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Impressions: Nightingale
I had low expectations rolling into Nightingale – a Mixed review score on Steam and its own game directors professing disappointment will do it – but the game was surprisingly good. To be fair, I only started playing until after the Realms Rebuilt reengineering, so perhaps I would have been less surprised with the original rollout.
What I do want to note for posterity is my current giddiness and wonder surrounding the principle conceit of the game: portals to fae realms. I have played a lot of survival crafting games in my time, and it’s not particularly often that the world itself (or the potential thereof) excites me. But this initial Abeyance realm? Very excellent first impression. And as I was exploring the island, I kept thinking about how many problems realm-walking solves. Usually, carving up the world into disjointed instances is more of a programmer shortcut than artistic design, but it simply synergizes perfectly here. The only other games that achieved this level of environmental design brilliance for me was Starbound and No Man’s Sky. Getting that same feeling in a non-sci-fi setting is practically unheard of.
Now, it’s important to understand I haven’t actually made it off of this tutorial island yet. All this potentiality in my mind is exactly that: a superposition of imagination not yet intersected with reality. I have no doubt the waveform will eventually collapse and we’ll see, yet again, that the cat died in the box. But regardless of what ends up happening with Nightingale, I do want to see more things like this. I think having a more fae and/or eldritch angle on the genre is an otherwise untapped vein of novelty.
As far as general gameplay, Nightingale again surprised me in several ways. Chopping trees breaks off chunks, mining ore chips away rock where you hit it; little details like that go a long way with me. I remember reading people complaining about combat and the AI, but so far it appears serviceable, if not robust. The pseudo-zombie Bound mobs run, crawl, lurch towards you from multiple angles. Your character can block, get knocked around from attacks, and have a dedicated dodge button. Non-standard traversal is also supported, with a Mary Poppins-style umbrella glide and rock-climbing picks that you can also throw at surfaces to grappling hook yourself up. Again, all on the tutorial island.
One huge innovation that I hardly ever see in any game is the fact that multiple different resources can be used in recipes. For example, one cooking recipe calls for two Raw Edible Plants – this can be satisfied with mushrooms, blueberries, barberries, etc, or mixed and matched. This may not seem like a big deal, but think about all the times you’ve had wolf meat in a game but couldn’t craft something because it required boar meat or whatever. Additionally, all these resources have specific bonuses associated with them. Gloves need Hide to craft? Okay, well, you can use Hide (Prey), Hide (Predator), or Hide (Bug), and they will confer +Stamina, +HP, or +StaminaRegen respectively.
Having said that, there are definitely some… let’s say opportunities for quality of life improvements.
I was able to recruit a follower NPC who helpfully assists me in combat and also picks up resources automatically. That’s great! Their inventory is not weight-based like mine though, it’s item-based. While this works out in my favor if I’m loading them down with heavy resources like wood or stone, they are just as likely to fill their pockets with leaves and twine, necessitating some awkward inventory management. Furthermore, while I greatly appreciate being able to craft from storage, could we craft from NPC inventory too?
Also, while I love the idea of “decorative” objects conferring a bonus to crafting stations and items created, it feels real dumb to have no control over which bonuses take precedent. Maybe this is a “problem” that gets solved later on with higher-tier crafting stations (that have more than two enhancement slots), but once I realized I had to move the Hunting Trophy across the house in order for the Training Dummy to grant my crafted Knife +Critical Damage, I wanted to throw the entire system in the trash. Like, what’s the design intention, folks? Am I supposed to have two separate Crafting Tables set up, one surrounded by objects that grant me 20% ammo per craft and +Damage on ranged weapons, and the other near objects with +Melee modifiers? Or is my “pick it up and place it in another room” workaround the design goal? Just… let us toggle which ones are active.
——
Having made it to the 2nd island, things are getting a bit more abrasive. The enemies are much harder, presumably tuned to be a challenge for players in Tier 2 equipment. But the only real way to get Tier 2 equipment is to gather Tier 2 essence to unlock the upgraded crafting stations. Meanwhile, surprise, the realm has a negative modifier that reduces your HP regeneration. The whole situation was a bit brutal. But now I’ve unlocked a bow that literally deals 100 more damage per arrow than I deal currently, using materials I can gather from my Abeyance realm. Which… is not the way that is typically supposed to work. Anyway, once that gets crafted, I’ll continue onwards to farm mobs for essence to unlock more crafting stations so I can craft the gear that will allow me to be actually successful in exploring the area.
