Things Begin To Take Shape In Stars Reach

Playable Worlds is running a fairly extensive round of pre-Christmas testing for Stars Reach. There's a two-hour test every day, Tuesday through Friday this week, with a double helping on Wednesday for some reason. The majority of the tests are in EU-friendly time-slots, too, mostly falling around teatime and extending into the early evening.

I was planning on waiting for the Thursday or Friday tests, when I'd be home all day and wouldn't have to come back from work and jump straight in, but as it happened everything aligned perfectly yesterday for a full, uninterrupted two-hour session. We'd finished eating and Beryl had stuffed herself to the point of collapse so she was flat out on the bed for once, sleeping.

I'd actually forgotten there was a test on but when I sat down at my PC a few minutes after seven and logged into Steam, the first thing I noticed was a 1GB update for Stars Reach. That jogged my memory, so as soon as the patching was done, I logged in.

The server was up and completely stable. All the disconnection issues and lag of the early tests seem to be over. There are also no wipes going on at the moment so my character was available and where I'd left her. Which would have been good if I'd had any idea where that was.

I seemed to be on the side of a hill, somewhere on the edge of the map. I imagine I got interrupted and logged out wherever I happened to be at the time. Not that it makes a lot of difference at the moment. I don't know where anything is in relation to anything else anyway.

The three available planets are all pretty small, maybe the size of something like The Feerrott or possibly Rathe Mountains in EverQuest, although with a great deal more verticality. If there was a map it would be very easy to find your way around but as it is you have to rely on landmarks, a dubious process in a world subject to terraforming and strip-mining at every turn.

I am just now beginning to recognize a few semi-permanent features, like the high plateau with the weird, ghost-trees or the big lava lake, but I'm a little hazy yet even about which planet I'm on. I can tell if I'm on the Desert planet right away but the Temperate and the Jungle look very much alike in certain areas so I find it quite easy to confuse them.

This time I was on the Jungle planet when I woke up. I think. I'm basing that mostly on an observation I made later, after I'd been into space and swapped planets. I remembered Wilhelm talking about a co-operative attempt to build a city using the new construction tools, something that was happening on the original, temperate planet so, when I came down from orbit to see a grid-like pattern of new buildings, I guessed that must be where I'd landed.

Traveling through space to get from one world to another was a first for me. Or rather, it was the first time I'd gone into space with the deliberate intention of using it as a transit station. I've been space-mining before and ended up back on a different planet from where I started but that was by accident. 

This time, I wanted to go to a different "zone" so I looked for the blue beam of light that spears into the sky to let you know where the spaceport is, gravity-hopped across the map to get to it, then took the space-lift to the asteroid belt. Once there, I went outside the docking bay, looked around for another blue laser beam, found one, engaged my jet-pack and flew across to it so I could go back down to earth.

As a means of getting from one zone to another, it's a very odd process if you stop and think about it. I have to assume it's purely for the pre-alpha and forms no part of the eventual plans for travel in the live game. Also, if there's a way of telling which portal goes to which planet, I don't know what it might be. Making the beams of light a different color for each would be a start.

This sort of transport system is exactly the kind of thing that's great fun to discover and come to terms with when it's new but which quickly turns into a complete pain when you have to do it every time you want to get anywhere. It's something many developers have had to come to terms with as players lose patience with the exact, same mechanics that once enthralled and enchanted them. Never has the old saw about familiarity breeding contempt had greater currency than in the life-cycle of an MMORPG.

The reasons I wanted to travel to another planet were twofold: firstly, I'd finally achieved my longstanding goal of mapping all sixty-four out of sixty-four Survey Points. Only took me about half a dozen attempts. And I didn't even use the mapping tool, mostly because I was too mean to spend 400 xp points on it when I only had a handful of points to find.

The second reason I wanted to go somewhere new was to see if anyone was dancing. Stars Reach has a bizarre means of health and stamina recovery, something Raph has carried over from Star Wars Galaxies, where it was both popular and made at least some sort of sense. In Stars Reach it's still popular with ex-SWG players, of whom there are many in the testing program, but to anyone who hasn't drunk from that particular jug of Kool-Aid, it makes absolutely no sense at all.

As I understand it, the way it works is that you stand near another player while they're dancing and that somehow heals you and restores your stamina. In SWG it would have happened in a Cantina or some kind of bar or club and the healing would have been done by a character of the Entertainer class, which definitely has a kind of logic to it. I can imagine someone, getting back to town after a long day of murder-hoboing, kicking back with a beer while watching a little pole-dancing to de-stress and unwind.

In Stars Reach, though, it's just standing next to some random guy in a camp, jigging about on his own. How that's supposed to lighten anyone's load I'm not really sure. Still, whatever gets your HP back, right?

