Looking for Nightingale : More First Impressions Of Realms Rebuilt

Anyone remember the original trailer for Nightingale? I didn't, not until I went looking back at my old posts for confirmation that the game we got wasn't the game we were promised. Which was when I watched the trailer again and discovered it more or less was.

Here. Take a look if you don't believe me.

With the possible exception of the big dinosaur thing at the beginning, just about everything in that video is in the game I played earlier this year. So why did it feel like something quite different when I got to play it?

Partly it was because the UI and the mechanics were (Mostly still are, I think.) kinda clunky. Everything feels just a tad more laborious than it should, which makes the whole thing feel a little more like playing a game than a really slick game does. There can be bit too much thinking about how you're going to do something, sometimes, as opposed to just doing it. It can take you out of the world for a moment.

Partly it was the procedural generation that some said made the Realms feel a little generic. That was a frequent complaint I saw. I didn't think it became as obvious as all that until maybe fifty or sixty hours in, which would have been fine, had it been a straight-up RPG with an ending. Not so great for a live service game you might spend months or years with. 

And then there was the whole "There's no Nightingale in Nightingale" thing...

Nightingale is the name of the game but also the name of a mysterious city, de facto chuman capital of the Realms and quite possibly the one remaining center of human civilization, now the Pale has spread to Earth. You get glimpses of it and every NPC tells you about it but you never get to go there yourself. 

The whole thrust of the narrative in the original version of the game was that the player character was seeking a way to get to Nightingale. That premise has been retained in the revised edition. The biggest question I have about the new build is whether that goal will ever be attained.

The gates to the city? Not a chance.

There is supposed to be a much stronger storyline this time around, although as of yet I've seen precious little sign of it. Granted, you sometimes don't get much of the narrative in a tutorial zone but I made it through the first dungeon today, beat the first boss and opened the first portal to one of the new, hand-crafted Realms but the story seems as elusive as ever.

However the story turns out, I really would like to get to Nightingale this time. If I knew for certain that the tale, or at least the opening chapter, ended with my character freely able to walk the streets of the fabled city, that would be all the motivation I'd need to make it through. If, on the other hand, we're  all going to finish up in that not-all-that-glorified mission hub like last time, then I'm not sure I'd want to bother.

I did expect that by this time - I've played for more than six hours now - I might have seen at least some sign of the new, narrative-driven direction. Instead it's been a very enjoyable but largely disconnected series of minor tasks and tutorials. I get that the game needs to introduce its mechanics slowly enough for the often confusing complexities to be understood but I do feel there ought to be some narrative hook other than Puck's gnomic, disdainful hints of adventures to come. 

Mechanically, the new game feels, by and large, much the same as the old. Some of the really rough edges have been sanded down a little but there are still a lot of loose ends to trip over. I'm not sure whether I would really want them all to be tied up too neatly - one of the attractions of the game for me has always been its endearing funkiness - but if the goal is to make it as accessible as possible to players used to the kinds of games that do most of the behind the scenes heavy lifting for you, I'm not convinced it's mission accomplished just yet.

Visually I do think there's been a significant upgrade. I always thought the Realms were beautiful but there did seem to be quite a lot of fairly obvious asset re-use. There still is some of that but at least there are more assets now and the environments definitely have more of a hand-crafted feel to them. There's a palpable sense that exploration might be rewarding, not just in terms of the mats you might gather but for the new sights you might see. 

Wouldn't want to waste the day in bed.

One thing I do find hard to parse is the difficulty. I found the original game largely consistent and logical in terms of challenge but the new one feels all over the place.

Some of that is manageable through the UI. The game now has four optional difficulty settings, Explorer, Balanced, Champion and Nightmare, which translate to Easy, Normal, Hard and Very Hard. The default is Balanced. I haven't changed mine but I could, any time.

It's not a one-time choice. You can switch difficulty without even logging out. All four appear as options every time you sleep. You can also now decide whether to wake at Dawn or Noon or Evening, the last of which would have been a very odd choice before, when darkness brought an endless series of attacks but it seems that dubious pleasure may have been curtailed. The warnings about it certainly have. I haven't tested it by staying up all night yet but, given the beauty of the night sky, I hope I'm right. It's a great game for star-gazing.

Travel has been simplified and streamlined. There's no longer any need (Or indeed option, so far as I've seen.) to make your own portals, something that was a huge part of the game before. There's now a ring of statues, which turn into portals as you progress through the storyline. You can port to that ring at any time so it acts as a sort of terminus for travel across the Realms. Or it will, when I get them all working. I only have one lit up so far.

