Nightingale City - I Guess It's Not Going Anywhere...

There was a big surprise for me in today's gaming news - the sudden appearance of Nightingale City. I knew it was in the works but with Nightingale already receding into the nostalgic past (It happens so quickly these days.) I really wasn't expecting it to happen any time soon - if at all.

The update had actually been trailed but I have to admit it's been a while since I read any of the PR or watched any of the regular "Dev Bites" videos, where the two main voices left to talk up the game banter amiably and long-windedly with each other about how things are going.

It's here, though, whether I was expecting it or not, the missing piece without which the game always felt unfinished. Which, of course, it was. That's what Early Access means. 

Still, it always seemed like an error of judgment to hang an entire plot on getting to somewhere you couldn't ever go. I certainly wouldn't claim it was why I stopped playing but it was the main reason I felt unsatisfied when I did. It was like walking out half-way through the final act of a play.

Well, now the story has a proper ending at last. Or it might, at least. I'll tell you when I get there.

 Unfortunately, due to the bizarre and illogical way the game has fractured and split over its short life (The first anniversary only came around a few weeks ago.) I'm not in a position to just log in and go see what Nightingale City looks like. First I have to navigate the long and arduous path to get back to where I was when I gave up the first time.

The problem is that I started over when the Realms Rebuilt update soft-relaunched the game. As I recall it, you couldn't transfer existing characters into the new version and I wanted to see the new content so I could  post about it, so I re-rolled.

Which would be fine if I'd gotten that character as far as the first one but I didn't. I played through the new stuff until I hit the point where it was obvious I was going to have to repeat a lot of the same quests to carry on with the story and that didn't seem very appealing. So I stopped for the second time. And I haven't been back.

Inflexion Games is nothing if not accommodating so I didn't lose my old character. She's just immured behind the wall of what they call Legacy Mode. I'm pretty sure Legacy Mode doesn't get any updates but just to be sure I'm patching it up right now so I can log in and check Nightingale City hasn't made it back to the past. 

It would save me an awful lot of time if I was wrong and it would be very annoying to find out later I could have been where i needed to be in half an hour, not a few weeks. I can patch the old version back in the time it takes me to write this, so why not? It'll be nice to say Hi to my old character again, too. 

I did Google it first to see if I could save myself even that minimal effort but up-to-date information on Nightingale isn't that easy to come by. Not that it matters. It takes a while to swap between the two versions, since it relies on a kludge using Steam's beta testing process so the entire game needs to be re-patched each time you move one way or the other, but it's still a lot faster than leveling up is going to be. Might as well do it as not.

Assuming it isn't going to work, though (And I'm 99.9% sure it's not.) I'm guessing it's going to take me a good few hours of leveling to get to the point where I can take some screenshots of the rediscovered center of civilization. What's more, those hours are going to be spread across a number of weeks, if my current unwillingness to do any gaming at all is any guide. It might be summer before I get there. 

The real question is can I be bothered? I do want to see the place but there are other ways to do it. The update is less than a day old and there aren't any videos on YouTube yet, other than the official trailers, but no doubt there will be. Is there any game so obscure or unpopular that no-one uploads videos of them playing it?

Watching videos isn't the same as playing yourself but it's one hell of a lot quicker. I'm sure the time will come when I'm in a game-playing frame of mind and a few dozen more hours in Nightingale will seem like a rare treat. I'm certainly not there now, though.

I'm minded to wonder whether it wouldn't be better to save the whole thing for a time when I might actually appreciate it, rather than be mildly aggravated that it's turned up unexpectedly and demanded my attention. What's the opposite of FOMO? Because I think I might be suffering from it.

FOBO, I think it must be - Fear Of Being Obligated. I feel like I ought to want to go see Nightingale City. I was complaining for long enough about not being able to, after all. I feel I ought to do it just so I can post about it. Only I don't want to, not if it's going to be all this trouble.

The Legacy version patched while I was writing. I've been in and had a look around. Of course there's no Nightingale City there. How could there be? Legacy is time-locked. Nothing will ever change. 

So now I'm swapping back to the live build. That'll take a while and then I'll have to have a think about what to do next. 

If I do decide to carry on I imagine I'll post something about it soon enough. If I don't then I didn't, if you get my drift. Right now I feel like I won't but who knows? It's not like I ever really know what I'm going to be doing from one day to the next...

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.

Yet Another Grab Bag Because I Am All Out Of Original Ideas Again

Am I imagining it or did End of Year lists not used to come out at the end of the year? Not any more. I've been peppered with the blasted things since the beginning of December. I love lists but I wasn't ready, dammit!

