Monday, March 18, 2024

Death Trip


Although I said I didn't want to turn this blog into an obituary column, I probably need to recognise that the road is about to run out for most of the significant names from my teens and twenties. I try my best not to give in to nostalgia but there's ample evidence now that biology plays a part, too, and that's less easily shurugged aside. 

Even if that wasn't true, I am literally sitting here typing this while looking at a visual reminder. There's a faded satin scarf strung across the wall behind the monitor that's been there since we moved into this house thirty years ago. Most of it is obscured now by stacks of books but the part still showing reads "Steve Harley And Cockney R..."

Steve Harley died yesterday at the age of 73. It was a shock in a way although as I said in reply to my ex-wife, who sent me a link to the news, I'm always a little surprised when any old rocker makes it past sixty. They really didn't hold back in the seventies and eighties and it catches up with most of them eventually.

In my teens, Cockney Rebel came very close to being my favorite band. I first heard them through the scratchy, fading signal of Radio Luxembourg in 1973, when the band's first single, the magnificently overwrought epic Sebastian, became a hit all across Europe. 

It was then and remains now one of my favorite songs of all time, although as with all such favorites, I almost never listen to it. The more you listen, the less you hear. You have to pace yourself if you want to live with a song forever.

I bought the first album as soon as it came out a few months later and played it incessantly and melodramatically, as we all did with our favorites in those days. Cockney Rebel came several times to play in the city where I lived  over the next couple of years. Bands, even quite successful ones, used to come round and round on a kind of musical conveyor belt back then, which is one reason I rarely found it necessary to to travel far to see any of them. If they couldn't be bothered to come to me...

The first time they played, I saw a card on the noticeboard of the super-hip record shop I was almost too nervous to go into, asking for volunteers to come hump gear for the band in return for a free ticket and beer. I was a bit too young for that but I've always kind of wished I'd offered my services anyway. It would be a story.

The next time, they'd had a few hits in the UK and had upgraded from clubs to concert halls. I went to that one. The thing I remember most about the gig isn't anything from the performance. It's the row of stalls outside the venue selling scarves and tees and badges and who knows what else. 

It was the first time I'd really noticed anyone selling "merch", as we definitely didn't call it then. I imagine it was beneath the likes of Hawkwind, Yes or Pink Floyd, the kind of bands I was used to going to see. By their standards, Cockney Rebel was almost a pop group. 

So I bought a scarf. I mean, why not. I doubt I was even being ironic. And I wore it for the gig and when the band got to Tumbling Down, the epic number (All Steve Harley's songs were epics) that ended with the whole audience singing the chorus for what seemed like hours, I held my scarf above my head and swayed from side to side along with everyone else.

I'm not going to say it was magical. But it was.

The next year, I saw them again at the same venue. By this time they were on their fourth album and Steve had gone weird. Weirder, I should say. It's not like he wasn't weird to begin with but now he was heavily into Rosicrucianism along with everything else. 

The whole sound of the band (The second iteration of Cockney Rebel, after he sacked most of the first line-up) had changed almost out of recognition, from Bowiesque glam to a funkier groove that somehow managed to feel dry and swamp-ridden all at the same time. Out of all expectation, I loved it. 

Cockney Rebel released five studio albums in the 1970s before calling it a day until Steve got the band back together a good few years later, when they recorded one more. The first two were released under the band name alone, the others as Steve Harley And Cockney Rebel

Of those six albums, the first - The Human Menagerie - is an acknowledged classic, while the rest are generally considered at best hit or miss. I like the second (The Psychomodo) and the third (Best Years Of Our Lives) a lot but they aren't entirely coherent. They each have a couple of his best songs but also some undeniable filler. The fifth, Love's A Prima Donna, is not great and the much later sixth album I have never heard.

The fourth, Timeless Flight, was not well-received at the time and I'm not sure what its critical reputation is now. It is, however, one of my favorite albums. I listened to it a very great number of times back when I used to play vinyl but unlike The Human Menagerie, which was the first album I bought on CD, I never thought to upgrade. 

I have, however, listened to some of the tracks online, now and again, and relatively recently (By which I mean in the last decade.) and I think it stands up pretty well. I have All Men Are Hungry on in the background as I type and it sounds great, still. What it's about I have no more idea now than I ever did although I do now realise it has something to do with Hemingway...

That's the thing with Steve Harley. He was a striking lyricist, famous for it, and yet rarely did I know what he was trying to say. He was so fin de siecle you couldn't make out the meaning for the brocade.

It didn't matter. It never mattered. As he once said of Sebastian, "It's poetry. It means what you want it to mean... I can't define its meaning. It's like most poetry, it's a lovely word." He made his method even clearer in another interview "'Sebastian' is possibly a sort of Gothic love song, possibly not: I'm not really sure to be honest."

If Steve didn't know what his songs were about, I don't know why we should be expected to. What always mattered with his work was the imagery and the emotion. That was a powerful narcotic to an adolescent and it hit me hard enough the bruise hasn't faded yet.

Thanks for all the memories, Steve. Like your songs, they've lasted well.

Saturday, March 16, 2024

Awkward Interregnum


Regular readers may have noticed a marked absence anything to do with AI here at Inventory Full lately. It's not just that there haven't been any posts specifically about the technology or the cultural phenomenon or the underlying concepts; there also haven't been any AI-generated illustrations necessitating end credits listing prompts and models.

It's not a change of policy. Nor is it a reaction to the low-level pushback AI occasionally generates. It's a lot simpler than any of that. I just got bored with it.

Not with the potential. I still find that thrilling. It's more like what happened with VR. There, I was never remotely convinced or impressed by the claims being made, a position I think has been borne out by experience. With AI, I did think something was genuinely about to happen.

And it probably will, one day. The thing about AI as it stands now, though is...

It's not AI.

I mean, we all know that, don't we? No-one really believes anything we're seeing or hearing about is intelligent, artificially or otherwise, surely? 

Calling any of it AI is confusing, misleading and increasingly annoying. It's gone from a promise to a buzz-word to a cliche in just a couple of years. 

