Nivalis Nights - A Smattering Of Random First Impressions

Thanks to a suggestion by Nimgimli in the comments, I now know how to take screenshots in GeForce Now and have them save to my local drive rather than wherever NVIDIA keeps its data center. Also, I have only just this moment noticed NVIDIA styles itself in ALL CAPS. 

I have yet to figure out a good way to take screenshots in Nivalis Nights without the UI, though. If I have a pet peeve (Note to self: Name next vanity pet "Peeve".) it's the way most devs don't provide an easily-accessible option in the default settings for removing the UI and taking screenshots. It's like they don't want their games to look their best on social media.

No, that's can't be it. It's more likely the opposite. Social media's their main focus. Not archaic blogs like this. 

Most modern games include in-game cameras that have all kinds of filters and frames, specifically designed to produce images suitable for use on Instagram or Facebook. (I believe some people still use Facebook. Gemini keeps linking Facebook pages as authority for the misinformation it feeds me, anyway...)

I love those in-game cameras. They're ideal for posed shots. Nivalis Nights has a perfectly good one, too. The problem with them is that they're designed for photo shoots not journalism. They're impractically slow to access and set up if all you want to do is record what's there in front of you as you play. As for action shots - forget it!

What passes for an action shot in Nivalis Nights. By which I mean you can see my hands.

The old fashioned, basic screenshot-on-a-hotkey option is so much more convenient for reportage and in-combat captures. If you can bind Hide UI and Screenshot to the same key, so much the better. Where that's available, I like to hammer the key a few times mid-fight and pick out a good shot later. I don't want to be trying to set up a tripod while some baddie's ripping my arms off.

Playing on GeForce Now's remote servers adds another level of difficulty. Any in-game camera becomes functionally useless because every shot you take goes to someone else's hard drive. 

Sidebar: It's like in the old days before digital cameras, when I'd take scores of photos on holiday and then never get around to having the films developed. The images exist in a the same way that damn cat in the lead-lined box exists, neither one thing nor the other. 

When I was clearing out drawers this summer, not only did I throw away hundreds of hopeless holiday snaps, I also binned a couple of dozen undeveloped rolls of film. What was on them? We'll never know. Their liminal existence has been committed to landfill until entropy settles the matter once and for all.

As I begin to settle in to GeForce Now as my primary gaming platform, some of these issues are starting to resolve themselves. Workarounds are becoming habits. And that's fine. It's good not to have to think about how to take a shot before I take the shot. 

Cut scenes mean clean screens. 

I can take clean pictures of Neverness To Everness and Valheim and store them locally without much trouble but Nivalis Nights remains recalcitrant although it is very early days. NTE didn't get around to adding a simple option to hide the UI until it had been out for a few months. 

There's no such option in NN yet but there is a mod you can apply that will do the job because players are always much faster then developers when it comes to quality of life hacks. Unfortunately, you can't use mods on GeForce Now so it doesn't help me any. I'll have to keep using ugly shots that show the UI or crop them tightly to leave it out. Or I could get AI to remove the UI but that takes a while.

In my quest for cleaner screenshots, it was only late last night that I discovered how to hide the huge quest panel that dominates the right-hand side of the screen. While I'm playing, I like having it there. It's very helpful. For screenshots, though, it takes up a ridiculous amount of space and there's no obvious hotkey or command to close it.

That's because Nivalis Nights is one of the worst-documented games I've played in years. It's one thing to go all "in media res" and "learning by doing" - I'm fine with all of that - but you do need to tell people what the basic controls are. 

It's a reasonably popular game - just under 7,000 concurrent players on Steam at launch, although that's a bit of a poor return from the reported "one million wishlists". I imagine a lot of potential purchasers are waiting to hear the widely-reported performance issues have been fixed before committing. With that take-up, there's already a decent amount of information on the internet so a quick search finds answers to most of the questions that really should have been resolvable by a quick glance at the Settings.

It's fine. I didn't want to see anything on that side of the screen anyway...

