Mr. Barnabus Builds His Dream House - #3 In The Series No-One Asked For!

There very nearly wasn't a post at all today thanks to the insidiously addictive nature of building houses in video games. I was in the middle of trying to figure out how to build some stairs and very nearly getting somewhere when Mrs Bhagpuss asked me if Beryl had been fed, which led to me asking what the time was and finding out it was an hour later than I thought because time just evaporates when you get into the fiddly detail of a build.

Or it does for me, which is why I'm always extremely wary of any game that has base building, as it seems to be called these days, as a feature. It's the most "just another ten minutes..." of all game activities as far as I'm concerned. I don't relish the loss of control. Especially when those ten minutes turn into two hours as they inevitably will.

To pick up where we left off last time, having cobbled together what has to be the smallest, ugliest, most pathetic shack I have ever built in any game, I moved on to something better. A big, ugly shack.

Okay, not quite that bad. The next build was more of a wonky bunker. The important thing wasn't what it looked like, though, It was the size of it. The first, my Ratonga Warlock could barely fit inside. The next had ceilings three times his height.

What happened was that I suddenly remembered that one of the most useful features of housing items in EverQuest II: scalability. You can blow anything up or shrink it down to quite a significant degree. With that in mind, it occurred to me it would be a lot easier to make a big house if I used big blocks. 

So I tried it and it really wasn't. I'd forgotten how thick it would make the walls. As thick as the actual walls of a real medieval castle and then some.   

Luckily, I'd also thought of an alternative to building with blocks like a five year-old giant. How about walls? There was a whole set of walls in my Carpenter's books. The set is called Seru's Duplicitous Tileset and I have no clue how she got it but among other things it makes sections of wall with frames for windows and doors. Just what I needed.

I got her to make twenty or so of each, went through the rigmarole of passing them across via the shared bank and then got on with building something out of them. It was not as easy as it could have been, mostly because I hadn't considered the flatness of the surface when I picked my plot. It's hard to line up walls when the ground slopes down to the sea.

Once again, EQII's wide-ranging options for placement and alignment came to my rescue. Well, almost. You can swivel and rotate objects and also raise and lower them. Most importantly, you can sink walls down through the earth and into each other which makes it easy to line them up so there aren't any gaps at the joins or at the bottom on sloping ground.

Sadly, the same can't always be said of the top. Still, I muddled through, eventually. There were a lot of small gaps here and there, some of the walls were far from straight and the top edges were a bit jagged but it was better than my first attempt.

Of course, it didn't have a roof. There are, as far as I can tell, no roofing items you can make or buy, let alone any prefabricated roofs. There are also no ceilings per se. For those you need to use floor tiles. I guess one person's ceiling is always another one's floor. 

I had my Carpenter knock out fifty floor tiles from the Seru set and with some of those I put a flat roof on top. Oh, how simple that makes it sound. It took me ages and it looked terrible. I had to overlap tiles to cover all the gaps because not only is there no snap-to-fit, the area I was trying to cover wasn't even a regular shape, thanks to the walls not being straight.

I got it done somehow. It looked awful. But it was late and I had to stop so I left it at that. I had, at least, learned something and also I was starting to find placing things and lining them up a little easier.

When I came back to it today, really I should have torn the whole thing down and started again. But I didn't. I had some walls left so I thought I'd add a second story. And when I'd done that, I thought I might have a bash at a roof. A sloping roof.

That was fun. I worked out how to place the tiles on the floor, raise them up and swivel them. You have to do it that way because if you try to put them on the walls themselves they insist on sitting half on one side and half on the other. Nothing ever wants to go where you want to put it. It's infuriating.

There are ways around it, though. All of which make the end result look like a barn that's barely survived a tornado going through. But it's a roof. And it slopes!

That took an hour or two. Shame I didn't think about the trees when I started. In some games, if foliage gets in the way you can chop it down. Here, it just has to stick through the walls. Maybe I'll put a wardrobe over the branches. It'll be like Narnia.

The main lesson I'd learned by this point was to take a very great deal more care about where to put the damn house in the first place. The second was to build on a firm foundation. I see what those blocks are for now.

For the time being, though, I had a two-story building with a roof. Good start! No windows or doors, of course, but you can't have everything. 

Except I wanted some windows and doors. I know you can have doors, at least. I remember making some before, when I was building a Gnome Trap (Don't ask...) I got the Carpenter out again and had a more careful look through her recipe books and yes, she can make doors. Quite a lot of different doors. Wood, metal, stone, jail. All sorts of doors.

She made a couple of wooden ones and I played around with those for a bit. It was surprisingly easy to scale them up, fit them into the frames and get them opening and closing. Very much the wrong sort of doors for the rest of the build but with proof of concept established, I'll make some more suitable ones later.

Windows, though... Windows were a lot harder. I couldn't figure it out. I had to go look it up out of game in the end.

It transpires the main reason I couldn't find any recipes for windows in my Carpenter's books is that Carpenters don't make windows. Makes sense. Windows aren't made of wood, are they? 

So who does? Tinkerers, mostly. Also there are some holiday-themed windows that anyone can make. I had a look at what was available and settled on the Frostfell ones. They have a snow effect that seemed ideal for the setting. Most windows seem to come with a visual effect of some kind. What you can't have is a good, old-fashioned, plain glass window you can see through.

Getting my hands on the Frostfell windows was a bit of a performance. There were some comical misadventures in the Frostfell Winter Village, where I thought I might be able to buy them, ready-made, off the elves and goblins (They don't sell them.) Then I thought I'd need to use the workbenches in the Village to craft them only I couldn't find where they were. (Didn't even need them anyway. I'd forgotten I have my own set of all-year-round Frostfell crafting stations in the Mara home.) 