Unfortunately, labels stick and AI is the label attached to the disparate collection of algorithms, apps and processes currently drenching the media and drowning all coherent thought, so I guess we're stuck with it too. Since we've used up the acronym on what's effectively nothing more paradigm-shifting than a bunch of productivity software, what we're going to call any genuinely intelligent artificial entity when or if it ever appears, I have no idea. 

Master, probably. Or God. 

That, however, is a problem for another day. More likely, another century. For now, we're all going to carry on using the thick-headed shorthand we've been handed so let's just try and make the best of it.

It's not very useful

I mean, it isn't, is it? Let's be honest. Everyone in this part of the blogosphere who's experimented with AI has reported back with overwhelming evidence of inaccuracy. 

The AIs that are really Large Language Modules have been designed and developed to build sentences and paragraphs by extrapolating the next most likely word in a sequence, based on the petabytes of data fed to them from trawls of the internet, authorized or otherwise. That allows for an initially astonishing impersonation of something a person might write but it has very little to do with fact and even less to do with truth.

The tech giants behind all of this are doing their damnedest to force these systems to comply but by my own experience I'd have to say they aren't getting very far. The main reason I'm not using ChatGPT or Bard (Now Gemini, for reasons.) or whatever the other one is called is that it actually takes me longer to put a post together with any of them than it does to do it the old-fashioned way.

That's because I have to fact-check everything they tell me before I can risk publishing it, unless I'm just using the output for humor, in which case the less accurate it is, the better for me. Otherwise, I have to put everything I don't know to be true through Google Search, at which point I clearly could just have searched for the information that way to begin with and saved myself a step.

It's widely reported that Google Search has deteriorated of late but it still seems reasonably precise to me. I can always find what I want, even if what I want is frequently on Reddit. Moreover, the whole supposed benefit of using AI to search, which being that you can communicate with it in normal, conversational English, is what I've been doing with Google Search since the early 2000s.

I learned correct internet search practices way back in the 1990s but I haven't bothered to use what I learned since Google made it optional. Google Search easily parses full sentence queries and returns highly appropriate search results, so what value does AI add other than a fatuous "Thank you" at the end?

It's not funny any more.

I guess whether AI was ever funny is a matter of taste but it used to make me laugh out loud, sometimes uncontrollably. I found the nonsensical non-sequiturs all kinds of amusing - charming, whimsical, sweet - and the warped, weird images delightful. 

Two things have happened to blunt those positive impressions. The AIs have gotten much better at faking being human and the novelty has worn off. 

The second is probably the more damaging. Jokes aren't funny when you've heard them lots of times before. 

I follow Janelle Shae's excellent blog AI Weirdness, in which she tests to destruction the capacity of various AIs to follow simple instructions. When I first started reading it I had to be careful not to have a cup of coffee in hand when I opened a new post in case I laughed so much I spat it all over the keyboard. Now most posts barely raise a tired smile. Seen one mislabeled animal, you've seen them all.

Janelle still seems to get a laugh out of them but I fear she's having more trouble with the first problem. These days the AIs tend to give her something a lot closer to what she's asking for than they did a year or two ago. She has to push them harder to fail in a humorous way. That does suggest at least a move towards usefulness but it also diminishes what made the results so fascinating before - their inhuman alienness. 

The pictures all look the same.

Not literally. That would be interesting. No, what I mean is that as the AI Image Models become more and more sophisticated, the results seem to have acquired something of an AI imprimatur. You can look at an image and immediately sense it was created by AI. Just not, unfortunately, in what I used to think of as the good way.

There were two things I liked about making pictures using AI. Firstly, it meant I could imagine I could draw. Secondly, all the pictures looked bizarre.

I can't draw. Never have been able to. All my friends can draw, even the ones who really can't. Drawing is weird. If you believe you can do it, you can do it and other people believe you can, too. I never believed it so I can't draw and absolutely no-one ever thought I could.

If you look back at the earlier AI images on the blog, they are horrific. Warped, distorted, unnatural, freakish. That was what I liked about them. If I use NightCafe to make images now, they're almost proper pictures. Sometimes they're very good. Sometimes they're just a tiny bit off. Occasionally they're very poor but never in an interesting way.

Whatever they are, though, they're clearly not "my" pictures any more. Not in the way they were when the people in them had three arms. These all look like commercial art. I like commercial art well enough in its place but I don't aspire to using it here. It's too slick and corporate and functional for a funky, home-made blog.

It's nowhere near ready yet.

I've said this before but I'll reiterate: I want to be able to press a couple of buttons and have a complete blog post appear, indistinguishable from something I could write myself. Better still, I want to type in a short plot synopsis and have an original story as good as most of the proofs of novels I take home from work. (Seriously, it's not that high a bar...) 

In other fields, I'd like something that could generate animated cartoons or CGI movies as good as the ones I watch already, just from a few brief instructions in plain English. Most of all, I'd like a small device I could clip to Beryl's collar that would talk back to me, convincingly, in her voice while we're out walking.

None of this is currently available or even possible, although if you follow AI reporting in the media you absolutely could believe it was. It reminds me very strongly of the early days of VR, when everything seemed to suggest we'd all be running around inside the Star Trek HoloDeck by Christmas.

About the only thing the media gets right about AI is a that it's a highly disruptive technology. The problem is, until it gets a lot better, the kind of disruption it causes isn't going to be the supposed cultural reformatting that might or might not lead to a genuinely different, maybe even better, future; it's going to be the kind of disruption you'd get if you released a swarm of killer bees into a crowded shopping mall.

And that's why there's not much AI on this blog right now. I reserve the right to go back to covering the phenomenon should anything interesting develop - I am still keeping an eye on it and it is a fast-changing field, although most of it isn't changing anything like as fast as I'd like. 

Right now, though, it feels like there's nothing much to say about AI that hasn't been said too often already. When there's something to talk about, then we'll talk.

I will still use some AI images if I find it convenient or appropriate (Obviously I was always going to use some for this post.) but honestly I'm getting a lot more fun out of going old school and running screen grabs through an image processing app until they distort to the point of unrecognizeability.

I may also do some more experiments with the LLMs just to keep an eye on progress there. If they ever start to return consistently accurate results I would be interested in using them as research assistants. If that happens, though, it'll probably be the last I ever write about them. At that point, they'll become about as interesting as spell checkers or email clients. I mean, I use a spell-checker on every post but I don't feel the need to tell anyone about it.

