Waiting For Nightingale

I had a plan for today's post. I was going to wait for Nightingale to release, something I thought was due to happen at 4pm. I was going to buy it, then try logging in with the Stress Test client to see if it would update.

If it did, it would save me a lot of  download time. I'd be able to make a character, take a few screenshots and do a quick post, all before tea. 

Then I'd have the rest of the evening to get stuck in to the game itself, always assuming Beryl would let me. Evenings are her play time and she insists on full participation from everyone in the pack house.

It might still happen but that schedule has already slipped. As I write, it's just before six in the evening and I'm exactly halfway through the 52GB download with an estimated fifty-nine minutes to go. 

My time zone conversion turned out to be an hour out. The game was actually due to go on sale at 5PM "London Time", as the Nightingale Discord put it. I sat in the Discord channel for about twenty minutes in the lead-up to going Live, listening to people chatter about this and that. 

One person said it reminded him of being in /ooc in EverQuest, waiting for an expansion to launch, which seemed like an oddly old-fashioned reference. It made me wonder what the age demographic for Survival games might be. I would have guessed it might skew fairly young, maybe clustering around the late teens/early twenties, but thinking about it, there's something of an age-agnostic feeling to the whole genre. If Survival games were board games they might well have one of those irritating "7-99" advisories.

As five o' clock drew near, I tabbed out of Discord to refresh the game's Steam Store page and stap me if it wasn't up already. It must have gone Live about five minutes early. 

I bought it and as soon as Steam had my money, an "Install" button popped. I wondered for a moment whether to ignore it and follow my original plan with the Stress Test client but it occured to me there was a fair chance doing that might cause some conflicts, so I decide to play safe and let Steam handle things the way it clearly wanted to.

Rather than sit staring at a download screen, I took Beryl out for a walk she didn't much want. Then, when we got back, I started writing this. 

A quarter of a century spent watching progress bars fill. It's a life. I guess.

Steam helpfully sends an email whenever a game on your wishlist becomes available. I got mine for Nightingale about thirty seconds after the PayPal receipt confirming I'd bought it. 

The email contains all the usual promotional pictures, text and links but it also includes something you don't often see these days: a street address. 

 

Why the developers felt the need to include their full postal address I'm not really sure. Maybe they're hoping everyone will send them a Christmas card. 

There's also a link to "Add us to your address book".  I don't think I have one of those. 

The last time I remember having an address book would be back in the 'nineties. I clicked the link to see what would happen and it opened a Microsoft app called "People", which I never knew existed. Then again, I try never to use any Microsoft apps if I can possibly avoid it. 

After that, out of curiosity and because people in the Discord had been making some fairly big and confident claims about how well the game was going to do, I thought I'd see what impact it was making on the Steam charts, ninety minutes after launch.

I don't think that's a good sign. Or maybe it is. Maybe it means so many people are trying to play it broke the counter. I kinda doubt it, though.

Speaking of counters, mine says there's about half an hour to go. Just enough time to make myself a coffee and have a sandwich before I get to the next stage - the inevitable first-day patch.

With luck, I might yet get to make a character tonight. I was never expecting to play for real until tomorrow, anyway. Still, there's no need to let a little thing like not being able to log in to the game stop me posting about it on the first day, is there?

Apparently not. You're looking at the proof of that.