Winter Is Coming. (But I Couldn't Wait.)

In a few days, a new Once Human scenario, awkwardly entitled Prismsverse's Clash, will go live. That will make three, along with the original PvE and PvP scenarios Manibus and Evolution's Call. There's a further three-way split, with each of the latter two now coming in three difficulty settings, Novice, (The only difficulty at launch) Normal and Hard.

The original Seasons lasted six weeks, after which you either moved to a new server and started over or hung around until your server was switched off a few weeks later. You also had the option of footling around in Eternaland, an option that, as the name implies, is always on the table.

I wasn't all that keen to repeat the same content that soon after I'd just finished it - or at least got as far with it as I was going to - and I was less than clear on exactly how the Season mechanics worked, meaning I was loathe to go ahead without learning more. Which is why, without really meaning to, I stopped playing Once Human back in August. 

The last time I logged in before today was three weeks ago, when all I did was wander around Eternaland, trying  to figure out how the whole Season thing was supposed to work but not really getting all that far. When I logged into Steam this morning and saw a big announcement about the imminent arrival of an actual new scenario with different content, I thought it was probably about time I made some kind of decision so I logged in and spent a while looking at the options again and reading such information as I could find. 

Here's a tip. When it comes close to the end of the Season, make sure you're wearing your cosmetic gear. Everything else gets stripped.

I can't say it helped a whole lot. After what must by now add up to a couple of hours of reading official handouts, reddit threads and blog posts, I think I've got the basics but I'm uncomfortably aware there are probably plenty of details I've missed and I'm quite sure there will be implications I haven't grasped. Still, you have to make some kind of choice eventually. Either that or stop playing altogether. (Eternaland doesn't really count. It's lovely but it's a toy not a game.)

As far as I could tell, the choices available to me this morning were:

• 1) Manibus Novice: play exactly the same scenario again, on exactly the same difficulty but with a brand-new character. I may be wrong but I don't think an existing character can go back to the introductory difficulty. I wasn't offered any Novice servers when I finally clicked on the New Season button, anyway. I could only see them on the main server list.

• 2) Manibus Normal: Play exactly the same scenario but on very slightly harder difficulty. From what I can glean, what makes Normal harder than Novice is a small increase in damage output for the mobs and a couple of new, tougher types of mob, although I'm not a hundred per cent sure those aren't only in Hard. Such info as I could find was confused and contradictory.

• 3) Manibus Hard: Play exactly the same scenario on a significantly harder difficulty level. The tweaks there are the same as for Normal plus some bosses that are immune to certain types of damage, more onerous survival mechanics and more vicious base raids

• 4) Evolution's Call: Difficulty settings and scenario as above but on a PvP server.

•  5) Prismsverse's Clash: Sign up for the new scenario, for which there already seems to be some kind of waiting list and which developers Starry are clearly expecting to be a bit of a land rush. That sounded like a plan until I checked what was different about  and realised it was just the same scenario yet again, only with factional PvP bolted on. No idea if it also comes in varying difficulties.
  

• 6) The Way of Winter: Wait for the fourth scenario, arriving sometime in October. Not only does that one have a much better name, it's a PvE scenario and it comes with some new, explorable territory as well as additional survival mechanics (Cold-related ones, presumably.)

• 7) Give up playing for the foreseeable future.

Speaking of cosmetic gear, this is new and it's so special it gets its own promo video.

I didn't want to start over completely from scratch on a new character so I discounted #1.

Playing the same content but significantly harder seems like pure insanity to me so I discounted #3.

I don't much enjoy playing PvE content in a PvP environment so I discounted #4. 

I do like factional PvP but I am very bad at it and generally need to be surrounded by people who aren't before I can actually enjoy myself so, since I definitely didn't want to go shopping for a guild or whatever they're called in OH, I somewhat relectantly discounted #5. 

I like Once Human, so I discounted #7 too. 

That left two options. I realise now, all too late, that I should have had some patience and taken  #6 but I was in a bit of a gung ho mood so I didn't. I took #2 almost solely because I was fed up of not really knowing how the mechanics of choosing a Season actually worked and I wanted to find out and write a blog post about it.