Here's how you hide the Journal panel: Hold down the J key for about three-quarters of a second. Obviously that's something that was discovered by some fat-fingered, slow-handed player, who then probably spent a few frustrating minutes trying to find out where the hell their quest journal had gone. 

And even that option has its problems, it seems. There's a patch out already that purports to fix some of the performance issues and address a few of the more commonly reported bugs and at the end of the patch notes it warns 

"When hiding the quest log (holding the J Key), it can happen that the text becomes illegible after the quest log has been hidden for some time and then is unhidden again. This issue is already fixed, but we were not able to include it in this patch. Reloading your save will fix this issue if you do encounter it."

Speaking of saves, there is an auto-save but it's quite slow to trigger. My first session lasted nineteen minutes but when I logged in the next day, ready to carry on from where I left off, the Continue button was greyed out. I had to start over from scratch. Not too much of an imposition, given the short time it took me to catch up to where I'd finished, but it was still annoying.

I'm so used to playing online games that don't require manual saves it hadn't even occurred to me to save my game before logging out. I'm doing it now. I also now notice when the little "Saving Game..." icon pops up in the bottom-right. I haven't yet figured out if it's a time-based process or if it triggers when some specific type of event occurs. Either way, I won't be trusting it alone. Manual saves all the way from now on.

Can you handle my game saves for me please, AVA?

 And that's enough about the technical issues, important though they are to a first impression. If you really feel a game, though, you'll let all kinds of technical issues slide. Well, I will. 

So, am I feeling it for Nivalis Nights? Hmm. Mostly yes. A little bit no. It's complicated.

It's also extremely early to be making any criticisms or endorsements that I'll most likely end up having to take back later. I've played for just over three hours so far. If the game was better-documented I'd be able to tell you if that takes me past the tutorial. I'm inclined to think it doesn't but who knows for sure?

There's a great deal about the game I like very much indeed. I already mentioned in the Very First Impressions post how much I like the look of Nivalis and the more I see of the city, the better I like it. I tweaked the graphics up a little and now it looks better than ever. 

As it does in Neverness To Everness, the weather plays a huge role in defining and enhancing the mood. Unlike in NTE, you can't just set the weather to whatever you'd like it to be but you do get a very accurate weather forecast for the coming week. If it says there will be storms on Wednesday, there will be storms on Wednesday. Spectacular storms.

And if the sun comes out... oh, boy! Nivalis is a different city in the sunlight. All that moody noir? Stripped away. Everything that was dark now glows. It's an extraordinarily delightful transition.

It's a different world when the sun comes out.

 The city itself is an absolute masterpiece. Huge, rambling, chaotic and entirely convincing. This year has seen the two best cities I've ever visited in virtuality, Hethereau and Nivalis. With GTA6 to come, and Vice City doubling the size of Los Santos, this has to be the Year of the City in gaming.

I spend much of my time in NTE just wandering around Hethereau. I've been doing it for six months and I haven't had enough of it yet. I can easily imagine doing the same with Nivalis except for one thing: there's this slightly annoying game attached.

I did say "slightly annoying". From the little of it I've experienced so far, I'd say it's a pretty good game. It's just that at this stage I don't feel like any kind of game is really what I'm after. I'd like to spend a few hours just wandering around, getting my bearings, opening the fast transport points, seeing the sights and basically playing tourist.

The developers do not want me to do that. What they want me to do is run a noodle bar. It's literally the first thing. The introductory quest. You go meet this guy, talk to him and when you do, he gives you his noodle bar and says, it's yours, here you go, now you're in business. And then he leaves.

I have no interest whatsoever in running a noodle bar. Not a real one and not a fictional one. I for sure don't appreciate being lumbered with one before I've even figured out who and where I am. I like it even less when I find out that by taking ownership of the damn thing I've also lumbered myself with the previous owner's massive debt.

The depressing ending to each day's work.

Now, apparently, I have to work my ass off, setting up a stupid noodle bar, shopping for food, hiring staff, buying furniture, dealing with all the other restauranteurs in a half-kilometer radius, most of whom don't like the new competition, just to pay off this debt that isn't even mine!. All of this when all I want to do is goof off and see the city...

