Throne And Liberty - First Impressions - Of A Kind...

Before we begin, just in case you came here from Google Search looking for some kind of useful information about the game, I do apologize. That's not really what we do here...

After an extremely lengthy and repetitive installation process that seemed to go on forever, I finally got in and played some Throne and Liberty last night. Just over three hours of it, according to Steam, although it didn't feel that long, which might mean I enjoyed myself.

On the other hand it, it might just be that I was zipping through the parts I'd already done back in open beta at such a pace it felt like a lot less time had passed than the clock would have showed. Shown... Shewn...?

Hang on... what's the past participle of "To show"? Let me ask Gemini...

Well, there you go. I get these moments of existential doubt sometimes. Doesn't everyone? How fortunate we are that our AI overlords allies are here to help. 

Although I'm not quite sure I like the way it's corrected my capitalization. That seems a bit cocky. Reminds me of Dirk Bogarde in "The Servant". Not a good sign.

Popular game is popular.

Well, this isn't going the way I thought it would. Shall we see if we can get it back on track? Or shall we just sit here talking to ourselves in the second person plural like some kind of experimental novel?

Does anyone really enjoy experimental novels? The kind that come in a box with all the pages loose so you can read them in any order? Or ones where the author has managed a hundred thousand words without once using the letter "e"?  

I know a couple of people who claim to read that sort of thing for pleasure but I can't stick them, myself. The novels, that is, not the people who like them. Although...

I'm all for being pretentious but there are limits. I was reading Stuart Lee in the bathroom a few minutes ago and he described Tarka the Otter as an experimental novel for adults that Puffin repackaged as a children's book in the 1970s, which goes a long way to explaining why I gave up on the damn thing when I tried to read it in my teens.

Speaking of otters, I think you can be one in Throne and Liberty. There are "travel forms" you can morph into, "morph" being the verb employed in the game for the process which, in keeping with all such events in every game, is never explained. It's just magic, I suppose.

I have three travel forms so far: wolf for running, hawk for flying and otter. (Or at least something that looks like an otter although, for reasons that also go unexplained, it appears to be wearing a hat.) I'm guessing the otter is for swimming but since I haven't been in the water yet I can't say for sure.

If you'd just switch the lights on, we could appreciate the stitching.

I like travel forms as a rule. I think my first experience with them must have been in EverQuest, where druids get a spell that lets them change into wolves. Being a wolf in Norrath confers a number of advantages besides letting you run faster. 

I mean, that's a given, given the name of the iconic spell: Spirit of Wolf aka SoW or more often "Can I get a SoW?", the cry so frequently heard in any public space where crowds gather in preparation for adventure, but being a wolf in EQ also makes some people like you more. And others less but swings/roundabouts.

When I get back to Throne and Liberty (I'd have used the name of the world where it takes place there, if I'd known what it was. I wonder if Gemini knows?

Okay, come on! You have to admit it. That's useful. I know I could have googled it to get the same result but isn't it neater to ask a straight question and get a straight answer? Of course it would be better if the answer was right...¹)

I left a sentence hanging up there, didn't I? I haven't forgotten. I'll start that part over. 

When I get back to Arcion (See? That's better, isn't it?) I'll have to see if I can't find some water to jump in so I can try the otter-form out. I wonder how many travel forms there are in the game? Not nearly as many as there are in AdventureQuest 3D, I bet. There are dozens of them there.

I think I look pretty badass. But then, I would...

So, anyway, other than running around as a wolf, which is always fun, what else did I find to do in Arcion? (Now I know what the place is called you can bet I'm going to make the most of it.)

Mostly questing so far, as you'd expect. I haven't really bothered to read up much about T&L but I have a general idea from things I've heard that it's a very group-oriented game. Unsurprisingly, that restriction has yet to get in my way. It's early days. I'm still getting tutorial tips.

Before I could begin, of course, I had to make a character. That was fun. I do like character creation. It's a game in itself these days, isn't it?

Hold that thought. I have to stop now and drive to another city to drop off Mrs. Bhagpuss's annual accounts at the accountants, which makes it sound way more grand than it really is. Then we're going to give Beryl a walk and maybe have lunch - it's a beautiful day - so I'm going to have to pick this up when I get back. 

Maybe I'll be in a less self-indulgent mood then. I'll probably read this back and delete most of it so you'll only be reading this if you're in a different timeline, one where that didn't happen.

And I'm back. Had a lovely walk, saw some impressive goats, ate a very large ice-cream. Good times.

We're all still here so I guess I didn't split the timeline. Always a consideration. Also I read the above back and it seemed pretty spry so I'm gonna carry on. Where was I? Oh yes...

So I made a character and almost fell into the same trap as last time. Nearly ended up with someone who looks like the first cousin of the first NPC you meet, which would be a bit like wearing the same frock to a party. Embarrassing!

