One Against Many

I am still playing Nightingale. What's more, I'm playing it more than I expected, now I've come to the end of the story. And I'm not entirely sure I'm happy about it.

Angry Onions left a comment on the recent post about the Steam Sale in which he talked about playing just one game at a time, maybe for hundreds of hours. Most people reading that will relate, I'm sure. 

Wilhelm has been running a series in recognition of and response to EverQuest turning twenty-five, in which, among other things, he's been revisiting some of the key locations he remembers from his early days in the game. He's also posted several times on other topics related to the anniversary. I haven't said much about it here, although I've made up for my silence by leaving lengthy, anecdotal comments at TAGN, in part as something of a sop to my own feeling I ought not to be letting such a significant event pass by unacknowledged.

Not that I was ever going to let that happen. It is, after all, an anniversary year for EQ, and although I often mention that I started playing in 1999, it wasn't until November that I finally logged in and made my first character. 

I did think of waiting until my own twenty-fifth anniversary with the game before marking my time there with some sort of celebration here on the blog but that would clash awkwardly with the twentieth anniversary of EverQuest II, which will also arrive in November. I was there for that one. 

I was there before, actually, having been in the closed beta since, I believe, September 2004. No doubt I'll get to the details when the due date arrives but the relevant point here is that back then, when EQ was turning five and EQII had yet to be born, Mrs Bhagpuss and I, along with everyone else in our EQ guild, felt we had to make a choice between one or the other.

And it wasn't the first time. A couple of years before that we'd been through the same thing when Dark Age of Camelot launched. We went through it again with a friend and guild-mate for the launch of Horizons and once more with another friend during the surge in popularity that hit World of Warcraft in 2005. 

In those four examples - and I could quote plenty more - twice we said our goodbyes and left for the chance of something fresh and new, twice we stayed behind and waved goodbye to people we'd spent hundreds of hours with until then. These things happened all the time and although it would have been perfectly practical to keep in touch, even in the days before social media made it hard not to, mostly we never did.

I can't speak for offline games of the period but back then, if you played MMORPGs you tended to play them serially. Very few people tried to play more than one at a time and for good reason. 

Firstly, most required a subscription. That would have been a problem only for the very frugal and those on a strict budget but seeing that a large proportion of the target demographic was made up of players still at school or college, that probably meant most of them. A decade down the line it became quite common to hear veterans boast obnoxiously about their favored financial circumstances but not so much in 1999-2004, even if characters were changing hands on EBay for hundreds of dollars a time back then.

More important than money, though, came time. Doesn't matter how much you have in the bank, you only get the same twenty-four hours in your day as the rest of us. Playing MMORPGs, especially if you took it seriously, as so many did, might as well have been a full-time job. 

It was commonplace for people to play twenty-five hours a week. Forty wasn't considered at all unusual or extreme. I have always tried not to work full-time but for my core EQ/DAOC/EQII years, during which I played very socially, knew lots of people and joined in with all kinds of group and guild activities, I, like almost everyone I played with, was either in full-time employment or full-time education. 

I worked five days a week and still somehow managed to play EQ for 25-40 hours on top. With that level of commitment I was able to hit the level cap on a couple of characters and stay abreast of current group content. Barely. If I'd wanted to kick on and raid or even work on getting my characters into an acceptable state just to to apply to join a raid guild (As Mrs. Bhagpuss did, successfully and, thankfully, briefly.) I think I'd have had to give up sleeping.

The idea of playing two such games simultaneously would have been laughable to most people then, which is why it became such a contentious, emotional issue whenever anyone declared their intention to move to another game. No-one in my experience ever responded to announcement of that kind with "That sounds cool! I'll get it too and we can still hang out!"

You were either on the bus or off it. Guilds made rules about it. Loyalty and responsibility were factors. Even if you were the kind of player who mostly soloed, unless you were a complete loner a new game meant the end of your friends list and back to being the new kid nobody knows.

I was thinking about all of this yesterday, first when I read MassivelyOP's discussion topic about playing MMOs in retirement and later, when I was doing some prep work for the series of posts I'm planning for my aforementioned celebration of the EQ Silver Anniversary. I logged into EQ partly to pick up my Anniversary freebies but also to start collecting /played information on all my characters there.

Both the EverQuest games have a useful function whereby you can see the exact date and time you created your character and how many hours you've spent playing them. Strictly, how many hours the character has been online, I guess. If you were in the habit of going AFK for hours a time as many were, the definition may blur a little, especially if the character was a Bazaar trader.

I didn't even get around to checking the server with my most-played characters so I haven't yet seen the really big numbers. It's probably just as well. The lesser names from the deep past are disturbing enough. Even characters I know I only ever played for a few weeks have /played times measured in days. 

For example, one of my several druids, Cassice, a character I created in 2003 but barely remember playing at all, other than to log her in briefly in recent years to port somewhere and take a few screenshots for a blog post, somehow made it to Level 48, racking up almost five days online.

To put that in perspective, if Cassice was a Steam game, at 116 hours she'd be third on my Hours Played list after only Valheim and New World. It would be one thing if all that time spent came with a fund of anecdotes, amusing stories, or emotional memories but I can't fricken' recall a single time I ever played her! And she's just one minor character out of literally dozens. 

That was how MMORPGs were. Even now, although progress is much faster, they still eat up relatively large chunks of time compared to other genres. It may only take a couple of weeks to hit cap where once it took months but that's only the start. 

The idea that these games are more casual and require less commitment only really stands up if you play them the way I was describing earlier. Where it took me hundreds of hours just to reach the level cap back in 2003, now I could do it in most MMORPGs in a few sessions. Even in EverQuest, provided I could get groups for the last 35 levels. That, though, would just be the start.