I was planning on doing my own Best Of 2024 in 2025 but now I worry it'll be old news by then. I'm working on it, anyway. It's a bit top-heavy. I haven't posted a What Have I Been Listening To... since mid-October and it looks like that's going to be the last of the year, so there's almost a quarter of the year missing.

As for games and TV, which I guess would be the other two categories, both of those have tailed right off, too. Makes me wonder what I've been doing with my time. Also, why it is that the less I work and the more spare time I have, the more it seems like I never have time to get anything done?

But I digress. Which just means I'm awake. Let's get on.

Star Quality

One of the nailed-on certainties for my Best Music On Inventory Full 2024 Edition list (I'll firm that title up, don't fret.) has to be DC Fontaines' Starburster. I largely ignored the first few years of the Irish fashion-disasters' career but their sudden swerve into nuanced, layered, textural soundscapes took me by happy surprise.

It seems I wasn't the only one to notice. Someone in Gearbox Software's marketing department appears to be a fan. The new trailer for Borderlands 4 is cut to the aforementioned Starburster.

When I saw the news I was intrigued but unconvinced and having watched the trailer I'm even less convinced than that. It's a nice idea but, while someone's taken great care to try and sync the animations to the ryhthm and even to make the lyrics sorta-kinda fit, the visuals are just far too lightweight to match the music. 

DC Fontaines' sound is thick. It's a blend of post-punk and grunge, the sharp clarity of the former infused with the sonic density of the latter. Borderland is a cartoon. I'm not sure if the idea is to buy back some gravitas after the disaster that was the Borderlands movie (Still haven't seen it; still want to.) but if so, I don't think this is going to do it.

As for whether the game will be any good, I have no idea. Ask someone who plays.

And A Nightingale In A Pear Tree

Is the week before Christmas an odd time to release a major update? I'm not sure. It is the holiday season so people will have some spare time, I guess. But won't most of those people be busy doing holiday stuff? 

End of November/beginning of December, that slot I get. It falls neatly into the "Anticipating Fun" window, while avoiding the "This Is Just Too Much Now" frenzy of the latter half of the month. In the olden days, when you could actually go to a store and buy a game in a box, it made plenty of commercial sense to put new product on shelves for people to buy and I suppose that could still work in this digital age for people who think sending a code counts as gift-giving but this a free update. 

Wouldn't it be better after the holidays, when people still have some down-time and might be looking for something to carry them through the dark, dismal days of the empty year ahead? Not to mention that it's an update and it will go wrong. Do the devs really want to have to come in Christmas week to fix what they broke? Or, worse, will they just go home for the festivities and leave it to later?

I guess if the game is Nightingale, which it is, and only about five hundred people still play, on a good day, it's something of a moot point. The real surprise is that there are any updates at all. How long can it go on?

As to what's in this one, it's a little vague but here's a list because lists are great.

1. NPC Automation
2. Building UI Updates
3. New Tileset (Fae-themed Obsidian)
4. Winter Holiday Event including pets, seasonal outfits, furniture and snow.
   
5. "Listen Server" - lets players talk to each other without having to be in multiplayer mode.

I might have to log in just to see the new snow. I do love snow. 

Otherwise, I think I might just be over Nightingale now, at least until the update that adds Nightingale City itself. That I would love to see. Doubtful it will ever happen but as the devs point out in the video, while the overall rating on Steam is mixed, the Recent Review rating is Very Positive so things are at least going in the right direction.

An Epic Early New Year's Resolution

I just referred to Nightingale's Steam player count as I frequently do with games I play on Steam. It is, of course, important to remember that, with a few exceptions, most games, particularly MMOs and MMOlikes, are available on other platforms as well.

Some of those are proprietory logins for individual games or Publisher Portals like NetEase's Loading Bay but Steam does have a direct competitor in the shape of Epic Games. Nightingale is on that so maybe more people play it there.

I have an Epic Games account. I just never remember to use it. Or that it exists. I do add things to it every once in a while via Prime Gaming but that's now so nicely automated I don't have to leave Prime to do it, which means I just click the freebies onto my EG account and promptly forget I have them.

I was moved to make the effort and actually log into my Epic account yesterday by a welcome PSA from Tobold, who posted to let everyone know that The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria™ is free on Epic Games this week. Thaniks, Tobold!

It wasn't a game I had on my radar but Tobold's description ("a procedurally generated "open world" survival crafting game") and advice ("if you like survival crafting games like Valheim, this is certainly worth checking out") caught my interest, so I logged in to grab it. And I'm glad I did.

