First Catch Your Hare...

Here's an odd fact about Nightingale. The sun rises in the south and sets in the north. Or it does in my Abeyance Forest Realm, anyway. In my Antiquarian Forest Realm, however, the sun rises in the north and sets in the south.

Does it mean anything? Is it telling me something about the Realms and the Byways that I ought to know? Or is the direction the sun travels merely a pseudo-random artifact of procedural generation?

I have no idea but it's the sort of thing that makes the game feel more mysterious and otherworldly, a sensation that has a lot to do with why I can't seem to stop playing it right now. It really is an explorer's dream. From the reviews, it seems most everyone agrees about that.

Not everyone is in such accord about the rest of the gameplay, though. Always assuming we can agree on what the gameplay even is.

It's clearly a survival game now but I keep hearing that the endgame, if and when Inflexion finish it, is going to make Nightingale feel more like a Lobby MMO along the lines of the original Guild Wars, complete with a central, multiplayer hub where you can find other players, form parties and take on dungeons and raids. 

How that is going to fit in with the sudden pivot to add an offline solo mode the devs apparently never intended to offer at all, I cannot begin to imagine. It sounds almost as though they'll have to make and maintain two separate games, if players who choose to go for the offline solo version aren't going to be locked out of endgame content altogether. 

Or I guess the game could just stop at a certain point for offliners, unless they flip a switch to go online and join everyone else. That'd be popular, I'm sure!

It's easy to see why they're changing their plans, though. Nightingale currently has a Mixed rating on Steam, in large part because a lot of people don't like having to be online all the time, particularly when the servers aren't handling the load particularly well. That last is being addressed quickly. New servers for South America came online just today. Spreading the load ought to help.

I was taken a little aback by the virulence of the objections to an internet element for the game. Apparently the always-online requirement came as quite the surprise to some, which is hard to credit in 2024. Since I deliberately avoided reading much about the game before it went into Early Access, I can't say whether that's down to poor messaging by the developers or wishful thinking by some of their customers. A bit of both, probably.

Browsing the reviews, another common complaint, even from some of the people giving the game a thumbs up, is that the crafting system is wildly over-complicated. That was going to be the basis of the post I was going to write but to go into all of the implications properly would take me all afternoon and for once I'm very clear that I'd rather play a game than pontificate about it. 

I know! Undermines the entire ethos of the blog, doesn't it?

This, then, is the shorthand version of that post, believe it or not. The gist of my argument is that you really can't please all of the people all of the time but if you want to stay in business you'd better at least try to please most of them most of the time. And good luck with that!

The kind of crafting Nightingale has now clearly falls somewhat short of that goal. As a fun way of spending a gaming session its appeal is, how shall I put this... niche.

 One reviewer offers an excellent summation of the problem:

"...you craft a thing so you can use that thing to craft another thing, which is needed to make a different thing, then that different thing makes another 'nother thing, and then the 'nother 'nother thing is used finally as a reagent for what you actually wanted to craft in the first place. And that thing you actually want to craft needs about 4 different items that all have the same issue."

It reminds me of the original crafting system with which EverQuest II launched, twenty years ago. That one lasted less than a year before it was completely revamped. Most people loathed it, although there's still a rump of disgruntled veterans who occasionally lobby (Always unsuccessfully, thank God.) for its return, especially on the retro servers.

There is one absolutely enormous difference between the two and it's a difference that makes all the difference. In original EQII, no single crafting class (With the exception of Provisioner, but let me not derail my own post with that little sidebar.) could make all the necessary sub-components to be self-sufficient at their chosen craft. 

Everyone relied on at least one other class, often several. You either had to play multiple alts and level  different tradeskills or you had to buy or bargain for your sub-combines from other players. Guilds set up virtual crafting sweatshops, while individuals horse-traded among themselves. It was hell.

Some people, naturally, loved it. Or claimed to. Most really did not. SOE saw sense after a few months, which still felt like far too long, changing it so you could, by and large, craft all you needed for a tradeskill with the character who was supposed to be the expert at it. 

Over the years, many more iterations came to crafting, all of them moving the dial further towards either ease of use or entertainment or even both at once. The subset of crafters who seem to value verisimilitude over everything else kvetched about it but commercially the direction of travel seemed both wise and inevitable. 

In the two decades since then, just about every game has chosen to let players move smoothly through the crafting process without making too much of a fuss about the fine details. It's not uncommon to separate refining from manufacturing, so you have to smelt ore to get metal or tan hide to get leather but once you have the basic materials it's straight to the finished item. 

I'm in two minds about the whole thing, which rather surprises me. So long as I don't have to negotiate with another human being for sub-combines, I find I quite enjoy them. It's strangely satisfying to have to make straps and twine to bind tools together instead of just choosing a recipe, clicking Combine and having game physics hand-wave away all the awkward in-between stages. 

Then again, it's only fun for a while. Like many things, getting all the right pieces together is fascinating the first time you do it, less so the second time and a pain in the neck forever after. If I was a game designer, I'd use the same mechanic for learning recipes that many games use for opening fast travel routes: first time through, you have to do every step yourself but after that the game does it all for you.

Even as I say that, though, I'm aware of the potential loss of something ineffable but invaluable. Call it immersion or authenticity or granularity; whatever you call it, we all recognize it when we feel it and at the moment I'm feeling it in Nightingale. Every brick removed risks bringing the whole thing crashing down. 

One of the frequent complaints in the negative reviews is that all this busy-work gets in the way of playing the real game. I wondered, even the first time I saw someone make that assertion, just what they imagined the real game might be. If there's much more to progression a survival game than making better stuff  so you can go to tougher places and kill tougher things to get stuff to make better stuff to go to tougher places...

Sometimes you don't want to pull on a thread lest the whole tapestry unravel. 

With that caveat, I'm pretty sure we're going to see many quality-of-life improvements to crafting as Early Access proceeds. There's one on the way already.

"Additionally, we have some much-requested quality-of-life improvements in development, the most notable of which include craft from storage and queued crafting."

OK, that's two. With many more to follow, I'm sure.

I'm happy. I'm glad to have had the opportunity to play the game the way it is now but also happy that it's going to become less fiddly and fussy, with luck just as I begin to lose patience with all that fiddle-faddling nonsense. Sometimes you can have cake and eat cake.

Even if you do have to mill your own flour and fire your own plates first.