All of that speaks to changes intended to make things as convenient as possible, sometimes by giving more control to the player, sometimes by taking potentially confusing options away. As Azuriel observed in a reply to a comment I left on his first impressions post, the pivot to a more structured, narrative-led direction doesn't always seem to sit comfortably with the survival mechanics, which ramian largely as they were. Indeed, they may have actually been made somewhat more onerous with the addition of a new condition, Hunger.  If that was in the game last time I don't remember it at all.

Just need one good hit!

 

After my time with the new build so far, though, I'm beginning to wonder not so much about whether the survival tropes fit the new Nightingale as whether they really matter at all. I'm starting think they may be little more than decoration. Hunger, for example, seems to be removed as a factor entirely just by gorging, so all I do is stuff myself until the bar fills then forget about it. As for item degradation and repair, so often a real nuisance in survival games, here it's barely an issue.

Items wear out quite quickly but they can be repaired instantly with a single click from the UI, anywhere, at any time, all of them at once, using a resource that is in plentiful supply. It may be that this gets more taxing later but at the moment I'm finding it hard to see the point of having item decay at all when it can be fixed immediately at no meaningful cost in either time or resources.

And then there's the death penalty. Unless I'm misremembering, in the original, when you died, you had to do a corpse recovery to get most of your stuff back. That could be very challenging indeed. I remember one particular incident that took me two sessions to recover from. Maybe that was later in the game but I'm already fighting Tier Two mobs and when I die, which is often, I still wake up with all my stuff. As far as I can tell, there are only three tiers so if corpse recovery is in the game at all any more, it's going to have to make a fairly late appearance.

In order to get to where I could die to Tier Two mobs, though, I first had to die to a Tier One boss. And I died a lot. The boss is called Jabberwock (Because of course he is...) and he appears at the end of a long dungeon that was itself quite draining of resources to get through, meaning I was pretty low on food and health when I reached the final room.

Jabberwock waited for me there, standing on a platform on the far side of the very large room, the floor of which was filled with explosive traps. From his perch, he peppered me with an endless stream of magical  missiles from the moment he spotted me. When I managed to snipe him to about 90% health he took to teleporting all over the room, blasting me all the while.

Unsurprisingly, I did not get the better of him that first time. Or the second. Or the third. After several deaths decided to regroup. I ported back to my camp and upgraded all my gear as far as I could, which wasn't far. Then I went back and tried again with much the same result.

I considered dropping the difficulty but although I talk a good game about wanting things as easy as possible, I have a fairly strong dislike of changing the settings once I've started. No logic to it but there you go.

One thing that I hadn't done at that point was to hire an assistant, something you can do almost immediately and which costs you nothing. A companion would give me some extra dps but more importantly they'd pick me up you when I  fell over. 

I went and hired the first one I saw, made her some gear, gave her a slingbow (Which it turned out she couldn't use so I had to swap her to axe half-way through the fight, which was fun.) and went back for a third try.

That went much better. It turns out the combination of a very lax death penalty and an endless series of free rezzes completely trivializes the encounter. It no longer mattered how many times I died. I just let it happen, waited for my pal Janie get me up, took my chance to hit the boss once or twice before he knocked me down me again and on we went like that until he was dead.

Or, put another way,
97.6% of players
have not completed the Tutorial

It helped that for no apparent reason Janie seemed to take far less damage than me and that Jabberwock didn't regain any health, even if we both died and had to respawn. Since the respawn point was maybe fifty meters away, even a wipe was barely an inconvenience The whole fight felt extremely sloppy and inelegant but that's how the mechanics work and you get no bonus points for style so why try harder?

I'm not complaining. Once I'd figured it how it worked, I was fine with it,ugly though it was. It just took me a while to realize it really didn't matter if I was any good at fighting or not. The game doesn't care. It's possible that this approach won't always work when I progress to more dangerous Realms and more challenging opponents but I feel a precedent has been set. 

That first boss battle suggests it's not worth trying too hard because the game doesn't care how you win, just that you win. It wants you to progress and it's going to let you do it no matter what. I don't have a problem with the intent but I'm not so sure about the execution. I am absolutely not suggesting I would prefer the Big Fights to be harder in any way - that's the last thing I'd want - but I do feel I might quite like them to be easy in a more aesthetically pleasing fashion.

All of which is a long-winded way of saying I'd be quite surprised if this version of Nightingale turns out to be massively more successful than the last one. It feels very much as though the same thinking is still being applied and the results are just as - shall we say idiosyncratic? - as before. 

Personally, I like it. I think it makes the game feel both original and peculiar and that's a combination that works for me. I'm just not sure it's going to bring in the numbers they need. As yet, I sill don't feel as though either I or Inflexion have found the real Nightingale. And I'm not just talking about the city this time.