Nothing Has Changed : Nightingale, Realms Rebuilt And Early Access

With more than twenty hours play in Nightingale: Realms Rebuilt, the update that was meant to reset the entire game, and having beaten the bosses required to gain access to the second and third zones, I feel ready to give my provisional judgment on the revamp. So here it is:

"Huh?"

Or maybe:

"Is that all?"

As far as I understand it, the game didn't receive the reception its developers were hoping for when it went into Early Access earlier this year. It didn't attract players in the numbers that flocked to similar games around the same time (Particularly Palworld and Enshrouded.) and it wasn't able to retain most of the players who did give it a try. The hope for Realms Rebuilt was that, by relaunching the game, at least some of that failure could be mitigated, some of that decline reversed.

Immediately prior to the rebuild, concurrency on Steam had fallen to the low hundreds from a peak of just under fifty thousand at launch, itself not a particularly impressive figure. The relaunch, if that's what we're calling it, did result in a significant bump, with concurrency rising to around six thousand in the first week although it's already dropped to more like half of that.

I can't say I'm all that surprised. I put more than a hundred hours into the first version of the game and while it would be disingenuous to say I couldn't tell the difference between that iteration and the current one, I find it hard to see how anything like enough has been improved to make anyone who didn't like it the first time around change their mind, let alone for Nightingale to gain and hold the attention of anyone who wasn't interested to begin with.

The pre-publicity for the update seemed to suggest a pivot to structured narrative with a linear storyline that would play out in "handcrafted" zones known as "storied realms". The collective content contained within all of these new areas was described as a "campaign", which at least to me suggests some sort of coherent and continuous story. After those twenty-some hours, I'm still waiting to see any of it.

From my perspective, having completed just about all of the content in the original build, I'd have to say it feels like Realms Rebuilt has even less in the way of a through-line than before. I thought the old version told a somewhat consistent and reasonably convincing story that led the player through each of the biomes available at a steady, manageable and enjoyable pace. Lack of story was not one of the problems I'd have said Nightingale had anyway, but if anyone did, I'm pretty sure this is not going to convince them that problem's been fixed.

Here's the Main Story as I've experienced it so far:

First Realm: Abeyance. 

Walk around the map and pick up some stuff other Realmwalkers have left behind to get free recipes to craft those things.

Talk to some people in a cave to get a breadcrumb quest to the next Realm

Fight a boss to open a portal.

Second Realm: Sylvan's Cradle

Talk to some people in a village to get a couple of quests to clear some mobs from a building and a cave and get some hints about who to speak to about opening the next portal.

Speak to that person and do a couple of jobs for them so they open the gateway to the building where the portal is.

Fight a boss.

Third Realm: Welkin's Reach

Complete three Bastilles of Agility to open the Empyrean Observatory to reach the third portal.

That's as far as I've got. It doesn't seem like a lot but I'm working from memory here so I might be missing something.. 

Nope. I went and checked my Journal, which handily keeps a record of completed quests, and if anything I'm making it sound more impressive than it was. 

The Abeyance Realm chapter records seven Main Story quests but when I read them through they were pretty much all just listening to Puck explain how things work then doing something basic so he'd believe I was capable of surviving in the Faewilds. In other words, it's just a series of tutorial tasks. 

It also lists five "Side Quests", one of which is the picking up left-behind trifles one, so that isn't even in the main sequence. Neither is the one where the NPC tells you where to go next. In fact, the official "Main Quest" in Abeyance is literally doing those tutorial tasks for Puck and nothing else at all.

Worse, I remember doing the tutorial the first time around and I'm pretty sure there was actually quite a lot more to it then. Puck had more to say and he made everything sound more exciting, plus there was a sense of urgency and adventure that's wholly absent now. I also seem to remember there being more conversation with the journalist Wilhelmina Sasse, who stood out as a character worth remembering. She doesn't any more. I feel she's had some of her lines cut, too.

On inspection, Sylvan's Cradle turns out have an eight-part Main Quest sequence that was so memorable I had entirely forgotten it until I re-read my journal, even though I only finished it a few days ago. It involves talking to a woman by the name of Desma Valavani about the corruption in the region and helping her test a possible cure. 