And here we are!

The question is, now I've taken the plunge, am I any the wiser? Well, a little. I do know how the transfer of items from one Season to the next via Eternaland works, at last. Well, kinda.

Almost everything comes with you into Eternaland. Not just the stuff that was in your backpack when the server closed but everything in your storage chests, all your armor, weapons, tools and all your deviants. I wasn't sure what would happen to the deviants so I was happy to see they all made it.

Anything you made, like all your workstations, your vehicles and your furniture vanishes. All your dropped or found furniture stays. Your main currency gets converted in Eternaland currency so you can go nuts there. Seasonal currencies go poof. 

There's more to it than that but that's the gist. More importantly for the purposes of this post, when you choose a new scenario you get a stipend to spend on bringing items across with you. Each item has a set cost, which varies quite a bit. My stipend was 20k and one very nice piece of armor cost 5k to move but some dropped house items that for some reason hadn't been included automatically were free. 

You can swap stuff in and out to see the costs before committing, something I did a lot of before making a final decision. In the end I took four pieces of armor, a weapon, a couple of tools, a mod and anything that was free. 

Unfortunately, even though I read the decriptions very carefully and double-checked before committing, almost all of it turned out to be useless, at least for the time being. I specifically picked gear and weapons that did not show any level restrictions, something that many pieces had clearly marked, but when I went to equip them on the new server, they all had somehow acquired Level 40 Required tags.

To be fair, it was obvious they were going to be ridiculously overpowered for a low-level character but I naively assumed the lack of level restriction - when other items clearly had one - meant there was going to be some sort of scaling. Nope.

Oh, well. They'll come in handy if I get to Level 40, I guess. Which obviously I won't, even though, as I said when I was writing about my recent return to Nightingale, the fundemental survival gameplay loop is always compelling. I had no intention today of spending any more time in Once human than it took to gather information for this post and yet I ended up staying for more than two hours, most of which was finding a location to build a house (I picked a really great spot with huge potential.) then chopping trees and smashing rocks to start work on it.

I also did a couple of quests, mostly with research in mind. One final option I haven't yet mentioned, which can, at least in theory, also affect your experience as you retread the same ground, is the Simplified Task toggle. If you can find it... and if it really exists.

When I picked my Normal Manibus server I thought I was done with making decisions but there was one more choice to make: Task Mode. You can choose to replicate your previous experience precisely, completing all quests, missions and tasks in full, just like last time. Or you can opt for Simplified, described as "a more streamlined version with only essential task guidance". 

Not just a Scenario
a Scenario Festival!

I dithered over this one for a while. I really wanted to go the Simplified route, as much to see how it worked as anything, but I was aware that I'd skipped a lot of possible quests first time around and I was wary of missing out on what would, to me, be genuinely new content. In the end what made the decision for me was the note that ran beneath beneath both options, which I read as indicating it would be possible to activate Simplified Mode on a case-by-case basis, even if you took the other option. 

That sounded like the best of both worlds so I went with Complete. Unfortunately, having seen no sign of any way to excercise the option when doing a task I know I did last time, I'm now wondering if that rubric refers only to Simplified Mode itself, meaning you have to choose it as an option in the first place before you can toggle it on and off. 

In the long run I don't think it's going to be a problem if that proves to be the case. Much though I love Once Human, I can think of better ways to spend my time than spending the autumn replaying the exact same content I worked my through over the summer. Choosing a new Season today was a useful excercise, in that I learned some things I didn't know and made some mistakes I'd sooner have made when it didn't matter, but other than that I would have been better off waiting for The Way of Winter next month.

As I understand things, it won't be possible for me to move my current character across to the new scenario until the Season on the server I'm on now comes to an end, which won't be for almost six weeks. If Winter comes sooner and I don't want to wait I'll have to make a new character to try it out.

Having seen what the options are for moving stuff out of Eternaland, that doesn't seem like it would be a problem but should I decide I can't live without my tiger-striped pants (Cosmetic items aways transfer, I believe.) at worst it'll mean waiting a couple more weeks. I ought to be able to manage that. 

That I didn't today proves nothing!