Hit points and stamina recover on their own but only up to the max, which falls every time you die or do other things I'm not entirely clear on. I believe the cap does go back up on its own as well, albeit very slowly, but I'm not a hundred per cent sure about that. The new tutorial was trying to explain it to me when I foolishly closed it to do something else and then found I couldn't open it back up again. I sent a bug report about that because I do think you ought to be able to pause a tutorial at will, not just have the one shot at it.

I needed to go stand next to someone doing the space rhumba for a while because I'd knocked a lot off my health and especially my stamina with all the running away I'd had to do while I was map-making. The change to leashing has very much made running away the preferred means of dealing with unwanted attention from aggressive wildlife. I only died twice this time and both were when I stayed to fight.

You may die less often that way but bouncing across the increasingly rugged landscape like a runaway spacehopper does lead to a certain amount of unavoidable physical trauma all on its own. By the time I got my last Survey Point I was battered, bruised and bleeding but, having covered the entire map, I was also aware there was hardly anyone else there and of the people who were, no-one was holding an impromptu dance party.

I didn't have any more luck on the next planet. There were more people around, for sure, but they all seemed very busy, doing whatever it was they were doing. This building-focused phase of testing seems to be making everyone a lot more intent on leaving their mark on the world, although most of the marks in question seem to come in the form of huge, gaping, jagged holes it's all too easy to fall down. I did that. Several times.

As yet, I haven't made any serious attempts of my own to get to grips with building. I did, by sheer chance, manage to find my Homestead again, the one I placed last time then promptly lost. It was satisfying to find it was still there, a small sign of permanence in a very impermanent world.

I'd also put it in a really stupid place so the moment I found it I tore it down. I haven't found a new place to put it yet. I'm going to have to give that a lot more thought before I go in for any serious home-making.

So far, there's precious little evidence I can see of any major architectural projects in progress. Unlike Landmark in even its very earliest public incarnation, when vastly impressive structures sprouted from the ground almost immediately, construction in Stars Reach seems more a proof-of-concept than a system anyone's going to spend a lot of time with purely for creative reasons. Then again, that might say as much about the current cadre of testers as it does the tools they've been given.

What I did run into, once again, was one of those odd, shrine-like affairs with small, golden statues of animals. I think those are part of the infrastructure, not anything players can make or place, but what they're intended to suggest is beyond me. It's nice to find them, all the same. Evidence of any sort of non-player-made lore or civilization is thin on the ground at this stage of development.

Even though I had no interruptions this time around, I still ended up logging out ten minutes before the server came down. As a player, I felt I'd achieved quite a lot, having mapped one planet and half of a second and used the accrued xp points to fill out quite a large chunk of the skill matrix. I also sent in a few bug reports so I was reasonably comfortable I'd fulfilled my responsibilities as a tester.

Speaking of testing Stars Reach, as opposed to just playing it, the testing process for me seems like it's reaching a kind of plateau. I'm vaguely familiar with the controls, I have reasonable facility with their usage and I'm not running into that many bugs. I suspect the part of the game I'm still entrenched in has been fairly thouroughly tested by now. I'd need to move on to new things to start running into problems.

As a player, I'm in two minds over what to do next. I've explored most of the three planets. I can get around with an approximation of efficiency and do much of what I want to do at the basic survival and exploration level without too much difficulty. That's all good.

To progress further is going to require actual effort and I'm not sure how I feel about that. As I wrote in a previous post, Stars Reach seems to start with a presumption that players (And therefore testers.) will want to create goals for themselves and find much of their motivation and pleasure in working towards achieving them - with the emphasis on the work part. 

That really isn't me or not any more. I don't much like the buckle down and grind it out approach in live games, where there's full persistence and progression, so the appeal of doing it in a testing environment where wipes are frequent isn't at all clear. 

Housing is a great example of my problem. I love building homes in games but once I've done it I tend to enjoy living in them. Otherwise, what was ther point? Even when I run out of space to build or decorate, I'm still more likely to learn to put up with an overstuffed, chaotic home than tear it down and start over. 

The exception to that would be Valheim, where building a base was an integral part of the fast-transit system. That did motivate me sling a string of shacks across the landscape and once I had the walls up, I couldn't leave well alone. It's why I have literally dozens of half-built homes there and also why I logged twice as many hours in the Viking afterlife sim than any other non-MMO I've ever played.

Maybe when Stars Reach goes live in a few years, I'll do the same there. For now, though, while I'd love to explore how the building tools work, I don't have the energy or the commitment to put hours into it, knowing I'll have to start over again in a week or a month or whenever it is the next build lands. 

Similarly, I enjoyed mapping one planet but I can't say I'm getting anything like the same satisfaction out of mapping a second. Things that are fun to do once or twice don't always stay fun forever.