As for my dabbling with audio and video, unless and until there are some very major advances, I can't see that continuing. It takes ages and I get nothing interesting out of it. Right now, AI in those fields is probably at the stage of becoming a useful tool for professionals. The day when the ungifted amateur can produce satisfying, convincing results for almost no effort is far, far away.

As for all the other things we also call AI, like the kinds of procedural generation used in virtual worlds or the way mobs follow a path or fight in an MMORPG or even the app I use to remove parts of an image and refill it with something unnoticeable, well no-one's really talking about any of that when they use the jargon these days, are they? I imagine that although PR people will try hard to convince us otherwise, all of that will carry on much as before without any of us needing to pay much attention.

I think that about covers it.

Oh, wait! I haven't even mentioned Artificial Insemination...

Friday, March 15, 2024

Different Class

When I went to log in to Nightingale yesterday, I noticed the minimally interactive banner (You can click it and it changes very slightly but only once.) at the top of the screen announcing the Steam Spring Sale. It doesn't feel much like Spring outside but if Steam says it is I guess it must be. 

As time goes on I become more and more enmeshed in the Steam ecosystem I resisted for so long. I used to see people talking about Steam sales and shake my head at the idea of anyone falling for such an entry-level marketing ploy. Now I hear the news and go "Ooh! I wonder if there's anything good?"

There wasn't, not really. I can't claim to have gone through the entire list line by line but I flicked all the way to the end of the main page, where what I imagine are meant to be the most enticing offers are, and didn't see much I was interested in. Not at those discounts, anyway.

Of course, there were some very heavy reductions, some of them even on titles I have wishlisted, but they're games that regularly go on sale. Horizon Zero Dawn : Complete Collection, for example, has been 75% off several times since I put it on my wishlist.

The problem with that one and several other bargains I noticed is that the cost isn't what's stopping me. It's knowing I won't play them. I don't even claim free titles from Prime any more unless I'm almost certain I'm going to play them almost immediately. 


Horizon Zero Dawn looks great in principle but in practice I'm pretty sure the gameplay wouldn't suit me very well. £9.99 may not be much but it's still a waste of money if the game's just going to sit there in my Steam library gathering virtual dust. Rather than buying it because it's on offer I should probably just take it off my wishlist.

There's an argument for culling the list quite severely. It's full of titles that have been on offer numerous times without triggering a purchase. For most of them, though, that is price-related. Discounts between 20%-40% just don't seem generous enough to make me think "I'd better jump on that!"

Even at half-price I rarely bite. There are four titles on the list at 50% or more off in the current sale but I haven't gone for any of them... yet. In every case, what that tells me is that I'm not really as keen to play them as I thought I was when I put them on. All of them are titles I wishlisted after playing demos in various NextFests and as I've said a few times, for a lot of games an hour-long demo is probably about as much as I ever needed.

There's also the salutory fact that the last several games I bought in Steam sales I either haven't even started yet or, worse, played for a while then somehow forgot to finish. If that was because I wasn't enjoying them it would be one thing but actually my hit rate on picking games I enjoy is extremely good. I'm just very bad at sticking with them for long enough to get to the credits.


Then there's the issue of timing. When I put Coreborn on the list, for example, I had space in my schedule for a new MMO/Survival title. Now I really don't, even at 70% off.

Perhaps most important of all, though, is that a lot of the games on my wishlist just aren't very expensive to begin with. If I wanted to play them - as in right now - I'd be happy to pay full price. For a discount to work its magic it needs to be attached to a game I'm already teetering on the edge of buying anyway. Then even a small reduction is enough to nudge me over.

And that's how I came to buy Class of '09 last night. I've been thinking about it ever since I somehow stumbled across a playthrough on YouTube a few weeks ago. There are lots of playthroughs of the game on YouTube. I'm going to embed one here but please pay serious attention to the warning that comes with the game itself:  

This game contains reference to sexual themes and explicit criminal acts such as drug solicitation, substance abuse, homicide, physical assault, sexual assault, fraud, and self-harm. 

Boy, does it ever. And the rest. That's just scratching the surface of the ways Class of '09 could offend, upset, disturb or outrage. If you're ready for it after all that, go ahead, don't let me stop you.

Tell you what, let's just have the intro. I'm not convinced clips work out of context and I'm not expecting anyone to watch a whole playthrough.

I've played two games of Class of '09 now. I think that's how it works. You just keep playing in the forlorn hope of getting any kind of acceptable conclusion. Catharsis.

My first run, Nicole hung herself. That was cheery.

My second run she's hiding at home because she thinks something she posted on the internet is going to get her school burned down by extremists. Compared to some of the endings I've seen, that doesn't really seem like such a bad outcome.

If Class of '09 was just sweary, boundary-breaking shocksploitation, obviously I wouldn't be here writing about it now. It's a lot more than that. It's witty, smart, funny, sweary, boundary-breaking shocksploitation, with very good voice acting. 

It didn't surprise me in the least to discover there have been attempts to shift the property to other media. It would make a great animated TV show, not least since one of its acknowledged inspirations is Daria

A Kickstarter looking to fund an anime based on the game raised $132k on a 35k ask last year, enough to make an 11 minute pilot episode. That's yet to come but there's a three minute teaser made for the Kickstarter that's really good.

It'd be nice if that all goes somewhere further than a pilot but for now the game's the thing and I plan on playing it plenty. I particularly appreciate the structure, which seems to resolve itself into shortish, TV-like episodes as you hit the inevitable buffers on every playthrough. More games should come in bite-sized chunks.

When I've seen a lot more of Nicole's fractal life, no doubt there'll be another post. There are supposed to be thirteen endings but how many branches before you get to them I couldn't say. It's too early to make any solid statements about how looped the gameplay is or whether there's ever any real sense of progress or achievement. I suspect there isn't and I imagine that's the point.

The one thing about the game that slightly worries me is that it's the sole creation of one guy, Max Field, who might just possibly be a bit of a dick. Here's an interview with him that kind of gives that impression. I'm not entirely comfortable with all of this supposed female psychological insight coming purely from a male perspective, either, although that leads onto a whole corridor of doors I really don't want to open.

He sure pisses the racists off, though, so at least he has that going for him.