Not because of the Moria game itself. I haven't tried it yet. What pleased me was finding another game, Infinity Nikki, one I'm a lot more interested in playing, is also available for free from the Epic Game store. 

As I mentioned a few days ago, I was about to play this one when I found I didn't have enough drive space to install it. I still don't although I will do after Christmas, when I'll either have received a new SDD as a gift or have bought one for myself if not. I already have the standalone installer downloaded but it would be much neater to have the game available from a platform I'm already using (Or could be using, if I was more organized, which is where that New Year's resolution comes in.)

While I was logged in, I also noticed a bunch of other games I own there that I probably ought at least to take a look at, like some of the Borderland titles, BioShock and Frostpunk. I also notice that, like Tobold, I have notifications set to inform me of all the games Epic gives away for free. Unfortunately, because notifications annoy me, I have Desktop Notifications switched off so I never see them. I wonder if there's a way to get those by email?

Surely He Can't Have MORE Music?

Ohhh yes he can! I'd start an actual music blog if I thought anyone would see it. Maybe I should seriously think about that for the New Year...

Meanwhile, as I was saying earlier, I've fallen completely behind in posting my current listening habits. Partly that's because of all the Christmas music but it's also largely down to a change in viewing habits. I'm doing most of my musical investigations on the laptop late at night and I've been very lax in transferring that data to my PC, where it needs to be before I'm likely to do anything with it. 

I have got a few things bookmarked over here, though, so I think I can find something. How about this?

Today's "Naughty" Christmas number is a tune by Advance Base. Advance Base is actually one guy called Owen Ashworth, who also works under the better-known (For a given definition of "known".) name Casiotone for the Painfully Alone.

I was familiar with that band name but I'd never bothered to listen to anything by them. It reminded me of The Pains of Being Pure At Heart and I imagined they'd be part of that noughties, New York, post-twee scene, of which I have probably heard as much as I care to by now. 

I was wrong. It's not that. It's something arguably more interesting, much as I love my tweepop. Ashworth specialises in slice-of-life narratives, delivered in a sort of lo-fi, indie electronica fashion that verges on outsider art. He has a new album out under the Advance Base name which Stereogum just made its Album of the Week. 

They describe it as "a haunting, minimalist collection of story-songs set in the same fictional town where only bad things happen". It's called Horrible Occurences and here's a track from it.

And we're done.

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!

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.

Nightingale: Realms Rebuilt - First Impressions

So, who's up for some more First Impressions posts on Nightingale then? Nobody? Tough luck! They're coming. Why, look! Here's one now!

I think it's fair enough. The Realms Rebuilt update is about as close to a relaunch as you get in live games - the cute callback to Final Fantasy XIV's "A Realm Reborn" being no co-incidence - so a re-review is entirely justified.

There's supposed to be a whole raft of entirely new content but as yet I've seen almost none of it so this is going to be a very first impression: character creation, the opening scenario and the basic tutorial up to the point when Puck (For it is he.) deems you ready to step into the first new, handcrafted, story-rich realm. 

That's about it so far, even though Steam tells me I've played for just over three hours, which seems really high. It felt more like two but I don't think it was because the gameplay was so scintillating the hours just zipped by. The difference is more likely accounted for by the length of time it took me to get my "old" character copied to the offline client. It looks as though Steam was counting every minute of that little escapade.

Anyone got a torch?

I could easily fill a whole post with all the fuss and bother but I don't see why anyone else should have to suffer, even vicariously. All I'll say is that the process is convoluted and messy and really ought to have been made much simpler. It does at least work, though, so there's that.

After I'd managed to get my character successfully transferred to what's now known as "Legacy Mode", the client-based, offline version of the former game that will never receive any more updates, I found myself wondering why I'd bothered. I stopped playing that character because I'd lost interest in what there was left to do in the game. If there's never going to be anything else, why should I care if I can still play that version of the game or not?

I guess the reason rests in those hundred-plus hours I spent there. It just seems wasteful to throw it all away. I might not ever play that character again but I'll probably log her in now and then just to say Hi so I appreciate that Inflexion took the trouble to make that possible. They very easily could have not bothered. This is still Early Access, after all. Wipes were always a possibility. I'm sure it'll be in the EULA somewhere.

Once I had my past safely archived, I swapped back to the present (And maybe the future.) with the regular client, something that was also more awkward than it should have bee. I suspect that's a function of Steam that Inflexion can't do a lot about, though. It looks like they've had to finesse thngs just to get two versions of the game up at the same time. Legacy Mode is masquerading as a beta. 