I'm aware this is a test not a game and that having fun isn't the point. Some degree of fun is, however, necessary if I'm going to want to do it at all. At the moment I am still enjoying myself and being able to write posts like this is motivation enough but I'm close to the point of having said most of what I have to say about what there is of the game so far, or at least about the part of it I'm willing to take the time to discover.

That was apparent this time, when I decided to stop before I had to. It won't put me off playing again. I just need to think ahead a bit and have some prepared goals in mind. Paradoxically, while I know I'd have more fun if the servers were up all day, so long as they're only up for a couple of hours, that couple of hours can feel too long, especially when I have no particular purpose in mind.

There are quite a few more things I'd like to fiddle around with other than housing. I'd like to see if filling out the combat tree makes standing my gorund a viable option, for a start. It'd be nice not to have to run away every time.

I'd like to look at the crafting options more closely too, not least because there is an alternative to watching people dance I ought to be making more use of. You can make plasters out of bananas that restore a large amount of health. If I could figure out how to make those it would be a big help. Maybe there's a recipe that restores stamina, too. It's not that I want to be anti-social but you can't always find a dancer when you need one.

So there. Seems like I do have a few attainable goals after all. When's the next test?

Stars Reach: Third Test, Best Test

Right after I finished tea yesterday, I logged in for my third session in the Stars Reach pre-alpha. I was looking forward to it after the first two, not least because I was starting to feel as though I'd learned enough about how to do things. I felt it was about time I got down to using some of what I'd learned.

The first test was mostly about figuring out the controls and getting acclimatized to the environment. The second was all bugs and crashes. I was hoping for the third to be more of a regular play session. And guess what? It was!

I spent ninety minutes mostly running around, gathering mats, getting xp and crafting stuff to use, just like in any new game. It would have been the full two hours only Beryl the dog came crashing into the room at half past seven to tell me it was absolutely playtime and since I'd somehow managed to get myself lost inside a gigantic cave system and couldn't find my way out, I didn't try to argue with her.

I'm going to say a couple of things about Stars Reach up front. Okay, three paragraphs in, but close enough. 

Were these trophies always here? First time I spotted them.

Firstly, even in pre-alpha it already feels like a game. This was the thing I found the most unconvincing about the whole thing in all the PR and publicity I'd seen, before I was able to get into the testing program and try it for myself. 

It seemed that Stars Reach was being marketed as a game, when what it looked like was a utility.  I understood how the project was intending to simulate an environment but that made it sound more like Second Life In Space than an MMORPG. Not that there's anything wrong with making Second Life In Space. It's just not what I'd define as a game.

That, though, is a problem I have with sandboxes in general. I think of therm as spaces where gaming can happen, not as games in themselves. And I do think that's where Stars Reach may be headed, but right now, because there are only a relatively small number of things to do and those things are quite clearly signposted, it does feel like playing a more traditional, more linear video game. 

And that suits me very well. Surprisingly, to me at least, it even feels like a game I would like play. It's fun, something I wasn't necessarily expecting at this extremely early stage.

I do love me some lens flare!

The second thing I wanted to emphasize is just how good-looking Stars Reach already is. I mentioned in yesterday's post that I hadn't bothered to take any screenshots in the first zone of the new EverQuest II expansion, which said something about how unattractive the scenery had to be, given I take screenshots by the thousand in most games.

By contrast, in ninety minutes yesterday I took nearly thirty screenshots of Stars Reach, which works out at one every three minutes for the entire time I was there. I probably didn't need to do the math for anyone there, did I?  It would have been double that, too, if I hadn't made myself stop taking snaps so I could get on with what I was supposed to be doing.

These things always depend on a personal sense of aesthetics, so I imagine plenty of people will find the look of the thing not to their taste. I love it, though. It's bright, vibrant, warm and oddly kind of... snuggly. I didn't think Stars Reach was being marketed as a "cosy" game but it certainly has the look and feel of one.

So, it plays well and it looks good. What else is there to say about it? Plenty!

Here I am and it's night because of course it is. Although, since the day/night cycle seems to last around ten minutes, it's no biggie.

Yesterday's test felt much more stable than the previous one although, as it says in those legal warnings, your experience may vary. I think it very much depends on luck right now. Last time, I ran into a bunch of crashes and bugs. This time I crashed just once in an hour and a half and was able to log straight back in with no problems, meaning I came away with the impression things had gotten much better.

While I was having a fine old time though, I could hear people talking on Discord all through the test about how they were crashing or getting stuck, to the point where at least one person, sounding quite fed up, announced they were quitting the test early because they couldn't get anything done. 

