Good Morning, Folks! Last night was our regularly scheduled Sibling Time ™, and I spent it with my sibling Ace. One thing that you have to know about Ace is that they love ANYTHING to do with the ocean, which means that I have more or less lost them completely since the release of Subnautica 2. Last night we decided to dive into the realm of multiplayer, and I have to say… much like it is with EVERY survival game… Subnautica 2 is better with friends. That is not to say there are no problems. Subnautica 2 has way more of a specific story than the first game, but less so than the expansion. The unfolding of the story happens in a very non-sequitur manner if you are not the person clicking on all of the objects. You will be exploring the world and have a sudden voice clip play from out of nowhere.
The game more or less follows a similar flow to the first one. You are on an Ocean planet, working for an evil corporation, and the first steps in this new world are to unjam your pod and send it to the surface. From there, you are gathering resources to build a more permanent structure and upgrade your kit of equipment to do various things. Where this game differs from the first one is that it adds to the mix genetic mutations that allow you to interact with various things that you cannot from the start. For example, before you launch your pod, you have to take an adaptation that allows you to process oxygen under the high atmospheric pressure of this planet. One of the first mutations that you seek out when oceanside is something that will allow you to process water and nutrients from the planetary wildlife. This is where the slug shake comes in, because effectively, you end up picking up these adorable sea slugs and drinking the filtered water inside of them.
Last night was a heck of a lot of fun, and we plan on playing on this same save file next week during Sibling Time. Probably the highlight of the night was disturbing this giant crab monstrosity that seems to churn up resources as it moves around. The other highlight is just how fast resource gathering goes when you have multiple people working towards the same objectives. We ended the night with a pretty sweet base, after our first one did not really meet our long-term needs. We had a lot of issues with that first base and object collisions, but in the second base, we largely built it once we opened up the ability to create rooms, so we have so much more space for “activities”. Right now, we are sort of working towards our ability to get a vehicle, and with that, I know that Ace is going to push me to start exploring the deep dark ocean that terrifies me so.
Since I have largely stopped playing Diablo IV, that means I am back in Path of Exile for the moment while waiting on the launch of Path of Exile II’s new league on the 29th. One of the characters that I really enjoyed this league is my yolo build around taking a guardian and then using a few new uniques to create a giant army of minions. Mostly, I guess I am seeing how far I can push this build before I lose focus again and start playing Path of Exile II. It is shocking just how well this build works and how tanky it actually is. It is nothing like my Righteous Fire characters, but it still has a fair amount of block and over 5000 life. I have been doing Delve with this character, which seems wild because you need a very tanky character for that. I’m not sure if I have ever had a Minions character that felt this comfy. Do I think anyone should follow this build? Probably not. It was super easy to level, and I mostly just typed Minion into the search box and went for those nodes.
I think for Path of Exile II, I am once again going to go with an Infernalist for minions. There does not seem to be any really popular overpowered build guides for this class, but my plan right now is that I am going to do what I did with the above build and just type “minion” in the search box and go where the nodes are. If nothing else, that should get me through the campaign pretty easily, and then I just have to work on defenses. My hope is that going Infernalist is going to allow me to pivot pretty easily into Raven Righteous Fire whenever I can get my hands on that staff. This first character will also serve as something to acquire some easy currency and buy some of the other new build enabling uniques. I want to try and shield throw/slam build with the new Tul unique. I am contemplating trying to do that build as a strength stacker with the new water sprinkler unique. Honestly, I am looking forward to playing some POE2 way more than I expected.
This was a bit of a mixed bag of topics, but as is the case often with my muddled chemo brain.
Good Morning Folks. This past weekend I originally set out to start a brand new world in Enshrouded, and see all of the content. What I have done instead… is compulsively hollow out the side of a mountain, with the goal of building down to the shroud. There are certain patterns that I get suck in with games… where I cannot bring myself to do something else until the mission has been accomplished. I even built a worktable and a bed on this nonsensical shelf floating above the shroud just so that I could quickly reset the day or build more stone blocks as needed. There is nothing impressive about my build… it is mostly just a box, but I still find myself compelled to build in this manner. Often times I “pretty” the structure up once I have reached a point where I feel okay about it… but at least for awhile I always go through a bulk utilitarian building phase.