Anyway, if I had to sum up the things I would like addressed over Early Access thus far, it would be:
- Toggle active Augmentations on crafting stations
- Craft from NPC inventory
- Sort by Weight option when viewing NPC inventory
- Remove or reengineer Hunger Meter (Food buffs mean you’re always full anyway)
- Reimagine the Magick/spells system entirely (it’s barely supported and boring to boot)
- Tighten up traversal mechanics, e.g. what can be climbed, grappled, etc
- Allow us to build bridges
Other than that, so far, I’m very impressed.
Card Hunter’s F2P, Multiplayer, and Potential
Let’s get started.
Multiplayer
As strong as the campaign mode is right now, Card Hunter’s multiplayer is probably going to provide the “long-tail” revenue for the game. Because by “multiplayer,” what they really mean is PvP. The basic setup is pretty simple: your three characters against their three characters in 20-minute matches. Every map I have seen thus far includes Victory Squares (+1 Victory Point per turn that you control it) as well, so the games do not necessarily devolve into simple death-match.
There are some pretty big incentives to give multiplayer a try, even if you aren’t necessarily into that sort of direct competition. Winning your first multiplayer match of the day grants you a chest that has a guaranteed Rare drop, for instance – plus another Rare item if you have a subscription. The reward path after that extends outwards to special Rare chests at 3rd, 7th, 12th, and finally an Epic chest at #20.
Pictured: Not Multiplayer, just a tactical genius at work.
A particularly clever move on the dev’s part – aside from the subtle push into subscriptions to double your guaranteed rewards – is the fact that if no one is available to play against (at your MMR), you will automatically get into a match against the computer. Which, trust me on this, just as brutal in MP as it is in the normal campaign. Which is awesome.
The downside to multiplayer is the downside to multiplayer everywhere: other people. I have only faced one human opponent thus far and he/she was a perfect gentleman/lady, but the beta forums are awash with concern over how to handle players who intentionally drag out games in attempts to win via boredom. Since the queue time for games visibly increases based on MMR, this is a particularly apt concern. The solution seems to be heading towards a progressively shorter turn timer (2 min, 1 min, 30 seconds) based on a player hitting certain limits, but I’m not entirely sure the full scope of player metagame malevolence is being appreciated here. Unless the triggers are invisible, why not wait until [Trigger – 1 second] to play your card? You know, other than to avoid being an asshole?
It is also worth mentioning that, given Card Hunter is a game about hunting for cards, you will also encounter other people with way better cards than you. The MMR should help with things a bit, but some of your matches are going to suck enormously when your mad tactical skillz are thwarted by a rich moron buoyed up to your MMR by the power of their cards. Speaking of which…
F2P
In talking about Card Hunter’s F2P scheme, there is really only two things to note.
First, my (beta) experience thus far as a non-paying customer has been fantastic. Based on what I have seen, I do not think there is really a paywall or some necessary purchase you cannot do without. Given the game’s incredible difficulty, you might feel tempted to purchase a few bonus chests or otherwise acquire more loot earlier in the game (when you are more restricted by random drops) though. While it is possible this could change as I enter the “endgame” (my party is level 11ish at the moment), it would very much surprise me.
The second thing is that just because you don’t have to spend money in a F2P to have fun, that doesn’t mean that you will get a good value for your money if you do spend. This is, unfortunately, the state I see Card Hunter’s cash shop in right now.
To illustrate the issue, let’s start with the cash shop currency page:
/sigh
I will ignore, with difficulty, the fact that there is a $99 option for the cash shop currency. I mean, I guess a 12-month subscription to an MMO would run $180 before discounts and such. But seeing the “best value” option set at $99 tells me that the devs are either A) incredibly optimistic, or B) setting up the game to make make one hundred dollar purchases of things attractive to players.
Gut reactions aside, a better metric of the F2P Evilness Scale is to look at the lower end of things. The minimum buy-in is $5, for example, which raises an eyebrow. What exactly can I purchase with $5? Well…
/double-sigh
So we have “cosmetic” options which are really just new figurines altogether. Do note though, that purchasing these new figures is the only way to access the other gender options for your race/class. You can purchase new Multiplayer Starter kits, which is the equivalent of a sort of theme deck in a TCG. While you can use your campaign characters in multiplayer – everyone is scaled to the same max level – the huge difference would be the quality of your starting items. There are “treasure hunt” maps which are dungeons that reward guaranteed epic items that you can purchase either individually or collectively with a discount. It wouldn’t be a F2P game without some ($5) lockboxes, of course. You can also straight-up convert leftover pizza into gold at a 5:1 ratio.