There was also much discussion of the bug that saw Wilhelm turn into a pillar. It's still going on and it's frequent enough to have been given a name. It's now known as the 0,0 bug because it happens when the game spawns you at that location. So far, exactly why it's happening or how to make it stop are works in progress.

None of which is surprising. It is a pre-alpha. No-one expects it to run smoothly. It feels great when it does, though!

I think we should call it the Orchard Planet.

Wilhelm was talking about the different biomes now available in the current multi-planet test. I was very keen to see some of those but I logged in to the same, familiar temperate world I'd been on in the first two tests. I think there's some way to swap worlds but I didn't know how to do it so I just got on with things where I arrived.

Since that happened to be right next to the portal, I went straight to space to carry on gathering mats for crafting. I was pleased to find we still had our characters from last time and even more pleased to see all the mats I had then were still in my bags. 

I spent a while in space, hoovering up manganese and iron and other presumably useful materials until I made the mistake of going inside an asteroid that was already occupied by some sort of aggressive space beast. I did briefly try to blast it with my electric arc gun but I couldn't get a clear shot so I jetted off into space instead, heading for the portal and escape  to planetary safety.

If you can call it safety, that is. Which in my opinion you really can't. 

I didn't take any pictures of dangerous wildlife this time so here's one of a lake of lava instead. That'll kill you even faster.

In the current test build I would say there are far too many aggressive mobs. They're everywhere, in space and planetside. I got attacked by Ballhogs (?) and Owldeer and Panthers and Skysharks and a whole load of creatures I never got the names of. I killed a few, when they were reckless enough to come at me alone, but mostly I ran away because the percentages just aren't there when a pack of panthers comes pounding towards you.

When I spoke about the cosy feeling this game is sending out, I have to say the sheer quantity of aggressive wildlife is really harshing that vibe, man! Even if gear upgrades later make killing the critters trivial, getting constantly interrupted by something trying to gnaw on your leg while you're busy doing important stuff is always going to be annoying.

Speaking of doing important stuff, as usual I couldn't really make up my mind what that was going to be. I wanted to craft something, although I didn't have any clear idea what, so I thought maybe I'd just pile up the mats and see what they made. 

That turned out to be a pretty sound plan because the first of the recipes I bought that I was able to turn into something tangible, the Grav Mesh, was something of a game-changer. It's a device that lets you fly and flying always makes games better. 

Yes it does. Stop arguing!

We were promised jetpacks. And we got them!

In this case, it mostly lets you fly like one of those too-heavy birds that can just about clear a hedge before crashing back to earth. The Grav Mesh relies on your stamina, which depletes rapidly - far too rapidly for steady flight. Instead, the commonly accepted method is to keep flicking it on and off so you lurch about like a drunken butterfly. It's a compromise familiar from countless previous games I've played so it took no getting used to at all.

I did have a little more trouble working out how to use the Mesh in the first place. I assumed it would be a device that went on the toolbelt but in fact it's some kind of undershirt you wear, The game has three clothing tabs, which I had imagined were going to be mostly for cosmetic purposes but it seems they're much more practical.

Once I'd made the jet pack (Because that's what it is, really. You can see the exhaust fumes streaming out behind you when you fly...) my focus changed from gathering mats to exploring. 

As well as mining ore, I had also been using the Harvester quite extensively, pointing it at anything and everything to see what happened. It happily strips bananas off banana tress, which seem to be weirdly common on other planets, but it does nothing for the fruit that look like apples or oranges. Some flowers get sucked into the Harvester's maw but not many. 

Space bananas. I'm sure there's some logical explanation...

Fungi, however, give up all sorts of goodies, including ammonia and salt. Don't ask me. I just take the stuff, I don't write up papers on it. Nor can I tell you why salt crystals are accepted in recipes that ask for "gems". I'm just happy they are because otherwise I couldn't have made that Grav Mesh.

I was pleased by how much xp I was getting just by doing random stuff. I had to use the Help function to look up how to see my xp (Press "K".) but when I did I was surprised to find I had enough in several disciplines to buy skills or recipes. 

Since I was planing to do some more surveying, I spent 400 points on the mapping function that's supposed to let you see where the locations you haven't yet found are. Somehow. I'd tell you more about how it works but having bought it, I couldn't figure out how to use it. Or even where to find it.

As it happened, I didn't need a map anyway. When I came back from that one crash I mentioned earlier I found myself on a different planet, the desert biome, which meant starting a new survey from scratch. There were pink globes and pyramids everywhere. No map required.

Valley of the Pink Globules.

The desert planet was very pretty. I took a lot of pictures. I was making very good progress with the survey, too. It seemed easier to see long distances, probably because of the lack of trees, and the Grav Mesh made getting to the awkward spots much easier. 

