
• And the better ones require sub-combines.
  
• And unlike most games with housing, you can build anywhere and as extensively as you want.
• Which means you're going to end up tearing down and rebuilding.
• Repeatedly.
  

Questing and Storyline

• Bundled together here because they often seem to be one and the same
• Also, they seem to be inextricably bound up with crafting.
• And crafting progression.
• And exploration.
• And exploration progression.
• And combat, of course.
  
• Although sometimes you can craft an item to bribe a mob to give you its drop instead of killing it.
• Much faster and easier just to kill it, of course.
  
• Just be prepared to be criticized for your thuggery if you do.
• And to miss out on sub-quests.
• On really big, long, involved sub-quests. 
• Like half the fricken' content of the game, it seems like, sometimes.
• So maybe don't just kill everything, yo!
  
• Also, better be ready to go exploring.
• And you'd better like reading because there's no voice acting but there is a lot of flavor text.
• And instructions.
• That you need to follow.
• It helps if you can do funny voices in your head.
• Well, it helps me...
  

I think that's enough to give an idea of just how fiddle-faddly Nightingale is and I haven't even touched on the magic system or the extremely fine gradations of choice available in crafting, enchanting and otherwise enhancing your gear. Or the potions. Or the food. Or stealth. Or using the Spyglass.

Everything seems to lean into everything else. There's no real boundary between the types of gameplay on offer. You need to be willing to engage equally with all of them and they are all very complex. 

Unnecessarily so, I'm sure many players would say, but I would not be one of them. Inconvenience that draws you in rather than pushes you away is a very difficult trick to pull off but clearly, for me, Nightingale has managed it, in much the same way Valheim did a few years ago.

Still, I strongly suspect Nightingale will not hold the same, wide-ranging appeal as the viking survival game. I think the crafting is likely to appeal hugely to a very limited demographic while driving everyone else to distraction. I think there's a point of diminishing returns to this level of inconvenient complexity and I imagine a lot of people reached it long ago.

I'll get there soon too, no doubt. Even at Tier 2, it's already taking me literally hours to gather the mats, make the combines and finish the items I want. It's only going to get worse, I'm sure. I don't think I'm going to be sounding so cheery about it by Tier 5.

For now, though, I'm still motoring along although I'm not sure how much traffic there is ahead of me. Today I completed the last of the six Sites of Power, The Hunt. For that, as for the first five, I got a Steam achievement. As of time of writing, only 8.2% of players have made it that far.

It does look as though what I'm finding compulsive, everyone is finding exactly the opposite. Never mind, though. Just wait a while and I'm sure it will all get honed down until there are no inconveniences to speak of. By the time the game officially launches, you'll most likely be able to finish in a few seconds what's currently taking me most of a session. 

By then, though, I won't care. I'll be long gone, probably off playing some other half-finished game that drives everyone nuts with its awkward, annoying mechanics and its refusal to make anything simple. 

Luckily for me, that's most games when they begin. I'm not likely to run out of options any time soon. Especially while Early Access stays popular.