Anyway, judge the work, not the creator, I guess. I can recommend an entertaining, if not entirely helpful, book on navigating that cultural minefield if anyone's interested. I liked it more than Rachel Cooke from the Guardian did but I can't argue with most of her criticisms. It's all over the place.

And we're getting off the subject again, aren't we? Back to the game. Or should I say games?

There's a sequel called Class of '09: The Re-Up, too, which I cannot imagine not wanting to play once I'm done with this one. It may have to wait for another sale though. At the moment it's a derisory 20% down although there's a double pack of both games (That I now realise is the one I should have got.) for 45% off.

I guess sales do have their uses, on occasion.

Thursday, March 14, 2024

They Only Come Out At Night

One thing I haven't mentioned about Nightingale is what happens after the sun goes down. The monsters all come out to play. Everywhere, even your home Realm, innocuous by daylight as it is, becomes a playground for murderous mobs, all of whom seem to know exactly where to find you.

To put that in a less flowery context, there's some mechanism whereby as soon as it gets fully dark, Bound mobs, the Fae Lands stand-ins for zombies, begin to appear. I haven't figured out exactly how it works but it looks very much as if traveling about after dark- or even standing still for too long - causes portals to appear close by.

Depending on your temperament, you could see this as a handy delivery service, bringing useful crafting materials right to your door. Or you could find it scary and unsettling and very much wish it wasn't happening, or at least not to you.


More likely, you might not even notice. I'd been playing for more than a week before I found out it was even happening. That's because Nightingale has another mechanic called Rest that means there's a good chance you've never stayed up more than a few minutes after sundown.

I find it very easy to forget Nightingale is supposed to be a survival  game. It has all the usual switches and levers - not only Rest but Hunger, Stamina, Item Decay... all the old favorites. The thing is, they're all extremely easy to counter, making them minor irritants at most. 

Personally, I'm torn. I really don't see the point, for example, of having Item Decay, when you can literally repair all of your gear with a single click, for a cost that is utterly trivial. Yes, the amount of Essence Dust ramps up to apparently ludicrous amounts as your gear improves but as soon as you notice you can convert regular Essences into thousands, even millions of dusts, that's the last time you'll ever need to think about it.


On the other hand, I'm not at all interested in making it harder, slower or more expensive to keep your gear up to scratch. I'll take a meaningless, trivial repair system that doesn't get in the way of my enjoyment over a more "realistic" one any day.

Food works much the same as in every game but particularly like it does in Valheim. You can have up to three foods in play at once and all the buffs stack. The basic foods last a few minutes but as you get more recipes and become better at cooking the duration goes up. The buffs from food are very significant so it's unlikely you'll ever need to be reminded to keep eating. Again, it's a couple of clicks every ten or twenty minutes and forget about it.

Stamina needs managing in relatively interesting ways. Swimming drains it very quickly, Gliding fairly quickly, Climbing not quite so fast and Sprinting barely at all. You also need Stamina to fight and dodge so it's a hands-on stat in most situations. That, however, just makes it feel like Stamina in many games, not just the ones with the "Survival" tag attached.



Of all the primary survival mechanics, the most asinine is Rest. Honestly, I cannot see the point of this at all, at least not in its current implementation. You have a blue bar that tells you how tired you're getting. As it drops you lose some stats (I think...) and if you let it go all the way down you can't do anything that requires effort, not even jumping onto a ten centimeter high ledge. 

It's almost like a second Stamina bar in a way, just one with a much slower decay. It would be very annoying if it wasn't insultingly easy to restore to full.

To recover your fully-rested state, literally all you need to do is click on a bed-roll. Or a cot. Or a bed. Even the handkerchief-sized pet bed your fancy Dachsund sleeps in will do. It doesn't have to be your bed, either. Any furniture an NPC sleeps on will do just as well.


Making a bed-roll requires just a few sticks and some plant fibre. It needs to be under cover so you might have to use a few more sticks to put up a tent but Nightingale is far better than most games at recognizing when you're sheltered from the elements so a doorway or the mouth of a cave will do just as well.

In other games I've played that have similar mechanics - probably all of them - there's a discreet pause to indicate time has passed. Sometimes your character actually lies down on the bed. Sometimes the screen goes dark. In Nightingale, when you take a Short Rest, nothing like that happens. 

Instead, your Rest bar instantly returns to full and that's that. All done. Unless, of course, the sun has gone down.


Nightingale uses a fairly lengthy day-night cycle. I haven't timed it but it feels like daylight probably lasts at least an hour. I have no idea how long night-time lasts because as soon as night falls, clicking on a bed or bed-roll brings up the option to take a Long Rest. Once you've tried it, you probably won't ever see darkness again.

Clicking on Long Rest does instigate a very brief pause, maybe three or four seconds at most. The screen goes completely black, then the morning light rushes in with a disorienting effect like someone letting off a magnesium flare before quickly stabilising to regular daylight. 

This has two highly advantageous effects: firstly, it avoids any and all interaction with the creatures of the night and secondly anything you had cooking in the forge or the oven or any other crafting table will have instantaneously completed. If you need to something that takes hours to craft (Not that unusual.) it's a smart idea to save it for bedtime.


Once again, I'm in several minds about this. I do think the current system is laughably inept but fixing it would almost certainly mean making it more awkward to manage without adding any entertainmnet value. I'd lay odds all of these Survival mechanics will be heavily overhauled during Early Access but I certainly wouldn't put any money on the new iterations being any more fun to use.

The one significant downside of the way darkness has been turned into something players both want to avoid and find very easy side-step is that a lot of players may never even get to see the astonishing night skies. All the sky-boxes in Nightingale are spectacular, as are the lighting effects, but the wheeling auroras  and giant moons of the Fae Realms' night skies deserve special praise.

It's not just the sky at night, either. Many of the settlements and structures light up at night to be seen from far across the zone. The Essence vendors all travel in elaborate wooden caravans that come to glittering, glimmering life as soon as the sun drops below the horizon.


Because Nightingale is internally moddable through use of any number of Cards, it is possible to create a very safe Realm in which night never fades. I might have to think about doing that, just for the screenshots.

Until then, though, I'll carry on with my early nights. Might as well enjoy some good, sound sleep while it lasts.