Back then, it was entirely possible to make leveling the point of playing. Lots of people never made it to the cap and even those who did often just started over on another character. Modern MMORPGs tend to have all the grind at the cap, not before it, which may be why it's now so tempting to play lots of them, either serially in short bursts or even all at once. 

A big part of the attraction of the genre has always been the sense of satisfaction that comes from progression. The Ding Effect, if you will. That's why Tipa named her blog Chasing Dings, I imagine. Game hopping, now that leveling is so accelerated, gives you those dings in spades but when the levels run out, you have to figure out where the next dopamine hit's going to come from and it can be disheartening to realize it's going to involve a hell of a lot of one kind of grind or another. 

Much easier just to jump ship to the Next Big Thing because, after all, what did you commit to? Nothing.

Survival games package up a lot of that progression-satisfaction into tidy packages. Easy to understand, easy to achieve, they just keep on coming. It's very smart design. I suspect if we could see the numbers we'd find people stick around longer in new survival games than they do in new MMORPGs, even if both lose almost everyone in a matter of months. 

Nightingale feels particularly slippery in this respect. I was expecting to be done with it not long after I made it to The Watch and the end of what story there is in this Early Access build. That has not happened. I'm still playing several hours a day and even as I type this I'm itching to play some more.

It would be an exaggeration to say Nightingale has an endgame right now. As far as I can tell, there's no equivalent of raiding or stepped-difficulty dungeons to gear up for and take on. Instead, there's the genuine sandbox of infinite Realms, each different from the rest yet none of them as different as all that. 

That, however, is not what's holding me. It's the crafting. It's tricksy. As I explained a while ago, there may be only quality grades but there are also a number of sets (I don't know for sure how many.) plus some single pieces and as I am only now discovering, the sets have their own baseline stats that put them into some sort of hierarchy. 

This means that if you imagine, as I did, that you're done once you've upgraded all your gear to Epic you are very much mistaken. All you have is the epic version of whatever set you started with. If there's a better set, the epic version of that will be better too.

Since upgrading each piece requires forty essences from each of three tiers and since these essences cannot be recovered by salvaging the item (That just nets you Essence Dust.), every time you discover a recipe for a potentially superior set of gear, you have to begin again from Common and work your way back up to Epic.

That would be time-consuming enough but in Nightingale, materials come with stats that can be passed on to the items they make. It's a confusing process I don't claim to understand in full but I do know that if you genuinely want to have the best gear, you're going to have to acquire some very specific materials and combine them in some very specific ways. At the least, it involves hunting named creatures for Fabled materials and crafting particular Realms with perks that generate rare gems. 

There's probably a lot more to it than that, I imagine, but I'm hitting a plateau in my ability to care. I like the exploring, the gathering, the hunting, the crafting and the general ambience and I get a dingish buzz out of making new items and upgrading them but...

...increasingly I'm finding myself wondering "What is the point?" it's a very dangerous question to ask about any video game but especially about the kind that rely on gear-based vertical progression to hook you in. In MMORPGs, though, there's generally at least a token purpose to it. You need the better gear to do the harder content where you get the better-still gear to do the even-harder content....

Nightingale doesn't have that. And without an appearance system, it doesn't really have much of a stake in the fashion wars endgame, either. Thanks to the The Watch, there is the potential to strut around like a peacock, daring everyone to ask you how you managed to get yourself looking so fantabulous, but even there, in a game with no player economy, no broker, no bank system and no social structure to speak of, the opportunities to catwalk your way to fame are limited.

All the same, it is that minimal interaction with other players that just about allows me to think of what I'm doing as purposeful. Other players can see what you're wearing and everyone displays a gear score next to their name. I'm doing a few Vault runs every day and I feel some small obligation to contribute. I don't mind the occasional carry but it gets embarrassing if it happens every time. To that end, I can convince myself that continuing to upgrade my gear is socially responsible rather than some kind of nervous tick I can't suppress.

Without that fig-leaf, I'm not sure I would carry on playing. The prospect of taking the game offline, as so many have apparently demanded, seems to me to be almost surreally misguided. Other than to speed up zoning and avoid disconnections, something that could presumably be achieved with better network code and hardware, why would you want to remove the one and only objective reason for continuing after the story ends?

I could give a few answers to my own question there but I'm not going to bother. I'm a little concerned that I'm pulling too hard already on a thread that could unravel the entire tapestry. Almost a quarter of a century after I came home from work carrying that original EverQuest box, I'm finally starting to wonder if I'm getting too old for all this.

Not because I can't perform physically. I may be stiffer and slower but I can still handle most of what I ever could in an MMORPG or similar. Not because I've lost interest, either. This length of this post is ample evidence of that. No, the problem, if it is one, is that I find myself thinking more often of what else I could be doing with the time instead.

Ironically, that's less of an issue when I'm jumping between games, uncommitted, searching, scratching around for something that will hold my attention for an hour or two. Then, gaming feels like a perfectly reasonable part of a varied entertainment diet. It's only when something digs its claws in and won't let go, like all those old MMORPGs did once and like Nightingale threatens to do now, that I start to feel uncomfortable.

I never really felt that way when I was playing MMORPGs, even though objectively I spent far longer doing it than I have done or ever will do with survival games. It's because in an MMO, the presence of thousands of other players, many of whom who I can actually see or hear all around me as I play, normalizes things. It can't be so bad if everyone else is doing it, right?

Once you take all that striving and grinding into the private sphere, it becomes a lot harder to see it as benign, I think. Which is why, for my offline gaming, I prefer to narrative experiences with a clear ending. 

If I'm going to be doing something that's a completely pointless waste of time, at least I'd like some company while I'm doing it.