Eventually I got it all figured out, made myself half a dozen of the two types of window, vertical and horizontal, and went to fit them into the frames. And guess what? They don't fit.

Not even close. Neither of them. This is the part I don't get. Why even have tile sets with window-frames if none of your windows fit the holes?

I'm convinced I must have missed something. It makes no sense otherwise. Maybe I need to do a bit more research, although it won't be easy. Information on any of this seems hard to find. 

For now, though, I have a reasonably effective workaround involving scaling the windows up and sinking them into the walls. The end result doesn't look too bad. Not compared to the rest of the shoddiness, anyway.

All of that took much longer than I thought because time moves at an entirely different pace when you're building. When I finally had to stop, I was in the middle of figuring out how to build those stairs. I think I have it but if I'm right it's going to take a lot longer than I want to spend doing it. 

Who needs stairs when you can fly, anyway? Do birds have stairs? No, they do not!

And that is as far as I've gotten so far. This post ended up a lot shorter than I was planning, thanks to the building itself taking much longer so I guess we all dodged a bullet there. I strongly suspect this will not be the last in this series,either, but I have to go to work tomorrow so at least we can all have a day off before the next not-so-thrilling installment. 

I don't know about anyone else but I bloody well need one. Building is fun but it's hard work.

You Don't Want To Do It Like That!

Just a short post today (He says, optimistically...) following on from yesterday's report on the purchase of my new island getaway. 

Once I'd gotten all my other responsibilities out of the way last night, I logged back into EverQuest II to see if I could figure out how you go about building a house from scratch. I knew it was possible, or at least I thought it must be, even though I'd never seen it done. I imagine there are plenty of self-builds I could visit but I haven't been to see another player's house for many years. 

Also, it's generally a bad idea to go check out what other people are doing with their houses in EQII, at least if you have any plans to do something with your own. Some of these people are seriously good. It can be discouraging.

All I knew was that I'd seen any number of crafting recipes for Blocks and Windows and similar essentials of the trade. I'd always assumed they had to be there for those players who'd found decorating an insufficient outlet for their inner architect. What else could they be for?

Hmm. That sounds like a set-up. As though I was leading up to saying I'd found out all those recipes were in the books for something else entirely. No, sorry. Just some thoughtless phrasing. They're exactly what they seem.

As it happens, I have a max-level Carpenter on my team, so it was easy enough for me to take a look at what they make. I do, in fact, have several max-level crafters at my disposal - Sage, Alchemist, Jeweller, Weaponsmith, Carpenter, Tailor. I think that's the lot. So far, anyway. I'll probably have the full set some day. I could do with a Provisioner, I know that much...

It can feel like a real grind to get a crafter to the cap from scratch but once you've done it it's pretty easy to stay up to date. It's far easier to knock off those five extra levels every second expansion than it is to catch up as an adventurer. 

The first three on that list I picked because between them they make spells and skills for all classes. That's very important if you're going to solo. Makes you pretty much self-sufficient. Spells and skills can get very expensive.

Weaponsmith, though? That one I picked mostly because I'm an idiot. It's pretty much useless. I would never pick it now but it's what my Berserker does and at this stage I'm stuck with it. I chose it for him for roleplaying reasons and also because I thought it would be cool to make swords and stuff. It's not. And I don't even role-play, so what was that all about?

My Inquisitor, on the other hand, is a Carpenter for good reason. Carpenters make boxes. Everyone always needs boxes. Can't have too many boxes. And they make furniture. I thought it would be very handy to have someone who could help me decorate all those houses I keep buying. 

And it would. In theory. Only, the someone in question usually ends up being whoever put whatever it is I need I need up on the Broker.  For peanuts. 

Here's the irony. Other than skills and spells, most crafted items are so cheap and plentiful it feels like a self-indulgence to make your own. And who wants to stop and craft when you're about to do something more interesting? 

One of the perks of being a Member is access to the Broker from anywhere. It means I can usually just grab whatever I want the moment I need it. And often for barely more than the cost of the fuel and the mats, if I made it myself.

It's not the cost so much as the time. If I do decide to make something for myself, first I have to log in the character that can do it, always assuming I can remember who that is. Then I have to get that crafter to my Berserker's Mara house, which is where I keep all the crafting mats, hundreds of thousands of them, and where I have all the crafting stations set up. 

Unless it's my Berserker doing the job, which it never is because no-one wants the crappy weapons he can make, just getting to his house means a trip to a city, because you have to be in a city to access housing at all, then to the particular crafter's own house, because that's where the portal to the Mara home will be, and then finally to Mara itself.

All of that takes a while, what with loading times. And then sod's law dictates that one of the mats needed will turn out to be something I haven't got in store. I mean, I have a vast hoard of them but EQII is over twenty years old. There are a lot of different crafting materials now. And even if I have the mats, I might not have bought the book with the right recipe. There's a lot that can go wrong, just making something that should be simple.

So, what with all of that and a few other little wrinkles, mostly it always seems faster and easier all round just to let someone else do the work, then pay them whatever pittance they're asking. On the odd occasions that what I want isn't up for sale or if it's heavily overpriced, then I make it myself. Sometimes, when I can be bothered, I even make a bunch of spells and skill and put them up for sale. That can be a real earner.

So, anyway, dragging myself back to the point, crafting is a thing I know how to do. I'd just never had the need to make bricks before. But how hard could it be? 

I woke my Carpenter up, got her to Mara, plonked her in front of the woodworking bench and told her to get on with it. She opened her Recipe books and started looking for "bricks". And there weren't any.