Then I set about making a new character. That took a while but not for any problematic reasons.

They shall not pass! For a given value of "they", that is.

I couldn't see much different in character creation but I thought I probably ought to go back and refresh my memory by reading what I said last time. Just about everything I said then applies now so I won't rehash it all except to say I still have no clue why there's all that rigmarole about birthdays and ancestors. It never did seem to mean anything but it's all still there. 

Whether it will have any added significance in the new, narrative-focused Nightingale I guess we'll just have to wait and see. I bet it doesn't, though. It looks to me like someone's clever idea they just won't give up on even though it never quite went anywhere. Kill your darlings. It's sound advice.

There was one thing that went differently this time but it was entirely by chance. The first step in character creation gives you a basic face to work with and the one I got reminded me a little of Sabrina Teitelbaum (Aka Blondshell, if you want to go the Blondie/Debbie Harry singer-is-the-band route.) It might just have been because I watched the Deceptacon video from Friday's post immediately before I logged in. Or possibly it was because I'd watched it about half a dozen times in the last twenty-four hours. Not that I'm obsessed with it or anything...

Whatever the reason, I decided I'd try to make my character look as much like her as possible, which took a while. I couldn't get the chin right - there just didn't seem to be a slider that would do it - and none of the longer hair styles came with a central parting but overall I wasn't displeased with the final result. 

My photo-reference and the final result. That's the closest together the eyes will go, the roundest I could get the chin and one of only two longer hairstyles available, neither of which has a central parting. I actually forgot about the eyebrows altogether and the eyes ought to be a darker blue. Other than that...

I did consider naming her Sabrina Teitelbaum, which would be an excellent name for a Nightingale character, given it sounds like it is one already, but I thought that really might be crossing a line . So I called her Califa Mortensen instead. She looks both Californian and Scandinavian so it seemed to fit.

Once that was all sorted out, I logged in and found myself in a very dark cave. I don't remember it  from the original game but I suppose it might have been there. If it was, though, it must have been a lot better-lit because I definitely don't remember being completely blind at the start of the game. I couldn't see a bloody thing!

Puck, our unreliable narrator with the orotund vowels, popped up and told me to follow the sound of his voice but then he immediately stopped talking, which I thought was very unlike him. I blundered around in the dark trying to find where he'd gone, got jumped by a bunch of Bound (Zombies to the uninitiated.), got confused in the dark trying to turn around in the narrow corridors to fight them off and promptly got clawed to death. 

Not the most encouraging of starts but possibly not entirely unintended either, given what happened next. After I'd revived, exacted revenge on my killers and managed through sheer luck to stumble into Puck, he pointed me at a portal he told me would take me out of the cave. Thank god! Daylight at last!

Don't tempt me...

Yeah... nope.  I was very annoyed to find myself ported to somewhere just as gloomy if not more so. I was about to curse all developers who think darkness equals atmosphere when Puck handed me a card and told me to put it in the machine next to him. I did as he said and suddenly the gloom vanished, the sky turned blue and the sun came out.

Granted, it was an impressive piece of scene-setting and a clever way to demonstrate how cards can be used to change the environment but was it worth fifteen minutes of frustration in the dark? I don't think so. If this was a brand-new game I might well have consigned it to the recycle bin before I got to the punchline.

That said, it seems quite likely that the cave isn't supposed to be quite as dark as I found it. A while later, when I reached the settlement where the NPCs stand around waiting to hand out the missions, I was more than somewhat irked to find they'd chosen another subterranean pit of gloom to hang out in. They gave me some spiel about it being safer down there but it cut no ice with me.

Those caves were even darker than the last lot, so dark I literally couldn't see where to go. I couldn't even see the steps leading down. Frustration sent me to the Settings to see if there was anything I could do to make it lighter. 

I wasn't expecting much joy there. I haven't seen a gamma slider in a very long time. But Nightingale has one.

Gamma to the max.

I slammed it all the way to the right and suddenly I could see normally again. I think that's probably what underground is supposed to look like. Unfortunately, when I emerged from the cavern back into the sunlight it was like someone had let off a magnesium flare in my face so I had to push the slider a ways back to the left again. I suspect that slider is going to be doing a lot of work in the days ahead.

Lighting aside, the rest of the visuals seemed much the same. Character models stil feel slightly off and no-one seems to have thought about adding any idling animations yet, which sometimes makes me feel I'm looking at a very clever automaton rather than an actual human being. 