In The Country

Just a short post to say I'm back from an equally short holiday where we stayed in a "log cabin" (Aka converted garden shed - but very nicely converted!) on a farm that turned out, somewhat to my surprise but rather to my delight, to have no WiFi coverage whatsoever. I took my laptop but all I used it for was to watch old music videos that I had thoughtfully taken with me. That may result in a back catalog post at some point.

It was quite odd not to look at anything online for almost three days. I could technically have used my phone but the signal was barely there either and I chose not to bother trying to find a better one when we visited what passed for civilization in those parts. It was really nice not to have to think about looking stuff up for once, although I think three days was probably enough.

Anyway, we had a great time, the weather was unbelievably good for the time of year and Beryl went crazy when we took her to the seaside, which we did twice. It was worth the trip just for that. 

We're back now and what passes for normal service will be resumed tomorrow. Probably. If I'm in the mood and if I have time after I've picked up the more than a hundred apples that fell onto the lawn in the time we were away. Literally. I counted a hundred and thirty before I gave up.

Looking for Nightingale : More First Impressions Of Realms Rebuilt

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The gates to the city? Not a chance.

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

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

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

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

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

Wouldn't want to waste the day in bed.

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

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

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

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

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

Just need one good hit!

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nightingale: Realms Rebuilt - First Impressions

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

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

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

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

Anyone got a torch?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Don't tempt me...

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

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

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

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

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

Gamma to the max.

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

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

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

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

I know where the bodies are buried.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An example from the new crafting Progression tree.

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

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

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

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

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

Pardon My French

I probably ought to be posting about the Nightingale revamp today but I forgot all about it until I saw Azuriel's post so I won't be doing that. I have the update downloading now, all 28Gb of it so maybe tomorrow. Instead, I'm going to go ahead and finish the Covers post I keep talking about. 

I went through all the possibles this morning and narrowed it down to ten or twelve good ones so all I have left to do is put them into some kind of order, write some words, find them on YouTube, embed them, change the sizes, do the header ...

I might have left this a bit late. I'd better get on with it.

Les Cactus - The Last Shadow Puppets

(Jacques Dutronc cover)

I regret not getting into the Arctic Monkeys a lot sooner than I did and I regret missing out on the Last Shadow Puppets even more. Still, better late than never, eh? I'm not sure if it's Alex Turner or Miles Kane who has the great taste in covers but they did this and they did This Is Your Life by the Glaxo Babies, who I used to go see play locally when I was still a teenager (Just about...) and whio I thought I'd never hear covered by anyone, ever. We've had that one before or it'd be here now. (Don't say that. You know why.) 

They also covered I Want You/She's So Heavy by some band called the Beatles but I guess even that has a kind of hipster cred - I mean, it's hardly Hey Jude, is it?

Miles Kane is also partly responsible for one of my top ten favorite Lana del Rey tunes, Dealer, which comes from what's supposed to have been an album's-worth of songs they recorded together. Every bloody Lana out-take and demo leaks except the ones you really, really want to hear, right?

Les Cactus - Jacque Dutronc

I'm not going to paste in all the  originals full-size for these but there are a few I don't want to throw away on just a link. Also, fair warning, there are quite a lot of French acts coming up. Maybe I should just front-load them. Yes, I think that's best.

It all started when I looked up something by Serge Gainsbourg and ended up down one of those notorious YouTube rabbit holes that are so damn easy to fall into and sometimes so revelatory. The internet in general and YouTube in particular has made it possible, easy even, to shake prejudices that otherwise I would have taken with me to the grave. I mean, who knew French pop before Daft Punk was good?

Les Cactus - Vanessa Paradis

(Jacques Dutronc cover. Oh. You knew that.)

Good things always come in threes, right? More to the point, Vanessa tees up the next one perfectly.

Joe Le Taxi - Petite Meller 

(Vanessa Paradis cover)

A fan-made video, using a whole bunch of clips from other Petite Meller videos, which is one way to do it. Probably means that this will be a dead link in a year but no-one is ever going to come back and try to click on it, so so what? Anyway, the entire internet will be dead by then if you listen to some people, so so so what, what? Eh? Eh?!