That's because they're called "blocks", apparently. She had a ton of recipes for those. They start at the bottom and go all the way up the leveling ladder. I have far more high-end mats than low, thanks to most of my gathering being done at the cap, so I started her making Shadow Stone blocks. 

One at a time. Boy, was it slow! I figured it would take me hours to make enough for a house that way. And then I remembered a Tradeskill AA, one I'd never seen the point of before: Mass Production. I could see the point of it now, alright.

I'd never bothered to take that AA but luckily EQII is an extremely flexible MMORPG - if you know how to play it. Many years ago, they added the option to set and save multiple AA builds. For free, too. Convenient and generous. Time to take advantage.

I opened the AA panel, swapped to a blank Profile, spent the necessary AAs in the Prestige Tradeskill line and presto! The means of Mass Production were mine.

I wasn't sure how it would work but it turned out to be extremely user-friendly. You just select how many of an item you want to make from a drop-down menu. It goes up in fives as far as a hundred. Then you do a single combine and it makes the lot in one go. Talk about a time-saver!

I made a hundred Shadow Stone blocks and fifty half-blocks. Just to get started. I thought I might need some doors and windows too, so I had a look through the books for those and... 

Couldn't find any. I could find plenty of frames but nothing to put in them. I still haven't. I need to do some research on that after I finish this post. There must be some.

I made a few frames anyway, then took everything to the bank to pop it into Shared Storage so my Warlock, the one with the island, could pick them up and get started on building his new mansion.  

That went... well it went somewhere. Downhill fast, mostly.

The good part is that hundreds of stone blocks apparently weigh nothing at all so moving them wasn't a problem. They also stack, so neither was storage. The Warlock picked up his blocks, took them to his island, picked out a nice spot and started placing them.

There were just two problems. First, the stack itself. Great for transporting blocks, not so good for placing them. Or that's what I thought. It transpires, as I later worked out, that you can place the whole stack and one will peel off automatically, leaving the rest back in your bags. But I didn't know that then.

I started splitting the stacks and putting the blocks into his bags individually, which was slow and annoying. And guess what? The Warlock's bags were almost full even before I started. 

I know! Who would ever have thought? Anyway, splitting stacks isn't just slow and annoying. It's also fiddly and tedious. I did about twenty and I'd had enough. More than enough. 

Second problem, worse than the first. The blocks are quite small. Not as small as bricks but still not what you'd call big. You'd need an awful lot to make a house. 

It was starting to look like an impractical project or at least not a fun one. Still, I'd started and I was at least going to make some kind of hut before I finished. 

And I did. I made a hut. A small, ugly hut with no door and no windows, just the holes where they ought to go. The walls weren't the least bit straight. The flat roof that didn't even sit flush on the walls. The doorway was too small even for a Ratonga. Along with many other shortcomings I won't embarrass myself by mentioning. When I'd finished, even the flying snake wouldn't have lived there.

Here's the thing about EQII. It's an old game. Newer games, particularly all the many survival titles, tend to have a mechanic where all the pieces snap together. You might have a bit of trouble getting the system to line them up just how you want but once you do - Bingo! They snap together like magnets. A perfect fit. 

Sometimes you get a grid to make it even simpler. It's easy and it's fun. 

EQII has nothing like any of that. From Mrs. Bhagpuss's time as a competitive decorator, I vaguely remember there was a third-party add-on you could use to line things up and change angles but that required math. I know she hated using it. It certainly wasn't EZ-Mode. The very opposite, if anything.

Building in EQII is hard. It requires a lot more skill and application than I'm used to providing. Even Landmark was easier than this. 

And yet, I persisted. In fact, I really got into it. Building in games is hellish addictive. Time passed fast as I placed my blocks by hand. It was not, sadly, time well-spent.

My blocks did not line up. It didn't help that the ground sloped. Or that my pet flying snake kept getting in my way and I couldn't work out how to dismiss it. The whole thing was a disaster and yet I couldn't leave it alone. In the end, I only stopped because Beryl barreled in and started jogging my arm to make me pay attention.

About the best I can say for my first attempt at building a house hut is that I learned some things. Things I applied with only a very minor degree of success in my second attempt. What those things were, though, and what my second home looked like, will have to wait for another post because this one's long enough already. And then some.

This could turn into a series. We'll all just have to hope that doesn't happen. 

Island Life In EverQuest II

Back on Black Friday, Wilhelm at TAGN posted a piece about the cash shop in Palia and "micro" transactions in general. In the course of the piece, he pointed out that unspent cash-shop currency is a drag on the balance sheet for the Accounts Department and the last thing they want you to do is hoard the damn stuff and never spend any of it.

Which, of course, is what I do all the time. It's partly due to something Wilhelm was complaining about, namely how tough it can be in most games to find anything at all in the cash shop that seems like it's both good value and worth buying in the first place. For me, it often seems as though everything in most in-game stores is either ridiculously overpriced or hard to figure out why anyone would want it at any price.

I spent a decade playing Guild Wars 2, for example, and in all that time just about the only things I ever bought were storage upgrades. Those were useful but, like just about everything in the Gem Store, very expensive, so I always waited until they went on sale, which they reliably did - once a year. 

Even at that attritionally slow rate of purchase, I still had all the storage space I wanted, if only because of diminishing returns. No-one can ever have enough storage space in GW2 for the intentionally overwhelming torrent of very-slightly-not-quite-worthless items that rains down on you whatever you do but at some stage having more room to stash it all  just adds to the sense of desperation that the flood is never going to stop and you'll drown in all that junk you can't quite bring yourself to destroy.

Ahem. This wasn't supposed to be a post about GW2 and its many shortcomings. Or, for that matter, about inventory management, although I could tell you some tales...

