Good Morning Folks. I’m still testing positive for COVID-19 some two weeks after my initial test, and honesty… I still feel fairly awful. Every day is a little bit better, but it is a battle waged in inches rather than feet. While I am actually getting decent enough sleep now, which is a huge positive… my game time is still rather fraught and unfocused. Lately, I have been spending quite a bit of my time in Minecraft. It seems like this is my “sick” game because over the years I have faded back into it whenever I was not feeling myself. I never really stick around terribly long, but it is sort of the experience I can completely shut my brain off for and just build and explore.
This recent bout of Minecraft nostalgia is brought to you by the fact that I remembered that I have videos that I shot eons ago… in deeply potato quality of my very first Minecraft world. I explored with a sense of wonder, in part because I was still figuring out the rules of world creation back then. I didn’t know with certainty where I could strip mine to get diamonds, nor did I really understand how to find key resources like coal or iron, and I just sort of freeform built wherever things seemed cool. I think in some part I wanted to maybe rekindle a bit of that with a new world. There is part of me that wishes that I still had these original files… and quite honestly I thought I had backed them up because prior to us getting a multiplayer server Rylacus and I used to swap our worlds back and forth so we could see what the other was building.
Right now I am very much in the “ugly but efficient” phase of the world where I am building out of whatever materials I happen across. For the moment I have this awkward-looking tower that is nice and safe from all of the monsters that spawn around it. I have no clue how tall I am going to make it, but given my penchant for building Skyroads, I will probably keep building upwards over time. For the moment only one floor is really very active with my bed and crafting machines, but I expect to add in some other stuff at least for storage purposes.
Beneath the tower, I started digging straight down and then began to do my more recent spiral staircase style of digging. Digging straight down is entirely too dangerous, so if you start digging around a central column, with each step going deeper you usually have enough time to react to any danger you might encounter but also it does not take a ton of space. I used to always dig a stairwell down, but it always felt like I was wasting a lot of space in doing so. I’ve not hit bedrock yet, but I did tunnel down into a geode. I spent enough time down there to torch off a large section to make it a bit safer. I similarly hit a natural cave on the way down that had quite a bit of iron, which I have similarly torched off to make it safe.
The tower is technically the first place I attempted to settle in this world. While I was running from the spawn point I built this makeshift bridge and then started digging into the side of a mountain. Given my natural dwarven tendencies, my first bases tend to be similar areas. The big problem here however is that I dug into a very active cave system with a zombie spawner. I was quickly overwhelmed and forced to run back from the spawn. This of course meant that my next priority was to get enough wool to be able to make a bed. However, I did come back to the cave system farm it down, and eventually torch off the zombie spawner so that I could make it a bit more reasonable. This is just around the corner from my tower and I might at some point try and connect the two areas with an underground tunnel.
While it is not the most efficient thing in the world right now, I did set up a very rudimentary zombie spawner farm so that I can come back here when I need experience for enchanting. I am sure I will improve this a bit over time to make it work more efficiently. It works well enough for now and if I need to shut it off I can easily throw a torch inside there to make it safe enough to work on. Right now the zombies have a bad habit of getting caught in the blind corner to the right, so at some point I will optimize this to make it work a bit better. If I ever get a silk touch pick, I might pick the spawner up and move it to someplace a bit closer to my base. Thought like I said above it might be fun to connect the two areas up via a safe underground tunnel.
For the moment I am planning on expanding out the walled-off area to add a bit of a farm, and maybe starting to pen off some animals. Once I get a reliable crop of grain, I am probably going to lure some cows into a “meat hole” which is a truly disturbing contraption that essentially has you feed cows until they overpopulate the number of spawns that can appear on a single block… and then kill off the older entities creating meat and leather. Sheep on the other hand I can just harvest like normal with shears, and potentially I might build a lava-based chicken farm to get eggs and feathers. Essentially I need to build up some reliable sources of food… because for the moment I am running on whatever I have lucked into farming out in the world and some bread that I found in chests.
However, I am somewhat hesitant to go wild on building a bunch of automated farms… because on some level that destroys the simplicity of the game.
Featuring: Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! We are back after taking a break last week due to the limited number of folks available. This week we start off with a topic that has bounced around a bit on our docket. Namely, we marvel at just how balanced City of Heroes/City of Villians is and what a pinnacle of system design it really is. Bel spent a bit of time playing Nightingale now that is available in early access, and talks about the mess of a game that it is. Finally, we dive into our primary topic this week and talk about the Last Epoch 1.0 launch and how phenomenal the game feels right now despite all of the server-side woes.
