Snow, What's New?

I'm barely managing to keep all my games updated just now, let alone actually play any of them, but yesterday I did somehow contrive not only to patch Nightingale but to spend an hour or so in the game, checking out the latest build. It includes several significant changes but the main thing I wanted to see was the snow.

The update, snappily entitled "Winter Update", adds something I'm sure a lot of people will be happy to see - the ability to run the game on "Player-hosted Servers". I'll skip that part, since it has no use or meaning for me, but for anyone that cares, there's the skinny on how it works to your left. You'll need a magnifying glass.

Considerably more interesting, to me, anyway, is the new ability to recruit NPC "Survivors" to work as slave labor unpaid volunteers on your Estate. Interesting but not necessarily welcome.

Frankly, even the use of the term "Estate" for what I had previously thought of as my character's home creeps me out a little. If I have an Estate, I must either be the Lord of the Manor or the Estate Manager, neither of which really appeals. Having a bunch of silent serfs scuttling around picking up logs and growing crops makes it feel too much like feudalism for comfort.

This, unfortunately, seems to be a growing trend. I'd like to blame Palworld, which was where I first encounterted this ethically challenging mechanic, but I know it was preceded by a far, far worse iteration in Conan Exiles. There's a version in Enshrouded, too, I believe. Indentured labor seems to be the fashion everywhere, these days.

For my mental and emotional peace of mind, I'd be glad if developers put a stop this sort of thing before it goes any further. I don't play fantasy adventure games so I can spend even a portion of my time role-playing an Overseer or a Feudal Lord or some kind of animal-abusing zoo-keeper. Even playing a fair and equitable Estate Manager smacks of tedium. What next? Fantasy chartered accountant?

Still, I had to take a look the new mechanic for the sake of science and I can say that so far, the part I've seen feels half-baked and lacking any polish. Coming back to Nightingale after a lay-off really points up just how much of an Early Access title it is, something I found very easy to overlook in the white heat of discovery a few months ago.

I was able to recruit several workers through the uninspiring process of speaking to each of them individually and running through the exact same dialog every time to get their "Calling Card", which I then had to add manually to my Cairn, the device that marks the area of land you've claimed for your Estate. That's as far as I've taken it because to set them to work you need the upgraded Cairn Mk. II and I haven't yet found the time to make one.

I didn't want to get side-tracked on that because my main reason for logging in was to check out the (Once again.) unimpressively-named "Winter Event". Seriously, couldn't someone have come up with something a little less generic? I mean, I'm not asking for the Winter Convergence Festival but at least we could have had Festive Frolics or It's Snow Time!

The Winter Event includes all the usual holiday tropes: snowballs, outfits you wouldn't be seen dead in any other time of the year, festive food (Although wouldn't Pumpkin Pie be more appropriate for Halloween?) and, of course lots of snow. 

There's also a pet (Pets aren't just for Winter Event, remember!) and decorations for your home Estate. I have yet to obtain any of those.

The first thing I did was get the snow falling. For that you have to find the thingamajig that sets the rules for the zone you're in and slap a new, minor card into it. 

There are three of them: Cosy Winter, Winter Wonderland and Naughty and Nice List. The first just changes the weather to snowy, the second makes the ground slippery with ice and also makes you move faster so you can fall over more easily (Probably...), while the third changes the local loot table so it includes coal and presents.

You have to make your own cards, something that took me a moment to remember how to do. Since I wanted snow, I made Cosy Winter and I'd like a word with whoever came up with the name. In my book, "Cosy" does not imply any kind of low temperature debuff. I'd just about had enough of those with Once Human's Way of Winter so I was not best pleased to see the little snowflake icon pop up when the weather changed.

Luckily, whatever the debuff does, it seems to be very feeble so I was largely able to ignore it as I figured out what I needed to make the new outfits. When I found out, I wasn't best pleased. It reminded me of another annoying mechanic in another game I've been playing, or rather play-testing, namely Stars Reach.

Here's another irritating trend I'd like to see the back of: having to go kill stuff just so you can craft things. 

I don't mean to get materials. That makes sense. You want a bearskin rug, you have to kill a bear, I get that.

If you want to learn how to sew a Jolly Dress, however, I cannot for the life of me see why you need to kill a random creature with a snowball first. Or why making a wooden push-along horse needs you to hit the same creature ten times in a row with a snowball before you can figure out how to do it. Maybe it's just me, but I really would prefer to see some faint semblance of a logical connection between action and consequence, even in the Fey Realms.

You have to do what you have to do, though, so I made some snowballs. Far, far too many snowballs. I didn't realise the recipe produced them in batches of 20. Now I have hundreds. I had to pile them up in storage chests just to make space in my backpack. 

I needed a few, though. Killing a creature with a snowball means exactly what it says. No throwing a snowball to get its attention then swapping to your axe and hacking it to death. Since the snowballs don't do a lot of damage, that means pelting something that won't run away with snowball after snowball until one finally takes the last few remaining hit points.

After a couple of failed attempts (Deer: ran away; Bear: wandered off while I was working out what key to press to "throw".) I found a boar that was willing to play. While my assistant kept the pig occupied, I piked about a dozen snowballs into it until eventually it keeled over. Voila! Three free recipes - Jolly Coat, Boots and Hat.

If that doesn't sound ridiculous then I don't know what to tell you. Maybe I've been playing these games too long but I feel like I've come full circle. When I started playing EverQuest in 1999 it used to infuriate me that wolves dropped rusty weapons. I got over it after a while but I feel the same sense of outrage creeping back.

I'll skip over the next part, the bit where I filch around in my chests for old bits and pieces to make Augmentations to enhance my crafting stations. I didn't have to do it but I felt I ought. The devs have done a lot of work on that aspect of the game, making it much easier to see and understand what effect these things have. It's good but it also makes it less acceptable simply to ignore the mechanic altogether, as I mostly hasd been doing. It's a bit of a mixed blessing, now I come to think about it. 

Once I had that finished (Or barely started, if I'm honest. A lot of work still to do there...) I made myself a set of the red holiday gear. There's also a blue set but that requires an entirely different and more arduous combat-based achievement, one I may or may not be able to bring myself to complete. The blue does look better though, at least in the pictures.

It would pretty much have to because the red is hideous. Most outfits in Nightingale are unpleasant to look at so I shouldn't have been disappointed but I was, a little. And then there was the issue of the stats.

You have a choice in Nightingale: you can wear clothes with the stats you want and put up with looking like the Before on an extreme makeover show or you can Glamor them to look like something halfway tolerable. I have the Glamor Station to do the glamoring with but it costs tokens every time you use it and they aren't that easy to come by. I only have nine so far.

If you decide to change the look of something, the receiving piece retains its own stats, so I could glam my good gear to look like the horrible Jolly set, something I'd consider doing just for the season if I could then glam it back to the original look. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, I can't. Glamming it will destroy the original appearance for ever and it just happens to be one of the few looks I have that I actually like.

There may be ways around this or I may be misunderstanding how it works but until I find out for sure I am not minded to risk it. For now, I'm just wearing the low-level Jolly gear for the purpose of taking screenshots then swapping back to my good gear when I want to do anything else. It's annoying but it'll have to do.

There's still plenty in the Winter Event I want to try. I'm not sure how long it runs for but I imagine it will stretch into the New Year. I'll try to fnd time to get the rest done and report back.

If anyone cares.