Getting back to the point, thanks to a combination of overpriced and/or unattractive stock in the shops and my personal psychology, which, thanks presumably to convictions instilled in me, growing up, by people who lived through two world wars and a global depression, leads me to feel a lot more comfortable with funds unspent than with the not exactly essential goods or services those funds might have purchased, I tend to build up a lot of savings in any game I play for more than five minutes.

It doesn't help that I also suffer from choice paralysis. If a game is lucky enough to have developers willing to fill their stores with useful and attractive items at reasonable prices, my eyes glaze over as I stare at them through the shop window, incapable of deciding which to buy. 

The EverQuest II cash shop is pretty good as these things go. There's a lot of vaguely useful stuff in there, not least because Darkpaw has been running a soft Pay-to-Play regime for many years. At least, it has if you want to get groups or, god forbid, start raiding. Then you either have to come at the game like it was a full-time job or get your credit card out. 

Or, so I understand, from the forums, which I confess may not represent the most unbiased testimony. As a solo, casual player, though, none of that really affects me at all. I could buy Familiars and Mercenaries and throw them down a well to boost the various buffs and boosts and bonuses that gives but why would I bother? 

Ditto the xp boosts and spell research reducers and all the other time-saving devices. I don't even use most of the ones I get for free, so why would I want more? 

Same story with the cosmetics. I have so many of those I literally had to designate a character to hold them all in storage for everyone else. That character has a bank full of costumes and appearance gear. And still no-one uses any of it!

All the while I'm not buying anything from the cash shop, my funds keep increasing. Not because I ever spend a cent on cash shop cash. Not for at least a decade and a half, anyway. I did, once, back in the glory days of SOE, when Smed's team were so far out of touch with reality that they ran Triple Station Cash sales and let you buy expansions off the back of them.

I bought some Station Cash then, alright. Everyone did. It was like they were giving it away. And then, naturally, I never spent most of it. I still have it. Some on my main account. More on the account that used to be my main account back then. And still more on Mrs. Bhagpuss's long-dormant account. And her second account. Darkpaw's accountants have got to love us...

Most of what I have on my subbed account doesn't come from those long-ago sales but from the monthly 500DBC stipend that come with the subscription. That adds up over time. 6k a year and it's a rare year when I spend even a third of it. 

When I logged in this morning I had just shy of 35k in the bank. 

So I bought an island. 

Frostfell has started. I knew it had because I saw Stargrace's post about it last night. This morning I thought I'd check if there was anything new for this year, which there isn't, really, other than the expected stuff you can buy either for gold and platinum in game or for DBC in the store. There's a new Achievement and some new places where you can mark your name for everyone to see (Always inexplicably popular.) A couple of odds and ends but no new quests or anything like that.

And, really, why would there be? Do you have any idea how big the Frostfell event is?  No? Go read Angeliana's post on the forums then! She lists over two dozen specific quests, many of which are actually quite lengthy chains, and that's not even all of them. Plus the gazillion other non-quest activities and entertainments you can enjoy between now and the fifth of January. It sounds like a long stretch but if you wanted to do everything, it'd probably take you that long.

But as I was skimming the list I spotted something I hadn't seen before: "Introducing your own wonderland."

A Prestige House. Now that's one thing I will spend my funny money on. I bought one only a couple of months ago, during the other big holiday of the Norathian year, Nights of the Dead. I think I mentioned it in passing but I didn't do a post on it. I was probably waiting until I'd decorated it, which of course I haven't.

Haven't set foot in the place, in fact. Redbeard was saying only yesterday how decorating wasn't really his thing. He was spurred into talking about it by the arrival of housing in World of Warcraft, my own thoughts on which I originally intended to include in this very post. We're a long way in now, though. It seems a bit late to start. Probably better to save it for a post of its own.

Decorating kind of is my thing, as in I enjoy it and I'm not bad it it, both in game and in real life, but in both cases the downside of decorating is that it takes ages. I have several well-decorated houses in EQII, not all of them on the account or even the server I currently play on, but every one of my characters has at least one home and most of them have several and I just do not have the time to make all of those houses look good.

Or even most of them. I ought to log everyone in and count the houses one day. I would guess that, just on  my main account alone, there are more than fifty. Who has time to decorate that?

So, naturally, I've just bought another. Only this one is a little different. 

Most Prestige homes, even if they're really full zones, which in EQII they often are, come with a pre-built residence of some kind. Mara, for example, the place where my Berserker has been living for many years, ever since he moved out of his huge, sprawling Maj`Dul mansion, is a full zone with a complete town, many of the buildings in which are fully habitable.

Winter's Island, the absolutely beautiful new Prestige Home I signed the deeds on today, is exactly that: an island. Small, somewhat bean-shaped, in the middle of a blue, blue sea. It has an odd climate. Winter at one end, Fall at the other. Grass or snow. Bare branches or autumn leaves. 

All around, sticking out of the sea like spikes, are rocky islets. At least twenty of them by my count. Most of which you can get to and build on. 

The place is big. Bigger than it looks. I flew between the two farthest-apart rocky islets and timed myself on a stopwatch. It took more than three minutes on a fast flying mount. Just to ride from one end of the main island to the other takes half a minute.

As Angeliana says "There is so much potential." There really is because all you have to start with is some land and a lot of sea. 

Here's where EQII differs from many theme-park MMORPGs when it comes to housing. (The exceptions I can think of would be WildStar, which hardly counts any more, and maybe Rift.) You aren't limited to decorating. You can also build.  

In the before-times, back when Mrs. Bhagpuss used to be big on the decorating scene, all building had to be done by re-purposing existing furniture items, something people did with enormous imagination and skill. Latterly, though, Darkpaw has catered to the obvious demand by supplying actual building materials, bricks, tiles, stairs, doors, windows, the lot, all of which you can obtain in abundance both through crafting and questing and via the Cash Shop.

