In a year where competition among the best survival games has been fierce, Nightingale has struggled despite its striking sense of style. The “gaslamp fantasy” release from Inflexion Games hasn’t reached the highs of rivals such as Enshrouded, Palworld, Once Human, and Valheim, and hasn’t seen over 1,000 active players at once since the start of July. CEO Aaryn Flynn and art director Neil Thompson of Inflexion Games deliver a frank assessment of where the game is at, but promise that big changes are coming.
The art direction and world design of Nightingale showed a lot of promise, but it was impacted by early launch issues, a general sense that it lacked satisfying progression systems compared to other survival games, and restrictive limits making base building tough. Despite peaking at a high of 47,569 players at launch, its highest player count in the last month was 1,200 on Sunday July 7, and the game’s Steam rating sits at a ‘mixed’ 64% across 11,600 combined user reviews.
“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 says. Much like its recent updates, the new developer blog carries a reflective but hopeful tone. Players responded well to the self-styled gaslamp fantasy design, which is certainly its strongest asset, but there’s still plenty of room to improve on things.
One of the biggest issues the team is focused on right now is improving its Realms. These trans-dimensional portals are the game’s big selling point, but they’re falling short. “You are a Realmwalker,” Thompson says, “I think a tremendous amount of the work that we’ve been doing is to fulfill that promise, the promise of adventure, whether it’s doing more work within the Realms to make them more engaging, more content within them, more unique. Those things are super important to us.”
“We’ve heard loud and clear that the Realms can sometimes feel quite samey and repetitive at times,” Flynn remarks. “We’ve spent a lot of our effort thinking about how we can improve that.” “It was almost too open-world, too self-motivated in terms of goal setting,” Thompson adds, “and we’ve made some changes to make that a bit more traditional structurally, but exciting as well.”
Another key note is progression. “One big way that we want to improve [Nightingale] is to bring more structure to the experience,” Flynn continues. “What I mean by that is more sense of you as a player progressing; a better understanding of what you can do.” That ties into the Realm exploration, as Inflexion aims to deliver a slightly more directed experience than the very open-ended approach taken at launch.
The pair also address build limits. “I know many of you have been patient on this topic,” Flynn says. “Nightingale has not had the most robust limits – if you play other survival crafting games you will have seen they have more pieces you can put out there to build these grandiose estates and things.”
“I think we’re finally at a place now where we can actually match those, where we can bring you much more of what you love about building in Nightingale.” The reworks should “really up the number of pieces you can put into your structures and estates so that they can be more creative, more expressive, bigger, and overall more interesting,” Flynn explains.
As for when we can expect this update to land, Flynn says it should arrive “towards the end of summer – it’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.” Thompson notes that the team’s full focus is on this update for now, and that it’s put other plans such as endgame expansions aside to ensure the core game feels more fulfilling. “It really became apparent to us that we had to get this right before we could move onto those things,” Flynn responds.
Only time will tell whether the update pays off, but I certainly hope the team at Inflexion Games manages to find that magic spark. There’s a lot to like about Nightingale’s world, and if the core loop can be made more fulfilling then I’d certainly be tempted to give it a second chance. Comebacks from rough launches are ever more commonplace nowadays, and maybe, hopefully, in a year or two we’ll look back on Nightingale as another of those.
While we wait, here are more of the best co-op games for you and your friends to enjoy together, along with the best crafting games in 2024.
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