I'd love to say I remembered and caught myself in time but in fact it was only when I got into the game and the person in question came running up that it all came back to me. Fortunately, I'd already gone for a goth-gamine-tomboy look just very slightly askew from my norm so it all worked out fine.

After that I sped through the tutorials as fast as possible. It's amazing how it comes back to you. If you'd asked me ahead of time to recap my adventures in open beta I would have stared at you blankly but every step and most of the dialog drifted up from somewhere, just a beat ahead, as I clicked through for the second time.

It took me more than an hour and a half to get back to where I left off last time, which was the bit where you have to make bait to lure wolves for the annual wolf-killing competition and then get the wolf-bits to make the trophy you get for killing the most wolves (Except, as it turns out, you don't, because they stopped giving them out years ago.).

I felt a bit odd, running through packs of wolves as a wolf, killing them and stealing their teeth, but that's the way of things in magic-land.

Last time I did it, I stopped after I'd made the bait and gotten a drunken dwarf with a really unconvincing accent (Although not, for once, a Scottish one - or at least I hope that's not what it's meant to be.) to make me a couple of fake trophies. It seemed fair enough for the trophies to be fakes since I hadn't even entered the competition, let alone won it.

A dwarf with Imposter Syndrome. That's new.

It was around there, somewhere, that I felt things were getting a little meta but I hadn't seen anything yet. At the risk of spoilers, although it's one of the first quests in the game so it's probably exempt in under the ten-minute rule (Which I just made up so don't bother googling it. Or asking an AI.) the quest carries on for a fair old while, bringing in hallucinations, visions, time-travel and who knows what-all else until it turns out you're the mysterious hero who saved all those children a decade ago. 

Or something. Don't look at me. I didn't write it. I could barely follow it.

It's all quite confusing and honestly not really as bad as I'm making it sound. It was fine. By the standards of MMORPG questing, that is. Which, let's not kid ourselves, are not all that high.

I'm extremely wary of raising expectations that are bound to be disappointed but the quality of both writing and voice acting in Wuthering Waves have spoiled me for these kinds of quests. I think I would have been moderately impressed with this one a couple of years ago and I still think it's more than decent for the genre but standards have risen.

Or my tastes have changed. Or both. 

I don't think there's much doubt about the voice acting, though. It is not great. At least, not in these early stages. Maybe it improves later. That happens, sometimes.

It's not actually bad. Just not very engaging. If I had to guess I'd say it was a lack of direction more than any fault of the actors themselves.

Down in one! Down in one!

There are exceptions. I liked Chris, Dave's pal. He was good. The voice actor seemed to be having some fun and putting the effort in, which is more than I could say for some of them. 

I was predisposed towards him just because he was called Chris, though, to be fair. I liked there being two nobles called Dave and Chris. (Dave wasn't as convincing.) It made a nice change from all the Lord Evertrues, Ragnar Bloodswords and Lentensip Fentonworps we usually run into in these things. 

That quest chain itself was quite long. I think it probably took me the best part of an hour. By the time I
finished it (Plus all the other tutorial tasks.) I was Level 12. 

It mostly involved a lot of running around, plenty of chatter and a good deal of fighting. All the fighting was easy even though I had no idea what any of my abilities did. I could have stopped and read the tool tips but I wanted to get on. Anyway, button-mashing seemed to be more than up to the task.

Apart from the two tutorials showing me how to craft and upgrade weapons and armor, I made absolutely no effort to improve myself from the moment I stepped into the world. I kept getting messages telling me I had new abilities or I could upgrade the old ones but I didn't bother. 

I made a nice hat and a sword and then annoyingly I got another hat as a quest reward. Other than that, when I dinged 12 I was still wearing the same clothes I started with.

I'm guessing at some point I'll have to buckle down and make sense of what looks like a very fussy and over-complicated gear-and-skill system but so long as I can get away with not bothering, that's what I plan to do. I find it unlikely that I'll stick with Throne and Liberty for long, especially if those rumors about needing to guild and group up are true, but I'm not done yet. I had fun last night, though, and I'm quite keen to carry on and have some more today.

If nothing else, the world is extremely pretty to look at and I quite like the character I'm playing, which is always key. Whether that will be enough to hold my attention for more than a few sessions I somewhat doubt. As I keep complaining, if complaining is the right word, which it's not, there's a lot going on in gaming just now. T&L is going to have to dig some pretty sharp claws in to hang on to my custom and the no money at all it's worth. 

I doubt it can but I'm going to expose myself a little longer to give it the chance. It seems like the polite thing to do. They are giving the game away for free, after all. It would be rude not to play it for a while.

^{1. [The actual name of the world in Throne and Liberty is Solisium.]↩}1.

Nightingale: Realms Rebuilt - First Impressions

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

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

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

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

Anyone got a torch?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Don't tempt me...

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

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

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

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

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

Gamma to the max.

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

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

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

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

I know where the bodies are buried.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An example from the new crafting Progression tree.