Ces Bottes Sont Fait Pour Marcher - Muguette  

(Nancy Sinatra cover)

Okay, I admit it. This is what I think of when I think of french pop music from the sixties. Kitsch covers of kitsch songs or kitsch originals that sound remarkably like songs you already know. Which is how I found Muguette.

As I was tumbling down my rabbit hole I happened to hear Ne Fais Pas Le Tete by Katty Line and I thought to myself well that sounds familiar, which led to me to wonder if any of the many French Ye Ye girls had actually covered Nancy's classic stomper and of course they had.

Ce N'est Pas Un Vie - Pussy Cat  

(Small Faces cover)

I thought this sounded remarkably familiar, too, which it should do, seeing as it's the Small Faces' Sha La La La Lee with the title changed. And quite possibly the rest of the words, too. 

When I was about sixteen or seventeen I once did the lighting for a school dance. There was a band playing and a friend of mine was in it. He later played keyboards and did some of the vocals for the band I was in, although only for our first three gigs, which was how we got a review that compared us (Inaccurately but favorably.) to Capt. Beefheart but for this band, which I think was his older brother's outfit, he was on drums. I was in the wings, supposedly working the lights but actually doing something entirely more interesting with a girl I ended up going out with for about two weeks. My pal Chris, who was also doing the lights, had to do the whole thing. He was quite good about it, considering.

The band played mostly covers, as you'd expect at a school dance. They did Sha La La La Lee. Can't help but think of that night every time I hear the song. Even in French.

All Shook Up - Camp Claude  

(Elvis Presley cover)

Transitioning smoothly out of the francophone pop phenomenon by way of a band whose origins I still haven't entirely figured out. They certainly have french connections. I suspect they might be French-Canadian. I'd look it up but where's the fun in that?

I thought I'd heard all their stuff but there was an EP I missed at the end of last year and it's all covers. All of them great, too. Could have used any of them but this is the one with the video so that's the one we're having. 

They seem to have been doing this one for a while, too. There's a live TV performance from 2017 I like but not as well as this.

Persecution Complex Cellphone Girl (LOL) - Oktavia  

(Cover ... Your guess is as good as mine.)

This is where things get messy. This is a cover but not only had I never heard the original before, I'm not entirely sure what the original is. I came across it while I was doing a bit of "research" on AI music, which this isn't, not really, but even before I got started I found myself deep in a subculture about which I know a little but understand almost nothing.

The singer is a vocaloid, meaning it's produced artificially. How? Don't look at me. I don't know! I mean, I've read quite a bit about it all  and I know who (What?) Hatsune Miku is but I'm still not at all clear on how it actually works. 

There are lots of variants on Persecution Complex Cellphone Girl (LOL) on YouTube but I haven't had much luck working out which is the ur-version. Plenty of them have millions of views so that doesn't help. Most of them have a name or a pair of names appended to the end (GUMI, GUMI&Rin, GIgaP&Shooze...) but I get the impression at least some of those are the names of the vocaloids used in the cover. 

Also, I'm not sure cover is the right word. It seems to me these are more like remixes. Further research is required but if anyone is already deep in this and wants to school me on how it works, the comments are right down there.

These Days - Miley Cyrus 

 (Nico cover... or is it?)

On the subject of what constitutes a cover, here's an interesting case study. This was posted on a YouTube account by the name of MileyCyrusFans with the rubric (Nico Cover) appended. And it is, in the sense that Nico recorded the song on her first solo album, Chelsea Girls. I don't think it's much of a stretch to imagine that most people who know the song would think of Nico in associoation with it before they thought of anyone else but she didn't write it.

Jackson Browne, who plays guitar on the album, did. He wrote it specifically for Nico. Astonishingly, given the elegaic feeling of looking back in time to an earlier version of yourself that it so perfectly evokes, he was just sixteen at the time. Nico, of course, has always been older than god.

Nico's album came out in 1967 and Browne didn't get around to releasing his own version until 1973. @MileyCyrusFans acknowledges Browne's authorship in the details but that knowledge clearly doesn't make it a Jackson Browne cover as far as they're concerned.

