The future looks bright for Nightingale. It’s never nice to see a game face a troubled launch, especially one as spectacular to look at as Inflexion Games’ Victorian gaslamp fantasy world. Fortunately, the survival game has seen a gradual and continued recovery from its rocky start with the dramatic Realms Rebuilt overhaul, and it looks to have paid off. Now, it’s focused on the future, and that starts with one big upgrade to base building as the developer returns to working on a larger city environment that reaches back to its original MMORPG roots.
In a new Nightingale dev blog, CEO Aaryn Flynn and head of audio Neil Thompson sit down once again for a chat about the state of the survival game. Flynn notes that the team is seeing a lot more positive reviews on Steam – it’s now lifted dramatically to a much more positive recent rating of 77% across the last 30 days – and adds that he was pleased by the outcome of the recent community base-building event.
As for what’s next, the team has just launched a new update to the public test realm, which Flynn notes includes “hundreds and hundreds of bug fixes.” There are also additional UI upgrades, with a redesigned dialogue window to display NPC conversations and improved task tracking. The most dramatic change, however, is a small but highly impactful tweak to the way base building works.
“The [change] that people are going to have the most fun with is that we removed structure support requirements for building,” Flynn says. Whereas before you’d see objects go red due to restrictions around connecting pieces, that has now been lifted. “It just felt like more of a limitation in the end rather than something that was enabling you to do really cool things,” he explains, “so we just thought, hey, what’s the harm in cutting it? Have fun with it – it’s really all about fun in the end.”
You’ll still have to establish a foundation to build new objects on, but once they exist you can remove the foundations and the connecting structures will float in place. This is a fantasy realm, after all, and floating islands and structures have already been a key part of the design. It’ll also be another great space-saving tool to combine with the increased build limits in Realms Rebuilt, allowing you even more freedom to create a magical, memorable home. It’s a change that feels like it helps capture the fantasy of the world, something Flynn told me he wanted to emphasize in a recent Nightingale interview.
Speaking of memorable locations, Thompson brings up a place that will be familiar to those who’ve been following Nightingale since its original conception as more of an MMORPG. In that format, players would have ventured out to the various realms from a central hub called Nightingale City, which was already fairly deep in development but didn’t make it to the full release following the game’s structural shift to a survival crafting focus.
“Nightingale City is not in the game at the moment, and that’s always felt like a big hole,” Thompson says, “so we are now working back again on Nightingale City.” He notes that large sections still exist from its original incarnation, which the team is in the process of cleaning up and reworking. Flynn adds that there’s no time frame on its arrival yet, but that “it’s a big, important part of our vision for the game, to give you all this awesome, magical Victorian city to go to, and so we’re taking the first steps in doing that.”
Also on the way is a Halloween event, which is included in the current PTR update. Flynn says this will arrive on the full server once final testing has concluded. “Certainly no later than Halloween – it’d better be out by then, I guess!” In the meantime, you can test the event alongside the new building features on the Nightingale PTR right now, with additional details on how to do so available via the game’s Discord.
For plenty more places to scratch that itch to explore, take a look through the best open-world games on PC right now, or maybe the best fantasy games instead.
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