There was some evidence of the new, hand-crafted scenery off in the distance but the bits I was walking around in felt very familiar. The game now sets you down in an Abeyance realm, meaning it's relatively safe to go exploring. It's a large zone with a lot of points of interest marked on the map, so I guess if you wanted to go off script and ignore the story prompts you could settle down and amuse yourself there for quite a while.

Speaking of the map, it seems to have had a quality-of-life pass. There's annotation now to tell you what some of the POIs are for, not just where they are. It also has the relevant locations for at least some of the missions marked on it.

I know where the bodies are buried.

The first thing the new main questline asks you to do is go find some tools. They're all handily marked on the map but since they're also all right next to the only obvious path that isn't quite the boon it first seems. There are a dozen "treasures" you're supposed to go find as well, which I thought, somewhat goulishly, were going to be on the corpses of Realmwalkers who didn't make it home. They're actually just lying about and they're all marked on the map too, or they appear there once you get the quest. It's defintely an improvement

Everything I've done so far has been pretty much a tutorial and at these very early stages it's all been extremely straightforward. Puck pretty much tells you he isn't going to let you go anywhere until you've learned the absolute basics so that's what I've been doing. Gathering mats, making tools, claiming a base. All the traditional tropes of the genre.

As I said the last time, the basic survival gameplay loop is pretty much bullet-proof by now. If you ever enjoyed it at all, chances are you'll enjoy it again, whenever and wherever you encounter it. It's obvious why these games have been so overwhelmingly successful - they pare that old Skinner Box/Dopamine hit combo down to its core and then absolutely ladle it on. It just works, at a back-brain level that's very hard to resist.

The last thing you'd call it, though, would be exciting. Compelling, immersive, addictive, any of those but thrilling, exhillarating, surprisng? Nope. Not a chance.

Maybe a little more of this, a little less "Go pick up that second-hand mining pick"?

The original introduction, as I remember it, did go a little further in that direction. I seem to recall Puck instilling some sense of urgency into the process as he insisted you experience all three major biomes before choosing one to settle down in. I seem to remember there being some actual plot and an element of danger that did something to pull me into the game.

There's none of that here. This time it's all far more streamlined and considerably less intense. I spent a couple of hours doing pretty much nothing and it's clear I could double or treble that without gettin the feeling I'm going to miss out on anything important or that anything rests on my getting my act together.

Maybe Nightingale is going to re-pitch itself as some kind of cosy base-builder. It certainly has the chops for it. Or maybe once I follow Puck's next instruction and cross the Abeyance realm in search of a way out into the Realms the narrative will pick up pace and I'll start to feel like something's actually happening. 

As for the structural changes, I'm not wholly on top of all of them as yet. I haven't encountered any of the new pets, for example, just the good old dachsund, who I made it a priority to invite into my home. (No sign of my old Twitch drop dog or any of my other Twitch rewards, though. I asume those didn't make it through to the New Nightingale.)

As for the crafting revamp, rather baldly re-badged as "Progression", it seems like a sideways move at best but maybe it'll grow on me. It is certainly a lot tidier and better-presented but also quite a bit less evocative. The original may have been chaotic but it also felt aspirational. This new one looks a bit too much like a work schedule for my tastes.

An example from the new crafting Progression tree.

I think they must also have done away with the system whereby you had to visit all kinds of NPCs scattered throughout the realms to buy most of the blueprints. Now it looks like all of that happens in the UI which, once again, is a lot tidier and more convenient but also considerably less interesting.

The one new addition I was really keen to try out doesn't appear to be available at this early stage of the game at all. I couldn't find the "Glamour Station", the new device that lets you swap the stats of one piece of gear onto the look of another (So you don't have to go around looking like one of those scarecrows even Wurzel Gummidge wouldn't be seen with.) anywhere in the Progression tree at all. [Edit: I found it! It's in the Structures tab, Tier Two. It requires a whole bunch of stuff I won't be able to get for quite a while but it's a worthwhile goal to aim for.]

There seems to be very little information available as yet but from the little I was able to glean I have the impression it relies on tokens dropped by mobs, which seems like an unecessary complication. Changing your appearance seems like something that really ought to be a UI option.

Anyway, there's no need to speculate further on things I haven't had the chance to try out for myself yet. I already know I'm going to be carrying on with the game. It feels both familiar and fresh, which is a nice combination. I wasn't expecting to be playing Nightingale again but it looks like that's what's going to happen.

If I do, you can expect to read about it here. You can take that as either a threat or a promise. Up to you!