To make things even more complicated, the arrangement Nico used, which Wikipedia credits to her, has been followed by many subsequent artists, including Miley, but when Jackson Browne recorded his version he used an arrangement originally created by Gregg Allman, earleir in 1973. But things gets fuzzier yet.

Wikipedia may be wrong about Nico being responsible for the arrangement in the first place. I was skeptical, thinking that it sounded an awful lot like the kind of arrangements John Cale was doing for his early solo albums like Paris 1919. Cale was in the studio, played on most of the tracks and wrote or co-wrote some too but he wasn't credited as either Producer or Arranger. Those roles fell to Tom Wilson and Larry Fallon respectively but Fallon's distinctive string and flute arrangements were done at Wilson's request and overdubbed later without Nico's knowledge or agreement.

So, when Miley covers the song, is she covering Jackson Brown or Nico? And if Nico wrote neither the tune nor the lyrics and possibly didn't have much to do with how the song turned out other than the way she sang it, is her version a cover, even though it had never been recorded before? Are all songs sung by singers who aren't also credited at least as co-composers covers?

No, of course they aren't! That would be silly. Let's move on.

Let's Get Lost -  Fontaines DC  

(Chet Baker cover)

They get better and better, don't they? Give them another couple of years and I reckon they could make an album their fans hate as much as Arctic Monkey's fans hated Tranquility Base Hotel and Casino. And it'll have taken them half as long to get there.

Probably should have a couple of fast ones to finish with. Send everyone out into the cold night air sweating and buzzing.

Deceptacon - Blondshell  

(Le Tigre cover)

I fucking love Blondshell! I fucking love Deceptacon! I don't love the mix but you have to take what you can get when it comes to audience recordings.I'm just happy I get to see and hear it at all.

Deceptacon - Le Tigre

I'm not hiding that behind a link!

Ever Fallen In Love (With Someone You Shouldn't've?)

 Le Butcherettes  

(Buzzcocks cover)

Remember last time, when I posted Le Butcherettes cover of Miley's Wrecking Ball and I said I had another by them that was even better? That was it!

And we're done. Managed to get through less than a fifth of the covers I had bookmarked. I guess I'd better do another one of these pretty soon...

Back To The Future

After the flurry of recent name-drops, on the blog and in comments elsewhere, I'm sure it will surprise no-one to learn that I am, once again, playing Star Wars: the Old Republic. Although, as yet, I have to use the term "playing" advisedly. I haven't actually done anything that felt like play so far.

It didn't take a huge push to get me interested again. Since I stopped, several years ago now, I've thought surprisingly often about giving the game another go. There always seemed to be other things to do, though, and besides it seemed like too much trouble to get it all set up. (Ironic foreshadowing ftw!)

The trigger for me to actually do something about it at last was pulled by Yeebo's post on the game but also by Shintar's reply to my comment, in which she reminded me that I did actually seem to quite enjoy myself when I was last there, something I was aware of in a general fashion even though I'd struggle to bring any specifics in mind. I was almost there and then the final shove came from a post at AI MMORPG News that I read this morning.

AI MMORPG News was one of the two highly controversial AI-generated blogs that participated in Blaugust this year. I can't actually remember what the other one was. I know I never even saw it, much less read anything that got posted there. The AI news blog, though, I read every day. I'm sure it will annoy some readers to hear that I found the posts generally quite a good read and also reasonably informative, which is why I added it to my blog roll when Blaugust came to an end. 

Can anyone smell sulfur?

One of my main complaints about most pro/semi-pro MMORPG coverage of recent times has been how snarky and cynical it often is. I know that's rich coming from someone who sometimes satirises company press releases and official statements for the purpose of so-called humor but I hold personal blogs to a very different standard than supposedly professional news sites and I like my gaming news as straight and un-quirky as it comes.

AI-generated text has a tendency to be far too gosh-wow and gee willikers for any rational human being to feel entirely comfortable reading it but after years of trying to extract a few facts from what too-often appears to be someone's attempt to hone their routine for Friday's open mic night, I'd take sickeningly sweet over solipsistically sneery any day. If nothing else, I find saccharine praise far easier to filter out and ignore.