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

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

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

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

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

Spellfarers Early Access: Very First Impressions

It's about time I admitted I'm probably never going to find a "cosy" MMO I truly enjoy. I keep telling myself it'll happen one day but it never does. 

On paper the genre looks so enticing - housing, pets, whimsy, relaxed pace, no pressure - but when it comes to the games themselves, almost none of that turns out to be true. All too often they feel more like forced-labor sims than the chill zentertainment they're sold as.

I was firmly reminded of all of this when I spent an hour with the latest cosy candidate, Spellfarers, which went into Early Access yesterday. I got an email alerting me because I had it on my Steam wishlist, although I have no memory of putting it there. Even though I didn't have any real interest in starting a new game just now, it seemed rude to ignore the invitation, plus I thought I'd at least be able to get a post out of it. Cynical, perhaps, but here we are.

I want to say right upfront that nothing I say about the game from here on is meant as a review, let alone a judgment. I only played for an hour and the game has only just entered EA. I'm sure it will change out of recognition in the coming months and years, assuming it makes it that far.

These are just a few very first impressions of the game as it stands right now, based on my experience as a brand new player in the first hour... which, as we all know, is quite a bit longer than most players will give any game if it doesn't immediately grab them.

First off, I really dislike logging into a game on Steam for the first time and immediately being sent to a third-party website to register a separate account. It negates a significant benefit of playing the game through Steam in the first place. I don't particularly lay the blame for this on the developers. It seems to me Valve ought to be able to hand off the necessary information seamlessly and  automatically, asking for any additional details the developer might require to be submitted through Steam itself.

Hang on... did I enroll in Agricultural College by mistake?

At least registration was simple - name, email, password, confirmation email, done. That took me directly to login and thence to character creation, which started off very well indeed. There's no cut scene to sit through, thankfully. Instead there's one of those Dear Diary openings, where your character muses to her journal about what she's about to let herself in for, complete with all her hopes, anxieties and expectations.

I've encountered this mechanic a few times and this is one of the better implementations I've seen. The visuals are charming, the writing is good and the necessary information slips down smoothly. Along the way, there are also several multiple choice questions to answer, ones that might indicate something substantive, either about the character you're creating or the gameplay you'll encounter or both. 

Or neither, which is the problem. I picked several options that might have quite serious gameplay implications - a rival instead of a friend, a nervousness about meeting new people instead of an eagerness - but the game gives nothing away. The choices could be pure color or the equivalent of picking a class. It would have been nice to know.

This is me, mid-makeover. Imagine the Before shot. No, don't.

Still, that was the highlight of my hour in Spellfarers. From there on nothing was that much fun. 

Character creation proper is very obviously a work in progress, with many options shown not yet available. It's also invidious and uncool of me to say it  - or even to admit I noticed - but the default character the game offers as an example before you start to alter it is... hideous!

Seriously, I cannot remember seeing a more unappealing character looking back at me, first blush. I wish now I'd taken a screenshot but I couldn't wait to get the image off my screen. 

Not that the final version I ended up with was that much better. I just couldn't do anything about the mouth, which seemed to veer between a gormless, open-jawed gape or the pouty version I went with, where her lower lip looks like she's just been stung by a hornet.

I'd also suggest that the character you start with ought not to be wearing a hat, especially a large, wide-brimmed one that covers half the face. I'd nearly finished making my adjustments before I finally found to the option to change or remove headgear, after which I pretty much had to go back and start again.

Eventually I got something I felt I could live with and into the world I went. The conceit is that you're a witch-in-training (Witchcraft seems to be something you have to go to college to study in this world.) who, as part of her studies, has been sent to do field research on a surge of magic that recently hit a small town called Wenngrove.

What that really means is exactly what it has meant in every cosy game I've played so far, namely you're about to go to work for the town council as some kind of indentured laborer.  As is made very clear quite early on, the main responsibilities of a witch are getting to know everyone, not pissing them off, and farming. Oh yes. Farming.

Pardon me? "You witches?"

Y'know, I'm coming to realise it's not so much that I don't particularly enjoy farming in video games, it's more that I actively dislike it. It's dull, repetitive, quotidian and tedious. Why would I want to sit in front of a screen pretending to plant seeds and water them? Is that entertainment?

Well, apparently, since millions of people love to do it. Which is fine. I just need to stop imagining I might be one of them. I can just about tolerate something like the Once Human take on farming, the basic version of which takes  two or three clicks, with anything more complex going to automation. Any game that tells me I need to "make good use of the land you've been given", though? That game can go take a flying leap.

And what about that land I was given, eh? Something very off about it, if I'm not mistaken. It's a run-down cottage that used, until very recently, to belong to another witch, who's mysteriously gone missing. In suspicious circumstances. 

What happened to her, then? And isn't she going to want her old home back when she returns? If she returns. What do you know that you're not telling me?

What are you implying, Luan?

