An Inconvenient Truth

After more than sixty hours, I'm now fairly convinced that the key to Nightingale's stickiness - for me, anyway, as with Valheim before it - lies as much in its inconvenience as in its undeniable wonder and beauty. Inconvenience and, it has to be said, risk. 

I always say I don't enjoy risk in games. On the whole I don't, but the need to be constantly aware, to be always fully engaged in what I'm doing, is paramount when it comes to holding my attention in a survival game. Unlike MMORPGs, I don't generally play survival games to relax.

In all the time I played Valheim, I could never truly let my concentration lapse. There was always the possibility, however remote, that something unexpected would happen and things would escalate faster than I could respond.

It used to be like that in MMORPGs. That same underlying tension fueled the infamous addictive quality that drove the success of EverQuest. There, despite the longueurs, the tedium and the repetition, an awareness that, with one wrong decision, everything could fall apart, made the whole experience feel more significant than a video game had any right to be.

It's an addictive quality famously based on the risk of loss, the concentration required to avoid it and the effort needed to recover from it, should the worst happen. More positively, it's also about luck, chance, fortune and surprise and the ability to react to the unexpected as it happens.

The most obvious of inconveniences, the one everyone worries about the most, is what happens to your stuff when you die. One thing original EverQuest, Valheim and Nightingale all have in common is that when you die - and you will - you lose all your stuff and have to go get it back.

 It's actually not as harsh in Nightingale in that you get to keep what you're wearing but it's still bad enough. You still have your clothes and whatever you had on your hotbar but you don't have the rest of your gear any more and you do have a hefty debuff for being so remiss as to die in the first place. Getting your things back is going to be tough but if your bags were full you sure as heck aren't going to write it off to experience. 

Problem is, the thing that killed you will still be there and you will be weaker. If you couldn't beat it last time, how are you going to do it now?

That's where the interest lies. I say "interest" rather than "fun" because I am not going to pretend this is fun. Although, as Mrs Bhagpuss will confirm, there was a time when I did like to tell people how much I enjoyed corpse recoveries. 

Boy, that used to annoy them. Annoyed Mrs Bhagpuss, too, come to think of it. Especially when I said it when she was in the middle of getting her own corpse back.

But  I did. And I do still, in a way. Getting your stuff back in a video game can be an interesting puzzle. It takes thought and planning and tactics and strategy and some thinking on your feet when it all goes wrong again. It also takes patience and determination because you'll be lucky if you only have to do it once. When it works, it can be very satisfying. 

When it doesn't, though.... that's when people log out and don't come back. Which is why very, very few games stick with mandatory corpse recovery and item loss in the long term. MMORPGs that start with it inevitably tone it down and usually end up removing it altogether. Corpse recovery hasn't been unavoidable even in EQ for more than twenty years.

In MMORPGs these are design decisions but survival games tend to delegate these kinds of  choices to the player, or at least to whomever has control of the server. Palworld, for example,  allows you switch the death penalty off altogether so you respawn at a place of your choosing with all your stuff. 

I made that change to my private Palworld and although I don't regret it, I suspect that decision had more than a little to do with the sense of disconnection I had with that game. I enjoyed my time there but it didn't always feel completely convincing as a place and I think that complete abnegation of risk was a factor.

Risk, of course, plays a widely-recognized and acknowledged role in the appeal of many games. We hear a lot about "Risk vs Reward" as a design concept. It's generally accepted that there has to be some measure of perceived risk in order make players feel there's some weight to what they're doing. The debate revolves around how much risk there should be, not whether there needs to be any at all.

Inconvenience, though, is rarely seen as any sort of positive in a game. Players demand and developers strive to provide quality of life improvements to make inconveniences go away, tweaks that often continue throughout the life of the game. Even games coming up to their twentieth anniversaries still list QoL improvements in their patch notes.

For some players, though, and it appears I'm one of them, inconvenience can be weirdly appealing. The bulk of potential customers are looking for a clean, polished experience, but for a significant minority who get considerably more pleasure from figuring out how things work than they do from "playing the game", what others call inconvenience qualifies as content.

Even in Early Access, Nightingale has plenty of content. It has exploration, puzzles, crafting and building as well as quests and a story-line. None of them are what I'd call "convenient". 

Let me briefly take you through some of the reasons why.

Exploration

• The possible range of biomes is large but all of them have to be created by the player through a combination of crafting and interaction with in-game devices.
• Some of which you also have to craft.
• After you've discovered the recipes, that is.
• And found the machines.
  
• It's a highly complex system that takes a good deal of learning and even more tuning to provide the desired results.
• Once you make them and travel to them, all of the maps are huge
• But travel is slow. 
• There are no mounts. 
• You can sprint but it uses stamina.
  
• So do climbing, gliding and swimming.
• You can die from falling.
• And from drowning.
• Consequently, stamina management is a constant concern. 
• As are environmental conditions like rain, hail or polluted water, all of which have negative consequences that need to be avoided, prevented or cured. 
• You also get exhausted if you don't rest. 
• If you're exhausted you can't run, swim, jump or climb.
• Plus you can sprain an ankle or break a leg.
• Or an arm.
• Try climbing with a broken arm.
• Or sprinting with a broken leg.
  

