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With Nightingale off to an average start, its developer is rolling out an offline mode as soon as possible to win fans back.
Nightingale, the debut offering from Inflexion Games - a studio led by former Bioware boss Aaryn Flynn - released in Early Access this week, and despite many players enjoying building, crafting, and battling their way through its Victorian-era fantasy world, reviews for the game on Steam are 'mixed.'
One of the main reasons for this is that although the game can be played solo, doing so still requires an online connection. "This is a fantastic and fun game so far, however, I'm playing single-player and am often getting 'network error' due to having to be online ALL the time," says one reviewer. Another writes, "I REALLY like a lot of this game so far. Being always online, even when playing solo, is absolute nonsense. There is no reason a game like this has to be online at all times."
To Inflexion's credit, it has listened closely to the feedback and is now "prioritizing and developing" an offline mode, which it plans to implement "as soon as feasible."
In a post on the Nightingale Steam page announcing the move, the developer laid out its reason for making Nightingale online-only for the game's initial release and acknowledged that this "can be frustrating" for fans.
"Our vision for the game since inception was to create an interconnected series of Realms, with the idea of allowing for co-operative exploration in mind - a universe bigger than a single Realm or server," it explains. "That meant we made a choice early in development between supporting co-op from day one or focusing development on an offline mode.
"Co-operative gameplay associated with having party members across multiple Realms was the more technically challenging problem and therefore the one we chose to tackle first," it continues. "Looking back on that decision, we misjudged what some of you were looking for in your experience."
Inflection didn't give a timeframe for when we can expect to see offline mode added to Nightingale, and given the game's emphasis on a shared world experience, implementing it is likely no small task. Still, this is is clearly now a top priority for the team, suggesting we'll see it sooner rather than later.