I imagine I might be reading more into all of this than was intended. Either that or I missed something when Luan the guard sent to show me around my new home, explained how it came to be available. I confess I probably wasn't listening all that carefully, due to having seen all of this so many times before.

Inside the shack there's a spell book left by the previous incumbent, which I immediately appropriated. Again, is that acceptable behavior? At least in My Time At Portia it was clear I'd inherited the house and all its contents from a deceased relative. Here I just seem to have moved into someone else's home while they're away and claimed squatter's rights.

Using the spell book and some reagents that just happen to be handily lying around the house, I cast the one and only spell in the book and summoned a familiar, which turned out to be a mildly sarcastic, slackerish cat. I liked this part. The spell mechanics were easy but satisfyingly tactile and the graphics were the most impressive of anything in the game so far, which admittedly isn't saying a lot. Spellfarer's isn't exactly a feast for the eyes, on the whole.

Sarcastic cat is sarcastic.

You get to name the cat. The game curiously tells you only you can see the name so you might as well have some fun with it. I called mine Splodger, which is what we call one of our neighbor's cats. They do look a bit alike. 

Until this point I was still kind of loosely on board but this is where the game lost me. My next move was to go into town and meet the Mayor (I think it was the Mayor. It's almost always the Mayor...) in the central square for some kind of induction process. From then, everything stopped being fun.

For one thing, it was night and I couldn't see anything. I found the game-world very dark even in the middle of the day.By night it was almost impossible to find anything. I only managed to locate the path into town by walking along the edge of the area, pressed up against the boundary, until my character slipped through a gap I couldn't see. Usually I tweak my screenshots for the blog but I've left all of these unretouched to show just what I had to look at. And even then, the screenshots look quite significantly brighter than the same scenes looked in game. 

Hey, at least I have my nameplate to light the way!

I tried to change the settings to make things lighter but I couldn't find any way to adjust the gamma. Most of the controls are only available through a series of nested menus, which made it annoying to keep going in and out looking for buttons to press every time I came across some new annoyance, which was often, so mostly I just put up with whatever was getting on my nerves. Obviously, that didn't do much to endear the game to me.

Things didn't get any better when I found the Mayor and they explained a bunch of stuff about how the town operates, including the fact that certain shops and facilities are only open at certain times of day and that everyone has their own lives to lead and might not always be where you'd like them to be. Oh, joy...

It's a truism in MMORPGs that NPCs have no lives of their own. They stand at their shop counters or on their street corners 24/7/365, always ready to buy whatever you want to sell or tell you their problem so you can fix it. We've all complained about how unrealistic it is and how much better it would be if NPCs could behave more naturally. I know I have.

What makes you think I don't have things to do, Sulo? Wait... don't answer that.

Except it isn't better at all, which is why it rarely happens, at least in MMORPGs. It's bloody infuriating to go to speak to an NPC and find they've gone to bed or to the Inn or to the fishing hole. It strongly suggests the developers believe the imaginary time of an pretend shop-worker is more valuable than the actual time of a real customer, which is probably not the impression you want to be creating if you want people to pay you money.

Cosy games do tend to lean into this trope, often making it overtly clear that NPCs are the more important members of the community by making you jump through hoops to ingratiate yourself with them. More important than your character might be fair enough, but by implication they're saying NPCs are more important than you, too, given you're the one at the controls. At first, I found that quite cute. Now I find it borderline passive-aggressive and decidedly unamusing.

In the case of Spellfarers, the irritation I was already feeling at being asked to go speak to a whole list of service providers, any of whom, as I was warned, might have better things to do with their time than speak to me, was compounded by the simple fact I couldn't find any of them. I wandered about the dark, drab, unattractive streets for what felt like hours but was probably ten or fifteen minutes, looking for imaginary people who might as well not have existed.

Well, fuck you, too!

Spellfarers is a multiplayer game so I saw several other players wandering about, some of whom seemed to be doing the same as me. I found a number of the places where the NPCs I was looking for worked but none of them were there. 

Finally, just as I was about to give up, I spotted one of my targets, jogging down the street towards me. I walked over to intercept them (Default movement is a disturbing sort of power-walk. If you can run or sprint, I couldn't find the key.) I tried to get their attention as they passed but the only response was an unconvincing apology and a vague promise to "talk later" as the jogging figure disappeared into the distance.

That, I felt, was adding insult to injury. I'd had enough but as I turned around, I spotted another player who appeared to have found one of the NPCs on my list, miraculously at their place of work, for once. Willing to give the game one last chance to get on my good side, I waited until the player moved on them approached the NPC and spoke to them.

Want me to collect your dry-cleaning while I'm in town?

They turned out to be the one who was tasked with helping me get my new cottage into better shape. The "help" they were willing to offer, however, consisted mostly of unsolicited and frankly unwelcome advice, along with the loan of a watering can that wouldn't even hold water. I was told to go see the Blacksmith to get the thing mended, then come back so we could get started on "getting your farm fixed up".