Good Morning Folks! Since the Last Epoch servers were down last night in preparations for the 1.0 launch today, and Nightingale opened up for early access I decided to give the game a spin. Right now the game is on an introductory price of $26.99 and I figured since I knew I was going to pick it up eventually, I might as well get in at the cheapest price. I feel like I need to set the stage for this discussion. I’ve played a lot of survival games over the years and most recently have been playing a heck of a lot of Enshrouded. This is going to greatly color my opinion of this game. After spending around 5 hours last night playing Nightingale I can state without a doubt that it isn’t an awful game, but so far at this stage in development it isn’t a great one either.
Let’s scroll back a few years and take a look at the original trailer that announced the game during the 2021 Game Awards. I realize this is setting us up for failure because early trailers are more akin to a “mood board” than anything related to what the final product is going to look like. What I got from that trailer is that we would be Cthulhu-style Victorian-era adventurers in cool costumes tromping through the fae multiverse looking for treasure and building settlements. I personally imagined something with a combat system akin to New World, with big chunky good feeling attacks and interesting combatants to fight and a bunch of gorgeous realms to explore. I imagined a building system something akin to Valheim where you recruit people and bring them back to your base to build up to some epic battles as the baddies attack you. I admit I have not followed the development of this game terribly closely, but these trailers and the ones that followed at Summer Game Fest recently set the expectations.
Nightingale has a bunch of really interesting ideas. It has one of the more creative character generators I have seen to date, where not only do you set the looks of your character but you also can define your background and lineage. For example, if you so choose… you can creat the appearance of every person in your direct line for three generations… and then choose to inherit traits in your appearance rather than set them yourself. This is some utter nonsense, but you can tell this is something that one person on the team was super passionate about. My only complaint was with the beard options where I could not have a nice full bushy beard and essentially had to choose between a svelt goatee and a lovely set of muttonchops.
What they nailed was the world. There were several moments where I just had to stop and enjoy the vistas. It has a very Myst like quality to it, as you explore these areas that were once inhabited by the Fae with impossible constructions, floating towers, and such. The world maybe doesn’t feel quite as atmospheric as the trailers would indicate. During tutorial quests you end up crossing through a Forest, a Desert, and a Swamp… the three biomes that exist in the game currently, and all of them very much felt like what you would expect from a procedural generator. While there were some cool set pieces, none of them felt terribly atmospheric. Each of these three tutorial realms had a very limited scope and served to teach you how the tech tree works.
This starts us down the problem I am having with this game. If I compare it against other survival titles… it is ploddingly slow. In this sort of game, I am used to hitting the beach… because it always seems to be a beach… gathering some twigs and rocks and outfitting myself in my first tools and weapons within the first fifteen minutes. Everything feels extremely drawn out as you have to wait for the game to give you permission to craft anything… which doesn’t really take place until you reach the second of the three tutorial realms. This sluggish quality seems to carry forward into all aspects of crafting. It takes forever for you to be able to craft your own clothing because in order to get to that point you have to have crafted three different sorts of machines to assemble some slapdash leather.
When you can assemble your first gear set… it looks like this. We were drawn in from the trailer and visuals of romping around the wilds in spats and petticoats… and instead, you look like every murder hobo in every survival game. I look like I am about to defend my steakwrap by shivving you. I get that this is the starter “tattered” gear, but in order to get started and run through the first major objective you have to upgrade out of what looked like much better gear. Essentially we are a few hours into the game and the anachronistic aesthetic from all of the trailers is already shot. I am sure that eventually, we will probably have access to get that looks like the trailers, but at the rate of progression through the game, it seems like it will be months down the line.
One of the biggest problems that I am having with the crafting system is “bag bloat”. Essentially recipes will request a type of ingredient, for example “t1 Bones” and that can come from any Tier 1 animal that can drop bones. However in your bag… the items are kept in separate stacks as to whether or not they came from a predator or a prey animal, or later when you learn fishing… each TYPE of fish is stored separately. This trickles through to the final produced material so the game can see that I have “16 Meat” on my hotbar, but in my actual bags this is a combination of grilled prey meat, grilled predator meat, and each individual type of fish that I have caught and cooked. The types of ingredients you put into a meal impact the stats of the meal slightly, but so far this has seemed to be negligible, and all I really care about how is healing myself and not dying to the hunger mechanic that slowly kills you. This isn’t so much a problem for your character’s backpack, but it rapidly becomes a problem in trying to store this nonsense in baskets. There really needs to be a way to convert up materials to a generic form that stacks cleanly.
