Recently, Nightingale devs took time to explain the difficult financial situation they found themselves in, leading to layoffs and the closure of the UK Studio. They held off any future development commentary, saying that would come later. A new developer Q&A for November is here, and they are looking towards the future and what we can expect in Nightingale (there’s a sword).
This month, they're targeting the addition of listen server functionality, which means you'll be able to play the game without having to connect to an official hosted server. It will debut in preview mode, but they'll continue looking at the feature over time. There's focus at the studio and some shifts.
"Nightingale is a very broad game. It's sometimes broader than it is deep, and we want to add depth to the places that we now have confidence you're all enjoying, or other people are enjoying. That's things like the combat and then the building/estate management," Flynn says in the transcript. The staff reductions do mean more focus on smaller things or small pieces of big things, released over more time.
“Basically, over the next two updates we will be dripping new end-game stuff for players”, Flynn says, with Nightingale City the next big release in terms of big new playable content.
As for that sword, it is coming and there will be an alternate for the Slingbow too. Aaryn Flynn notes that, “We struggled to think of the sword as a Victorian-era weapon. Hence, we didn't prioritize it”. Yet, it was such a common request that well, you all did it. It’s coming. Also on the way are multiple new tilesets, and we’ll see some closer to the holidays. The devs mention an Herbarium set, Fae set, and Western set are among them. These tilesets are priority, but they will be looking into new building pieces afterwards.
Other things definitely in the works are decorations, including holiday decorations and other new decor. Also in the works are improvements to augmentations that let you assign different augments to benches. This is part of an overall augmentation overhaul that is coming soon. Inflexion is also working on having multiple NPCs to fill out the NPC gameplay and enrich the world. This is something we can expect over multiple updates.
Some things that are further down the line include farming and improvements to fishing, along with additional cozy gameplay mechanics and features.
The full Q&A is very informative, including things that the team is considering adding to eventual development, as well as if they don't have any future plans for but could be interesting. Nightingale’s next update should come later this month.