Splodger had something to say about that. Also about the NPC and his unfortunate manner, both of which opinions I wholly endorsed. Where we differed was that my familiar, at least, seemed grudgingly willing to give the guy the benefit of the doubt. I was not.

I logged out and I very much doubt I will be logging in again.

Chipper? Smug, I'd call it. And condescending...

As I said at the top, none of this is in complaint about Spellfarers itself. It seems in decent shape for a title that's just entered Early Access. I'm sure that, if it keeps getting updates and improves as these games tend to do when well-managed, it will find an audience. If anyone reading this is a particular fan of cosy titles, they  could do worse than give this one a try. It's free, after all.

As for me, I think I'm going to try to wean myself off the idea that cosy gameplay is my kind of thing. I suspect the truth is that, when it was very hard to come by, it seemed a lot more appealing than it does, now you find it absolutely everywhere. 

Feel free to remind me of that next time I post about yet another cosy game I'm optimistically trying out. I won't listen to you, obviously. Why would I? I never listen to myself. But at least you'll have the satisfaction of saying "I told you so" when all my best hopes come to nothing yet again.

A Hunting We Will Go or Be Vewy, Vewy, Quiet - I'm Hunting Pandas!

Somewhat to my surprise, I was at my PC at exactly six o' clock yesterday evening, when the timer ticked down to zero for the start of World of Warcraft's Pandaria Remix event. I logged in, partly expecting a queue of some kind, but there was none. It was straight to character select and the option to make a "Timerunner", which is what Blizzard has chosen to call participants in this glorious experiment.

Skipping ahead a step, the whole affair is typically garlanded with unnecessary trimmings. When I arrived in the world, I found myself immediately engaged in some kind of overly complicated, hard-to-follow narrative, involving dragons and time-portals and the inevitable ill-defined existential threat to natural order.

It would have been quite confusing enough on its own but since I was thrown into the middle of it all with what seemed like hundreds of other players, half of them riding mounts the size of busses (I'm surprised no-one was driving an actual bus...) it was positively over-whelming. 

This not being my first - or probably my fifty-first - server launch, I was able to handle it but I would like to go back and start over when things have quietened down, just to see if any of it actually makes any kind of sense. I tend to doubt it.

Going back to character creation, I'd forgotten just how basic a function it is in WoW. I'm so used to spending half an hour just trying to get my eyebrows right, it came as a bit of a shock to realize there was next to nothing for me to do.

Once you've set the trifecta - race, gender, class - there are just eight appearance settings you need to consider and half of those are colors. Given the paucity of options on offer it seems bizarre that "Eyesight" made the cut. Also, what the hell do they mean by "Eyesight", anyway?

In WoW's Character Creation, "Eyesight" means whether you you're blind in one eye, both or neither. I am honestly not sure whether this is Blizzard attempting to be culturally sensitive by offering a disability option or the exact opposite.

I'm assuming that blindness in the game is purely cosmetic, which certainly points towards the latter. If giving your character cataracts actually does impact gameplay, then I take my hat off to whoever came up with the idea. It would be quite radical.

I decided not to risk it. I felt I'd already taken enough of a cultural back-step by making my character blonde. 

Once I was in the game, everything proceeded smoothly. Very smoothly for a new server. At least at first. After about half an hour or so the disconnects began and eventually drove me out but until then, everything was fine.

By then I'd spent around an hour in the Remix, some of it on the Timeless Isle, which is where everything begins, the rest in the starting area of the Pandaria expansion, the name of which escapes me, even though I've been there twice this month already.

Last time I was playing a Goblin for the Horde. This time I was playing a Gnome for the Alliance. Both times I was playing a Hunter.

I was thinking about it as I ran around two-shotting mobs with my bow: the WoW Hunter has to be one of my all-time favorite MMORPG classes. I know it has something of a bad reputation but for all the right reasons. 

Hunters are self-sufficient to an infuriating degree. They can manage pretty well on their own in a genre where team-play is often deemed essential. Even more annoyingly, when played well, they can fit into a group with alarming efficiency. Playing a Hunter is often considered EZ-Mode and not without good reason. If what you're looking for out of your gameplay is relaxation and control, you could do a lot worse.

Given that WoW took a huge amount of inspiration from EverQuest and that many of the original design team had played EQ, I can't help feeling one of the reasons the Hunter is so good is that the Ranger in EQ was so bad.  

Rangers in early EverQuest were deeply disappointing, weak in almost all regards. They got beefed up eventually but for years they were, at best, comedy relief. The WoW Hunter looks like someone asked the EQ Ranger Class Lead for a list of improvements that would make the class worth playing and then doubled down on all of them.

I didn't think about it at the time but it was probably quite important that I pick a class and race I'm comfortable with for this experiment. I'm feeling more and more inclined to re-sub for a month or two while the Remix goes on and if I do, it's not impossible this could end up being my highest character. 