With half an hour to go, I'd collected over forty of the sixty-four required survey points. I was feeling fairly confident about getting the lot before the test ended, until I made the mistake of going into what looked like a short tunnel through some rock.

I'd been through a couple such tunnels already so I didn't expect anything different this time but it turned out this one was the entrance to a vast, underground maze of caverns. At first I thought it was something players had made but as it went on and on I became more and more convinced it had to be natural. 

Had Beryl not put a stop to my spelunking, I believe I would, eventually, have found my way back to the surface but I was thoroughly disoriented and totally lost, so I doubt it would have been in time to complete the survey. In any case, I'd already heard on Discord that a wipe was planned for the next test, which is supposed to be at the start of December, so any extra xp I might have made wasn't going to be of any practical use.

That's lucky. A short-cut! (Ironic foreshadowing...)

The forthcoming test is scheduled to use a new build, one that includes the first draft of a proper housing system. At the moment you can make crude structures using the tailings from mining and some people have been having fun with that. I saw a long bridge over a valley that apparently needed no form of support and someone had made a tiny, cubic hut just about big enough to stand in, although I couldn't see a door. Maybe they were still inside.

Actual housing with craftable and possibly snappable parts will open things up creatively and also risk the kind of trailer-park sprawl Wilhelm always likes to bring up whenever anyone says how great Star Wars Galaxies' housing was. As I've mentioned, SWG is a clear and ever-present touchstone for no small number of testers, hardly surprising considering the provenance of the game but in some ways the other regular comparison I hear, Landmark, might be more apposite.

I'm not sure if Raph was in chat last night but Dave Georgeson was and there were several references to the supposedly much-missed Landmark. Having played Landmark, on and off, right up until the servers closed down, I'd have to say that a lot of people may genuinely miss that game but almost none of them were playing it for a very long time before it closed down. The servers were virtually empty long before the plugs got pulled.

I loved building my houses in Landmark but it was incredibly time-consuming and what I made still looked like a child had modeled it in plasticine. There were some absolutely incredible works of art constructed in that game but I'm pretty sure all of them were built by people who were either professional designers or major hobbyists. The tools just weren't accessible enough even for keen amateurs.

Is there a recipe for sunscreen?

Stars Reach does frequently give me Landmark flashbacks. The character designs are really similar and so are the landscapes. Some of the movements and animations feel reminiscent. 

Even in pre-alpha, though, the game feels far more solid and playable than Landmark ever did. I fully expect whatever housing system we get to be orders of magnitude more user-friendly and I very much look forward to trying it out next time.

I just hope the new build brings some longer play-sessions and a bit more persistence, too. Building houses takes time, yo!

Into The Valley Of Ashes

Yeah... no. Not really. I cheated. Big time. If you're planning to visit the burning lands legit, you may want to skip the whole post. It's kinda spoilery. And you're gonna feel dirty after.

So, I read Wihelm's post on the arrival of Valheim's penultimate biome, the Ashlands, and I watched the weird, animated promo video that bizarrely looks like it could have been made for anime Valheim clone Dawnlands...

And then I thought "I suppose I ought to go take a look at it for myself". 

But I wasn't really feeling it.

Valheim was amazing when it first arrived. It came out of nowhere and I'd never played anything like it. I went in cynical and ended up spending nearly four hundred hours there. By the time I got to the end of the Plains, though, I felt like I was done.

After that, I played a whole bunch of games that were like Valheim but different. In some ways maybe better. Valheim has a clarity of purpose the Palworlds and Nightingales don't but after a while that clarity can begin to seem less like a virtue, more like a limitation.

I tried the Mistlands - very briefly - but as Wilhelm has made quite clear, the Mistlands aren't all that much fun. What's more, they're not intended to be.

Iron Gate haven't gone the full passive-aggressive dev route, snarling back at players who don't play the game the way it's meant to be played, but they have made their intentions very clear. There's a post on the official website entitled Getting Ready for the Ashlands and, while it's friendly and helpful enough in tone, it does let the mask slip now and then:

"We also want to remind everyone that Valheim is meant to be a difficult game"

I have no problem with that. Nice that they're being up front about it. I would just like to make it equally clear to Iron Gate that I have absolutely no interest in difficult games. I avoid them at all costs. 

Clearly there's some discrepancy here, what with my four hundred hours played. I can clear that right up. I didn't find Valheim as it originally appeared to be "a difficult game", in the same way I didn't find EverQuest circa 2000 to be "a difficult game". People might say that but it wasn't my experience.

I found the two quite similar in some important ways. I found they required more care and attention than other games and they certainly took up a lot more of my time. You had to play them slowly, carefully, thoughtfully. I found them to be games that could, on occasion, make me quite cross. I did not, however, find them "difficult".

