Tobold's Blog
Sunday, March 17, 2024
 
Influenced by Paradox

The typical games of Paradox Interactive are not for everybody. They are typically (grand) strategy games, and usually rather deep, which makes them not easily accessible for the casual gamer. There are probably a lot of people out there who tried one of these games, but ended up scratching their head, not having fun, and ultimately giving up on it. There are some which are a bit more accessible, like Age of Wonders 4, and some which are a bit less so, like Europa Universalis 4 (which therefore I haven't played yet). But I wouldn't be surprised, nor would I judge anyone, if a number of my readers just weren't interested in these games.

Whatever one thinks of their games, one has to admit that Paradox Interactive is good at modern influencer marketing. That probably shouldn't come as a surprise, because niche games are best marketed directly to a niche audience, while mass media advertising would work a lot less well. As I am following on Twitch a number of streamers that play exactly this sort of game, I was inundated this weekend with content about Millennia. This weekend content creators were allowed to play the game until the 6th age, and next weekend they'll be allowed to play until the end, with the game then releasing on the 26th.

Now I played the Millennia demo at the Steam Next Fest in February, and came away with mixed feelings. It took me some time to overcome my dislike of the ugly graphics and user interface, but the game obviously had a lot of depth and potential. On the surface Millennia is "Civ-like", but there is a complex wealth of resource-management and city-building game systems in addition to the usual fare of the genre. The demo wasn't great in as far as it was limited to 60 turns, which didn't get you really far into the deeper game elements. But I played it several times and got quite fascinated by it in the end. The game definitely has flaws, but it also has the potential for many hours of fun.

So after seeing more of the game beyond turn 60 this weekend on Twitch, I cracked and pre-ordered the game, even going for the $60 premium edition, which includes an expansion pass. Between having played the demo and seen the streams I felt that I knew enough about the game to be certain that I do want to play this on release.

What helped was my recent game of Victoria 3, which made me realize that even if a grand strategy game isn't terribly well balanced, it can be fun as a toy, to play around with all the different game systems and see what works and what doesn't. As long as I play single-player, I can just decide to *not* play the unbalanced and overpowered choice, I am not bound by the "meta game". For Millennia the toy approach might work well, choosing to play against an AI not set to a very high level: All AI in all 4X games cheats at high level, and in Millennia that results in the AI being faster than you in unlocking ages, which negates one of the Unique Selling Propositions of the game.

The main problem with being influenced to pre-order 10 days before release, is that I now need to wait for the game to actually release. I'll have to play something else in the meantime.

Saturday, March 16, 2024
 
Victoria 3 - No DLC

I finished my most successful run in Victoria 3 ever. I played Belgium for a full century, reaching great power status, the highest GDP per person in the world, the highest living standard, and with pretty much everybody in my lands being happy. And that in spite of playing as a colonialist, with a huge African empire reaching from the Congo to South Africa.

I also controlled Romania, which is actually a point of criticism. The latter part of the tech tree requires oil, and relatively few places in the world have oil. At one point I got so frustrated with that, that I decided to invade Romania, which had tons of possible oil rigs, but didn't build them. It was either that, or accept my GDP growth to stall completely.

Now currently Steam has their Spring Sale ongoing. And thus I considered whether I wanted to buy DLCs or an expansion pass for Victoria 3 at a nice discount. In the end I decided against it: None of the DLCs already released or announced, actually addresses my issues with the game. I can see me playing the game again, for example playing the USA (they do have oil). But not anytime soon, because right now the constant repetition of always the same events and the same economic and political problems, regardless of what country you are playing, would get on my nerves too much. The runs are too long, this last run took me 32 hours. I did have the impression that the patches improved the game compared to my previous 2 runs, but they didn't fix all the problems.

So instead I backed the crowdfunding for Gilded Destiny, in a faint hope that I'll get a similar Victorian Age grand strategy / economic game, with hopefully a bit better game flow. Which was cheaper than the discounted Victoria 3 expansion pass.

Thursday, March 14, 2024
 
Grand strategy toys

Strategy games have some fundamental game design rules to make them work: For example they should be balanced, so that the winner isn't already determined by choosing the starting side. And while some randomness can spice things up, in general the player should be able to make decisions that predictably move the game in his desired direction, albeit against obstacles in the way. I started to play Victoria 3 again, having heard good things about the latest patch 1.6, but all my previous games were problematic: Victoria 3 simply doesn't conform to the above basic game design rules. It is obvious that if you play as Belgium you will have a much smaller impact on the world than if you play the British Empire. And my previous games often got completely derailed by unpredictable random events, making me feel as if I wasn't in control at all.

After watching Victoria 3 videos from different sources, a realization finally hit me: Victoria 3 isn't supposed to be a game at all! If you play it "as a game", with some sort of optimization strategy, it will either end up in complete failure or in you breaking the game through exponential growth. What you are supposed to do is to play Victoria 3 as a toy: Choose a country, set yourself some goals, and enjoy the emergent storytelling caused by the random events. You can vary the difficulty and historical accuracy with your choices: The goal of taking over North America from coast to coast is easier and more historically accurate when playing the United States, but if you want you can do it as Mexico.

I can live with that. But it does require a degree of open-mindedness that is getting rare in this world. While that might be stunning and triggering news for the young generation, it turns out that the 19th century didn't exactly conform to 21st century progressive values. To play Victoria 3, you need to deal with unpleasant subjects like slavery, colonization, racism, child labor, worker exploitation, sexism, and many more. You can strive to make your country better than it started, or a paragon in comparison with the other countries, but you will have to deal with the events that reflect 19th century reality. If that makes you squirm, Victoria 3 is probably not a good choice for you. I think there are good opportunities for learning experiences in here, making you understand why the world got more progressive over time, but slowly.

If you are open to how the world was in the 19th century, and willing to entertain a degree of alternative history, there is some fun to be had in Victoria 3 as a toy, once you abandoned the idea of "winning the game". I am currently in a game where I play Belgium as a colonizer, but concentrate on South Africa rather than the Congo, in order to exploit the gold mines there. I had a lot of fun doing various exploration missions through Africa, like discovering the source of the Nile. And while random events made it impossible for me to pursue a secondary goal of forming the United Netherlands, I just decided to pursue other goals instead. In 1893 I reached "great power" status, which is some sort of a win in a game without a win condition.

Tuesday, March 12, 2024
 
D&D and the state of my tabletop gaming

Jean-François commented that he would like to see more D&D posts from me. Bad news: I am not currently playing Dungeons & Dragons anymore. A few years ago I had two groups: One fell apart during the pandemic and never recovered, the other moved from playing around a table to a virtual tabletop software called Roll20. Unfortunately the second group last year also fell apart, due to players not having the time anymore. And I haven't found a new group yet. I used to be part of a roleplaying club, but I moved and now live hours away from there, so that isn't a viable method to get back into D&D either. I would need somehow to find people to play with where I live now.

I started the year with the resolution to find new people and play. I started looking in the most obvious place: The largest local store selling role-playing games, board games, and card games. Like everywhere else, all the surviving shops of this kind lean heavily into collectible card gaming, and having played Magic the Gathering earlier in life I don't want to get back into that financial trap. The shop doesn't run any roleplaying game events. But once a week there is a board game night, and that is what I am now visiting nearly every week to sit around a table and play.

Technically most board games don't have a "Dungeon Master" role. At least not one that is described in the rulebook. But in practical terms, in order for something to happen at a board game night, somebody needs to bring a game (or at least know one of the games that are available there), set it up, and explain the rules to everybody else. And as I have a large board game collection without people to play with, it is often me who studies the game in advance, brings it to the board game night, and teaches it to the other players. Which ends up consuming about the same amount of time as preparing a D&D game as a DM. As this keeps me busy, I haven't looked further for an actual D&D table elsewhere.

In Fall of this year, "One D&D", the not quite next edition of Dungeons & Dragons comes out. Which then should be accompanied later, probably 2025, by "D&D Digital", an official virtual tabletop to play Dungeons & Dragon on. Now WotC is notoriously bad at releasing software, so I'm taking all this with a grain of salt. But theoretically there should be a huge new platform full of potential players somewhere in the digital future of D&D, and I am planning to participate. But this year is mostly going to be board games, not role-playing games.

Saturday, March 09, 2024
 
The electric car experience

My wife bought a fully electric car, and I wanted to write about our experience with it. Due to differences in national and regional conditions and regulations, not all of our experiences are relevant to other people. There are still a lot of first-world problems here that one might consider trivial in the global context. But there are also a bunch of more fundamental issues behind all this, which then translate to problems with the path towards general electric mobility as a significant piece of the puzzle towards climate neutrality.

The first issue here is price. A fully electric car is more expensive than the same car with the same options and an internal combustion engine. By how much? Now this is where the problem might become critical: The difference is huge for small cars, and small for big luxury cars. My wife bought a "supermini", which is a relatively small car, for €45,000. She could have gotten the same car with a combustion engine for around €10,000 less. And compared to her previous car the electric car was actually twice the price, with part of the motivation for getting a bigger car having to do with bigger cars having room for bigger batteries. She would have been fine with a smaller petrol car.

So, do you get that added initial investment back because the higher energy efficiency of an electric motor compared to an internal combustion engine? Not really, and it turns out that the cost of filling your electric car is a whole chapter of problems by itself. Where we live the cost of petrol for driving a small petrol car 100 km is around €10. So if you drive around 10,000 km per year, you end up paying €1,000 per year in cost of petrol. So even if you had access to free electricity, it would take 10 years to recover the €10,000 higher cost of the car.

Now on paper our new electric car consumes 14 kWh per 100 km. If you would charge it at home at the current electricity price here of € 0.12 per kWh, that is still a relatively cheap €1.68 per 100 km, a sixth of the price of petrol. However, the price changes significantly if you start charging it at a public charging station. Prices for electricity at charging stations are all over the place, depending on the charging speed and whether you have a subscription with a particular provider. If you roll up to a charging station in an unfamiliar location, you might pay over € 0.80 per kWh from a provider foreign to you at a fast charging point. Which would make the cost per 100 km actually *higher* than petrol. If you are able to look around for a cheaper alternative and a medium speed charging speed (which would take over 2 hours to fill up our car from empty to 80%) you still pay around half of the cost of petrol.

In practical terms, charging on the road is highly annoying. Adding a payment system that accepts bank cards and credit cards is highly expensive, so only around 5% of charging stations have that option. The majority of others need a specific different system: An RFID card of a "mobility provider". You pay by simply holding your card up to the reader in the charging station, and the mobility provider handles the financial transaction between you and the owner of the charging station. For a fee, of course. If you don't have such an RFID card, you simply can't charge your car in most places. We are still in the process of finding the best mobility provider, but for Europe a good option seems to be Chargemap, a French company. You can get RFID cards from companies you know for running petrol stations, but independent companies like Chargemap tend to have a much bigger network, due to having contracts with more different electricity providers. The other annoying part of charging on the road is that not every charging station provides a cable, you might have to bring your own (imagine a petrol station requiring you to bring your own hose). Which is related to the problem of different electric cars having different connectors.

The bigger issue related to charging your car is how far you can get with a full battery. That is expressed by a WLTP range, which stands for Worldwide Harmonised Light Vehicle Test Procedure. That is basically a scam committed by the electric automobile industry which got that passed by heavy lobbying. The range is determined in a laboratory under ideal conditions, and it is technically impossible for any electric vehicle to reach it on a real road. Problems with the test procedure include it being mostly performed at low speeds around 50 km/h, with electric vehicles using a lot more energy at highway speed. And the laboratory test is performed at 23°C, while actual temperatures in Europe during most of the year are lower. Lower temperatures lower range in two ways: Lower battery performance, and added electricity consumption from heating. While car electronics and lights also use some battery power, that is generally a lot less than the power needed for heating or air conditioning.

The overall result is that under ideal real conditions you are lucky to reach 80% of the WTLP range of your car. In an European winter your range might be just 50% of the WTLP. In our personal experience in February in Western Europe, we have a real range of 250 km (consumption of nearly 20 kWh/100km at 55 kWh battery size), compared to the 400 km WTLP sticker range. That got aggravated by electric cars being programmed to warn the owner of the potential problem of running out of power: We did one trip of 110 km, which used 40% of our battery, but when asking the GPS to calculate the way back, it told us that we wouldn't make it without charging. Of course we neither had the RFID card, nor the cable with us, so the way home was extremely stressful, even if the warning was overblown and we arrived with 19% left.

And that is where we are: We don't use the electric car for trips to places over 100 km away anymore, as we have a second car running on petrol for that. Our plans to one day eliminate the second car are currently on ice, until there are major developments in the availability, speed and ease of charging on the road. Of course we do a lot of small trips for shopping and the like, and for that the electric car is fine. We charge our electric car with excess electricity from our solar panels, which is probably the lowest cost you can have. But we probably won't ever recover the additional cost of the electric vehicle. That makes the electric car one of those things that rich people with a progressive conscience do, and not something which is really feasible for the general population. Which is why electric car sales are currently stalling globally. Solving global warming with electric vehicles seems still utopic.

Tuesday, March 05, 2024
 
Paradox spring offensive

It is easy to believe, albeit fanciful, that a company that mainly makes grand strategy titles does have some grand strategy in mind with their marketing and game releases. At least for Paradox Interactive it currently feels as if they are in the middle of launching a spring offensive. Between February 27 and March 6 new DLC with accompanying large patches are released for Age of Wonders 4 (Primal Fury), Crusader Kings 3 (Legends of the Dead), and Victoria 3 (Sphere of Influence). Where does one find the time?

I am currently playing the Primal Fury DLC for Age of Wonders 4, having bought the expansion pass. Age of Wonders 4 is definitely my favorite Paradox game, and the addition of a new culture with 7 sub-cultures is adding a lot of new variety to the game. I never bought Crusader Kings 3, but played it on PC Game Pass, and it is still available there, but obviously without any DLC. There is a sale on Steam, but buying CK3 with all DLC (including 2 upcoming ones) costs around $100; I simply didn't like the base game that much, and I have my doubts that the DLCs change that: My suspicion is that Crusader Kings 3 is in reality a weird dynastic role-playing game that only masquerades as a strategy game.

Victoria 3 I am still on the edge on. I bought the base game, but never the DLCs. Victoria 3 is a deeply flawed game, which is extremely frustrating because of a myriad of complicate interactions that often you can't see, or can't properly influence. What I find especially annoying is the system of revolutions, where it is easily possible that you get two competing interest groups radicalized, and both options of whether to enact a law or not will lead to revolution. And political unrest is always handled in the form of a civil war, where part of the country splits of to form a new country and wages war against the other half. That certainly represents a historical reality of the American Civil War, but the revolutions of 1848 in Europe didn't really work that way. [Sidebar: This is also why we should be careful with predictions of what will happen in the USA after the November elections: A "civil war" like the one from a century and a half ago is extremely unlikely, due to the opposing sides not being geographically well separated. Other forms of political violence, like the January 6 2020 insurrection are much more likely. The one thing that is unlikely is that the losing side, whichever one that might be, will just accept the democratic will of the majority.] Victoria 3 doesn't really do political unrest very well, which is a shame in a game where domestic policy is such a big part.

For both Victoria 3 and Crusader Kings 3 for me it might be more fun to watch other people play the game, especially if they bring some historical knowledge and/or roleplaying to the game. Playing these games myself is more likely to disappoint or frustrate me, although I will probably give Victoria 3 another go after the 1.6 patch.

Sunday, March 03, 2024
 
Is there an advantage to be large in the video game business?

In October 2023 a small board game company released a card game called Forest Shuffle (or "Mischwald" in German). This turned out to be a rather good game, and thus became rather popular. As a consequence, I can't buy an English language copy anywhere, and the original German language version is likewise sold out. Small company means small production runs, and even if the game is a hit, it takes quite a while to produce another batch. Even if an initial print run sells out fast, it doesn't make the small company directly rich, and so probably even a second print run will be limited in size and might sell out equally fast. There is little economy of scale here.

The video game business is very, very different. Video games aren't sold on disks anymore, and there is no limit to how many copies can be sold of a game online. Thus if a game like Palworld is unexpectedly popular, it can sell 19 million copies without running into print run or production problems. The only possible limitation is when a game like Helldivers 2 needs servers to run, and the game is so popular that the servers are full. But even that is a lot faster to solve than the production of a physical game.

A person walking into a board game store with the intention of buying Forest Shuffle is going to be told that the game won't be available for a while. So they might well end up buying a game that has the advantage of being available. And bigger companies can afford bigger print runs and have an advantage in the physical availability of their games in stores. Bigger video game companies don't have that advantage. 2024 is shaping up with games like Palworld and Helldivers 2 from small companies selling extremely well, while games that were much more expensive to produce like Suicide Squad or Skull and Bones sell rather badly and fail to break even.

Of course big companies have other advantages, but these advantages seem to be less prominent in the video game business. There seems to be some sort of inverse correlation between the size of a video game company and the quality of the games it produces. Smaller companies making passion projects appear to often do well. Large corporate entities under pressure from shareholders can make stupid mistakes under that pressure. That also affects longevity of game studios. Making a good and successful game can make a studio larger, and then end up producing much worse games: Just look at CD Projekt Red going from Witcher 3 to Cyberpunk 2077, or the perceived downfall of Blizzard. Embracer Group buying up 129 video game studios and trying to become a giant in the video game industry didn't exactly work out well.

In the movie industry the $100+ million movie has arguably taken over the market to the detriment of smaller companies and smaller budget movies, even if that model is also showing its problems. In the games industry it seems to be a lot harder for the $100+ million games to dominate the market.

Monday, February 26, 2024
 
Moving house in Nightingale

I followed the tutorial and main story in Nightingale, as it gives you a sense of purpose. So at one point you have to choose between a forest, desert, or swamp "abeyance" realm. Abeyance basically being the lowest difficulty level, having the lowest resource tier, and this is thus designated as the realm where you build your base in. You actually can't build a respite (home teleport) point anywhere but in an abeyance realm. So I built my base, and continued with the story, unlocking the next level of realms, the antiquarian ones. There I found the fae tower, where I got the item that allowed me to build my own realm portals.

With my own portal in my base, I started to experiment with realms and portals. You can make paper out of wood easily, and ink out of berries or mushrooms. So creating cards for realms is cheap. Now normally, every combination of two realm cards exists only once. If you made a forest antiquarian realm and then use another portal with the same forest antiquarian combination, you end up in the same place. Everything you built there will be there, and everything you collected there will be gone. However, you can specify that instead of reopening a portal to that forest antiquarian realm, you want to create a fresh one. That erases the previous version, including everything you built there, but gives you a fresh slate for exploring and looting points of interest again.

At this point in the game, you need a lot of T1 essences to upgrade your gear. And I had noticed that the fae tower gives a good amount of essences, plus the item you need to build a portal. So I decided to farm T1 essences by farming fae towers: From my home base and portal I reset the forest antiquarian realm, went to the fae tower in the fresh realm, looted everything there, teleported back home, and then started the same process over. So now I have hundreds of T1 essences, and materials to build half a dozen portals.

Then I became dissatisfied with my home base. The forest abeyance realm in which I had built it had the points of interest far from each other. And I had built too far from anything, and in a location that wasn't all that great. Demolishing everything and moving a few hundred meters away seemed a lot of work, until I realized that I could use my learnings from resetting realms. It was easier to make a fresh forest abeyance realm than to move in the one I already had.

The process still took some time: I created a nice forest antiquarian realm and built a bunch of storage crates right next to the portal there. Then I moves all my materials from my home base to that temporary storage. I demolished all my crafting stations and the house, and moved those materials as well. Then, from the forest antiquarian realm I used the portal to reset the forest abeyance realm, erasing my old home realm in the process. In the new forest abeyance realm I found a nice location close to the portal and built a new house there, now a lot bigger and with a slated roof. Then I built storage crates in the house, and moved all the materials from the temporary storage in the forest antiquarian base there using fast travel. Now I have a nice new home base in a better location and am well set up to continue exploring this game.

Sunday, February 25, 2024
 
Solium Infernum

Solium Infernum is Latin for "the throne of hell", and that is exactly what you are fighting for in this game. Solium Infernum is a 4X game that just released for $40 (-15% discount now) on Steam. You play as a devil, an archfiend, on a relatively small hex map in a relatively short game, with "relatively" being in comparison to other 4X games like Civilization. The main reason this is so, is that you are limited each turn to just a small number of orders, only 2 at the start of the game, and later potentially going up to 6. With tons of possible options, selecting the best orders for this turn is quite a challenge, and completely fulfills Sid Meier's condition that good games are a series of interesting decisions.

Things work differently in hell, you can't just attack your neighbor when you want to. Instead you need to start with a diplomatic play, like sending him a demand for tribute. If he pays up, good for you! If he doesn't pay up, even better, as that now gives you the opportunity to attack him. But even then wars are limited, you set a goal for limited objectives, and the war automatically ends if you fulfill those. Because the overall goal of Solium Infernum is gaining the most prestige, with prestige wagers on wars just being one of many possible ways to gain it.

Solium Infernum is great fun, as there is a lot of treachery and backstabbing going on, and other players can play events that completely mess up your careful plans. It actually works a lot better in multiplayer than the typical 4X game, because there is a lot more player interaction, and players can take their turns simultaneously, with all of them then being resolved at the same time. It reminds me a bit of the board game Diplomacy.

The one downside of that is that if you play this game solo, the AI is only mediocre. It can make good moves, but lacks the ability to plan ahead and coordinate several actions into a greater whole. There also is only one level of AI, and once you understood the game mechanics completely, you should be able to reliably beat the AI in a standard game. To help out with that problem, there is a series of scenarios, which get you to play all the different archfiends, getting increasingly harder due to unfavorable starting conditions. Like in the very first scenario your one legion starts with only a single hit point, giving the other players time to conquer stuff while you heal up.

Solium Infernum is not an early access game, but a full release, based on a previous game from 2009 with the same name. The current version is a lot prettier, and somewhat improved in other ways as well. There are still a few bugs left, but hotfixes are already incoming, and there seems to be a plan for continued support. It might be something of a sleeper hit, as there was very little marketing for this game, and as a result the game is a lot better than the player numbers would suggest. Solium Infernum is a lot more solid and balanced than Millenia, but Millenia had the huge marketing of publisher Paradox behind it, while Solium Infernum is self-published. As we are still in the oversupply phase of the video games pork cycle, Solium Infernum risks being overlooked in the flood of new game releases. Which would be a pity, because it sure has a lot of interesting concepts and fun to offer.

Friday, February 23, 2024
 
Agemonia received

In September 2021 I backed the Agemonia board game on Kickstarter. At the time, the estimated delivery date was December 2022. Today, in February 2024, the game actually arrived, "only" 14 months late. In that post of 2021 I listed 8 games I had crowdfunded; I now received 6 of these, and am still waiting on Arydia and 7th Citadel. I got a shipping notification for 7th Citadel, while Arydia (also originally estimated delivery in December 2022) is now not expected before "Fall 2024". Yeah, 2 years late can happen in crowdfunding of board games. But I still didn't have a single game that didn't eventually deliver.

On the positive side, I paid €99 for Agemonia back in 2021, while today the game on the website of the developers is €179. Somewhere in that parcel is a microcosmos of everything that happened in the last 3 years. :)

What wasn't immediately obvious from the crowdfunding page at the time is how huge the box is. It weighs 12 kg, and is bigger in every dimension than the already huge box of Gloomhaven. On the one side that is good, it feels as if I got my money's worth in game materials. On the other hand I have now started more often to play outside my home, for example at the weekly board game night of my friendly local games store, or at friends. This is far too heavy to lug around for such an occasion.

I have started to buy and crowdfund smaller and shorter board games than before. At the board game night in the games shop, you need to be able to set up the game, explain it, and play it within a time window of three-and-a-half hours. That eliminates a lot of the large campaign games like Agemonia, weight aside. There is no way around it, I need to adjust my board game preferences to the other people I need to play them with.

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Thursday, February 22, 2024
 
Some comments on Nightingale

How's your internet? It turns out that this might substantially influence your enjoyment of Nightingale. I am lucky, and I have 1 Gbps fiber internet. That turns out to not only be good for big downloads, but also for ping and latency. In Nightingale I get below 40 ms of ping consistently, which means that I don't run into some of the problems that other people are complaining about. So, since the servers came back up yesterday afternoon, I was able to play for a while and didn't encounter any technical problems other than long loading times at the start of the game and when using a portal, presumably server-side slowness.

Having said that, Nightingale is visibly still an early access game, with some of the quality of life features still missing, and some of the user interface still a bit rough. But it definitely has potential. Judging from what I could see up to now from the number of different crafting stations and recipes, the tech tree is pretty deep and involved. I like that, although I have seen reviews from people who particularly disliked that aspect. I also like that at the lowest difficulty setting, combat isn't hard at all, I even killed the first boss mob at the end of the first non-tutorial realm without difficulty.

Although that might have been a bit easier for me due to Twitch drops. Twitch drops are in-game items you can get for some games after watching streams about that game for a number of hours. And curiously the gear you get from Twitch drops has gear level 58. Which is substantial in a game where you start the tutorial with gear level 6, and the first boss mob requires gear level 20. Okay, the Twitch drops are only for some of the armor slots and don't include weapons, but I was at gear level 20 due to following the quest, and the Twitch drops increased that to an overall average gear score of 30. I don't mind, and the Twitch gear is sure a lot prettier than the crude gear you can craft at the start. But from a progression point of view I find this a bit weird.

Compared to Palworld, I am building better houses in Nightingale. Well, in Palworld the houses only got you into trouble with pal pathfinding, and you really only needed one foundation, one wall, one roof, and a bed under it. In Nightingale I have a wooden house with four walls, roof, windows and a door. And there is a system in place where I get bonuses for my crafting stations for them being on a solid foundation, sheltered from the elements, warm, and well-lit. Still, I mainly build for gameplay reasons, so the possibility to build in different styles doesn't really excite me. I could have built a stone house instead of a wooden house, but as far as I know there wouldn't have been a gameplay difference, only visuals. Wood was easier to construct, so I stuck with that.

Once you learn how to build a base, you can always quickly fast travel to there from anywhere. But that is a one-way thing. Fortunately I just got to the point where I can build by own portal in my base, which means at least I don't have to run from my base to the local portal all the time anymore. I should have built my first base closer to the portal, but I was trying to find a larger flat area, which turned out to be not wholly necessary.

I am playing Nightingale in third-person view. That, plus turning camera shaking and motion blur off, and increasing the field of view (FOV), results in me not having any problems with video game motion sickness. Although the third-person view is labeled as "experimental" in the settings, it works well enough, except for some minor targeting problems when skinning animals.

Overall I don't regret having paid $30 for Nightingale. The game is fun enough, I do like the graphical style, and the card-based realm / portal system is original and fun enough. Each created realm is relatively small, about the size of one landing zone in Starfield, but considerably prettier and with more stuff to find and explore. I don't think I will stick around for much longer than I did in Palworld, but I can see the potential of the game in adding more different biomes and cards in the future. Having said that, Palworld a month after release still has 10 times more players than Nightingale. There is a bit of a glut of survival crafting games right now.

Wednesday, February 21, 2024
 
Nightingale error

I spent the release day of Nightingale yesterday watching Twitch streams to get a better idea of the game. My main concern was the combat system, as I would hate to be stuck somewhere because I am too slow to vanquish some boss mob gating the content behind. But it turns out that you can play the game at different difficulty levels, and the easiest one seems very doable. Many people actually complain about combat being too easy, mostly because the AI of the mobs isn't great. So today I bought the game, and started the tutorial. So far, so good.

I am not playing right now, because the servers are down, which results in an "error getting shards for client" error message. One of the main problems people have with the game is the design decision to run Nightingale on centralized servers, which leads to all the well-known problems we had with MMORPGs for decades: Servers being down, servers being overloaded at peak hours, slow ping, rubber-banding in game, etc., etc.

While that sort of server architecture is necessary for MMORPGs, it seems somewhat unnecessary for a game with a maximum of 6 players on one shard, and many players playing solo. And I am surprised that after decades of experience, game companies still can't manage to get servers stable on release.

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