The other problem that I am starting to get into is that every craft seems to require refinement of a bunch of different materials in order to craft it. This mostly just serves to slow down the gameplay as you have to wait on a bunch of machines to craft up enough of the refined resources in order to do the final combine. I’m more used to survival games using something like a tiering system… which the game seems to have… but isn’t utilizing in the manner I am used to. I would expect a Tier 2 machine would require Tier 2 metal and Tier 2 wood… not just refined versions of the T1 materials or the secondary byproducts of refining the items. For example, if you want to make a Candle you need a wick, and if you want to make a wick you need two twines, and if you want to make twine you need “fibers” either through gathering plant fibers or refining meat into animal fibers. It rapidly feels a bit tedious to actually make anything.
The building system feels similarly cumbersome. I would expect to be able to create a wooden shanty quickly by chopping down some trees and using the wood that I gained from said trees. That is not the case and all of the “wooden” block types require you to gather three resources… plant fiber, sticks, and proper wood. Stone however just requires stone… so I have been crafting everything out of that. Stone however is a limited resource and I am slowly running out of stone piles on the island to harvest because Nightingale is not a voxel game with destructable terrain, which means that I can’t just start excavating the side of a mountain to get resources. I have to harvest specific nodes that yield a specific type of material and then deliver it back to the build side and apply it to the designed form. On one hand, it is really cool that you can essentially plan out the entire building in blueprint form, but when you apply resources… it applies them to the entire blueprint at once and then chooses to “finish” seemingly random blocks.
One of the particularly cumbersome elements comes from when you want to remove an item and place it somewhere else. There is no easy way to remove a segment of the wall or pick back up a crafting machine to place it somewhere else. You can toggle on build mode with “X” key… which I had to find by sifting through the keybindings, and in theory, you can deconstruct an item. This will cause a pile of materials to drop to the ground. However, it does not seem to be ALL of the materials that went into crafting the item initially. The other option is just to break an item… at which point you lose ALL resources that went into building it. Sure it is probably more realistic that if you knock down a wall, you can’t just stand it back up again but we are already dealing with magical floating blueprints so I feel like quality of life is a more important trait here.
You can recruit other survivors but they are honestly… kind of idiots. Here is my companion Agnes lighting herself on fire by walking through the cook stove. I legitimately was tabbed out last night typing a message and heard the clear sound of something catching on fire, only to flip over to this scene. I guess the positive is that Agnes appears to be immortal. She has very simple AI and that AI is to harvest every tree she sees… and gives zero fucks about whether or not that tree is going to fall on top of you and deal damage. You can be in the middle of combat and she is going to walk over and immediately start felling a fucking tree while you are skinning the corpse. She is as good at combat as she is at standing in fires.
This takes us to what I feel is the critical flaw in the game for me. Skyrim is a game that we all love and it did some groundbreaking things for open-world gaming… but even for 2010, it had what I would consider to be pretty shitty combat. Combat in Nightingale feels like Skyrim where mobs just sort of blindly rush at you the second they spot you… flailing wildly… and you sort of just have to swing blindly at them until you connect enough times to kill them hoping that your hitpoints outlast their ability to reduce them. There is no real strategy here. I found that I could just jump backwards in order to avoid most attacks and this became my strategy for ranged attacking them down until they died. Attacking with a melee weapon felt awful. Generally speaking, when you enter combat you have three to six things trying to attack you at the same time and your combat is mostly useless.
I completed the first dungeon and took on the first boss… and it was also similarly bad. It just sort of charged at you and you would need to duck out of the way and plink it down as it was ramping up for the next attack. I mostly used the pillars as a way of skirting around the boss because attacking head-on seemed like an awful idea. Its mechanics consisted on a dash attack and a big point-blank AOE, but otherwise, it just seemed to keep locking on my location and I needed to stop being there for a while. A lot of the selling point of this game is to go off on adventures fighting baddies and looking for cool treasure, and honestly… I am not sure I want any more of this combat. If this is representative of what the game has to offer, and based on some reviews I watched this morning before sitting down to write this… it seems like it is.