As Wilhelm's report on the Mistlands makes plain, the difficulty in that biome comes primarily from design choices rather than through gameplay. The land is jagged and unnavigable, while the field of view is obscured. It makes doing just about anything a pain in the neck.

That is the kind of difficulty I prefer to avoid, which is why I haven't attempted to play through the Mistlands content properly and am unlikely ever to do so. The new Ashlands content looks somewhat more manageable in that you can at least see where you're going and the terrain is flat but given that access to it is somewhat gated by completion of the Mistlands content, nopeing out of one effectively bars you from the other.

It may still be possible to make it across the burning waters (They literally set fire to ships other than the special one you have to build just to get there.) and limp through the opening encounters in your best Plains gear. It was certainly possible to explore the tougher biomes in the original game while still wearing armor from much earlier. At a certain point, though, it will surely become inevitable that you gear up from the last biome to do the next one and that means eating all your Mistland greens before you get your Ashlands pudding.

I am not going to do that but I still want to see the pretty new places. And they do look quite... well, not pretty, exactly. Impressive, let's say.  

Fortunately, although Iron Gate are keen to have everyone play their game properly, they're also unusually lenient in lending out their tools so you don't have to. Not only does the game have some fairly powerful difficulty settings up front - you can make all mobs non-aggro for example - even better it has a hidden set of developer tools that allow for even more radical rule-changes.

They did make the tools a little harder to find. You used to be able to bring them up just by pressing F5 but that probably caused a few too many customer service issues so now you have to make your alterations in the host platform, be that Steam or Game Pass. It's still extremely simple to do, though. There are full instructions in this PCGamer article.

The dev command I needed to go visit Ashlands was the one that lets you fly. I didn't decide to use it until I'd tried to get most of the way on my own. I knew it was the only way I was going to do the last part, across that fiery ocean, because I certainly wasn't going to be building any flameproof boats, but I did think I might be able to get as far as the opposite shoreline to take a screenshot of the smoldering land across the water.

I didn't do too badly, either. I ported to my southernmost foothold from back when I was playing regularly and headed further south overland from there. That took me through a swathe of Mistland, where I met some Dvergr Dwarves and had several conversations with Odin's Ravens, Hugin and Mugin, all of which was quite entertaining.

I also ran into an Infected Mine within the first five minutes, something that took Wilhelm a great deal longer. That's one of the more annoying aspects of Valheim's procedurally generated content. I had the same issue with one of the biome bosses - Moder, I think - who somehow eluded me for much longer than it seemed to take anyone else to find them.

I strongly advise against going into an Infected Mine just for a look-see. It has to be one of the most repulsive places I've ever visited in a game. Not the "mine" itself - the architecture is really quite impressive. No, it was the "infected" aspect that made my skin crawl.

Coming back out pretty swiftly, I carried on south until eventually I ran out of both land and light. I was stuck on a pillar of rock when night fell and I couldn't see anything at all. That was when I decided to quit pretending I was exploring and just take the tour.

With flight enabled I was able to swoop over the ocean above a forest of rocky spikes rearing out of the water to land on the grey/black/orange/red shores of the Ashlands. And they are impressive, if you're into hellscapes.

I won't bother describing the view. That's why I took all the pictures. I will say that the place is a great deal more built-up than I was expecting, with stone arches and runestones all over the place, along with some quite substantial towers and forts. 

Skeleton warriors and archers stand guard, large animals lumber around, firebirds whirl overhead. The place is teeming with activity. I imagine with mob aggression switched on it would be a slaughterhouse.

Since I had them all quieted down, I assumed I was completely safe to explore. That'll teach me.

I was standing under an arch, watching some orange globule do something or other, when there was a surge and a roar and suddenly I was dead. I still have no real idea what killed me. It won't have been a mob so my guess is a spume of lava erupted from the flow nearby and incinerated me. 

Or I could have died of heat exhaustion. I had the UI switched off for taking screenshots so I wouldn't have seen any warnings. Just goes to show you can never let your guard down in Valheim. Even when you think nothing's out go get you, something is.

I'd set the death penalty to the minimum, so I respawned wearing all my equipped gear. I had very little on me anyway. It doesn't matter if I get it back in any case because I'm as sure as I can be that I'm done with Valheim, at least as a game I actually play. 

I will almost certainly return to potter about in the original biomes (Okay, maybe not the Swamp.) but nothing I've seen of the Mistlands or Ashlands makes me feel it would be worth the time and effort required to master and tame them. I might fly around some more to see the sights. I might even put up a portal or two for easy access but I'm only ever going to be a tourist there.

I'll be very happy to hear about other peoples' adventures, if anyone has any. There were certainly plenty of people writing about Valheim a couple of years ago. At the moment, though, it seems as if the only blogger still interested in adventuring there is Wilhelm. 

