Three weeks after the launch of the neo-Victorian survival game Nightingale, Inflexion Games boss Aaryn Flynn says there are aspects of the game the studio isn’t happy with, but that fixes and improvements including a new patch aimed at eliminating disconnections from the game are on the way.
Nightingale got off to a strong start when it launched into early access on February 20, but, like so many other games, ran into trouble with its servers. The situation was made worse by Nightingale’s always-online requirement, even for solo play. The Steam user rating quickly slid to “mixed,” and the concurrent player count tailed off rapidly. It’s not a doom-and-gloom scenario—there are still thousands of people playing the game at any given time—but there’s definitely work to be done, as Flynn acknowledged in a recent update.
“We’ve been spending a lot of our time reading your impressions online, going through Discord, watching your streams, and building our plans for the next phase of the game,” Flynn said. “That being said, there are some things we’re not happy with about the game, whether it’s network disconnects, some missing quality of life improvements we want to get done, or other things in the game that are missing or not quite where we want them to be.
“We’re working hard to address those things right now and to make sure you get the best playable experience possible. Now on that front, we have a patch going live which is going to address one of our biggest concerns, which is network disconnects. Really exciting to get that done for you.”
Community coordinator Mariibel Diaz said the studio’s priority over the coming weeks will be “refining the current game experience,” which includes fixing bugs, investigations into crashes and network errors, game balancing, and removing exploits.
“We’re also looking into quality of life updates that don’t require a long turnaround time, but will have a big impact on players,” Diaz said. “This includes things like quick-sort into storage, craft from storage, queue up crafting, as well as the ability to purchase items from your guide book after you’ve met Essence Traders.”
Systems that have enabled some players to access high-end gear and weapons that aren’t intended to be accessible in the current build will also be removed in a future update. For now, community manager Steph Herman asked that players who have gained access to those items “be considerate of others and not use them in public vaults.”
Further out—”the next few months,” Diaz said—Inflexion plans to make improvements to creature AI, add additional weapon types and NPC features, make changes to building systems, and yes, get the promised offline mode in place—something that, unfortunately still doesn’t have a solid schedule in place.
“The offline mode falls into the medium-term category because it involves a lot of work. For example, the game workload is currently split between the servers and your PC. So we need to see how machines will handle doing the work of both. We’re still very early on this work and are unable to commit to timelines, but know that we are working on this.”