Wednesday, March 13, 2024

You Can't Take It With You

Sorting my Steam games by time played today, I was surprised to find that at 78.8 hours, Nightingale still hasn't broken into the top five, although not as surprised as I was to see what it will have to pass to get there. Sitting just ahead at #5 on the list with 81.2 hours played comes Bless Unleashed. How did that happen?

It's always possible I left BU running while I was long-term AFK of course, something I have been prone to do with games on occasion, but it's probably just that compared to any other genre, MMORPGs take up a phenomanal amount of time to play in even the most casual fashion. The only reason there are any other kinds of games in the first couple of rows of my Steam list is that I hardly play any MMORPGs through Valve's supposedly universal platform.

Most people don't, I would guess. A lot of the biggest, best-known, most successful, long-running names in the genre predate Steam entirely. Their players, active or lapsed, already have standalone installations, accounts and launchers provided either directly from the games themselves or via bespoke portals mandated by the developer.

For a long time, even after Steam took over many PC gamers' hard drives, almost all new MMORPGs came with their own launchers. It's only in very recent years that MMO developers have chosen to offer their games primarily or exclusively on Steam.

It has become something of a routine for older games to add themselves belatedely, usually with a flourish of publicity, and it does sometimes result in a surge of interest, bringing in new players for a while. When you look at the numbers playing through the platform a little later, though, it doesn't always seem as though many of those new players stayed for long.


Even less likely is the prospect of a significant proportion of the installed base for an MMORPG moving to Steam. I could play a lot of my MMORPG rotation there - EverQuest, EverQuest II, Lord of the Rings Online, Guild Wars 2 - but I don't. In some cases I'd have to begin again from scratch, an obvious non-starter, but even if the Steam version of the game can let me play my regular characters I'd still have to go through all the rigmarole of linking the accounts. Why would I bother?

Clearly most people don't. Taking the EQ titles as an example, Darkpaw would have been out of business years ago if the real average concurrency of the two games combined came to barely 350. LotRO on its own almost doubles that and GW2 makes it into the low thousands, which might just about be viable for a small indie developer but not for a sub-division of NCSoft with several hundred developers to pay.

Daybreak don't like to tell us exactly how many people play their games but you certainly don't need more than three dozen servers to accomodate three hundred and fifty people or even a couple of thousand, if we use the old 5x peak concurrency figure that used to be the top-end estimate for total participation in online games. The Steam numbers for all MMORPGs that aren't also Steam exclusives like New World and Lost Ark are more than just unrepresentative, they're downright misleading.

The disparity is so extreme it does make me wonder whether it's really worth an older MMORPG tooling itself up for Steam membership at all. Yes, there's that initial burst of interest and the concommitant flurry of new players but once the initial excitement fades you're left with a permanent red flag for anyone looking to answer that perennial gamer's question: "Is this game dead?"

If you looked at Steam for any of the titles I've mentioned, the answer would be "As a Dodo". GW2, sometimes reckoned to be one of the front-runners among Western MMORPGs, doesn't even appear on the list until you've clicked through ten screens of results. Then again, it could be worse. Rift, languishing at #1534 on the chart as I write, is so many clicks down in the hole I lost count. 


Rift, however, is the reason I was looking at my time played in Steam games in the first place. I'd seen the recent announcement about server merges and I thought I'd get ahead of the rush by moving my Faeblight characters before Gamigo put them wherever they were going to put them if I did nothing about it.

Given the lack of attention anyone - developers, publishers or even players - has shown Rift since even before Trion shut up shop more than five years ago, it's perhaps more of a surprise to learn the game still has enough servers to need merging rather than that it's actually happening. Server merges, in any case, are an inevitable phase of the life-cycle of any MMORPG and Rift was designed with an unusual degree of flexibility in that regard. Players have always been able to swap servers almost instantly with no charge. I've moved a few times already.

Consequently, I wasn't expecting much trouble when I logged in last night to move my seven Faeblight characters to either Greybriar or Wolfsbane or possibly some to one and some to the other, since I already have characters on both and I'm not sure how the processes handles overspill when you hit your allowed character-per-server buffer. That potential snag I may have thought of; I had not, however, reckoned with another: the guild bank.

It seems that when Trion created the transfer system, they allowed for the smooth  movement of just about everything except the contents of the Guild Vault. I imagine that was intentional to avoid customer service issues when someone tried to jump ship and take the whole lot with them without telling anyone. Rift has one of those very annoying automated systems for handing Guild leadership to someone else if you don't log in often enough so I can see how it could happen.


Moving the guild itself is easy enough. The Guild Leader has to move first and tick a box to say they're taking the Guild with them. Then, whenever another member of the Guild moves across, they're automatically added back to the roster, albeit for some reason at entry-level, meaning everyone has to be re-promoted. A bit half-assed if you ask me but a minor inconvenience at most.

The contents of the Guild Vaults, however, aren't going anywhere. The Valuts have to be completely emptied or you can't move at all. And therein lies my problem.

As I'm sure will astonish no-one whose noticed the title of the blog they're currently reading, my Guild Vaults in Rift are completely rammed. So, for the most part, are the bags of all my characters, although I did take the trouble a while back to make sure the ones I log in now and again at least had one empty bag to collect the inevitable "Welcome Back" bribes.

I considered the possibility of distributing the Vault contents among all my characters but even then there's not enough space. I thought about making a bank mule just to carry the load but I'd have to buy a another Character Slot. It was while I was looking at how much that might cost when I had a small epiphany: this is fricken' Rift we're talking about!

How often do I play Rift? Am I ever going to play Rift again? Do I really care which server my characters are on in a game I don't play now and don't plan on playing in the future? 

More to the point, even if I could buy a character slot for Rift Store Cash or Credits or whatever they're called, of which I still have a ton from when the game converted to F2P, do I even want to spend the time it would take to get the move done? To make a character, run through that damn tutorial, make some bags, transfer them over, join the Guild, meet whatever criteria you need to be able to withdraw stuff from the Vault, take everything out and stash it in another bank...


No. No I do not want to waste hours of my life doing any of that. I wanted to press a couple of buttons and forget about it, not start some major project that would take up hours of my life just to get me back to where I began - not playing Rift. 