Removing spawned material in Enshrouded is a massive pain in the ass… so what I learned when I decided to dig a basement at release, is that you can use prefab blocks as a way of removing chunks of the world in a consistent manner. For example my preferred floor height is two 2×2 blocks stacked on top of each other. So as I started hollowing out the side of the hill, I started placing these blocks and then removing them in a structured manner so that I could clear out individual floors of my weird boxy structure at a time. Effectively… I will probably be stuck in this pattern until I have hollowed out as far down as the current parameters of my base will allow. Then I will go back into a phase of adventuring again… until I can increase my base size… and then likely back to hollowing out the ground again.
This is not just an enshrouded thing… in Valheim I could not hollow out the earth easily… so instead I built this stupid network of connected bases. I had no real reason to build so many bases… but I just felt compelled to keep creating beachheads in new areas of the map. I even went so far as to create this secret base, with a hidden portal… that was MASSIVE and way deep out into the chain of islands on a shared map. I thought it would be funny if someone on our server stumbled onto it and wondered what the hell was going on. In Valheim specifically I used to use the fact that you could transport the same character between multiple save games…. to rapidly transport materials between locations since things had so much weight. I would pop over to a private save… dump my inventory, then move to where I wanted to dump the items in the public save… and pop back over to retrieve them into my characters inventory. I think this “efficient” gameplay annoyed Kodra who was all about the real world ramifications of having to transport objects around the world.
Minecraft is the real place where you can see my compulsive patterns in action. I have so many different save files… all with the same basic patterns. Something super common is my trademarked tunnels to nowhere. I will just start digging in a direction and keep going until I hit something that looks interesting. For example this tunnel goes for unknown thousands of blocks… I think I went through four diamond pickaxes to carve this 3×3 tunnel that effectively leads to nowhere interesting at all. I saved every bit of the stone that I harvested meticulously in a bunch of chests, so that I could then in turn use it to build other dumb structures that no one will ever see. A lot of times I will find myself compelled to build like this while I am listening to an audiobook or something, bringing subtle order to the chaos of the random spawns.
In the same save file you can see a “stack of boxes” similar to what I have going on in Enshrouded. What you cannot see is just how many floors are below ground that I compulsively dug all the way down to bedrock. Once you get down there… you can see a bunch of mining operations as I scoured the earth looking for resources. There are people who build pretty houses in these games, but for whatever reason… I always strike down into the earth to find my safe domicile. I think on some level if I had my druthers… my perfect house would be dug into a mountain side with big windows facing out into the world… but plenty of shadowy places where I can escape the light of day. I keep effectively building these same structural ideas in whatever game I happen to be playing.
Another thing you will find in a lot of my saved games… is interlinking paths that don’t really serve a purpose. There is no reason why I built skyroads between mountain peaks…. and then also hollowed out paths between them. Like there is no mechanical purpose to any of this. As soon as I closed off an area and lit it up, I was completely safe from anything that might spawn at night. However I just kept building these random terraces and cascading staircases that went up the sides of hills… and then dipped inside of the mountain only to poke out the other side and go in a different direction. My builds in games often feel akin to the Winchester house… where I just kept building for the purpose of building. Then randomly I will decide to roll a brand new world and start the entire processes over again.
Sometimes I will end up with something unintentionally beautiful… like this area where I dug into a mountain and found a natural grotto with waterfalls coming down from above and a subterranean pond. So I then set forth to build a stairwell that went up through said pond… for reasons that do not really exist other than to do it. I am sure all of this is some sign of a malady or something…. but I find a weird level of peace just sort of aimlessly building. I used to sit in the floor with building blocks, legos, or later contrux as a kid and effectively building the same sort of structural designs over and over. Now said buildings… exist in digital form. Because of this weird compulsion that I seem to have… all of these games will likely remain evergreen. Hopefully there will never be a time when I do not find joy in the simplicity of placing or removing blocks. On some level I think this is probably some way I deal with anxiety… because I am shuffling around quite a bit of it right now.
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.
