Nightingale: After a bumpy start: survival title gets offline mode

Another survival title, Nightingale, recently went into early access, but the launch didn’t go quite smoothly. The developers have now admitted a misjudgment and vow to improve.

The survival title Nightingale went into early access on Steam last week with great expectations, but apparently things didn’t go quite well. The title from Inflexion Games, a new studio run by Aaryn Flynn, Bioware’s former general manager, struggled with some server issues. The reviews so far have been rather mediocre, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing – after all, a 12-month early access phase is planned.

In view of the poor feedback for the cooperatively playable title, the developers have now decided to add an offline mode as soon as possible and even describe the earlier decision to be online-only as a misjudgment. A statement on Steam says:

“Our vision for the game from the start was to create a series of interconnected realms that would enable cooperative exploration – a universe larger than a single realm or server. This meant that early in development We had the choice of either supporting co-op from day one or focusing development on an offline mode. Co-op gameplay with party members across multiple realms was the more technically challenging problem and therefore the one we wanted to tackle first . Looking back on this decision, we misjudged what some of you expected from your gaming experience.”

Players are asked to keep an eye out for updates in the “coming weeks,” along with news about “other things we’re working on.” It also clarified that work on other updates such as new content, bug fixes and quality of life features is ongoing and that there will be more details “in the next few days.”

At least at the moment it looks like Inflexion Games still has a lot of work to do to make the title really competitive. But that’s exactly what early access phases are for, to try things out and to collect and implement player feedback.