Six months after release into Early Access, the Nightingale team has a new update on how things are going and what’s next.
Inflexion’s Aaryn Flynn and Neil Thomson dive in and talk about how the team has continued to respond to feedback, adding quality of life improvements and features like offline mode. As a result of spending a lot of time during the first few months on fixes, listening to players about pain points and what they could do better, in addition to adding features, bug fixes, and of course things like offline mode that were highly requested.
Yet, they haven’t been internally satisfied either, as Flynn says, “We're not satisfied with the overall sentiment. We're not satisfied with our player numbers and so a lot of the effort this past few months has been things we can do to again bring that vision we've had for many years [to the community]". Since May, they've been focused on improving those very things and looking ahead.
While there are things that are working well, like the gaslamp fantasy setting, the premise, and the realms overall, they are looking to improve upon many aspects. One thing Flynn suggests is the addition of more structure to the game, as a way of adding a sense of progression and understanding of what is possible instead of feeling a little too open and self-directed. They've also gotten criticism about Realms being too similar, So, another goal is making Realms feel more unique and reducing repetition overall.
Related:
Nightingale - Early Access Review
As far as structure, those changes do add some more traditional gameplay to the experience, but they admit things were perhaps a bit too open to be truly engaging.
One of the things we can expect is improvements and increases to build limits so you can start being more creative and build bigger structures. Expect all of these changes in a big update later this summer. This is what the studio is solely focused on at the moment. This means that some of their roadmap features are probably getting a bit shuffled, but the focus will be on this update coming out in the next few weeks and continuing to listen to player feedback