Even though it's still technically in Early Access, I get the feeling Valheim has pretty much done all it's likely to do, commercially. I see from the Steam Charts that the arrival of Ashlands has pushed numbers up but it's still only around 10% of the game's peak. 

I suspect I'm not the only one who feels they've done Valheim and it's time to move on.

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.

A Progressive Attitude

I thought I might give a little progress report on where things stand for me in Dawnlands right now. I'm still playing every day, give or take. I first posted about the game on 10 August, when I'd just installed it. Just over five weeks later, Steam tells me I've played for exactly 82 hours, which averages out to a little over two hours a day; pretty close to how I've been playing.

There's no padding in those numbers, either. I've been scrupulous in not leaving the game running when I'm afk and I've hardly even tabbed out to look stuff up while logged in. If it says I was playing, I really was playing.

For all that time and effort, I've haven't even managed to complete 10% of the content. To be precise, my "Proportion Explored" stat currently stands at 8.43%. 

I don't know exactly what's included in that count but I'm guessing 100% would mean at least removing all the "fog of war" from the whole map and exposing all the marked Points of Interest. It could mean much more than that, like maybe unlocking every recipe, completing every achievment or even ticking every box the game would like you to tick. There are many.

Whatever it means, since only six of the proposed ten biomes are currently available and assuming an even distribution (It's not remotely even but let's pretend it is for now.) it's possible I've really only explored 8.43% of 60% of the content, which would be even less in absolute terms - barely over 5% of the whole thing - but more like 14% of what's actually possible at the moment.

Even if I have explored 8.43% of the entire map and/or consumed 8.43% of the total content, it's still not one hell of a lot to show for eighty fricken' hours! It's not even two per cent a week!

Someone might want to check my math there, by the way. I got Bard to do it but I'm not sure it entirely understood what I was asking. I know I didn't...

However much or little I've done, there's clearly a lot more left to go. According to the Sealing Progress charts, I'm almost done with Grasslands (93.5%). Plains (87.1%) and Forest (82.5%) are closing in fast but I've barely scratched the surfaces of Black Forest (15.2%), Swamp (13.4%) or Snow Mountain (3%).

Here, once again, I'm somewhat confused. Swamp and Black Forest are listed as separate biomes but they seem to be intermixed on the map and in the world. They either share the same Boss (Lynd) or one of them doesn't have a boss at all. They do each have their own progress ladder, though, so they definitely count as two, separate biomes.

In terms of the storyline, my next target is indeed Lynd, my first task being to find him (Her, Them, It. I mean, the thing looks like a tapeworm bursting out of an elk - the last thing I need to be thinking about is what pronoun to use. Except that's exactly what I am thinking about...) 

Black Forest by night. More like indigo, I'd say.

It really doesn't help that none of the "official" sources agrees on what to call the biome where Lynd lives. The game calls it Black Forest but the wiki uses both "Dark Forest" and, most confusingly of all, "Black Swamp". As it happens, I know where Lynd is because I stumbled across the Seal while I was looking for iron ore.

I also know what he looks and sounds like because I clicked on the Seal to see what items I'd need to collect to summon him and it turns out you don't need any! He spawned on top of me and started yelling threats so I ran the hell away.

After that little escapade I watched a few videos of supposed quick or safe ways to kill Lynd. None of them look very quick or safe to me so I'm not in any hurry to try. 

It's not like I need to move the needle yet a while, anyway. It's true that much (Although by no means all.) of the crafting in the game is tied to the Sealing process. You do need the new tier of pickaxe that becomes available after the death of each boss to mine the new ore you find in the next biome and you do need that ore to craft the next tier of armor. Despite all that, the game offers considerable flexibility in how you choose to progress.

A lot of recipes are tied not to the death of bosses but to your level. You get a drip-feed of new options as you level up. There is a hard cap on levels tied to each boss but I've never found myself short of things to do even when I hit that cap. In fact, it takes me all my time keeping up with what is available and even then I'm generally falling behind rather than surging ahead.

Swamp by day. Surprisingly pretty, isn't it?

As for handling the general difficulty that comes with a new biome, there's a big overlap that makes it perfectly reasonable to carry on in the armor you already have, provided you also take the trouble to upgrade it as far as it will go. Just this morning I finished my full, upgraded set of Refined Dark Iron Armor (Well, almost. Still need to do a couple more upgrades on the belt.) but I'm not wearing it yet.

The reason for that is item decay, one of the few things about Dawnlands I'm not completely sold on, although I think it's far less of a problem than some of the hysterical rants I've seen would like you to believe. All armor is repairable and although making repairs causes durability to decline, I've never yet had a repairable item reach the point where it couldn't be refurbished and put back into service as good as new before I'd replaced it with something better anyway. 