That entire sequence of eight quests amounts to about the same amount of narrative content as a run-of-the-mill EverQuest II or World of Warcraft side quest. It doesn't begin to come close to anything in one of those games you might call a zone storyline, let alone anything anyone would ever label a "main quest". 

I cannot imagine how anyone could think this is an improvement on what was there before. At the most generous interpretation it's a side-grade; largely the same as before but swapped about a bit. I'm almost convinced by what I've seen up to now that it's actually a downgrade, with significantly less story than there was in the version I played a few months back. I suppose that might be down to a poor memory on my part plus the excitement of everything being entirely new back then but still.

What I am completely sure about is that Realms Rebuilt has not turned Nightingale into any kind of story-led experience. It's still a survival game with some generic quests bolted on, seemingly as an afterthought. 

As for the expanded and revised Progression path, there's certainly more evidence of that than there is of any new narrative. Crafting has been tidied up and organized into the kind of tree you find in many games. That's not something I'd have asked for or wanted but it's certainly something that's happened. I don't think it's a particularly well-designed or intuitive layout but it is more structured than than what came before. If anyone gave up on the game last time because they found the crafting too disorganized to deal with, I suppose it might be worth another look.

In terms of content, though, I don't think much has changed. Azuriel has an excellent post up, where he goes over the potential of the system in detail but as far as a I can remember, all of that functionality was already in the game already and I don't think the new system even makes the complexity any more accessible. Possibly less so, given the tendency of the new UI to overwrite itself as you use it, a reminder this is still Early Access.

I believe there may now be slightly fewer crafting stations and Augmentations to deal with although there are also some new ones so that might come out equal. You can now make short and longbows as well as guns, which I don't recall being possible before. Magic (Or Magick as the game irritatingly spells it.) also got a minor upgrade but it's still a very low-magic environment all the same.

Once again, I don't feel any of this is a substantial change to what went before, let alone a major improvement. It is better. It's just not better enough to make anyone who turned the game down last time decide to give it a second chance now.

Then there are the new bosses. I am not impressed. Well, not with the two I've seen so far, anyway. They manage to be both very annoying but also completely trivial, which is a good trick if you can pull it off. 

The reason they're annoying is that someone has tried to make them "challenging". Apparently the developers had "seen how much players have enjoyed some of the more formidable creature encounters in Nightingale" and "wanted to expand those types of encounters". Since I would very much have been one of the players who did not enjoy those encounters and would have liked to see a lot less of them in the revamp, this was never an approach likely to endear itself to me.

For that reason I am quite pleased to find they've made a total hash of it. Yes, the bosses are "challenging" in that they have some of the most unwelcome special abilities of any mob, namely teleporting all over the place and healing themselves back to full health. Fortunately, any advantage they gain from these cheat-mode tricks is largely negated by the fact that they can be worn down by attrition using the tried-and-trusted endless respawn method. With no meaningful death penalty the only barrier to success is tedium.

That was how I beat the first boss. The second was even easier. It's a very large bear that can only attack from the front and it's in a cavern with corridors too small for it to turn around in. Once I figured that out, it was cake. (Okay, technically the bear can turn around but it takes so long to do it and its so easy to just skip round the back again that it might as well be stuck. It certainly doesn't require any skill from the player, which is just as well because I don't have any.)

The thing that puzzles me most about this isn't the unsuccessful implementation. God forbid they get that sorted out and make the encounters genuinely challenging. That really would be an "I quit!" moment for me. No, it's the idea that this is substantively different from what was there already.

Didn't we have to open each new biome with a fight with a Boss last time? Or am I getting mixed up with the half-dozen other games I've played recently where I had to do that? It's pretty much baked into the survival game model by now, isn't it? Although, now I come to think about it, I can't actually remember a single one of the original bosses in Nightingale so maybe there weren't any.

Or maybe they just weren't very memorable. I will say that this time around I can at least remember Jabberwock and the Bear (Azazel or something like that I think he's called.) so maybe that's a sign that something has improved. Then again, it's only been two weeks. Ask me in six months and see how much I can remember about them then.

One final note concerning combat and general mechanics. Azuriel mentioned in a reply to a comment I left on his previous post about Nightingale that he's already stopped playing due to the Early Access nature of the game. When I read that, I was a little surprised because the game has never seemed all that rough around the edges to me. After a few recent incidents, though, I'm beginning to see what he means.