I have never built anything in EQII. Which, now I come to think of it, is weird. I build things all the time in survival games. I've been doing it for years. Until now, though, when I'm in Norrath I've been content to stick to decorating.

Will Winter's Island change all that? I have no idea. Yet. 

If I do get the building bug, though, maybe it'll finally give me something to spend my imaginary money on.

Little Red Corvette - Emphasis on "Little"

I believe I may have mentioned a couple of times in passing that I'd been given access to a playtest for an in-development MMO, whose name I hadn't revealed because I was unclear on whether or not there it was under some kind of NDA. I'm still no clearer on that but until today the point was decidedly moot since I hadn't been able to get the game to run.

That changed this morning, when I decided to be a bit more patient. Previously I'd gotten fed up of staring at a black screen after a couple of minutes and closed the client but today I tabbed out and looked at some other stuff until finally the blackness cleared to reveal an image of what looked uncannily like a Scotsman in a kilt, staring at a UFO.

After a considerably longer period, during which I had to go make an account and then wait for the game to sort itself out some more, I eventually arrived at character creation, where I spent a much shorter time making a character I thought I wouldn't mind looking at for the few minutes I imagined I'd be spending there. 

Two and a half hours later I logged out. I'd probably be there still, if I hadn't had real life stuff to do. I still don't know whether there's an NDA but on the grounds that there are a handful of videos about the test up on YouTube and because I always figure no-one is really going to get too upset if you're saying nice things, I thought I'd share a few pictures and chat a little about what I did.

This isn't going to be a review or even a First impressions piece. I'm mostly going to talk about the sole reason I applied to join the playtest in the first place: AI Text-to-3D Asset Generation. That's what the developers call it. It means you can type a description of anything you'd like to have into a field in the UI and the game will generate it for you.

It works, too. After a fashion. But we'll get to that. First, I probably ought to remind you why the name Dreamworld might sound familiar. There was a big hoo-hah about it a couple of years back, when a bunch of high profile streamers and vloggers including Asmongold and Josh Strife Hayes did pieces about it being a scam. 

I'm not going to go over that or even link to any of the discussions or accusations. It's all there in the public record if you're interested. I'm not, particularly. I only vaguely remember the fuss and I don't have any desire to go dig up whatever passed for facts back then. All I can say is the game exists, it's on Steam, you can play it for free if you ask for an invite and it's quite interesting when you get to see it in action.

It's not much to look at and it lurches and lags on my system, which meets the minimum specs, but it does run and in two and a half hours I didn't encounter any bugs, nor did I get disconnected, which doesn't seem too shabby for an alpha. 

The game offers the option of using controls that feel "Like Minecraft" or "Like Valheim" so obviously I chose the latter. The action begins yet another of those "Ladies and Gentlemen, We Are Floating In Space" scenarios, where you fall through a void and eventually land in front of what turns out to be the starting city.

From there on it's a typical tutorial and quite a good one, too. It goes through all kinds of things at a steady pace, in a comprehensible fashion. with clear explanations and solid documentation. After talking to several NPCs and doing their tasks I knew how to build, craft, fight, farm and travel.

Of course, what I really wanted to do was play with the item generator but that comes later. Although not that much later, fortunately. Somewhere about the time one of the NPCs gives you a quest to go kill goblins in a burrow and warns you you to take some friends, in fact. Because, yes, in case you'd forgotten, which had, this is a full-on MMORPG or wants to be.

I think I might have had some problems finding a group, had I actually wanted to go check out those goblin burrows. I saw plenty of evidence that other people had been playing - holes dug in the ground, houses half-built - but I didn't see another player in my time there. 

I did a good deal of building myself. The building tools are impressive. They're comfortable and reasonably intuitive and the snap-together is about as good as I've seen. I had little trouble getting things to fit although putting the "window fillers" in the frames was a bit hit and miss. 

I assume this is purely an alpha thing but at the moment you can make just about everything with wood, even stone buildings. While that may be unrealistically it's also extremely convenient, meaning all I had to do was keep chopping down trees to make anything I wanted.

And you can make a lot, even before you start petitioning an LLM to design you new stuff. There are plenty of recipes, some of which you start with and some which just seem to pop up in your Asset Catalog as you do other things, like gather flowers or loot chests. 

I spent far longer than I should have, constructing a country cottage. I don't believe you can even stay for long on the tutorial island (Which would explain why I didn't see anyone there, I guess.) so there's not much point putting a lot of time and effort into building your dream home. But building is just such fun...

As soon as I had the roof on (The forge needs cover to operate.) I placed my Dreamforge, the crafting station that makes your dreams come true, provided your dreams are limited to static objects that can be succinctly summed-up in a few descriptive phrases, that is. Then I had to think of something to make.

You know how it is, when someone asks you what you want for your birthday and you suddenly can't think of anything at all? It was like that. I played AD&D with someone once who, when he was offered a Limited Wish by a powerful entity, could only think of "a fur coat". Which is what he got. I asked for a magic weapon suitable for a ranger and I got a +2 flaming longsword that served me well for the rest of the campaign. Just saying.

Where was I? Oh yes. Trying to come up with something to have the Dreamforge make for me. For some reason I asked for a pergola with roses and butterflies. The things that come into your head, eh?

The forge receives your instructions then tells you it'll take a while and to come back later. I wasn't sure if that meant five minutes or tomorrow but it turned out not to take long at all.

Unfortunately, it still wasn't worth the wait. The "pergola", when it appeared, was a bitter disappointment. Tiny, malformed, nothing at all like I imagined. I placed it outside my house where it looked like a log with some pustulent fungus clinging to it. 