Puzzles

• There are "Intellect", "Agility" and "Combat" puzzles but all of them require aspects of the others.
• There are few, if any, explanations of how any puzzle works.
• Some are nested.
• Some are mazes.
• Some are very simple.
• Some aren't.
• Even when it's clear how a puzzle works, it's frequently not easy to see how it works. 
• I mean that literally.
• Some puzzles require you to observe a number of things that aren't all visible on screen at once from the same perspective.
• Some puzzles don't play fair.
•  Agility puzzles, for example, cannot always be solved without building scaffolds or ramps.
• That's not agility, is it?
  

Crafting

• There are very many crafting stations, most of which make intermediate items that can be used in others.
• All stations come in different qualities so there's progression.
• Some stations require fuel.
• Some stations can set you on fire.
  
• All stations can be crafted by the player. 
• Most of them need to be, although there are NPC stations dotted around.
  
• There are "Augmentations", subsidiary devices which enhance the stations. 
• Augmentations, which also have to be crafted, can affect multiple stations at once but have to be placed appropriately to reach them all.
  
• Environmental effects such as lighting or shelter also affect crafting stations.
• All crafted items, including the Augmentations and Stations, can be made from multiple materials.
• All materials have varieties, qualities and stats. 
• Lots of stats, in some cases.
  
• Materials affect outcomes, although it is not always clear how or when.
• Recipes are not automatically granted. 
• They can be found as drops or rewards and also bought from vendors. 
• There are a lot of recipes.
• And a lot of vendors.
• Getting all your recipes takes a lot of work. 
• And also some luck.
  
• Finished items frequently require many sub-combines, some of which require sub-combines of their own. 
• Making anything takes time. 
• Often a lot of time, at least in gaming terms.
• Crafting is far too inconvenient in far too many ways to sum up all of those inconveniences in a bullet point list like this.
• Seriously, it's really, really inconvenient.
• But hella fun!
  

Building

• OK, building isn't that bad.. 
• It's snap-together prefab parts.
• And they fit pretty well.
  
• How bad could it be?
  
• There are a lot of parts, though.
• And a number of styles.
• And you have to craft them all.
• And the better ones require sub-combines.
  
• And unlike most games with housing, you can build anywhere and as extensively as you want.
• Which means you're going to end up tearing down and rebuilding.
• Repeatedly.
  

Questing and Storyline

• Bundled together here because they often seem to be one and the same
• Also, they seem to be inextricably bound up with crafting.
• And crafting progression.
• And exploration.
• And exploration progression.
• And combat, of course.
  
• Although sometimes you can craft an item to bribe a mob to give you its drop instead of killing it.
• Much faster and easier just to kill it, of course.
  
• Just be prepared to be criticized for your thuggery if you do.
• And to miss out on sub-quests.
• On really big, long, involved sub-quests. 
• Like half the fricken' content of the game, it seems like, sometimes.
• So maybe don't just kill everything, yo!
  
• Also, better be ready to go exploring.
• And you'd better like reading because there's no voice acting but there is a lot of flavor text.
• And instructions.
• That you need to follow.
• It helps if you can do funny voices in your head.
• Well, it helps me...
  

I think that's enough to give an idea of just how fiddle-faddly Nightingale is and I haven't even touched on the magic system or the extremely fine gradations of choice available in crafting, enchanting and otherwise enhancing your gear. Or the potions. Or the food. Or stealth. Or using the Spyglass.

Everything seems to lean into everything else. There's no real boundary between the types of gameplay on offer. You need to be willing to engage equally with all of them and they are all very complex. 

Unnecessarily so, I'm sure many players would say, but I would not be one of them. Inconvenience that draws you in rather than pushes you away is a very difficult trick to pull off but clearly, for me, Nightingale has managed it, in much the same way Valheim did a few years ago.

Still, I strongly suspect Nightingale will not hold the same, wide-ranging appeal as the viking survival game. I think the crafting is likely to appeal hugely to a very limited demographic while driving everyone else to distraction. I think there's a point of diminishing returns to this level of inconvenient complexity and I imagine a lot of people reached it long ago.

I'll get there soon too, no doubt. Even at Tier 2, it's already taking me literally hours to gather the mats, make the combines and finish the items I want. It's only going to get worse, I'm sure. I don't think I'm going to be sounding so cheery about it by Tier 5.

For now, though, I'm still motoring along although I'm not sure how much traffic there is ahead of me. Today I completed the last of the six Sites of Power, The Hunt. For that, as for the first five, I got a Steam achievement. As of time of writing, only 8.2% of players have made it that far.

It does look as though what I'm finding compulsive, everyone is finding exactly the opposite. Never mind, though. Just wait a while and I'm sure it will all get honed down until there are no inconveniences to speak of. By the time the game officially launches, you'll most likely be able to finish in a few seconds what's currently taking me most of a session. 

By then, though, I won't care. I'll be long gone, probably off playing some other half-finished game that drives everyone nuts with its awkward, annoying mechanics and its refusal to make anything simple. 

Luckily for me, that's most games when they begin. I'm not likely to run out of options any time soon. Especially while Early Access stays popular.