With Nightingale, there is great hope in the survival genre in 2023, which comes completely without PvP. Shortly before the game awards, we were able to talk to the developers and bring a lot of new information with us.
What is Nightingale anyway? The project was presented in 2021 and quickly gained a lot of attention. Nightingale is a survival game set in the Victorian era, 1889 to be precise.
There, the game tells a story based on alternate history, mixing fantasy with real events and characters.
In the world of Nightingale, humans fight for survival against the dangers that the different worlds bring with them. Because you can use portals to travel to different “realms” and explore them. You can even set one of them as your home.
Not only are you always looking for new resources to build your own home and slowly push humanity forward again, but you are also looking for the last bastion of humanity, the eponymous city of Nightingale.
The newly founded studio Inflexion Games is responsible for turning this concept into a good game. Although Nightingale will be the studio’s first game, it is consistently staffed by experienced developers. In particular, some BioWare veterans who worked on games like Dragon Age are on board.
As part of the Game Awards, the developers now showed a brand new trailer and revealed some details to us.
Nightingale Realmwalker Trailer
Complete focus on PvE and exploration
What are you doing in the game? You are mainly looking for resources in the different realms, which you can enter and design yourself thanks to the so-called realm cards. You use an arsenal of different cards, which not only roughly determine the look and the biome of the realm, but also the loot and its level of difficulty.
The entire game is optimized in such a way that you should also be able to experience everything as a solo player. Weak portals bring you the same loot as the most difficult ones, just less of it. The former BioWare developers promise that even people who play Nightingale alone will get their money’s worth.
You then jump through the portal and literally explore a new world. You can meet other players, a maximum of 6 on one map, by the way, but they work together with you. Nightingale completely dispenses with a PvP system.
how do you move around City Food focuses on exploring the worlds, for which you have a lot of tools at your disposal, as shown in the latest trailer.
Not only can you climb up steep walls thanks to mountaineering equipment, but you can also glide through the world with an umbrella. In true “Mary Poppins” style, you can explore the dangerous worlds while being protected from the rain.
You can expect deep valleys and high mountains as well as extensive cave systems that contain particularly nasty monsters.
However, you cannot tame and ride the monsters, at least not in Early Access, as the developers tell us
From the ax to the magic wand
How is it fought? Nightingale gives you three different weapon categories to choose from, which fit into the fantasy world of the 19th century. The focus, at least at the start of your survival adventure, is fully on melee weapons such as axes and swords.
Later you will have the opportunity to use ranged weapons such as flintlock pistols and rifles. But the materials for this are difficult to find and the ammunition that you shoot up, you also have to make yourself. So it wants to be shot with caution.
In the endgame, you even have the option of using magic weapons. However, these should be a long-term goal and not something that you get thrown after, according to the studio’s CEO.
How does death work? As in every survival game, death also plays a major role in Nightingale, but it turns out to be comparatively nice in direct comparison to genre colleagues. If your character dies, you keep everything you were wearing at the time of death.
At the same time, you lose everything that was in your inventory. It will be left as a small backpack at the place of your death, where you can collect it later.
In addition, after your death you will receive a curse for a limited time that will make you weaker before you return to your full power.
There are story quests, but you have to find them yourself
Is there a plot? Nightingale has an overarching storyline. You play an involuntary realmwalker who travels to different worlds to rebuild humanity. The so-called Fae are your biggest enemy.
The fae are magical beings that are far more powerful than normal humans. But they are not fundamentally evil, but have various characters. However, the developers describe them as dangerous, since most of them only see people as objects and “toys”.
Facing the Fae are six different factions of humanity, led by different NPCs. You can also meet and talk to these and more in the world. They even have various quests for you.
How do quests work? If you have found such a settlement where there are NPCs who have something to do for you, you can talk to them and help them with the problems in their realm. These tasks should not be generic and even tell a story.
In addition, they should not be too short and require you to return to the respective NPC several times. Incidentally, many NPCs are based on the real world as well as real novels. So you can meet Ada Lovelace, Henry Hyde, Allan Quatermain and many more.
Apart from that there is no direct storyline in Nightingale.
The developers would like to push you in a certain direction, but the real adventures and stories should be written and experienced by the players themselves.
You can start next year
When can you gamble? Nightingale is currently in a closed alpha phase in which only very select fans are actually allowed to play. But that should change at the beginning of 2023, when the survival game should start in a closed beta.
Later in the year, early access will also start, with anyone who wants to be able to play. However, it is not yet known how much access will cost.
How many people can you play with? A maximum of 6 players can be on a map at the same time, so this is also your maximum group size. However, the developers speak of a shared world in which everyone can somehow play with each other. We don’t know the details yet.
Can you set up private servers? No, not in Early Access anyway. During the early stages of the game, Nightingale will not support private servers or modding.
The developers justify this by saying that they have to further optimize the server structure themselves in order to later be able to let more than 6 people on the same instance. However, modding should still be activated during the early access phase.
What does Early Access bring? You can play Nightingale yourself and freely explore the realms using the map system, but the full game is not yet available. The eponymous capital Nightingale should also be visitable at some point, but it is not yet at the start of Early Access.
During the EA phase, new content will continue to be added to the game and seasonal content will also improve Nightingale. Again, it is not yet known what exactly they look like.
Is there a character editor? Yes, and it is surprisingly extensive. The developers tell us that they put a lot of emphasis on players being able to truly be the character they want to be.
There are also numerous clothing options. By the way, the outfits and armor in the game are not tied to genders or body types. This should also contribute to maximum freedom in character creation.
What do you think of Nightingale? Are you looking forward to the survival title and realms, or are you disliking something at all? Write it to us in the comments here at MeinMMO.
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