Currently you're limited to five generations per day. I had four left and I wasn't expecting much from any of them but my cynicism was to be overturned on my very next attempt, when I decided to stop trying to think of something appropriate and just go with what was on my mind. Lana del Rey, obviously. It always is.

I asked the forge to make me "A large, framed painting of Lana del Rey" to hang on the wall of my cottage. And it bloody did it! 

As you can see, it doesn't hang well on the plaster and lathe wall I had up at the time. It hangs much better on the stone walls, now I've rebuilt, but I didn't take a screenshot of that, unfortunately. It's also a bas relief, which I didn't ask for but which I very much like. 

Following that success I thought I'd go for something bigger - like a car. I have a T-shirt with a cartoon Lana driving an open top sports car, which is almost certainly why my next thought was "A full-size red Corvette convertible".  

I don't know enough about cars to say whether or not what I got was a corvette but I sure as hell can tell you it ain't full size. It might just about fit a toddler, I guess. 

It looks great though - for a scale-model. I ought to get the forge to make me a pedestal. It'd make a great talking point for the den, when I build one.

Of course, even if the car had been life-size, I still couldn't have driven anywhere in it. The forge just makes furniture, basically. So since that's what it's good at I asked it to make me a rug. I asked for a large, shag-pile tiger skin rug and I got... a doormat. One thing the forge does not seem to be good at is dimensions.

That left me with just one generation for the day. What does every home need? That's right. A dog!

Remember when I said the forge doesn't do well with sizes? So far, that's meant big things coming out too small but it works the other way, too. I asked for a small black and white dog wearing a red bandana around its neck. I got everything but small.

But I like him. Hes kinda scary but cute with it.

I don't really know where the people behind Dreamworld think they're going with the game. It's clunky and awkward and clearly a lot of people haven't had much confidence in the project up to now. Like Story Crafter that I talked about yesterday, though, it's not hard to see the potential. 

Whether small, indie teams like these are going to have the resources to realize that potential seems to me to be quite unlikely. But someone will. Count on it.

Until that happens, Dreamworld is a lot of fun to play around with. I don't know how much longer the current test is set to run but I hope to get some more time with it before it disappears behind the curtain again.

A Very Small House In The Country - Tiny Glade Demo Microreview.

For lack of a better plan, I'm going to play each of the six demos I've chosen from this Summer's Next Fest in the order I listed them in yesterday's post. Then, assuming I can find something to say about each of them that will stretch to a whole post (Not likely to be a problem. Keeping all of them to just the one post each might be, though.) I'll offer my thoughts, such as they may be.

I'm working this weekend so I'm going to have to get on with it but how long can it take to play six demos?

In the case of the first, Tiny Glade, about twenty-four minutes. And that was at least twice as long as I needed. 

Start-point as provided.

As expected, this is a toy, not a game. In the demo version, it's also quite a restricted toy. Most of the options are greyed out, with a padlock symbol pasted over them, indicating they aren't available.

What's left is still good fun. All the action, such as it is, takes place in the titular tiny glade, a small clearing in a large forest. The game, if we can call it that for now, starts you off with a building of some kind, always a ruin or a fragment of a castle-like structure, then leaves you to embellish it as you see fit.

The controls are very simple and intuitive, which is just as well because there seem to be no instructions whatsoever. There is a Tutorial option in one of the menus but it, too, is greyed out.

About five minutes later.

I didn't find the options one hundred per cent straightforward. I was a little confused about a few things by the time I was done and I was curious enough to google to see what I'd missed, which is how I ended up reading this much more detailed review, from which I learned several important facts about the demo - details the demo itself had kept pretty quiet about.

Doors are locked in the demo but it turns out they generate spontaneously if you run a path into a building. Similarly, arches form in walls when you drag the stones across a track. It does tell you this on the store page in Steam but of course I hadn't bothered to read that.

I'd already figured out you can raise and lower the height of walls and buildings but I hadn't realised you can turn a pitched roof into a crenalated rooftop courtyard by dragging the tiles all the way downwards. There are other nuances in the demo I did spot for myself. 

As seen from the forest.

You can finesse the raising of land to create some interesting effects and various odds and ends of scenery appear when you force doors to appear. Windows open and flower-boxes generate through some mysterious process I didn't figure out. A sheep wanders into the garden from somewhere after a while, although what a lone sheep is doing in a forest I can't imagine.

There are a quite a few options for changing the color or texture of the buildings but most of those are locked for the demo.

You can take photos from an aerial PoV or from the ground, with the ground-based shots looking much more impressive. There's a day-night cycle that you can switch off if you want although since it's purely cosmetic you probably won't bother. You can set the time and the angle of the sun for shots, too.

The glade at dusk.

The demo is locked to Summer but full version will have three out of the four seasons (No Spring for some reason, although there is an option called "Flowery".) as well as something called "Olden". There will be water and trees and fences as well but even with all of that the options seem a little sparse. Still, there's enough for it to be fun.

The thing about fun is, a game generally comes with fun included but with a toy you have to make all the fun yourself. As I was looking through the screenshots I'd taken, I had an idea how I could make Tiny Glades a lot more fun: AI.

Actually, if this brief piece from from New World News, which is not a New World fan site but "The world's longest-running metaverse news and culture site" is to believed, Tiny Glades already uses AI. That wasn't quite what I had in mind, though.

And by moonlight.

What occured to me was that the screenshots I was generating in Tiny Glade might make interesting starting images for generative AI. I wondered whether they might go some way to producing images that looked a little less generic than AI often does.