I saved the “best” for last, though. Card Hunter has a subscription option whose benefit is receiving one additional item any time you open a treasure chest. You will know about this functionality from the first map onward, because the game will show you exactly what bonus loot you are missing out on every single time. I… suppose that that is alright, in the scheme of things. It doesn’t necessary feel like cash-shop-in-your-face as some other games, even though it technically is.
*twitch*
How much do the subs costs? Basically it will be $10/month (with +30 pizza), or you can get the 3-month subscription for… err… hold on, let me break out the calculator. 850 pizza means $20 (690 pizza) + $5 (150 pizza), which leaves us 10 pizza short.
…excuse me for a second…
Are you fucking kidding me? Ten of your goddamn tokens? Don’t try and tell me that was an accident. This is some Microsoft Points level of intentionally asinine corporate bullshit. Jesus Christ, this is the sort of malicious “trick the customer” design that poisons the entire concept of F2P. If you want to charge me $23.62 for your 3-month subscription, fine, charge it. This ten-hotdogs-eight-buns nonsense has got to go.
Ahem. Where was I?
If you buy the $20 and $10 tiers, you can get the 3-month subscription with 170 pizza left over. That is enough overflow to then pick up one of the epic lockboxes (-150 pizza) and then you are left with 20 pizza… which is, of course, ten pizza away from purchasing the 30 pizza lockbox. About the only scenario that doesn’t leave you with leftover arcade tokens pizza is the $20 buy-in with the 1-month subscription + unlock of the Treasure maps + 3 of the Rare lockboxes. Which is probably alright.
Potential
With Card Hunter as it exists now, I believe most people will likely consume all that they wish to within a month, provided they play on an MMO time-scale. A month is not a bad amount of time at all, especially for how much entertainment value you get at the $0.00 price-point for a game that runs in your browser. Multiplayer might satisfy for a bit longer, but it’s tough imagining that it will provide months and months more content even for those that enjoy tactical games. After all, you will eventually get the strongest items in the game, and that will be that – it’s tough to transition from a state of eagerly anticipating a rare drop to simply having fun playing within the same game, in my experience.
Where things could get potentially crazy is with the Custom game feature. You can, right at this moment in beta, create your own encounters for other players to try. This includes “drawing” your own map and placing monsters. I have not had a chance to dabble with it, but if anything, this is the feature that could spiral Card Hunter out (further) into a class of its own. Imagine creating your own 3-5 battle modules, complete with the sort of D&D sheet in front and pre/post-game writeups. Imagine being able to string several of those along in sequence.
*evil cackle*
Or how about going even crazier? Like instead of multiplayer being two people using their parties against each other, imagine one side controlling the monsters. Or allowing multiple players to control the same side, e.g. 3-person teams. All of a sudden, the game stops being a tactical mock-up of old-school D&D and starts being an online version of D&D.
If you are wondering why I see all this potential in Card Hunter and not in other games, the answer is pretty simple: it’s possible. Let me break it down:
- Card Hunter is not being made by some large corporation (even if their F2P pricing is similar);
- Multiplayer and custom games are already implemented;
- The graphical overhead is nil and no voice acting, making additions easy to implement;
- The game devs clearly like D&D enough to play such a great homage to it;
- Free content that players will likely pay for the privilege to make.
Make DM tools/campaign creation available with a subscription, allow user ratings to separate the wheat from the chaff, pay the successful module creators in Monopoly money pizza currency, and watch the real dollars roll in.
Bam! You’re welcome.
Shooting the Moon
As you may have heard, the companies behind Kingdoms of Amalur and the followup MMO are basically out of business. While I am sensitive to the dangers of schadenfreude, and loath to quote the same guy twice in three days, there was something about Keen’s final good-luck paragraph that struck me oddly:
[…] Following games closely and being so excited for something, just to have it shut down at a moment’s notice, is the hardest part of being such eager gaming enthusiasts. Such potential for something fresh or new is destroyed, but we’ll continue to see a new Call of Duty game released every year and a horrible MMO will see the light of day simply because it has a huge publisher. So frustrating.