It is apparently possible to level all the way to the cap in the event. When it's over, Timerunners will be converted to regular characters on your regular server, or wherever you made them, if you picked somewhere else. My current highest character on Live is 50 so he may well get overtaken if I decide to take this thing even half-seriously.

From what I've seen so far, I just might. Pandaria is a very enjoyable expansion. I've already played through a lot of it and I remember it quite fondly, which is more than I can say of several others. I certainly wouldn't mind pottering through it again, especially on fast-forward.

That said, I didn't find the xp rate that invigorating yesterday. I was expecting something a bit faster. As I said, I did two levels in about an hour, which is probably what I'd have guessed I would have gotten in the regular game at the same point.

Then again, there is all that Level Squish nonsense. I may be thinking of how many levels I used to get in an hour, back when there were twice as many. It's hard to keep track.

Other than the leveling speed, there's also the loot. A big deal has been made of the cosmetics but that doesn't mean much to me. Not because I'm not into playing dolly dress-up with my characters. As multiple posts on this blog can attest, I very much am. No, the problem is that I think most WoW characters look pretty bad, whatever they're wearing.

When I see people proudly sharing screenshots of their best-dressed characters I can rarely see what it is they think they're cerebrating. WoW has a particular aesthetic that definitely works but it does not shine in close-ups. I think my characters in almost any other MMORPG look better than even my better-dressed Azerothians.

I do like the new loot, though. The mobs drop little chests that give Remix-specific loot and it's fun to open them. I also like the gem system, which once again reminds me very specifically of Augments and Adornments in the two EQs. They seem like they'll be fun to play around with, not least because the mechanic for slotting and unslotting them is very straightforward.

I can't say the same about the weirdly overwrought system for scrapping items you don't want and turning them into Bronze, the Remix currency. To do that you have to spawn a portal in the world, then open it and drag and drop your items inside. It's very tactile and fun at first but I'm not sure how entertaining it'll be when you have to do it for the thousandth time.

All in all, though, I thought it was a promising start. I'm quite keen to get back and dig into it a bit more. I would think that by the time I hit Level 20, the kick-out point for freeloaders, I should have a pretty clear idea whether I want to subscribe for a month. 

If not, I can always just make another character and try again. It'll be a Warlock, I expect. If it's not a Hunter, it usually is.

Nightingale: First Impressions

I began writing this post only because Nightingale was offline this morning for the inevitable emergency update following yesterday's seemingly successful launch. I say "seemingly" because it certainly seemed successful to me; from what I've read, though, not everyone enjoyed such a happy introduction to the game.

I published yesterday's post just before seven in the evening. To my considerable surprise, ten minutes later I was playing the game. I was able to make a character, log in and complete the lengthy tutorial with no bugs, glitches, lag spikes  or interruptions of any kind. It played for almost exactly two hours and thoroughly enjoyed every minute.

This morning, once I'd gotten a few practical concerns out of the way, I logged in again and played for half an hour or so until the server came down for an emergency patch. It took about an hour, as promised, then I was back to play some more.

All of which does suggest I've been having a pretty good time. I have, but let's not run away with the idea the game is perfect, not even in these very early stages, when all new games tend to show themselves at their best. I've had to revise several parts of this post, some more than once, not only because of the inevitable learning curve, which means I'm discovering new things all the time, but because I'm beginning to realize Nightingale is a quite a bit buggier than I originally thought. 

Things keep changing and I'm not at all sure they're always supposed to. But more of that later.

First, as always, comes Character Creation. Well, always except on those ill-judged occasions when some jaded developer decides it would be clever to start off in media res, setting players up as fully-geared, powered-up, endgame characters before pulling the rug and stripping them of all their possessions and abilities an hour or two into the game. Then it's to back where they should have started in the first place, sans gear, sans skills, sans everything. I hate that trope.

Luckily nothing of the kind happens in Nightingale. Character creation veers sharply towards the other extreme, almost a game in itself. Making a character involves a great deal of reading and a lot of fiddling with sliders. 

I didn't time it but I think it took me at least half an hour to make my character who, inevitably, ended up looking pretty much like all my other characters. I made the mistake in Palworld of deliberately going for something different and I've been regretting it ever since.

There are a few parameters you can set that directly affect gameplay. You can choose your difficulty levels and how ready for adventure your character is going to be. You can also change these on the fly in the game itself though so, counter-intuitively, those important, gameplay-affecting decisions feel less crucial than what your character looks like, something that currently can't be changed later. 

There are also some annoyingly abstruse choices to contend with, like having to pick your parents, grand-parents and great-grandparents as well as your age and exact date of birth. You're offered no explanation of why or whether any of that might be relevant to gameplay and there's no gloss to explain what the very specific options you're offered might mean.

Even though I had no idea why I was doing it, I tried to make those choices as mindfully as I could. Whether any of them will ever matter - or be referred to ever again - I guess we can only wait to see.