Except as the record shows, I do occasionally play Rift. It's my seventh most-played game on Steam. I've spent more hours playing Rift since it moved to Steam than I've given to Palworld, albeit over a much longer period. And one of the reasons I still play Rift now and again is because it's on Steam. I very much doubt I would bother if I had to find and update a standalone client but because the button is just sitting there, sometimes I give in to whim and log in for old time's sake.

It helps that Rift is one of the games where I can play all my old characters. I can't remember if I had to set that up or if it was done automatically when the game was added to the new platform but it definitely makes it more likely I'll keep coming back, if only very occasionally. I suspect that if older MMORPGs were able to achieve seamless integration with Steam at no effort for the players it might help at least a little with retention. Then again, it's not like I ever spend any money when I'm there so there's probably no value in it for the companies running the games, even if they can get a few old lags to look in once in a while.

Having considered the possibilities, I'm going to do nothing. Not yet. The Gamigo announcement acknowledges some players may just not bother to move their characters ahead of time:

"Further details will be provided for those who may not transfer to Greybriar, Wolfsbane, Deepwood, or Laethys in time, ensuring your transition is as smooth as possible."

I'll wait until I hear what those "further details" are. Last time something like this happened they just flagged the old servers as Inactive and when you logged in you were forced to move somewhere else. For me, that would probably be as good as anything. If I'm not playing my characters anyway, I can not play them just as easily on a closed server as an active one.

Until then, it's back to Nightingale to see if  I can't push past Bless Unleashed and maybe even Divinity: Original Sin 2 at 91.3 and Dawnlands at 103.4. Both of those seem possible. 

New World at 235.8 hours, though? That's not going to happen. And as for Valheim at 384.8? 

That's a record I doubt will ever be broken.

Tuesday, March 12, 2024

The Essence Of Nightingale

As you can see, Nightingale has fishing. What self-respecting survival/rpg mash-up doesn't? It's not a very sophisticated implementation of the skill/sport/hobby/pastime but it's fun and useful, either of which trump sophistication in my book, when it comes to pretending to catch imaginary fish in a video game.

I don't exactly remember when, where or how I acquired the recipe to make the fishing rod Flora's holding in the shot above. My best guess is it was one of the basics included with the Simple Workbench but it could just as easily have been a reward from one of the countless Insight, r Agility or Combat challenges. 

Sometimes, when you succeed at one of those, you get a new recipe. I might have gotten my fishing rod that way. I know I had it for a long time before I bothered to make it, which I ony did because there's a quest that requires fish oil you cvan only get from specific type of fish you have to catch for yourself. 

Other than recipes, what you get from doing those challenges are Essences. Essences are the fuel that keeps Nightingale's engine ticking over. I'm not sure it's ever explained what they're the essence of but the human survivors trying to make something of their new lives in the Fae Realms have adopted them as a kind of  universal currency, so you can never really have enough. A small amount of Essence also converts into enough Essence Dust to fund all your repairs for weeks.

OK, I suppose technically you could have enough Essences, eventually. There's a finite number of things to buy with them, for a start and you can certainly have enough of the lower-level ones quite easily as you outgrow the items they can get you. 


Recipe vendors are mostly found in specific Realms. Realms come in tiers and vendors in each tier use the local variety of Essence as coin. Naturally, as you progress through the Realms, becoming ever more powerful as you go, the weaker Essences of the lower tiers and the items they buy lose their significance. Still, I imagine completionists, who must make up a large proportion of players, if not the majority, will want to grab all the sets, no matter how useless they've become.

Essences are also neded to upgrade your gear, a process that, in Nightingale, has a massive effect on your viabilty as an adventurer. I'm used to more incremental progression systems, where it's hard to tell which of two items is better without one of those inbuilt comparison functions to make it clear but there's no need for anything like that in Nightingale, where upgrading an item can almost double its primary stats.

That, of course, means Nightingale is also one of those games where you don't need new gear because you can just keep improving the gear you already have. I don't generally like that approach to progression, mostly because I find it boring. It's extremely practical, sure, but practicality has never been high on my list of criteria for enjoying a video game.

My main objection is to the aesthetics, though, not so much the gameplay. It's not that I want to go back to the turn of the millennium, where getting an upgrade to your leg slot item meant finding out which monster dropped something better for that slot, then finding and killing it, if you even could, so you could steal that monster's pants, strip them from it's cooling corpse and put them on, still warm. Or, more likely, get the alternate drop and have to kill the damn mob several more times before it dropped its pants.


In addition to upgrades, Nightingale does also have a number of different gear sets that represent some kind of progression system in themselves, so you won't be stuck wearing the exact same thing forever. Instead you will be changing your gear approximately once per tier and then upgrading it, multiple times, which is better than nothing but nowhere near as good as a fully-functioning appearance system.

Nightingale doesn't have such a system yet, which is fair enough in Early Access, I guess, although personally, if I were head of a games studio, a fully-functioning appearance system would be a top priority all the way back in alpha. What's worse is that there isn't even a mention of any such system in the recently published Not-a-Roadmap covering the next two stages of development.

The upgrade system, like the Essences it uses, also comes in tiers. So far there are only three and the naming convention used suggests there aren't going to be many, if any, more. There are four qualities: Common, Uncommon, Rare and Epic which come in four corresponding colors: Grey, Green, Blue and Pink. Stop me if you 've hear this one before.

I suppose there's Legendary and maybe Mythical still to come in the standard RPG progression hierarchy, which would allow for enough vertical progression to support at least a couple of expansions. That should see them safely through the next few years.

For now, though, we have those basic four. In theory you could upgrade your Common items to Epic, I think. You can definitely take Common up to Rare. I can't be absolutely sure what happens after that  because I don't yet have the Epic Upgrade Bench or whatever it's called.

I have the one that uses T2 Essences to upgrade Uncommon to Rare. The Epic one, it won't surprise anyone to learn, I'm sure, uses T3 Essences, which come, as you'd expect, from T3 Realms.

The catch is that the vendors who sell the recipes for the Epic crafting stations and the items they produce only take T3 Essences, which means you have to do challenges in T3 Realms to get them. And those vendors want huge quantities of Essences for most of the recipes they sell. A few recipes go for the knockdown price of 100 Essences but the going rate for most is 1300 a pop.

