Nightingale preview from Game Awards 2022: ‘Survival-crafting’ in style

NightingaleBy opening an umbrella, players can take off. Developers at Inflexion Games, the Edmonton, Alberta-based studio founded in 2018 by BioWare alumni, added this to the unusual fantasy only recently, Neil Thompson, the studio’s art director, told Polygon.

It may become a badge or another marker that helps curious gamers to identify and understand things with a high level of concept. Nightingale, shown in a two-minute trailer during The Game Awards 2022 on Thursday, is taken from the Victorian era, but it’s definitely not steampunk; and it’s a “shared-world survival crafting” role-playing game, but it’s not a massively multiplayer online game.

“We’ve made Dragon Age as a dark, medieval fantasy game, and we’ve made Mass Effect as a high science-fiction game,” said Aaryn Flynn, Inflexion’s chief executive and BioWare’s former general manager. He also holds developer credits. Jade Empire And Dragon Age: The Origins.) “But we started off wanting to build this kind of Victorian-era contemporary fantasy, with magic, [that]This is a great setting. Then we saw it. [and] we navigated our way toward the right gameplay for that.”

Image by Inflexion Games

Nightingale, first revealed at last year’s Game Awards, players will create a human character from the year 1889 in an alternate history, where humans have learned and developed magic alongside technology of the day. In this timeline, adventurers called “Realmwalkers” have journeyed from Earth to the “Lands of Fae,” a magical plane of existence, and are returning to report on their exploits.

A cataclysmic earthquake causes the portals to the other worlds to collapse, trapping humanity in the Lands and scattering its survivors. The survivors must be able to survive and become Realmwalkers, and then reach Nightingale. This city was founded by their forefathers as an outpost human for studying magic.

If all of that sounds like the premise for an MMO, you are not alone; the developers for a long time looked at this game as just that, said Leah Summers, Inflexion’s director of production. The systems they were working with, however, weren’t a good fit for a studio their size (Nightingale’s team comprises about 100 developers). But the crafting and survival gameplay that Summers’ team had worked up was too intriguing to throw out in a wholesale change of direction to a more traditional narrative RPG.

“The biggest conversation we’ve had when it comes to our survival players is the idea of accessibility,” Summers said. “You have Valheim coming out, where, it’s not really that hardcore survival; it’s quite accessible, and so some of the bigger conversations we have are, How do you want to challenge your players? What kind of challenge do you want for your players?The way you view combat in an MMO is different to the single experience. We want to build in a lot more opportunity for players to solve these challenges with our survival crafting.”

For all those inquisitive, Can I solo it?The answer is simple yes. Nightingale, Windows PC early access launch in 2023 sometime during the first half. This game is intended to be single-player, but there are some elements of PvE for guests. Explore, Discover, Harvest, Craft, Combat and Action are all part of the main loop.

To ensure a uniform experience while still tuning a game to a player’s strengths (or away from their weaknesses), Inflexion is introducing a modifier called “Realm Cards,” which are an opportunity for players to draw and set broad parameters for what they are about to encounter. “It’s the biome, it’s the kind of creatures and structures you’ll find in there,” Flynn told media during Monday’s presentation. “So you can buff your character up going in there, you can debuff what’s on the other side, you can give yourself unique attributes and unique benefits [by] playing certain realm cards.”

Thompson, Thompson the art director said that Realm Cards were created early in Nightingale’s development. “I think we all instantly felt that it would be a big differentiator, if we could make it work,” he said. Rather than setting variable difficulty levels (and balancing all of them), Realm Cards would give players a leg up on the next chapter of their encounter, or at least give them peace of mind that a particularly nettlesome adversary probably won’t appear.

“The thing that surprised us is how flexible [Realm Cards] are getting for us,” Flynn said, pointing to the closed alpha tests that Summers has administered since October. “How many different combinations and things players get to do to create that meta, so that players can find interesting ways to solve problems for themselves, in the instance, and from there comes the survival crafting strategies and tactics.”

At first blush Nightingale It would be comparable to Fallout 76Another large-scale survival-and-craft game, whose developers also refused to label it an MMO. Flynn stated that the encounters will be balanced to allow two or three players against AI enemies, but they won’t reach raid-level. “We want to make sure that the vast majority of our content is enjoyable to the single player,” Flynn said. Players can group their Realm Cards together to make an instance with greater difficulty, provided they’re up for the challenge. This will result in better rewards.

These are the heroes Nightingale Flynn explained that they are all custom and drawn from various ethnicities, identities, representations. There are many customizations possible in costuming. This is especially true when someone takes their morning constitutional through The Fae Lands dressed in either a top and waistcoat or a bonnet, bustle, and they wear them everywhere. Or the umbrella/glider; Summers said alpha players are already asking if they can have a special umbrella skin noting their participation in the game’s early development.

“I think we’ve always been quite clear and committed to, That is the essence of it Nightingale is, with its ‘gaslamp’ fantasy,” she recalled. “I think when we started to think about more of the survival aspect, we had conversations like, Well, you’re gonna look pretty fancy surviving.”

Nightingale This is currently only available for Windows PC. Flynn indicated that Inflexion Games envisions a period of early access for approximately a year prior to a full launch. Later versions for consoles will be available.