More meaningfully, there are some well-documented and properly explained difficulty choices. I opted for what appears to be the standard difficulty and preparedness (Medium) so as to play the game as close as possible to the nominal default setting, something I always like to do, at least until circumstances dictate otherwise.

There were so many possibilities that even thirty minutes spent fiddling with sliders felt like not nearly long enough. Trying out the full range of colors in the make-up settings alone could fill a full session. As has been observed before, though, no matter how much time and effort you're prepared to invest, characters in Nightingale do look a bit... odd.

There's a florid, Victorian aspect to the whole thing, hinting at too many hours spent in over-heated rooms while wearing too many layers of uncomfortable clothing. If I had to use a single word to describe the overall feel of Nightingale's Character Creation process, that word would be "florid". I suspect it might be something of a Marmite situation for some but I've decided I like it. 

What I don't like so much is the absence of idle animations and facial expressions. I noticed something felt off even in the Stress Test. This time, I took a moment to watch my character just stand there, doing nothing, staring fixedly ahead. I wanted to see if there was a cycle of idle animations, like there has been in just about every similar game I've ever played. 

As far as I can tell, there is none. When I'm not pulling her strings, my character remains rooted in place, immobile and expressionless. It's disconcerting, not to say disturbing.

Since I seem to have moved rather too quickly on to the subject of things I'm not all that happy with, let's get the big one out of the way. The controls and the UI are clunky as hell. The UI looks nice enough, although that Victorian letterpress look isn't a particular favorite of mine - and if it was I'd be quite annoyed it's only used for some things, while everything else uses a much more futuristic font. The clash is quite jarring. 

It all works perfectly well. There's nothing actually wrong with it... it just feels awkward.

Swapping weapons and tools is finicky at best and occasionally buggy. In most modern games I'm used either to the game itself selecting the correct item contextually, on use, or at worst with a roll of the mouse-wheel. Last night I had to press a number key to get my character to wield the item I wanted. I could see the individual icons on the hotbar, so it was at least straightforward to pick the right one and press the right key but it felt very old-fashioned.

This morning, however, all that had changed. I was now able to change tools by rolling the mouse-wheel, which was great, but all the icons on the hot bar had turned into shovels so I couldn't tell which was which until I selected it and saw on screen what my character was holding.

As of this afternoon, post-patch although that may be coincidental, the mouse-wheel selection is working and the correct icons are back. Fingers crossed it stays that way.

Then there are the menus. Boy, there are a lot of menus.

Some of them are radial. I'm not a huge fan. I can tolerate radials for less-used functions but I don't like them for anything I have to do very often. Nightingale seems to love its radials, especially for crafting. It's a survival game so I'm going to be doing a lot of crafting and seeing a lot of radial menus. Can't say I'm delighted about that. The radials, not the crafting. I'm fine with the crafting.

Fortunately the developers haven't decided to use radial menus for everything. It just feels like it, sometimes. The other mechanic the developers love is a drag-and-drop card system; it's very pretty but also quite clunky to use. 

The cards are kind of a signature note for the game so, fortunately, the interfaces for them do look a lot more polished than the radials, which is just as well. Honestly, some of those radial menu look like they're still using place-holder graphics.

Still, that's what Early Access is for, right? It's just a fancy name for "Beta You Pay For". Everything's temporary. I'm sure all the systems and mechanics will get plenty of tweaks in the year or two Nightingale spends in EA before it officially launches, most likely to complete indifference from all sides, if the fortunes of almost every other EA game to date are any kind of guide.

So far, though, those are about all the complaints I have. It's not much: some clunky mechanics that will almost certainly get a polish later and a few dubious design choices that don't happen to match my preferences.

On a much more positive note, for the five and a half hours I've played, I've found the gameplay compelling, the writing more than competent, the lore and the world-building intriguing and the voice acting and graphics both excellent.

The graphics you can judge for yourselves from the screenshots, which for once look exactly like what you'll see in game. The lighting effects are spectacular, the level of textural detail is impressive but it's the colors that really make the game pop.

I quite often juice those up a bit for the blog. In too many games, screenshots come out looking a little muted compared to the in-game visuals. I didn't need to do any juicing for these. Nightingale is as rich in color in capture as it is in play.

Praising the voice acting is really praising a single person. The only speaking role I've encountered so far is Puck, played with a whole fruitcake in his mouth by Marc Warren. By that I don't mean he mumbles like Marlon Brando. I mean he's plummy as hell. And it works. It sounds like a Shakespearean actor slumming, which I imagine was the note the director gave him.

The best I can say, to show how much I liked Warren's delivery, is that I let him get to the end of every single sentence just so I could listen to him roll the words around his mouth like a rich oloroso. Normally I read the text so much faster than the actor delivers it, I can't bear to wait for them to catch up. I flip ahead and cut them off mid-sentence. Not here. Listening to Marc orate is like listening to a good radio play.

