Nightingale, the survival game from former Mass Effects devs, is getting a big Early Access update aimed at improving the overall experience and player sentiment.
Inflexion Games, the studio led by former Bioware boss Aaryn Flynn, launched its debut project in Early Access back in February, and despite praise for its building, crafting, and Victorian-era fantasy world, reviews for the game on Steam were 'mixed' at the time. Nightingale has since released some substantial updates, with the "biggest one" targeting gameplay and quality of life, and it's now moved up to 'Mostly Positive' Steam reviews.
Even so, the road to 1.0 is long and Inflexion still isn't happy with the current state of the game, promising sweeping changes to many of the game's core systems, including its procedurally generated Realms, in an update coming later this Summer.
"It has to be said, we are not satisfied with where the game is at, we're not satisfied with the overall sentiment, we’re not satisfied with our player numbers," Flynn said in a video update. "And so a lot of the effort this past few months has been things we can do to, again, bring that vision we've had for many years around Nightingale to all of you ... that's been the focus now, since about May."
Flynn noted that there are things about Nightingale that the devs are happy with, specifically "the procedural generation system and a lot of the tools that have been built to bring those Realms to life," as well as the "Gaslamp fantasy stuff" generally.
However, art director and head of audio at Inflexion Neil Thompson laid out the general plan for getting Nightingale where Inflexion wants it. "You are a Realmwalker, we want you to have adventures in those Realms." Thompson said, "I think a tremendous amount of the work that we've been doing is to fulfill that promise, fulfill the promise of adventure, whether it's to do more work within the Realms to make them more engaging, more content within them, more unique. Those things are super important to us."
Flynn, meanwhile, teased some vague updates to the game's progression system as well as seemingly fundamental changes to the designs of the Realms in an attempt to give a greater sense of structure.
"We do love the game very much, but we do think there's a lot of room to improve it," Flynn said. "One big way that we want to improve it is to bring more structure to the overall experience," Flynn said. "What I mean by that is more sense of you as a player progressing; a better understanding of what you can do, a better understanding of the differences between these Realms. We’ve heard loud and clear that the Realms can sometimes feel quite samey and repetitive at times, so we've spent a lot of our effort thinking about how we can improve that while retaining the core pieces of that technology puzzle that we have."
On a similar note, Thompson described the game as "almost too open-world, too self-motivated in terms of goal setting, and I think we’ve made some changes to make that a bit more traditional structurally, but exciting as well."
"We played on the weekend together, we played this new version really recently, and there's still a bit more work to do, but I think it's elevated it quite a bit, but obviously you'll all be the judge of that when we bring this thing out," Flynn said.
Finally, Flynn and Thompson addressed the issue of build limits, acknowledging players have "been patient on this topic" and teasing an increase in the amount of pieces you can put into structures to match players' ambitions to build "grandiose estates and things."
Flynn said everything discussed in the video should be available to all Nightingale players "towards the end of summer," noting there's "still a lot of work to do to make sure it's all connected properly. We don't want to rush it, but at the same time we're keen to get this out there."
Ultimately, Thompson said the new version is "Nightingale, but better," to which Flynn emphatically agreed.
Only time will tell if this new version will make our list of the best survival games to play right now.