Kotaku is reporting that 38 Studios only would have been saved if Amalur sold 3 million copies.
Let that sink in. Three million copies or bust. Depending on who you ask, Amalur sold between 400k and 1 million.
I dunno, I am of two minds on the implicit lament in Keen’s quote. I do consider it a serious problem that the barrier to entry for RPGs (and games in general) has gotten so high as to choke out all but the biggest studios. Remember the thousands of garbage NES games on the shelves back in the early 90s? Most were bad, but at least it appeared as though someone with a good game concept had a realistic chance of getting their cartridge on store shelves.
On the other hand? I feel like it is a bit unrealistic. It is easy to hate on Call of Duty when a “new” one is pumped out every year… but Black Ops sold 25 million copies. MW3 made $1 billion in 16 days, and that was seven months ago; god only knows how much it’s up to now.
Desiring fresh and new things is fine, but it’s code for “I’m not getting catered to.” At some point, you have to ask “Who can afford to cater to me?” If Amalur’s direction was your thing, good for you, but the market clearly couldn’t support it. So… Curt Schilling should have settled for less, designing a less expensive game with a lower break-even point. But would any of us have been satisfied with that? Would you be fine playing an indie-level MMO or other game? Would you be willing to lower your (obviously high) standards to meet the developers making the actual games you’re talking about?
I am probably not coming across very clear; in fact, if any of that makes sense to you, let me know, because it kinda doesn’t make sense to me. It is just that whenever I see a lament about how a “horrible MMO will see the light of day” as compared to presumably a good one on the cutting-room floor, I cannot help but shake the “Whose fault is that?” retort. The publisher? The fans? Or our own unreasonable expectations?
Whatever the case, I always a respect for those who attempt to shoot the moon. Win or lose, you always leave with a story – which is more than most.
In An Age 
Titan Felled
Sep 24
Posted by Azuriel
I spent about 10 minutes coming up with various clever variations on Titanfall and Attack on Titan, but alas.
Blizzard has killed Project Titan after seven years in development. That Polygon article is overflowing with choice quotes.
Some would certainly argue that Titan isn’t the only project they can no longer find the fun/passion for.
Like… wow. (Err… no pun intended) That has “exit strategy” written all over it. And speaking of that:
I didn’t get the chance to mention it earlier, but Hearthstone hit 20 million players. Or “players,” whatever. It is still 10 million more than they had in March. While it’s tough to actually come to any sort of definitive conclusions about the significance of those numbers given how it’s a F2P game that is hitting mobile devices, it is clear that it wasn’t just a flash in the pan. If this analyst from CinemaBlend.com (…err) can be believed, Hearthstone could pull in $30 million in revenue this year… which is basically 14% of what WoW brings in yearly. Not bad for a team of 12-15 people.
Back to Titan though, being cynical is easy and mostly safe. However, I am beginning to agree with Gazimoff of Mana Obscura in that this might be the death of the super-genre MMO. “We won’t see another heavyweight MMORPG released by a major studio in the next two years.” I was going to say that EverQuest Next sort of proves that wrong, but that is probably a bit more than two years out, and who knows if it even gets released at all; Landmark might just cannibalize it, if it doesn’t cannibalize itself first. But surely there is something else… oh. Maybe not.
Whether you are celebrating the news – perhaps hoping that more tightly-focused niche MMOs will spring up in the vacuum “as they should be” – or lamenting the loss of AAA tourism, I do want to take a moment to mark the occasion. Because it is an end of an era, or another sign of it at the least. And while we can sit back and suggest that WoW “ruined” “real” virtual worlds like Ultima Online or Everquest or whatever, I do feel a bit sad to think that what we have is it. Specialization is great and all, but when I look at the ex-WoW guild member friends I have made, I see a group of people whom I have never consistently played any other games with. The “super-genre” WoW was pretty much the extent of our shared gaming interests; there is some tiny overlap here and there, but getting the hardcore Civ, the Team Fortress 2, and The Sims players all together as an officer core for a 5-year old guild was goddamn magic.
Titan was unlikely to have rekindled things for my disparate, dispersed cohorts, true. Sometimes things just reach their natural conclusions. And maybe there is something to be said about making friends with more similar interests in the first place. Still… I can’t help but feel a loss, somehow.
Posted in Commentary
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Tags: Blizzard, Hearthstone, Mike Morhaime, Potential, Titan