Nice set bonuses, too.

Repairs are instantaneous and free. You do need a workbench or anvil that's been upgraded to the appropriate level, which means going home to repair, but armor decays quite slowly. Unless you play every hour god sends and never go back to base, if you find your armor falling apart in the field you most likely have only yourself to blame. 

Added to that, the higher the armor tier you access, the further you can upgrade. My new Dark Iron set, can be upgraded from a baseline 250HP to 1000HP. The Bronze I'm wearing starts at 200HP and goes to 800HP (From memory...) At those levels I rarely need to repair at all and it's difficult to imagine that I'll ever need to replace any of the pieces now I've upgraded them. Even so, natural caution makes me reluctant to move on from an existing set before I have to and the Bronze still seems to be doing a good job so why swap?

Tools and weapons are a different matter altogether. Although you can still upgrade them in the same way, they are unrepairable. I've taken to prioritizing weapons and tools as soon as I open each crafting tier before moving on to armor. Fully upgraded, weapons last a good while but picks and axes feel like they wear down more quickly. It's probably identical but of course you do tend to hit ore nodes and trees a lot more times in a session than you hit monsters - or I do, anyway.

Given the rate of decay and the inability to repair, I tend to make spare tools and weapons so I can carry on when they break. I also swap my higher ones out for my lower ones whenever the lower ones are up to the task in hand and I try to avoid using my good axes as a weapons, although it's often just too convenient to resist. I really like axes.

The forecast said snow...

 All in all, I don't find the system too onerous. I wouldn't even remove item decay, given the choice; I'd just make tools and weapons repairable in the same way armor is. I do think that having decay and repair nudges lazier players like me into making the effort to go all the way down the upgrade path rather than, as I'm pretty sure I would otherwise, stopping at the minimum viable option.

In gameplay terms, it means I spend a lot more time planning and thinking ahead instead of just rushing off into the wilderness unprepared. It also means that much of my gameplay consists of looking for nodes or other sources of materials, collecting them, bringing them back to base, refining them and finally using them to craft and upgrade my gear.

It's time-consuming but absorbing. I spent two full sessions last week, scouring the entirety of the Grasslands and a good portion of the Forest for Phantom Crystals, a resource that seems plentiful in the early days but which rapidly becomes scarce. They're needed for part of the upgrade process for higher tier armor and weapons as well as for the starting gear so they remain in demand but because most resource nodes in Dawnlands don't regenerate, what started out as a trivial activity eventually becomes somewhat challenging.

Leaving aside the opaque Exploration percentages, what I do know is that I have two bosses left to kill and at least two more armor sets to make. There's a cold weather set that I've already started on but which I think will require items from Lynd to upgrade in full and a Mithril set that certainly will. The same applies to the mithril tools and weapons. There's also one locked and as yet unknown crafting station that probably won't reveal itself until I seal Lynd away either.

Based on my current rate of progress, I'd guess that could take as much as another forty or fifty hours, always assuming I could even manage to beat Lynd at  all, let alone seal the fifth and currently final boss, Niedner. He looks very tough and without him, there's no Mithril armor.

Something for every occasion.

I'm in no hurry. I have a lot of work still to do to get my complete set of upgraded cold weather armor and I haven't even started building a castle. That's not any part of progression but since there are a whole set of recipes for castle-building, it would seem crazy not to build one. 

There are also recipes for building a mining railway complete with working mine-carts. I'm not entirely sure if there's any practical benefit to doing it but once again, if it's there...

To re-iterate something I've said before, I've read quite a few critical reviews that talk about Dawnlands as some kind of predatory gacha game. While it does now have some gacha mechanics for cosmetics, it didn't at the time these comments were made. People see want they want to see. 

The non-respawning of nodes and the need for pages to unlock crafting recipes have also been cited as evidence of unreasonable monetization. After more than eighty hours, I have seen absolutely no sign of any of that.

With the sole exception of Phantom Crystals, which as far as I can tell you can't buy for real money anyway, every other resource remains far more plentiful than I can imagine needing. There are nodes everywhere in the areas I've explored and there are vast tracts of land I haven't even visited yet.

As for recipes, I've been able to buy everything I wanted immediately and I still have more than a hundred pages saved. Unless you want to buy every recipe as soon as it appears, just for the sake of owning it, I can't see what the problem is.

Well, yes, I think I can. It's a lack of patience. I guess if you have to have everything right away you might find Dawnlands a little frustrating. Maybe then you would try to buy your way out of the problem although I'm not at all sure you'd be able to; most of the basics aren't really for sale in large quantities and even the small amounts available only change hands for in-game currency.

It seems to me that the only real requirement for steady progress is to play the game, which suits me fine. I'm doing that already and very happy to do it I am, too.