It's actually a very good set-up for a business sim, which is a significant part of what Nivalis Nights sets itself up to be. I knew that when I bought it so I can hardly complain of a bait and switch. What I thought was that I'd just pay lip service to the business part while I focused on all the other activities, things I'd find more to my taste.

And that's what I've been trying to do. I got the place started then left it running. I got my boat last night and went fishing instead, which was a lot of fun. I've also been speaking to all kinds of people all over the city, picking up quests left and right. I've even finished some of them. There are some great little stories in the interactions, some that pick things up from where we left them in Cloudpunk. Some of the same characters even make a re-appearance.

Nixxy liked my snappy comeback so much she might make me a regular!

 All of that I'm really enjoying. But now I'm nearly broke thanks to that damn noodle bar and AVA keeps giving me dire warnings about how my business is falling apart and the whole thing is becoming really stressful. I do not have any interest in playing games that deliberately try to trigger a stress response so that's not going down well with me at all.

As soon as I felt things starting to get on top of me, I went googling for a way to destress the situation. I was hoping maybe there was an opt-out for the noodle bar but there doesn't seem to be. There is, however, a very easy way to find yourself suddenly rich enough to hire a manager, add a bunch of tables and let the place run itself while you rake in the profits: just steal stuff. 

That's how you do it. Apparently all you have to do is ignore the nightly curfew warning and when all the other business owners have locked themselves safely away in their apartments, you go round to their establishments, help yourself to their tables and chairs and all the appliances in their kitchens. Then you put everything you can use in your noodle bar and sell the rest. 

And that's it. That's the meta. I read it on reddit and on the Steam Discussion thread and several professional game websites. It's not like I just believed some AI's hallucination. I haven't tried it myself but I'm sure it'll work.

Except for one thing: I don't like to steal in video games. Okay, I'm not saying I've never done it but I don't enjoy it. I avoid it as much as I can in any game that allows it. I especially avoid it in any game that encourages it. It just makes me uncomfortable to do it, so I don't.

I'm not sure yet if I'm going to do it in this game. I might have to. And I can rationalize doing it, to a degree.

Now that's a decent use-case for AI...

 I've seen Nivalis Nights described as an unusual entry in the cosy game genre, Stardew Valley with a quirky cyberpunk skin. It is not that. In Cloudpunk, Nivalis was conceived as a postcapitalist dystopia. It hasn't suddenly turned into a fluffy little My Little Hello Kitty liberal democracy in Nivalis Nights. If that's the kind of city you're looking for, let me direct you to Hethereau.

In those circumstances, I might be willing to start helping myself to anything that's not nailed down. Dog eat dog, every man for himself, survival of the fittest, insert Ayn Rand quote here. If I do, though, it sure as hell won't be because it makes sense. 

How can you just take furniture from the bar next door and set it up outside your own place without anyone noticing? I guess I haven't tried it yet so maybe there's a gloss that makes it seem reasonable but from what I've read everyone just carries on as if it hasn't happened. I have to say it sounds more like a bug than a feature to me but we'll see. If they don't patch it out, I guess they meant for us to do it that way.

Since this is a game where you can have multiple saves, what I think I'll probably do is give the old night-time thievery a try and see how it sits with me. If I can stomach it and if it works then I'll carry on with that as my main save. 

If it doesn't, or if I find it too weird, I'll start again and see what happens if I don't do that introductory quest. Never go see the guy. Don't talk to him. Ignore AVA when she keeps reminding me. Never own a noodle bar.

I know it's the start of the Main Story Quest but I'm curious to know: if you abandon the MSQ altogether and just focus on exploring the city and living in it, can you do all the other stuff that's not connected to the story? Or is a bunch of stuff gated behind how well your fast food outlet does?

Either way, it would be interesting to find out, so even if grand theft does turn out to be the fix for noodle bar stress, I might try it anyway. Just what I need. Two versions of the game running in parallel. Just when i already have too many games to play...