That would be extremely awkward if it weren't for the current state of what passes for an endgame in Nightingale, which at present allows for some appropriately epic Essence farming opportunities. 

When you complete the first chapter of the main storyline and gain access to The Watch, you get a short questline to unlock The Vaults, a trio of repeatable dungeons backed by some very iffy lore. When you zone into any one of the three Vault instances (One for each biome.) you find you're no longer playing solo. Suddenly and without any real warning, the game has turned into an MMO.

I have no idea if there's any formal match-making algorithm operating behind the scenes. It certainly didn't feel like it the few times I went in. I just spawned in at the start with a dungeon run already in well progress. I don't even know how many other players were in there with me. More kept spawning and running past me so I fdidn't waste any time trying to figure it out - I just followed them. 

From the Gear Score next to each character name I could see I was teamed with some people much better equipped than me but also others about the same and one or two quite a bit worse. When I say "teamed", I mean it in the loosest possible sense. There's no organised group or party, just a bunch of people soloing together, much like public events in any post-Warhammer MMORPG. 

There's no shared loot system for drops, either, Anyone can hoover up anything that lands on the ground. That sounds problematic but then again, there's no credit system for completion either. As soon as any challenge completes, everyone in the dungeon can open the Essence chest and take a full share. 


There are regular loot chests, too, and I think they all have hypothecated items for everyone that opens them but there it's harder to be sure, especially since no-one ever speaks. My evidence for the supposition is If I was taking anyone else's stuff out of the chests, they never complained about it and there was always something in every chest I opened, even if other players got to it before I did.

In content, the Vaults are like a collection of the usual Realm challenges bundled together with a Boss at the end. There's some half-assed narrative justification for this in that the Fae supposedly used them for some nebulous sort of training and the Boss is actually always the same eternal etentity, inadvertently brought to the Realms by Qatermain himself, who keeps incarnating in varying forms. Killing him repeatedly is the only way to keep him from overrunning the Watch.  

I was not convinced by any of this but then neither are al lthe people who explain it so I think there's meant to be some ambiguity. Most games don't even bother putting any kind of narrative fig-leaf on this sort of thing so credit to Inflexion for at least trying.

The Vaults would be tough to solo, something you can do by crafting your own Vault card for use in a crafted portal. Soloing would be crazy right now, though. In the four or five runs I did I only saw the boss twice. Once he was dead within miliseconds aof my arrival in his arena and the other time I fought him, tanked him briefly, died, ran back and picked up my loot after someone else fiunished the job seconds later.

At the moment, as a critical mass of players reaches the endgame and tries to grind the tens of thousands of essences needed for the upgrade recipes, the public Vaults are constantly busy. You can zone in and find one in progress immediately. Since you get all the rewards just for being there, it makes no difference if you arrive just as everyone else leaves. You get the same rewards as if you'd been there from the start.

Well, so long as you can find all the glowing bubbles you need to click, anyway. A full run nets about 300 Essences but I could never find all of them - the whole damn place is a maze. 

My fastest run netted me a couple of hundred Essences for the time it took me to run through an empty instance from the entrance to the zone-out. My highest total was maybe fifty more for a whole lot of fighting along the way.  If you can face doing back-to-back runs for an hour or two, you could make several thousand Essences but even that would only buy you two or three recipes. You're going to be at it a for a while.

It's not going to be to everyone's taste, not least because it's a major change of direction from what you'll have been doing for the last 30-50 hours. If you don't like the sudden switch from solo or co-op to open grouping, there's always the option to just carry on as you were. As I mentioned, you can set up your own, private Vault but there's a whole set of open-world T3 solo Realms you can craft and farm. All you have to do is make the cards. There's even a quest to get you started.

I made one last night and had a run around to see how hard it would be. It was perfectably doable with my Rare gear but I'd be lucky to get a tenth as many Essences for ten times the effort. I'd recommend the solo/co-op Realms for exploration and for gathering mats but clearly grinding in the Vaults is the way to go if you want to farm Essences, at least until the current levelling bubble deflates and the torrent of nearly-free Essences dries up.

Other than for the fun of it and to satisfy the inevitable wish to have all the best stuff, there may not be much point in grinding for those recipes anyway. HAvign a full set of Epic gear would certainly make everything a lot easier but the main reason you'd want to be doing that content would be to get the gear in the first place. Once you have it, I'm not exactly sure what the point would be in carrying on.

For that, we'll probably need to wait until some higher-tier content is added to the game. That could take a while. It's not even in the medium-term development plan.

Reaching the Watch does feel like an ending to me. Not the end of the whole story, for sure, but the end of the first chapter, definitely. The driving urge I had to push forwards has all but dissipated now. I feel more inclined to go back to pottering around, exploring the variations on the three biomes, building up my base and generally leaning into the sandboxier elements of the game, which have very much taken a back seat for me until now.

Or maybe I'll just go fishing. 

I wonder if you can upgrade that rod...

Monday, March 11, 2024

Second Impressions Count Double


A salutory side-effect of having the entire history of music available for free on YouTube at the touch of a mouse button is that once in a while I get to have my face rubbed not just in my own ignorance (An everyday occurrence.) but worse, my own arrogance. Before the 'tube, if I formed a lasting judgment based on little more than supposition, I could hold onto it quite comfortably without worrying about finding myself contradicted by those pesky, annoying facts.

These days, though, every time I follow a link I run the risk of being exposed to something that challenges my personal prejudices or overturns them entirely. Such an event happened only a few days ago, when I was lying in bed, looking at my laptop, wondering what I could watch to pass the last few minutes before switching off and going to sleep.

All I wanted to do was watch a couple of music videos but for once I had the notion to look backwards instead of forwards. I was scratching around in my mental files for possibilities but if there's one thing I can't do with any facility any more it's pull random names to order out of what's left of my memory. 

To do that, I almost always need some kind of external prompt, which was how I ended up typing Daisy Chainsaw into the search field, just to get started. I don't suppose I've thought about that particular nineties band since... well, since the nineties. I only thought of them then because I'd recently written a post featuring Daisy Dreams, whose excellent song Molecules I'd listened to half a dozen more times since I posted it.