There are the usual bugs, of course, like my entire house disappearing the other night (It came back when I relogged.) and that flickering UI I mentioned earlier but there are some things I can't quite decide whether to put down to an Early Access build or some very peculiar design choices. If it is the former then it might actually be more fun to play now before they fix them.

Here are a couple of the more egregious examples I've noticed. The first was only revealed to me when Beryl ran in and started jumping up at me and pawing at my mouse hand when I was in the middle of a big fight. I got killed as a result of her exuberance but for once, instead of using the revive option, I just logged straight out. That's how I discovered that if you simply quit to Character Select when you die, when you log back in you reappear just where you died instead of halfway across the zone, which is a huge advantage and made any number of potentially tough fights trivial once I'd discovered it. 

Just as well, too, because one thing that does seem to have changed is the overall difficulty level of the game, which seems much higher, at least when it comes to fighting regular mobs. It's particularly horrible in Sylvan's Cradle, which for some inexplicable reason (Sadistic tendencies on the part of whoever designed it being the only rational explanation I can come up with.) has been lumbered with a massive debuff to health regeneration, making it extremely difficult to recover from any fight at all. 

I realise there's something of a fad for "challenging" content right now but I don't think that having to go into every fight at low health is the kind of challenge most people are looking for. Also, being killed repeatedly by boars that charge you from behind while you're trying to talk to NPCs in a fricken' settlement probably doesn't figure prominently on most players' dance cards either. None of this seems likely to expand the audience for Nightingale as far as I can see.

My second example of something that may or may not be working as intended comes from crafting. In the old build, you could always set up a bunch of crafting stations with some recipes that had long run-times, then go to sleep and wake up with them all finished. In that build, though, you couldn't go to sleep until dusk so it was a once a day bonus.

In Realms Rebuilt, not only can you go to sleep at any time, you can nap as many times a day as you like and you can set your alarm for morning, noon or night. This means every time you have a combine running that's likely to take more than a few seconds, you can just lie down and have it done in a moment. 

There's no penalty for this whatsoever other than the mild inconvenience of having to do it at all. If it's a quirk of Early Access then I think Azuriel has a point. If it isn't, though, and it's intentional behavior, then I can't see any reason to have timers on the recipes at all. They might as well all auto-complete instantly, which would certainly be my preference. 

The final aspect of the revamp that I'm going to mention - briefly - is the way it looks. Nightingale was always a very good-looking game but now it's even more gorgeous. I remain to be convinced just how "hand-crafted" these new Realms really are but I have no complaints about the eye-candy. It's spectacular.

All in all I'm happy enough with the new Nightingale but then I was pretty content with the old one. They haven't wrecked or ruined any of the things I liked and even if I'm not all that impressed by the changes they have made, I'm finding enough that feels slightly different to want to make a second run at the game. If they were expecting a huge revival of fortunes from the work they've done, though, I think they're going to be disappointed. 

It would be easy to conclude that this is another example of why developers shouldn't rush into Early Access before the game is ready. It's very hard indeed to get a second bite at that cherry. In the case of Nightingale, though, I'm not even convinced Inflexion know what game they want to make. Waiting longer might just have meant more work to undo when they realized they'd taken a wrong turning.

Against any criticism of Early Access, as a commercial choice at least, you have to set the successful examples such as those against which I'm sure Inflexion have been bench-marking. Games like the aforementioned Palworld and Enshrouded, both of which went the Early Access route and seemed to fare pretty well by doing so.

Intriguingly, though, while both those titles outsold Nightingale hugely when they entered EA, all of them have experienced a similar decline, with Enshrouded being the most successful at holding the audience it won. Looked at from that angle, perhaps Nightingale isn't under-performing quite as badly as it seemed. In fact, with the boost Nightingale got from Realms Rebuilt, it currently has about the same concurrency as Enshrouded, which suddenly lost fully half its remaining players over the last thirty days, having been stable for months prior. What's that all about?

And, looking on the bright side, at least Nightingale isn't being sued for patent infringement. That silver lining is always there. You just have to look hard enough!