One thing I haven't mentioned about Nightingale is what happens after the sun goes down. The monsters all come out to play. Everywhere, even your home Realm, innocuous by daylight as it is, becomes a playground for murderous mobs, all of whom seem to know exactly where to find you.
To put that in a less flowery context, there's some mechanism whereby as soon as it gets fully dark, Bound mobs, the Fae Lands stand-ins for zombies, begin to appear. I haven't figured out exactly how it works but it looks very much as if traveling about after dark- or even standing still for too long - causes portals to appear close by.
Depending on your temperament, you could see this as a handy delivery service, bringing useful crafting materials right to your door. Or you could find it scary and unsettling and very much wish it wasn't happening, or at least not to you.
More likely, you might not even notice. I'd been playing for more than a week before I found out it was even happening. That's because Nightingale has another mechanic called Rest that means there's a good chance you've never stayed up more than a few minutes after sundown.
I find it very easy to forget Nightingale is supposed to be a survival game. It has all the usual switches and levers - not only Rest but Hunger, Stamina, Item Decay... all the old favorites. The thing is, they're all extremely easy to counter, making them minor irritants at most.
Personally, I'm torn. I really don't see the point, for example, of having Item Decay, when you can literally repair all of your gear with a single click, for a cost that is utterly trivial. Yes, the amount of Essence Dust ramps up to apparently ludicrous amounts as your gear improves but as soon as you notice you can convert regular Essences into thousands, even millions of dusts, that's the last time you'll ever need to think about it.
On the other hand, I'm not at all interested in making it harder, slower or more expensive to keep your gear up to scratch. I'll take a meaningless, trivial repair system that doesn't get in the way of my enjoyment over a more "realistic" one any day.
Food works much the same as in every game but particularly like it does in Valheim. You can have up to three foods in play at once and all the buffs stack. The basic foods last a few minutes but as you get more recipes and become better at cooking the duration goes up. The buffs from food are very significant so it's unlikely you'll ever need to be reminded to keep eating. Again, it's a couple of clicks every ten or twenty minutes and forget about it.
Stamina needs managing in relatively interesting ways. Swimming drains it very quickly, Gliding fairly quickly, Climbing not quite so fast and Sprinting barely at all. You also need Stamina to fight and dodge so it's a hands-on stat in most situations. That, however, just makes it feel like Stamina in many games, not just the ones with the "Survival" tag attached.
Of all the primary survival mechanics, the most asinine is Rest. Honestly, I cannot see the point of this at all, at least not in its current implementation. You have a blue bar that tells you how tired you're getting. As it drops you lose some stats (I think...) and if you let it go all the way down you can't do anything that requires effort, not even jumping onto a ten centimeter high ledge.
It's almost like a second Stamina bar in a way, just one with a much slower decay. It would be very annoying if it wasn't insultingly easy to restore to full.
To recover your fully-rested state, literally all you need to do is click on a bed-roll. Or a cot. Or a bed. Even the handkerchief-sized pet bed your fancy Dachsund sleeps in will do. It doesn't have to be your bed, either. Any furniture an NPC sleeps on will do just as well.
Making a bed-roll requires just a few sticks and some plant fibre. It needs to be under cover so you might have to use a few more sticks to put up a tent but Nightingale is far better than most games at recognizing when you're sheltered from the elements so a doorway or the mouth of a cave will do just as well.
In other games I've played that have similar mechanics - probably all of them - there's a discreet pause to indicate time has passed. Sometimes your character actually lies down on the bed. Sometimes the screen goes dark. In Nightingale, when you take a Short Rest, nothing like that happens.
Instead, your Rest bar instantly returns to full and that's that. All done. Unless, of course, the sun has gone down.
Nightingale uses a fairly lengthy day-night cycle. I haven't timed it but it feels like daylight probably lasts at least an hour. I have no idea how long night-time lasts because as soon as night falls, clicking on a bed or bed-roll brings up the option to take a Long Rest. Once you've tried it, you probably won't ever see darkness again.
Clicking on Long Rest does instigate a very brief pause, maybe three or four seconds at most. The screen goes completely black, then the morning light rushes in with a disorienting effect like someone letting off a magnesium flare before quickly stabilising to regular daylight.
This has two highly advantageous effects: firstly, it avoids any and all interaction with the creatures of the night and secondly anything you had cooking in the forge or the oven or any other crafting table will have instantaneously completed. If you need to something that takes hours to craft (Not that unusual.) it's a smart idea to save it for bedtime.
Once again, I'm in several minds about this. I do think the current system is laughably inept but fixing it would almost certainly mean making it more awkward to manage without adding any entertainmnet value. I'd lay odds all of these Survival mechanics will be heavily overhauled during Early Access but I certainly wouldn't put any money on the new iterations being any more fun to use.
The one significant downside of the way darkness has been turned into something players both want to avoid and find very easy side-step is that a lot of players may never even get to see the astonishing night skies. All the sky-boxes in Nightingale are spectacular, as are the lighting effects, but the wheeling auroras and giant moons of the Fae Realms' night skies deserve special praise.
It's not just the sky at night, either. Many of the settlements and structures light up at night to be seen from far across the zone. The Essence vendors all travel in elaborate wooden caravans that come to glittering, glimmering life as soon as the sun drops below the horizon.
Because Nightingale is internally moddable through use of any number of Cards, it is possible to create a very safe Realm in which night never fades. I might have to think about doing that, just for the screenshots.
Until then, though, I'll carry on with my early nights. Might as well enjoy some good, sound sleep while it lasts.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment