Good Morning Folks! For those of you who are off for it or celebrate it, Happy Martin Luther King Jr. Day. I’m choosing to celebrate it… by stacking up a bunch of appointments and then trying to speed run my way through them. So essentially I will be out and about this morning but I wanted to sit down and do my normal Monday morning summary blog post of the shenanigans that I got up to this weekend. It has become a bit of a tradition for myself, Ace, and Ammo to get together Sunday mornings and run whatever strongholds we have unlocked for the week in Destiny Rising. Sometimes if there is time we run whatever event happens to be going on. For example we knocked out a 5 key run of Morgran’s Hunt which is active currently. I enjoy these little group interludes greatly, and any time I can group with Ace and Ammo it is a joy.
In other Destiny Rising news, I have fully unlocked the Jade Rabbit exotic Scout Rifle on all three accounts. Since there are now several Scout Rifle specific characters in the game, this really goes a long way into making them feel more beneficial. Slapping this puppy on Umeko or Kabr 2.0 immediately makes them feel much more solid for group content. I do wish there was a way to change the element of these weapons, but alas that is not really a thing. Basically there is an event running currently that through doing daily content you can unlock this exotic and a skin for it, and if you have not played Destiny Rising in awhile you probably should pop in to get this while it is available. I am not sure if this is going to end up on the exotic shop or not, but at least on my free to play characters it is a massive pain in the ass to gain enough currency through the black market to buy any of these weapons.
I also spent quite a bit of time this weekend in Path of Exile 1. Essentially I am trying to grind out two more of the league challenges so that I can get the same 34 point totem pole that I have for the last several leagues. Essentially I set the focus on grinding out as many Originator influenced maps as I could because you need to run essentially 200 affixes worth of content divided up in as many different ways as possible. If I were doing this with maximum efficiency, I would have made sure I was running only eight mod maps… but I did not do this thing. So a lot of the maps I ran were somewhere in the five or six mod territory making it take significantly more maps in total to grind this out. Essentially I just put my head down and ground until I came out the other end. I did have to snap up some maps off the market and it seems like the going rate for originator influenced anything is around 5-10 chaos each.
Now that I have completed that difficult grind, I am back to just running maps as fast as I can and have chosen to do so on my Ice Trap of Hollowness Elementalist, The character is a heck of a lot of fun, and does a much better job at dealing with the Breach Fortress maps than Righteous Fire did, because I am blowing up most of the screen at all times and also freezing it. Essentially the grind I am working towards is Quality Quandry and I am sitting at 39886 or 50000. Basically going forward I need to run max quality on my maps, which then combines with 15% from the tree, and 20% from running four sacrifice fragments. Regardless…. it is going to just require grinding out a bunch of maps and is honestly the perfect idle activity while listening to an audiobook, podcast, or youtube video. There is the additional side benefit of throwing levels on my elementalist while doing it.
One of the things that I learned this weekend is that you can right click your world and edit it after having created it. This grants access to a few things, for example you can slow down or speed up the day/night cycle. More importantly you can completely disable falling damage and completely disable the death penalty that causes you to lose items on death. I absolutely did these things because I was dying an awful lot and it was annoying me to lose so much stuff in the process. There is one thing that is extremely overpowered in this game, and that is any kind of monster that can poison you. Your health just plummets almost instantly from the damage over time effect. So I figured by disabling the item penalties I am way more free to roam around and run amok. I don’t play games for the challenge of them, I play games for the fun… and not losing shit on death makes things more enjoyable to me personally.
I’ve started on some semblance of a permanent base. There is a floating rock not too far from my original spawn point and I built a staircase up the side of it and then began flattening the top so that I could build a platform. This is essentially going to be my resource sink for awhile as I keep dragging rock of various sorts up here to start building away at a final creation. Probably the most important aspect is creating an optimized crafting area so that I have a bunch of storage chests that are all accessible by each of the machines. I wish the game had some sort of automated filtering system when it comes to chests, or at least some way of labeling each chest for a specific purpose. There might be mods that do this thing, as there are a staggering number of mods already available. For example I installed one that gives you the name of any item your cursor is pointed at, and another one that creates lucky mining streaks for ore so that it will produce additional ore nodes near the one you are mining when it procs.
Not having to worry about losing everything on death, has made the entire process of exploring the world so much more enjoyable. Firstly I want to now hop down every hole that I see because I can’t take falling damage, and the worst thing that can happen to me is that I get ported back to my spawn point. Secondly the entire process of pushing myself deeper under the earth in search of resources is just a way more fun way to play the game than trying to be careful all the time. Combat is always a bit of a battle of attrition and in spite of using your abilities to the fullest, you are always going to take some damage which compounds the longer you are exploring. I think for me this is the ideal way to play, but your mileage may vary if you care about challenge. I also really like the fact that I can just kill myself anytime I get bored of exploring an area and go back to base… rather than having to painstakingly make my way back to the surface.
I hope you had a most excellent weekend. What did you get it up? Have you been playing Hytale as well? Drop me a line below.
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Good Morning Folks! If you are floating around social media this week, you have most certainly seen chatter about a new building/survival Minecraft-like called Hytale. If you have no clue where this game came from, then I will attempt to explain. Essentially back in Minecraft proper, there was a group that ran a series of servers called Hypixel, largely known for the quantity and variety of mini-games that they offered. In 2020 Riot Games acquired Hypixel Studios with the purpose of publishing their game idea called Hytale, but that deal ultimately fell apart in June 2025 with the halting of development on the game. In November 2025, Hypixel Studios and with it Hytale was bought back by the original co-founders and since then we have had a rapid series of updates to the game to prepare it for its launch earlier this week. What you ahve not is a traditional early access model with the ability to buy into testing at various price points with the cheapest being around $20.
The real question however being that is Hytale good, and is it worth buying into? One of the challenges that I have with Minecraft is that I can almost never play the game in its original vanilla un-modified state. When I do play I use a tool called Modrinth to install and keep updated over twenty three mods that make the game feel better to play. Hytale out of the box… feels like a deeply modded Minecraft experience. It has slightly more modern combat, better graphics, and way more system depth in that the baseline feels like playing Minecraft with some sort of a technology pack addon. There are so many simple tweaks that just improve your quality of life, like the ablity to carry a torch in your offhand along with your tool or weapon in your mainhand. This makes exploring the dark depths of the world so much more palatable because really… you don’t NEED to torch off every inch of the world when you are down there only for the purpose of seeking resources.
Probably my single favorite thing that Hytale is doing is that it solves the “night one problem”. When you start a new Minecraft world you essentially have a very short period of time that you need to gather certain things. Firstly you need to craft some sort of a shelter, progress through the most basic tools, and locate either a large source of wood to turn into charcoal… or have some luck with surface coal so you can make torches, and spend some time lighting up an area of the world in order to prepare for the coming night. In Hytale you start off in an abandoned structure that quite honestly does an amazing job of serving as your first base. Once you clean it up a bit you have plenty of room to build all of the early progression, and have a safe hidey hole that you can duck into every night.
That is the other big takeaway that I have so far, is that the Night itself does not feel like as bit of an obstacle as it is in Minecraft. You can pretty much roam around freely at night, and so far almost every dangerous thing that I have come across… has some sort of significant glow effect going on. The Skeletons have glowing eyes and are often carrying a torch, and the weird void touched creatures all have some sort of green glow to them. So essentially if you have your head on a swivel, it is very unlikely you will ever be caught off guard by a random mob roaming up to you. There are these weird flying masses of tentacles that I have not tangled with, but look really ominous. You can barely see it in the above screenshot as it flys above the treeline. I have zero clue what these things are but they seem like they are bad mojo, but I was able to get relatively close to them without it aggroing.
One of the most interesting things about the game is that it has way more intentional creation than Minecraft does. This is a bit of a double edged sword. You are going to spend way more time roaming around the world looking for specific types of structures from the surface, than you are digging down and trying to find things. For example right outside of my first spawn point, is a cave system that goes all the way down to the lava layer, which is essentially what spawns in this game right above bedrock or the bottom of the world. You can in theory find all of the resources you need to get started, in one of these first holes. However as you roam around, different biomes have different resources, or at least certain resources might be more readily available. There was a badlands biome that I found that was loaded with surface iron deposts for example, and a swamp region that had these witches hut looking structures that had loot chests in them.
As a result you are going to be spending a lot more of your time roaming around the world looking for specific things. One of the benefits of exploring at night, is that a lot of the enemy camps have fires and lights, and can be seen easily at a distance. For example one of the first nights that I went roaming I stumbled across a troll village of sorts and thought I was doing really well… until I fell into a spiked pit and realized that there was a whole underground warren that I was not prepared to take on. I’ve found Mineshafts, forgotten villages filled with Skeletons, and entire cave systems full of all manner of poisonous creatures… that will ruin your day if you let them hit you. Essentially it feels like Hytale is delivering on the sort of promises that Cubeworld made, of having a really interesting world filled with meaningful drops. I’ve picked up several pieces of armor in my travels that are way better than anything I can currently craft, and dropped with decent stat bonuses on them. Loot feels like it actually matters in the game, and that alone will make the Minecraft experience so much more interesting.
So far at least, much of the early gameplay seems to be around building out your tech tree and trying to acquire specific resources. Copper Ore for example seen above, dominates the early things that you can build and allowing you to kit out your character in a full set of armor and items. Right now I am in a phase where I desperately need Iron Ore, which is pushing me to go out further and explore more dangerous places… which often leads to my untimely demise. One of the cool things about this game is that unlike Minecraft you don’t teleport back to your spawn point empty handed. You will lose a lot of the resources that you have found… but will at least keep a small percentage of stuff so that you never end up in a situation where a single death makes the game suddenly unplayable. So while I have lost countless chunks of iron down in the depths, I still managed to limp back home with enough of it to upgrade my workbench, and now am working towards upgrading my backpack size and storage limits.
If there was anything that was lacking in Hytale… I would say that it wouild be some sort of overarching quest structure to guide the player through progression. At least based on the original design for the game, it felt like this was going to be more of a feature than it actually is. Right now we have a really solid Minecraft clone, that feels like playing a really good modded server. However I feel like there could be so much more more, and there are lots of things that could be expanded upon. The look and feel of exploring the depths, and all of the cute and interesing critters that you stumble upon in your journey is pretty great. For example I found this amazing underground lake while exploring yet another cave system, and I was almost afraid to hop into the water for fear that it was acid or something. Turns out that no it was just lighting effects and normal water.
One of the few quests that exists in the game revolves around finding a portal to a forgotten temple, which then teleports you to what is likely going to be a social hub at some point in the game’s lifespan. Inside here are all sorts of cute NPCs that really do not do much of anything at the moment. There are a ton of WIP signs, but there are at least a couple of NPCs that allow you to barter life essence for general useful materials. Sadly they did not have any Iron Ore for me, but if I wanted to skip some steps in progression and buy spices for cooking I could do that easy enough. I would like to see more of this sort of content in the game. Let me stumble across traders out in the wilds that what me to collect region specific resources that I can then trade for interesting stuff. Given that so much of the game is about exploration, I am really hoping that there is some sort of waypoint system that allows me to fast travel between areas so I can build a bunch of forward bases as I explore.
I guess I should talk a bit about crafting. Essentially the earliest progression resolves around setting up basic crafting benches that do different things. For example you want to create a Campfire that will consume wood or charcoal and then produce cooked food. You can dump disparate resources into the input slots so that you can cook up multiple items at the same time. Most of the crafting benches will work like this, and they are capable of drawing resources automatically from chests that are stored within the vicinity of the crafting machine. I believe I read somewhere that this is an eight block radius, which means that you are going to want to optimize the placement of your crafting machines around maybe central column of chests. So far the starter building seems to be a good place for dumping these crafting machines and I’ve yet to encounter not being able to draw resources from the banks of chests that I have created there.
All in all I am pretty happy with what I have seen so far of the game. It is way more baked than I was expecting it to be for this point in its development cycle. Combat feels solid, and there is a ton of stuff to explore and find. Thinking back and comparing this to other Minecraft-likes that I played in early access… I would say that this is way more feature complete than Trove, Vintage Story, Boundless, Creativerse, or Nightingale was when I first played each of those. It is clear that this is standing on the backs of the progression systems built into the Minecraft modding scene, but I think that is okay. Setting up a fully modded Minecraft is only now a simple process, and there are many folks who have never gotten to experience what that came can be with enough effort. Hytale is a pretty great start on that experience. I am swapping it up to try third person mode to see if that makes exploration feel a bit less claustophobic.
Like I hinted at in one of the above paragraphs, I tried to pay the game like Minecraft and dig one of my shafts to bedrock and did not quite get there. In all of my way digging down I did not encounter anything terribly useful apart from some ore spawns. I am hoping at some point this is a viable means of playing the game, but right now it feels like you are supposed to be looking for features above ground, rather than spending all of your time digging around underneath it. There are some cave systems near my base that I really want to spend some time properly exploring and torching them off so that I can know where I have been before. I am not really sure if torches prevent spawns in the same way as they do in Minecraft, but that is half the fun of a brand new game like this. There are new rules about the world to learn and understand. For example in Minecraft I can drop into that game and have diamond weapons within the hour. At some point… I hope to reach that level of progression in Hytale.
Have you spent any time playing Hytale? What are your thoughts so far? Drop me a line below.
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I have to admit I feel a little bit bad for the Guerilla Games. This game released in early 2022 and was somewhat screwed over by Elden Ring releasing within a few days of it. Now the PC version is finally out and it is colliding up against the release date for Dragon’s Dogma II. For me… not being a souls-like fan I played this game originally on the PS5 but bounced around the midpoint of the game, or at least what I feel like is the midpoint. After some time I made the decision just to wait and revisit it when it released on PC since I enjoyed the first game infinitely more with a mouse and keyboard. Sony really needs to tighten up the release cadence of these games because two years waiting on a PC release seems a bit brutal. Complaining aside… Horizon Forbidden West is a beautiful game.
On so many levels, this is just mechanically a better version of the first game. It does everything that Zero Dawn did right and then adds multiple layers of nuance and enjoyment on top of that. The addition of gliding really improves the entire experience and makes this quite possibly the best version of “Breath of the Wild” that exists. The mechanics of hunting dinobots is just so much fun. Focusing in on specific weak points and weak elements to quickly decimate these gigantic machines is just pure enjoyment for me. However few moments beat this massively long glide down from the side of a mountain after finishing an epic climb.
The other thing that I really feel like calling out about this game is that the side content is so much more developed. In the first game the main story was the highlight but you still met a lot of really interesting side characters. In Forbidden West every interlude seems to be filled with characters that I legitimately care about. I was happy to see a bunch of folks returning like my Petra, my favorite side character from the first game. However there are a bunch of new characters like Silga… who once heard a radio broadcast for a brief moment and it sort of dominated her destiny from that point forward. So many heart felt stories woven through the forbidden west that I have spent way more time focusing on side content than actually moving the main story forward.
There are also so many freaking vistas that are just breathtaking. Like who else could have made a swamp look this interesting? The color palette of the game is part of what makes it all work so well. Everything is so vibrant and really pops on the screen, even without leaning on the gimmick of HDR since I generally play with that turned off. For the most part I have been playing the game at 1440p at at 144hz and it looks amazing. There have been a few times I shift it up and do 1080p 60hz when I am downstairs and playing on my laptop remote into my gaming machine upstairs via Parsec and that still looks gorgeous.
That is not to say there are not some performance issues with the game. There are some areas surrounding the region known as “The Grove” or “Lowland Territory” that have volumetric fog that seems to slow everything down. The game has received a few minor patches and I have not experienced since the first days, so maybe that is now taken care of… but I did experience some sluggish experience in a few specific areas. This was also something that impacted cutscenes where the dialog and the animations were wildly out of sync with the animations playing much too slowly. Like I said I have not experienced this in a few days and there were some patches… so hopefully it was a bug that was taken care of but I can’t talk about the game without at least mentioning that there were some issues from time to time.
I’ve passed the point where I was in my previous attempt at the game, and I have no clue how far I am from the end… but it is my goal to wrap this up prior to the launch of the Path of Exile League on Friday. That is going to happen fairly late in the day and I am off Friday so if nothing else I should be able to wrap up loose ends then. The Horizon series is just a phenomenal experience and it gives me some hope about the talk of an MMORPG version of this game. If I could have a game that is a mishmash of Horizon, Destiny, and Monster Hunter that I could play with friends… I would be in heaven. The only thing that gives me some pause… is that this project is being led by NC Soft… a company that is not known for creating games that I love. Sure they published Guild Wars 2… but that is more Arena.Net than anything that NC Soft did. They also had the short-sightedness to cancel City of Heroes so… suffice to say I am cautious about that project.
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Good Morning Folks! Since the Last Epoch servers were down last night in preparations for the 1.0 launch today, and Nightingale opened up for early access I decided to give the game a spin. Right now the game is on an introductory price of $26.99 and I figured since I knew I was going to pick it up eventually, I might as well get in at the cheapest price. I feel like I need to set the stage for this discussion. I’ve played a lot of survival games over the years and most recently have been playing a heck of a lot of Enshrouded. This is going to greatly color my opinion of this game. After spending around 5 hours last night playing Nightingale I can state without a doubt that it isn’t an awful game, but so far at this stage in development it isn’t a great one either.
Let’s scroll back a few years and take a look at the original trailer that announced the game during the 2021 Game Awards. I realize this is setting us up for failure because early trailers are more akin to a “mood board” than anything related to what the final product is going to look like. What I got from that trailer is that we would be Cthulhu-style Victorian-era adventurers in cool costumes tromping through the fae multiverse looking for treasure and building settlements. I personally imagined something with a combat system akin to New World, with big chunky good feeling attacks and interesting combatants to fight and a bunch of gorgeous realms to explore. I imagined a building system something akin to Valheim where you recruit people and bring them back to your base to build up to some epic battles as the baddies attack you. I admit I have not followed the development of this game terribly closely, but these trailers and the ones that followed at Summer Game Fest recently set the expectations.
Nightingale has a bunch of really interesting ideas. It has one of the more creative character generators I have seen to date, where not only do you set the looks of your character but you also can define your background and lineage. For example, if you so choose… you can creat the appearance of every person in your direct line for three generations… and then choose to inherit traits in your appearance rather than set them yourself. This is some utter nonsense, but you can tell this is something that one person on the team was super passionate about. My only complaint was with the beard options where I could not have a nice full bushy beard and essentially had to choose between a svelt goatee and a lovely set of muttonchops.
What they nailed was the world. There were several moments where I just had to stop and enjoy the vistas. It has a very Myst like quality to it, as you explore these areas that were once inhabited by the Fae with impossible constructions, floating towers, and such. The world maybe doesn’t feel quite as atmospheric as the trailers would indicate. During tutorial quests you end up crossing through a Forest, a Desert, and a Swamp… the three biomes that exist in the game currently, and all of them very much felt like what you would expect from a procedural generator. While there were some cool set pieces, none of them felt terribly atmospheric. Each of these three tutorial realms had a very limited scope and served to teach you how the tech tree works.
This starts us down the problem I am having with this game. If I compare it against other survival titles… it is ploddingly slow. In this sort of game, I am used to hitting the beach… because it always seems to be a beach… gathering some twigs and rocks and outfitting myself in my first tools and weapons within the first fifteen minutes. Everything feels extremely drawn out as you have to wait for the game to give you permission to craft anything… which doesn’t really take place until you reach the second of the three tutorial realms. This sluggish quality seems to carry forward into all aspects of crafting. It takes forever for you to be able to craft your own clothing because in order to get to that point you have to have crafted three different sorts of machines to assemble some slapdash leather.
When you can assemble your first gear set… it looks like this. We were drawn in from the trailer and visuals of romping around the wilds in spats and petticoats… and instead, you look like every murder hobo in every survival game. I look like I am about to defend my steakwrap by shivving you. I get that this is the starter “tattered” gear, but in order to get started and run through the first major objective you have to upgrade out of what looked like much better gear. Essentially we are a few hours into the game and the anachronistic aesthetic from all of the trailers is already shot. I am sure that eventually, we will probably have access to get that looks like the trailers, but at the rate of progression through the game, it seems like it will be months down the line.
One of the biggest problems that I am having with the crafting system is “bag bloat”. Essentially recipes will request a type of ingredient, for example “t1 Bones” and that can come from any Tier 1 animal that can drop bones. However in your bag… the items are kept in separate stacks as to whether or not they came from a predator or a prey animal, or later when you learn fishing… each TYPE of fish is stored separately. This trickles through to the final produced material so the game can see that I have “16 Meat” on my hotbar, but in my actual bags this is a combination of grilled prey meat, grilled predator meat, and each individual type of fish that I have caught and cooked. The types of ingredients you put into a meal impact the stats of the meal slightly, but so far this has seemed to be negligible, and all I really care about how is healing myself and not dying to the hunger mechanic that slowly kills you. This isn’t so much a problem for your character’s backpack, but it rapidly becomes a problem in trying to store this nonsense in baskets. There really needs to be a way to convert up materials to a generic form that stacks cleanly.
The other problem that I am starting to get into is that every craft seems to require refinement of a bunch of different materials in order to craft it. This mostly just serves to slow down the gameplay as you have to wait on a bunch of machines to craft up enough of the refined resources in order to do the final combine. I’m more used to survival games using something like a tiering system… which the game seems to have… but isn’t utilizing in the manner I am used to. I would expect a Tier 2 machine would require Tier 2 metal and Tier 2 wood… not just refined versions of the T1 materials or the secondary byproducts of refining the items. For example, if you want to make a Candle you need a wick, and if you want to make a wick you need two twines, and if you want to make twine you need “fibers” either through gathering plant fibers or refining meat into animal fibers. It rapidly feels a bit tedious to actually make anything.
The building system feels similarly cumbersome. I would expect to be able to create a wooden shanty quickly by chopping down some trees and using the wood that I gained from said trees. That is not the case and all of the “wooden” block types require you to gather three resources… plant fiber, sticks, and proper wood. Stone however just requires stone… so I have been crafting everything out of that. Stone however is a limited resource and I am slowly running out of stone piles on the island to harvest because Nightingale is not a voxel game with destructable terrain, which means that I can’t just start excavating the side of a mountain to get resources. I have to harvest specific nodes that yield a specific type of material and then deliver it back to the build side and apply it to the designed form. On one hand, it is really cool that you can essentially plan out the entire building in blueprint form, but when you apply resources… it applies them to the entire blueprint at once and then chooses to “finish” seemingly random blocks.
One of the particularly cumbersome elements comes from when you want to remove an item and place it somewhere else. There is no easy way to remove a segment of the wall or pick back up a crafting machine to place it somewhere else. You can toggle on build mode with “X” key… which I had to find by sifting through the keybindings, and in theory, you can deconstruct an item. This will cause a pile of materials to drop to the ground. However, it does not seem to be ALL of the materials that went into crafting the item initially. The other option is just to break an item… at which point you lose ALL resources that went into building it. Sure it is probably more realistic that if you knock down a wall, you can’t just stand it back up again but we are already dealing with magical floating blueprints so I feel like quality of life is a more important trait here.