So I logged in to NightCafe and used a few of my thousand-plus free credits to come up with some variations. Here they are below. I've captioned them with the prompts I used. 

A working, medieaval household with people, animals, plants and crops.

A country house garden party in full swing. A band, tables, people dancing and chatting.

An alien invasion with spaceships and explosions taking place in a the garden of a country mansion.

A village fete in the gardens of a country vicarage in the 1920s.

I did check the store page for any restrictions on usage for images generated with Tiny Glade but I couldn't find anything. I hope no-one at Pounce Light, the developer, objects. Sorry about the garbling of the game's name in the AI-rendered shots, too. I probably should have croped those out. Graphical AIs don't do well with words. 

Also, apparently, with the finer points of architecture. Still, nothing that couldn't be cleaned up in the edit, I'm sure.

Finally, I blew one of my five free credits on the new Animation feature at NightCafe. Here's what I got for my no money.

I've tentatively wishlisted Tiny Glade. I'm not really sure I'd get much use out of it but it looks like it could be fun and I can see some practical possibilities if the AI enhancement is a permitted usage.

An Inconvenient Truth

After more than sixty hours, I'm now fairly convinced that the key to Nightingale's stickiness - for me, anyway, as with Valheim before it - lies as much in its inconvenience as in its undeniable wonder and beauty. Inconvenience and, it has to be said, risk. 

I always say I don't enjoy risk in games. On the whole I don't, but the need to be constantly aware, to be always fully engaged in what I'm doing, is paramount when it comes to holding my attention in a survival game. Unlike MMORPGs, I don't generally play survival games to relax.

In all the time I played Valheim, I could never truly let my concentration lapse. There was always the possibility, however remote, that something unexpected would happen and things would escalate faster than I could respond.

It used to be like that in MMORPGs. That same underlying tension fueled the infamous addictive quality that drove the success of EverQuest. There, despite the longueurs, the tedium and the repetition, an awareness that, with one wrong decision, everything could fall apart, made the whole experience feel more significant than a video game had any right to be.

It's an addictive quality famously based on the risk of loss, the concentration required to avoid it and the effort needed to recover from it, should the worst happen. More positively, it's also about luck, chance, fortune and surprise and the ability to react to the unexpected as it happens.

The most obvious of inconveniences, the one everyone worries about the most, is what happens to your stuff when you die. One thing original EverQuest, Valheim and Nightingale all have in common is that when you die - and you will - you lose all your stuff and have to go get it back.

 It's actually not as harsh in Nightingale in that you get to keep what you're wearing but it's still bad enough. You still have your clothes and whatever you had on your hotbar but you don't have the rest of your gear any more and you do have a hefty debuff for being so remiss as to die in the first place. Getting your things back is going to be tough but if your bags were full you sure as heck aren't going to write it off to experience. 

Problem is, the thing that killed you will still be there and you will be weaker. If you couldn't beat it last time, how are you going to do it now?

That's where the interest lies. I say "interest" rather than "fun" because I am not going to pretend this is fun. Although, as Mrs Bhagpuss will confirm, there was a time when I did like to tell people how much I enjoyed corpse recoveries. 

Boy, that used to annoy them. Annoyed Mrs Bhagpuss, too, come to think of it. Especially when I said it when she was in the middle of getting her own corpse back.

But  I did. And I do still, in a way. Getting your stuff back in a video game can be an interesting puzzle. It takes thought and planning and tactics and strategy and some thinking on your feet when it all goes wrong again. It also takes patience and determination because you'll be lucky if you only have to do it once. When it works, it can be very satisfying. 

When it doesn't, though.... that's when people log out and don't come back. Which is why very, very few games stick with mandatory corpse recovery and item loss in the long term. MMORPGs that start with it inevitably tone it down and usually end up removing it altogether. Corpse recovery hasn't been unavoidable even in EQ for more than twenty years.

In MMORPGs these are design decisions but survival games tend to delegate these kinds of  choices to the player, or at least to whomever has control of the server. Palworld, for example,  allows you switch the death penalty off altogether so you respawn at a place of your choosing with all your stuff. 

I made that change to my private Palworld and although I don't regret it, I suspect that decision had more than a little to do with the sense of disconnection I had with that game. I enjoyed my time there but it didn't always feel completely convincing as a place and I think that complete abnegation of risk was a factor.

Risk, of course, plays a widely-recognized and acknowledged role in the appeal of many games. We hear a lot about "Risk vs Reward" as a design concept. It's generally accepted that there has to be some measure of perceived risk in order make players feel there's some weight to what they're doing. The debate revolves around how much risk there should be, not whether there needs to be any at all.

Inconvenience, though, is rarely seen as any sort of positive in a game. Players demand and developers strive to provide quality of life improvements to make inconveniences go away, tweaks that often continue throughout the life of the game. Even games coming up to their twentieth anniversaries still list QoL improvements in their patch notes.

For some players, though, and it appears I'm one of them, inconvenience can be weirdly appealing. The bulk of potential customers are looking for a clean, polished experience, but for a significant minority who get considerably more pleasure from figuring out how things work than they do from "playing the game", what others call inconvenience qualifies as content.

Even in Early Access, Nightingale has plenty of content. It has exploration, puzzles, crafting and building as well as quests and a story-line. None of them are what I'd call "convenient". 

Let me briefly take you through some of the reasons why.

Exploration

• The possible range of biomes is large but all of them have to be created by the player through a combination of crafting and interaction with in-game devices.
• Some of which you also have to craft.
• After you've discovered the recipes, that is.
• And found the machines.
  
• It's a highly complex system that takes a good deal of learning and even more tuning to provide the desired results.
• Once you make them and travel to them, all of the maps are huge
• But travel is slow. 
• There are no mounts. 
• You can sprint but it uses stamina.
  
