Recently, the Nightingale team announced the game’s Early Access launch date –February 22, 2024. In the latest developer update, they dive into why the delay, what they’ll be using the extra time to accomplish, info from the most recent playtests, and additional features and peeks.
The Early Access date is “ a little bit later than we had hoped,” community coordinator Maribel Diaz says. Considering that this is the latest of several delays, they’re putting their decision into perspective. Early Access is something they look at as a way to build the foundation for the player experience and to continue to make improvements based on feedback from playtests and the community.
So, they’re looking to make those improvements, let the team have the year-end holidays off to get some rest time, and then come back in full. They also admit that you only get one public launch, so they are working to make it as strong as possible.
Speaking of playtests, Nightingale had its latest closed playtest from August 25th-September 5th with over 7,000 players taking part. Since playtesters were able to invite their friends to help test the co-op options, they had a number of issues since there were so many players and all of those players were able to invite 1-5 other people. Of course, when you are testing a multiplayer online game, these are the issues you want to see in testing rather than later.
One of the things the team tested was a new onboarding flow that they say reduce friction and helped the early game experience be a smoother one. Even some new accessibility features based on player feedback. The first is the ability to do continuous actions just by holding down the action button. so you can just hold on the button to chop a tree instead of having to click over and over. You can also hold down a button to vacuum items instead of having to go around and collect them all. While these are accessibility changes, everyone can benefit from them.
We also got a peek at customization. While full details will be released sometime later, you'll be able to have customized colors, even giving your characters heterochromia if you want, and change your character's age. If you just want to jump in, there will be a number of character presets as well.
There will be additional playtests on the way too. For more, head to Nightingale.