There are obviously similarities between Nightingale and The Secret World but none more so than this. The last game I can remember playing, where I chose to sit and listen to every spoken word, purely for the pleasure of hearing the delivery, was TSW. That was also quite possibly the last game I played where I didn't quibble with the line readings. This, at least on my brief exposure so far, is going to be the next.

So far, it's been just one actor, though. Let's not be counting those chickens or they might come home to roost. I'll reserve judgment until I hear someone other than Marc deliver a few lines.

So, the game looks and sounds good. Great. But how does it play?

Judging by the time I've racked up so far, very well. The survival gameplay loop works its usual magic. There's little in gaming as addictive as working your way up from nothing to become landed gentry and I was building my first shack before the game even told me I should. Building seems very good but I'll save a post on that for when I've had a lot more experience with it.

The first two hours were taken up with a basic tutorial, stage-managed by Puck with a trickster's sleight of hand. There are three zones, or Byways of the Realms as the lore has it, each giving you a brief introduction to what's in store later. After you make it through all three, Puck asks you to pick one and that's where you begin the game proper. There's a title card and everything!

The three biomes are Forest, Desert and Swamp. Obviously I picked Forest but the others both had their attractions and I'm sure they'll be coming around again later. If you stick to the instructions Puck gives you, you'll zip through all three in no time. Well, in two hours, but that would be a mistake.

I regret not throwing off Puck's harness sooner. It was only in the third Byway, the swamp, that I chose to ignore his endless series of instructions and go exploring. There were a couple of wooden towers with hot air balloons tethered to the top and I couldn't resist going to see what they were for. 

Loot is the answer. Each of the towers had several chests, filled with all kinds of goodies, as well as a bunch of crafting materials, just lying around, waiting to be taken. I ended up with so much in my bags I could barely move. I had to deconstruct some of the mats for essences, used as a currency across the Realms, just so I could walk to the portal. 

Of the items I took, several have already come in useful, especially the umbrella. Getting wet is a thing that happens in Nightingale but not if you have an umbrella.

After the strict tutorial finishes, you find yourself in the place where the Stress test began, something that either gives a lie to the assertion that the test began at the point where a regular player would have been playing for ten hours or suggests there have been some major changes since then. Or that the devs expect people to explore each of the three maps a lot more fully than I did...

Thankfully, one thing that has changed are all those boars. I was able to get myself sorted out and set up without having constantly to defend myself from predatory porkers. It wasn't all tr-la-la in fairyland, though. I built my base so close to an ancient artifact I got attacked by zombies in my own front yard. I also had to deal with a few wolves down on the beach, which is apparently where they like to hang out in the fae lands.

Fighting them off was easy enough although I did die once, due to weight of numbers more than anything. Combat in Nightingale, at least at these low levels, is fast, frenetic and fun. At the default difficulty, winning is easy enough, while losing doesn't come with any too onerous penalties. 

The combat animations, like all the animations really, when there even are any, aren't much to look at. Fighting style is similar to New World or any number of similar games but a lot less slick. Really, everything about Nightingale feels a lot less slick than most of its competitors, although that's not necessarily a negative. I quite like a few rough edges, particularly at this stage. Better than knowing everything's been worked over so rigorously it's never going to change.

Towards the end of my third session, during which I spent altogether too much time building a house, I picked up a follower. Her name is Dora. My character's name is Flora. I didn't plan it that way but I wish I had. Probably just as well I'm playing on my own.

Dora is very useful. She doesn't say much, or indeed anything, but she helps with the mining and the fighting and most importantly she rezzes me when I die. 

Together we took on the first "dungeon" in the storyline and beat it. It was a close call. Dora must have picked me up off the floor at least half a dozen times. I picked her up once. It was chaotic but it was good fun, especially when I figured out that if the boss was made of metal he'd be the perfect target for a mining pick.

If the fights stay like that I'll be happy but if they get harder it's good to know you can tune the difficulty on the fly. That battle opened the way to the next Byway, or at least it will when I've crafted the card for it, but I've only seen about five percent of the map I'm on, so I don't think I'll be leaving this one just yet. I think I might just have a bit of a wander around. See what I can find. 

It's nice to be playing a game with a bit more structure than Palworld and yet not too much more. A sandbox with a few signposts here and there. Given the chance, I'd rather be playing Once Human, which seems to me to be the best of these kind of games I've tried so far, but until it comes back, Nightingale will do very nicely

I'm going to leave it at that for now, mostly because I'm itching to get back in and play. I realize that's a stronger recommendation than anything else I've said here. 

As I mentioned in a post  the other day, I've played a lot of Survival and/or crafting games in recent times. I was wondering whether Nightingale would suffer as a result. It hasn't. If anything, I feel refreshed and revitalized by my first few hours in the game, ready to give the genre another few dozen hours of my life. 

Let's see if I still feel that way after a few more sessions.