The AI blog posts every day with no particular agenda that I can ascertain and I always read it with interest. Today it came up with one of those listicles much favored by sites seeking to harvest clicks: The Top MMORPGs on Steam. 

For some reason it decided to stop at seven, which I very much doubt any human intern given the thankless task would have done. Star Wars: the Old Republic was not one of the picks, which I found strange. World of Warcraft was, though, which I found even stranger. Had I missed a major development or was it just one of those infamous AI hallucinations?

Neither, as it turns out. Blizzard have not yet become so desperate as to share some of their enormous yet possibly dwindling revenue stream with Valve but of course you can link your Battle.Net account with Steam and set WoW as an external game to be played through the platform. It bends the definition of "on Steam" a little but I don't think it breaks it.

Who said the graphics were old-fashioned? This looks just like The 5th Element!

Final Fantasy XIV, however, which is also on the AI's list, is fully playable on Steam, something I either never knew or had forgotten. So is Elder Scolls Online, ditto and ditto. I found that out when I fact-checked the whole list and it made me think. In some cases, like Guild Wars 2, playing through Steam means starting afresh; in others, like ESO, you can link the accounts and (I'm guessing...) carry on playing your existing characters.

Given that I was only yesterday musing about the possibility of starting over in games I used to play, either option sounded valid. The more I thought about it, the more I realised how convenient it would be to have most, if not all, my MMORPGs on one platform. The me of even five years ago would be outraged but I'm not that guy any more. 

As I said, I was somewhat surprised not to see SW:tOR on the AI's list. I'd had it in my head that the game had long been available through Steam and it would certainly seem to be one of the better-known games in the genre. I checked and yes, it very definitely is available on the platform, where it enjoys a Very Positive rating. 

I couldn't remember whether I'd played the game through Steam myself or whether I'd used a standalone client so checked that too. It seemed I hadn't played on Steam because there was no sign of the game in my library. 

Then again, there was no sign of it anywhere else, either. I couldn't find a client on any of my hard drives or an icon on my desktop so I have to assume I uninstalled it in one of my Marie Kondo moments.

Do I know you? Nope, don't believe I do.

All the more reason, then to re-install it through Steam. Or install it, I guess. Whatever. 

But first I had to check whether that would mean starting over from scratch or whether I could link my EA account and pick up from where I left off. I did remember that EA handed the game on to Broadsword a while back  - I even wrote a post about it, in which I speculated about coming back to try the game under its new management - but I figured the account I had would still be with EA. 

It was not. As it happens, my EA account is already linked with Steam for some reason but there's no sign there that I ever played SW:tOR at all. Fortunately, Broadsword have all my details safely in hand. I don't remember doing anything to pass the details across so presumably the transfer went through on the nod.

I did a bit of research on what I needed to do to link the accounts. The advice I found was less than clear but the gist seemed to be that just adding the game to my library and installing it through Steam ought to take me to a Broadsword login the first time I pressed Play. From there, I'd be able to sign in using my old account details to complete the handshake.

It kind of worked. Eventually. After a lot more messing around, googling, reading Reddit threads, cutting and pasting some code into the Steam folder... the usual sort of thing that anyone wanting to go back to play an aging game they stopped playing years ago is going to be perfectly happy to do. It took me about forty-five minutes altogether. It really didn't help that one of the authorisation screens uses borderless black tick boxes on a black background - just sorting that out took at least half the time.

Oh, so that's who I am!

Finally, I was able to log in. And there were my characters. Two of them. Neither of whom I remembered at all. 

It is very unusual indeed for me to come back to an MMORPG I played for months and not even being able to remember the name of my character when I see it. It may even be unique to SW:tOR. Apparently I did fifty-nine levels on someone called Fentara Michington, which doesn't even sound like a name I would make up, and thirty-nine on someone by the name of Coyenne, which sounds only slightly more plausible. 

I said in reply to Shintar yesterday that "I can remember precisely nothing about any of the story in SW:tOR from when I played" but even when I wrote it I was thinking "but I imagine it might come back to me if I started playing again.". Well, it hasn't. Nothing much about how to play the game has come back to me either. 