I remembered Daisy Chainsaw, in so much as I remembered them at all, as some kind of female-fronted pop-rock act along the lines of Transvision Vamp, a point of comparison that should already have been raising red flags, since it was only a few years back that I discovered, with a confused combination of delight and discomfort, that Wendy James and her band were a whole lot better than I'd either remembered or even realised.

It's with a similar sense of contrition I come here to day to affirm that KatieJane Garside, singer, songwriter and lifespark of Daisy Chainsaw, is also very much better in just about every respect than I knew or more likely let myself know. In fact, having spent some considerable time now, going through her extensive back catalog and reading about her career, I feel I need to realign her and her work alongside the likes of Polly Scattergood, Jane Weaver, Victoria Astley and P.J. Harvey.

Like all of them and a few other favorites of mine, I now recognise KatieJane as a true original, a genuine artist and an untameable force of nature. The incontravertible evidence, now readily available to anyone willing to tap a few keys and sit back and listen, is that she always was. How I came to think otherwise is testament to my unfortunate tendency to avoid things I've already chosen not to like, regardless of any short-fall in exposure to the thing itself.

About all I can say in my defence is that I am generally willing to change my mind, when presented with a convincing counter-argument, particularly if I'm the one making the presentatation to myself. I'm also more than willing to admit my mistakes and try to make some amends, so in that spirit, here's a brief selection from KatieJane Garside's sparkling career, beginning with the only band I knew she'd been in until I learned about all the others just a few days ago.


Love Your Money - Daisy Chainsaw

Where else to begin but with her notorious performance on that most '90s of all '90s TV shows, The Word, a show notorious in its own right for any number of reasons. I used to watch the show most weeks but I don't remember if I saw this particular episode. You'd think I would if I had but The Word was not a show one watched sober. At least not if one had any sense. Many weeks it passed me by in a blur.

Had I seen it, I'd like to think I'd have realised what a stormingly powerful, subversive stage presence KatieJane was. What I suspect I might actually have thought was that she seemed a bit hyper and her band looked a bit like Sigue Sigue Sputnik which, very superficially, they did.

Of course, I really liked Sigue Sigue Sputnik but it wasn't the sort of thing you admitted to in certain circles back then. It's OK to admit to it now. Probably.

Love Your Money - Daisy Chainsaw

If you didn't like the live version, you aren't going to like the studio cut any better, I imagine, and the official video is disturbing in a whole number different of fresh ways, not least that bass sound. How are they even making it do that?

The building reminds me of the party scene in Dogs In Space, the movie in which Michael Hutchence from INXS tries his hand at acting. He's playing himself, mostly, and quite well, too. It's a talent. Not everyone can do it.

There was an awful lot of that student house/anarchist squat chic going around in the early '90s. If you told me this was shot in the band's actual house I wouldn't question it. When you listen to KJG speak, she's very posh but then all the squats were full of public school types. It was a strange time in many ways.

Interview from Rapido

I used to watch Rapido fairly religiously, too, but I don't recall seeing this before, either. If I had, I'm not sure it would have endeared me to the band at the time. I wasn't as big a fan of that kind of chaos then, not when it frequently imposed itself on me in the street, at gigs or pretty much anywhere I went outside the house. It all looks a lot more fey and harmless now with thirty years between us. Honestly, if anyone thinks things are bad now, they clearly weren't around for the casual street violence of the '70s, '80s and early '90s. It only calmed down when they took the lead out of petrol.

Watching all this, it's not at all surprising to find KatieJane an acknowledged influence on Courtney Love and also, I read, on Arrow from Starcrawler. I imagine on a lot of less well-known front-women, too. Makes me sad to think I missed it all when it was happening right under my nose. I didn't really stop going to these sort of gigs until a decade later. I could have been getting elbowed in the face in that mosh pit.

Pretty Like Drugs - Queen Adreena

And here we are, exactly a decade later, in 2003 with KJ's new band, Queen Adreena, who I had never even heard of, much less heard, until a couple of days ago. I blame EverQuest

The progression from Daisy Chainsaw is remarkable. Live, there's still the same wild energy, the same pagan abandon, but in the studio...

Medicine Jar - Queen Adreena

So much more disciplined. Ten years will do that, although leaving the band where you wrote none of the songs to start another where you write them all must help. And yet the relentless drive, the remorseless attack, remains. That claw hammer bass. Those merciless drums. Guitar squalls like choking gulls. And KatieJane just rises above it all. She just rises. 

Has she peaked? Of course she hasn't!

Daisy Chainsaw released just one album in maybe five years. Queen Adreena put out half a dozen between the turn of the millennium and 2008 and inbetween those there was also a solo album, released under the name Lalleshwari

It's very different.

Puppy Love - Lalleshwari

Now you see where I was going with that Polly Scattergood comparison, right? I have no more proof Polly follows knowingly in KatieJane's wake than Let's Eat Grandma do but there's natural progression in art, too, isn't there? That ground has to be broken before flowers bloom.


For You I Hold My Breath - Lalleshwari

Another track from the album Lullabies In A Glass Wilderness, here set to footage from the problematic Valerie And Her Week Of Wonders, such a perennially popular choice among YouTube creators I sometimes feel I must have seen pretty much all of it just through watching music videos.

In The Arms Of Flowers - Ruby Throat

Even before Queen Adreena's last album hit the record stores, KatieJane was off again, this time to start a neo-folk duo called Ruby Throat. Another four albums followed until, in 2020, she changed names again to release what remains her most recent album, this time under the name Liar, Flower, although the members of that band remained the same as before - KatieJane and her partner Chris Whittingham.


Broken Light - Liar, Flower

What, if any, the difference between these two ongoing projects might be I have absolutely no idea. I just hope there will be more from one or other of them Or some new aggreation. It's been a while. I'd hate to think I've finally caught up with her just when she's stopped.

Even if, I'm very glad to have gotten myself straightened out over all of this. There's thirty years of back catalog to explore including not just all those albums but poetry, lithographs, a biography, even a  graphic novel published by Image, no less. 

Some of this but by no means all is still available from Katiejane's website. The rest, like the truth, is out there, somewhere, just like KatieJane herself.

I wonder who or what I need to re-assess next? It could be a long list...

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