There is also the problem of loot. If I am going to go delving into dungeons I feel like there should be some reward at the end of my troubles. What Nightingale has for loot is what I could call “Minecraft Loot” aka some random resources. You might find a single ignot… or a wick… or maybe even some leather straps, but nothing resembling anything special and unique to that dungeon. If the reward for doing dungeons is the same bullshit that I can get anywhere else on the island… then why am I doing the dungeons? The answer is that you have to do the dungeons in order to unlock new cards… which then allow you to open new realms… where you can gather more resources and have more crappy combat. For me at least that mechanical loop is flawed because if everything is just more of the same… “we have Skyrim at home”.
The problem that I see with Nightingale, is it is trying to be a bunch of different games and not really succeeding at any of them. It isn’t what I would consider a good crafting for survival game, because everything feels way too tedious, especially at the beginning. It isn’t a good adventure and exploration game, because combat feels awful. It isn’t a good dungeon delving game, because there is zero loot chase. Nightingale is not a bad game by any means… but it isn’t a particularly good one either. It is launching into a crowd that is thick with really good games that are hitting all of these buttons. Enshrouded for example launched similarly in early access but landed with a game that felt pretty damned close to finished. Valheim a few years ago did what Nightingale is trying to do but just better in spite of being woefully unpolished and having its own stack of problems. The major selling point of Nightingale is adventuring in weird period outfits… and that goes out the window the moment you have to craft something for yourself.
I get that Nightingale is an early-access game, and there is a little warning at the launch to make sure you understand that. However generally speaking in spite of the flaws that a game might have in early access, I can often see a core of the game that is good and just needs as lot of polish and bug fixing. With Nightingale, I am just not seeing a fun mechanical game loop that warrants me spending much more time with it. I put five hours in last night and I would have expected in that time for the game to have set the hook. It is a perfectly reasonable game… it just isn’t better than anything else in the survival and exploration genre. When you are launching in the same year as PalWorld and Enshrouded… you sorta have to do something really good in order to stand out from the pack and I am not seeing it. Sure the world is gorgeous… but a gorgeous world only gets you so far.
Hey Friends! I don’t have a ton to talk about this morning so I thought I would do a bit of a recap of my weekend. One of those games that I keep returning to no matter what is going on in my life is Minecraft. I’ve not felt the best over the last few weeks because of mystery-ailment-that-is-likely-not-covid. I can always retreat to Minecraft and my research into the NFTWorld fiasco sparked my desire to play the game. What do I usually do when I play Minecraft? Well, I burrow into the side of a mountain and dig one tunnel going up and one tunnel going down. This screenshot was from the beginning of my process of terraforming a mountain top. I’ve now since built a bit of a reasonable structure up top, and my incessant tunneling has served as material for building projects.
What consumed a truly inordinate amount of time is that in the process of digging down… I encountered an underground ocean. I mean I could, of course, have just blocked it off and continued along with my day but instead, I decided to use the particular properties of gates to hold back water… in order to give me access still to this resource if I happened to need it. Granted again I could have done this in a more simple manner with a door… but I set down this path so I trucked right along with this madness. The most quirky thing about this is that later on, I encountered another section of this cave network with the difference this one being mostly dry. My entire focus however became digging down to bedrock… which I accomplished yesterday and now have a ton of deep slate to build things with.
In other activities, I am still working on my Inquisitor in Path of Exile and have just started the final act. I am still running around with Wintertide Brand and have not transitioned my build over to Righteous Fire. I think I still need to finish cruel lab before I can do this thing, so I should probably set my mind to completing that before I finish Act Ten and take another resistance hit. I believe I am sitting at 70 just about to hit 71 so I have long since started getting lots and lots of map drops. My time with Path of Exile right now is more or less trying to figure out what I want to be when I grow up. What I mean by that is I am trying to figure out what I want my build to be for my first legit season open. I think a few of us are in this holding pattern of trying to click the gears in place because we know we are just about to do it all over again in mid-August.
Lastly, I am still spending time in Dragonflight alpha, and as such spending time poking around on an Evoker. I believe today is the cut-off for this phase of the alpha test and in theory, when I next play the game I will be able to access one of the expansion zones. I have a Deathknight ready to go and I will probably spend some time speccing out a Warrior and trying to build something I enjoy there as well. I am honestly looking forward to seeing the zones because I have heard good things about them. Evoker and Dracthyr are decidedly not my jam and I feel are right now negatively coloring my impression of the expansion so far. I’ve evolved to be able to play “finger wigglers” a bit more than I could in the past, but the Evoker is maybe a bit too on that spectrum for my tastes. I’ve never reconciled my ability to enjoy a Mage, but I dig the heck out of Demonology Warlock.