• So do climbing, gliding and swimming.
• You can die from falling.
• And from drowning.
• Consequently, stamina management is a constant concern. 
• As are environmental conditions like rain, hail or polluted water, all of which have negative consequences that need to be avoided, prevented or cured. 
• You also get exhausted if you don't rest. 
• If you're exhausted you can't run, swim, jump or climb.
• Plus you can sprain an ankle or break a leg.
• Or an arm.
• Try climbing with a broken arm.
• Or sprinting with a broken leg.
  

Puzzles

• There are "Intellect", "Agility" and "Combat" puzzles but all of them require aspects of the others.
• There are few, if any, explanations of how any puzzle works.
• Some are nested.
• Some are mazes.
• Some are very simple.
• Some aren't.
• Even when it's clear how a puzzle works, it's frequently not easy to see how it works. 
• I mean that literally.
• Some puzzles require you to observe a number of things that aren't all visible on screen at once from the same perspective.
• Some puzzles don't play fair.
•  Agility puzzles, for example, cannot always be solved without building scaffolds or ramps.
• That's not agility, is it?
  

Crafting

• There are very many crafting stations, most of which make intermediate items that can be used in others.
• All stations come in different qualities so there's progression.
• Some stations require fuel.
• Some stations can set you on fire.
  
• All stations can be crafted by the player. 
• Most of them need to be, although there are NPC stations dotted around.
  
• There are "Augmentations", subsidiary devices which enhance the stations. 
• Augmentations, which also have to be crafted, can affect multiple stations at once but have to be placed appropriately to reach them all.
  
• Environmental effects such as lighting or shelter also affect crafting stations.
• All crafted items, including the Augmentations and Stations, can be made from multiple materials.
• All materials have varieties, qualities and stats. 
• Lots of stats, in some cases.
  
• Materials affect outcomes, although it is not always clear how or when.
• Recipes are not automatically granted. 
• They can be found as drops or rewards and also bought from vendors. 
• There are a lot of recipes.
• And a lot of vendors.
• Getting all your recipes takes a lot of work. 
• And also some luck.
  
• Finished items frequently require many sub-combines, some of which require sub-combines of their own. 
• Making anything takes time. 
• Often a lot of time, at least in gaming terms.
• Crafting is far too inconvenient in far too many ways to sum up all of those inconveniences in a bullet point list like this.
• Seriously, it's really, really inconvenient.
• But hella fun!
  

Building

• OK, building isn't that bad.. 
• It's snap-together prefab parts.
• And they fit pretty well.
  
• How bad could it be?
  
• There are a lot of parts, though.
• And a number of styles.
• And you have to craft them all.
• And the better ones require sub-combines.
  
• And unlike most games with housing, you can build anywhere and as extensively as you want.
• Which means you're going to end up tearing down and rebuilding.
• Repeatedly.
  

Questing and Storyline

• Bundled together here because they often seem to be one and the same
• Also, they seem to be inextricably bound up with crafting.
• And crafting progression.
• And exploration.
• And exploration progression.
• And combat, of course.
  
• Although sometimes you can craft an item to bribe a mob to give you its drop instead of killing it.
• Much faster and easier just to kill it, of course.
  
• Just be prepared to be criticized for your thuggery if you do.
• And to miss out on sub-quests.
• On really big, long, involved sub-quests. 
• Like half the fricken' content of the game, it seems like, sometimes.
• So maybe don't just kill everything, yo!
  
• Also, better be ready to go exploring.
• And you'd better like reading because there's no voice acting but there is a lot of flavor text.
• And instructions.
• That you need to follow.
• It helps if you can do funny voices in your head.
• Well, it helps me...
  

I think that's enough to give an idea of just how fiddle-faddly Nightingale is and I haven't even touched on the magic system or the extremely fine gradations of choice available in crafting, enchanting and otherwise enhancing your gear. Or the potions. Or the food. Or stealth. Or using the Spyglass.

Everything seems to lean into everything else. There's no real boundary between the types of gameplay on offer. You need to be willing to engage equally with all of them and they are all very complex. 

Unnecessarily so, I'm sure many players would say, but I would not be one of them. Inconvenience that draws you in rather than pushes you away is a very difficult trick to pull off but clearly, for me, Nightingale has managed it, in much the same way Valheim did a few years ago.

Still, I strongly suspect Nightingale will not hold the same, wide-ranging appeal as the viking survival game. I think the crafting is likely to appeal hugely to a very limited demographic while driving everyone else to distraction. I think there's a point of diminishing returns to this level of inconvenient complexity and I imagine a lot of people reached it long ago.

I'll get there soon too, no doubt. Even at Tier 2, it's already taking me literally hours to gather the mats, make the combines and finish the items I want. It's only going to get worse, I'm sure. I don't think I'm going to be sounding so cheery about it by Tier 5.

For now, though, I'm still motoring along although I'm not sure how much traffic there is ahead of me. Today I completed the last of the six Sites of Power, The Hunt. For that, as for the first five, I got a Steam achievement. As of time of writing, only 8.2% of players have made it that far.

It does look as though what I'm finding compulsive, everyone is finding exactly the opposite. Never mind, though. Just wait a while and I'm sure it will all get honed down until there are no inconveniences to speak of. By the time the game officially launches, you'll most likely be able to finish in a few seconds what's currently taking me most of a session. 

By then, though, I won't care. I'll be long gone, probably off playing some other half-finished game that drives everyone nuts with its awkward, annoying mechanics and its refusal to make anything simple. 

Luckily for me, that's most games when they begin. I'm not likely to run out of options any time soon. Especially while Early Access stays popular.