Dragon Age and Mass Effect veteran says he looked at Palworld to reverse the fortunes of his survival game

Survival game hits Palworld and Enshrouded helped shape the major upcoming update to Dragon Age and Mass Effect veteran Arryn Flynn's own survival game, Nightingale.

Nightingale launched in February, just as a suite of other survival games were jousting for attention in the genre. Palworld, Enshrouded, and V Rising were just some of a glut of games that launched around the same time as Nightingale, and Flynn maintains that that was still a benefit for Nightingale.

Speaking to GamesRadar+, he said that his previous assertions that a rise in genre releases would be of benefit to his game were "still true": "I think we did get a 'rising tide lifts all boats', and I think we did get additional visibility because of that." But while Palworld and Enshrouded found large audiences, Nightingale struggled. Flynn thinks that might have been the result of being "the earliest of the Early Access versions of those games. And that's on us and on me in terms of prioritizing and helping to build Nightingale."

With a major update on the horizon, Flynn says that "if I could go back in time and deliver this [updated] version of Nightingale back in February, I would." He also, however, says that this update has been shaped in part by the success of those other games, telling PC Gamer that his studio "went through Enshrouded, Palworld, V Rising," to assess player perception. He found that "it was really the structure that stood out as something they offered that we were not offering. Players told us that they want to be creative and wanted to explore the limits of the building system, but those limits were too small, too narrow."

Personally, I thought that Nightingale's 'gaslamp fantasy' stylization meant that its building systems were a lot more interesting than, say, Palworld's, although I'll note that Enshrouded's efforts - much closer to something like Valheim - may have left Flynn's efforts behind. But Palworld's ideas made their mark on Nightingale in another way - Flynn says that a Palworld-style automation system had been on the cards, "but it was always a bridge too far for us."

Nightingale's Realms Rebuilt is set to launch soon, six months after that original launch. It's a player-focused update, driven by the fact that "our player numbers are not where they want them to be." Whether it's enough to turn the game's fortunes around in a year that's still undeniably stacked with survival games, however, remains to be seen.