You can recruit other survivors but they are honestly… kind of idiots. Here is my companion Agnes lighting herself on fire by walking through the cook stove. I legitimately was tabbed out last night typing a message and heard the clear sound of something catching on fire, only to flip over to this scene. I guess the positive is that Agnes appears to be immortal. She has very simple AI and that AI is to harvest every tree she sees… and gives zero fucks about whether or not that tree is going to fall on top of you and deal damage. You can be in the middle of combat and she is going to walk over and immediately start felling a fucking tree while you are skinning the corpse. She is as good at combat as she is at standing in fires.
This takes us to what I feel is the critical flaw in the game for me. Skyrim is a game that we all love and it did some groundbreaking things for open-world gaming… but even for 2010, it had what I would consider to be pretty shitty combat. Combat in Nightingale feels like Skyrim where mobs just sort of blindly rush at you the second they spot you… flailing wildly… and you sort of just have to swing blindly at them until you connect enough times to kill them hoping that your hitpoints outlast their ability to reduce them. There is no real strategy here. I found that I could just jump backwards in order to avoid most attacks and this became my strategy for ranged attacking them down until they died. Attacking with a melee weapon felt awful. Generally speaking, when you enter combat you have three to six things trying to attack you at the same time and your combat is mostly useless.
I completed the first dungeon and took on the first boss… and it was also similarly bad. It just sort of charged at you and you would need to duck out of the way and plink it down as it was ramping up for the next attack. I mostly used the pillars as a way of skirting around the boss because attacking head-on seemed like an awful idea. Its mechanics consisted on a dash attack and a big point-blank AOE, but otherwise, it just seemed to keep locking on my location and I needed to stop being there for a while. A lot of the selling point of this game is to go off on adventures fighting baddies and looking for cool treasure, and honestly… I am not sure I want any more of this combat. If this is representative of what the game has to offer, and based on some reviews I watched this morning before sitting down to write this… it seems like it is.
There is also the problem of loot. If I am going to go delving into dungeons I feel like there should be some reward at the end of my troubles. What Nightingale has for loot is what I could call “Minecraft Loot” aka some random resources. You might find a single ignot… or a wick… or maybe even some leather straps, but nothing resembling anything special and unique to that dungeon. If the reward for doing dungeons is the same bullshit that I can get anywhere else on the island… then why am I doing the dungeons? The answer is that you have to do the dungeons in order to unlock new cards… which then allow you to open new realms… where you can gather more resources and have more crappy combat. For me at least that mechanical loop is flawed because if everything is just more of the same… “we have Skyrim at home”.
The problem that I see with Nightingale, is it is trying to be a bunch of different games and not really succeeding at any of them. It isn’t what I would consider a good crafting for survival game, because everything feels way too tedious, especially at the beginning. It isn’t a good adventure and exploration game, because combat feels awful. It isn’t a good dungeon delving game, because there is zero loot chase. Nightingale is not a bad game by any means… but it isn’t a particularly good one either. It is launching into a crowd that is thick with really good games that are hitting all of these buttons. Enshrouded for example launched similarly in early access but landed with a game that felt pretty damned close to finished. Valheim a few years ago did what Nightingale is trying to do but just better in spite of being woefully unpolished and having its own stack of problems. The major selling point of Nightingale is adventuring in weird period outfits… and that goes out the window the moment you have to craft something for yourself.
I get that Nightingale is an early-access game, and there is a little warning at the launch to make sure you understand that. However generally speaking in spite of the flaws that a game might have in early access, I can often see a core of the game that is good and just needs as lot of polish and bug fixing. With Nightingale, I am just not seeing a fun mechanical game loop that warrants me spending much more time with it. I put five hours in last night and I would have expected in that time for the game to have set the hook. It is a perfectly reasonable game… it just isn’t better than anything else in the survival and exploration genre. When you are launching in the same year as PalWorld and Enshrouded… you sorta have to do something really good in order to stand out from the pack and I am not seeing it. Sure the world is gorgeous… but a gorgeous world only gets you so far.
The post Nightingale Initial Thoughts appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