Steam tells me I've played for 68 minutes and as I said earlier about 45 of those were spent trying to link the accounts and log in. The rest were taken up with staring at the UI then going through all the menus and pressing buttons to see what they did. Without a great deal of success.

I wonder what this button does?

I began by trying to find some way off whatever space station I'd found Fentara on. I had three tracked quests on screen so I thought I'd go do one of those but I couldn't work out how to get off the damn orbital. I tried the map but it just made things even more confusing. 

That was about the one thing I did remember from before - I never could work out how to get from one place to another without it taking forever. I'm so used to being able to just open a map and click on something to be ported there instantly or at the very least to be ported to somewhere I can get a ride to where I want to go that having to pass through the places inbetween on the way seems positively archaic.

By dint of pressing everything in every drop-down menu I did manage to find my way back to my apartment, which seemed barely furnished and not at all like anywhere someone might be living. Great views though. I also managed to get myself thrown out of the game altogether onto some selection screen that threatened to take me into one of the expansions instead. I chose to log out and back in again rather than end up somewehere I couldn't get back from.

After much trial and error I finally worked out where the elevators were on the map and by a process of elimination found my way to the spaceport on whatever planet the station was orbiting. Or at least I think that's where I went.

What I actually did was click on the door of the only ship that had one that did anything, then tried both options until I got to some place that looked like it might be somewhere I could get to somewhere else from. 

Left hand down a bit...

I looked at the map and spotted some docking areas labelled with Class names, Smuggler being one of them. I had the vaguest idea that might have been the class I originally chose, although when I checked against Fentara's name it said Scoundrel. Rude!

I had a dim inkling Scoundrel might have been a sub-class choice at some point so I made my way to the Smuggler bay, which is not a thing you'd imagine would be advertised as clearly as that, if at all, and when I got there I repeated my previous tactic of finding the only ship with an interactable door and hammering on it.

It was my ship. I got lost in there, too. I met a Wookie who wanted to talk to me. I couldn't remember where I'd met him or why he was on my ship but I talked to him anyway. Apparently, I said something he disapproved of but my standing with him went up anyway. Must be a Wookie thing.

There was a robot hanging around, too - a droid in the jargon, I guess - just standing in a corridor. He didn't have anything to say so I just left him there. Didn't rememeber him either.

After a few minutes aimlessly wandering the halls I somehow managed to find what I took to be the Bridge or the Cockpit or the Flight Deck or whatever it's called. There were no obvious controls but there were three chairs so I tried sitting in all of them and, like Goldilocks, I didn't find the one that was just right until the end.

From the command chair I managed to find the planet I had a mission for on the map  The mission step I was on actually said "Fly your ship to..." whatever the planet was called. I've already forgotten. It began with O, I know that much. 

Ah, it's called Oricon. I just read the description. Looks like we're in for some "fun" there.

So I did that and got out of the ship. Or, rather, I watched a cut scene where my character told the ship's onboard computer to set her down and pick her up later. By that point I would have been fine with everything being handled in a cut scene. I didn't feel I was in much control of the situation anyway.

Outside, the planet I'd arrived on appeared to be on fire. Maybe it was Hell. It felt like it could be. It was also time for me to go and start making lunch so I decided to quit while I was, if not exactly ahead, at least slightly ahead of where I had been when I started.

As a returning player, I have had a lot better welcomes back than that. Unless I missed something, the game made absolutely no reference to the fact that it had been several years since my last login. In a way it fitted in nicely with what I have to say is now the extremely old-school feel of the game. 

These days, almost every other MMORPG I can think of, even the old ones, takes its cues from the F2P imports, gach agames and mobile titles that do everything but kill an actual fatted calf whenever you come back after more than a day or two away. SW:tOR clearly does not care one whit whether you play the game or not. In a weird way it's quite refreshing to be taken so utterly for granted but I'm not sure how wise a choice it is, commercially.

I will persist, despite the lack of bunting and presents. Having made it to the right planet I feel I ought at least to try to carry out the mission I went there to do. Whatever it is. I have no idea. Probably going to involve murdering someone, I imagine. Usually does.

I just hope I can remember which way round to hold the gun.