Obviously no multiplayer game studio wants to shutter their game, but after two rounds of layoffs at Inflexion Games, it’s obviously hard for Nightingale fans to not harbor that concern. That elephant in the room was addressed by devs in a November Q&A session in which studio CEO Aaryn Flynn promised that the survival sandbox will stay alive.
“There is zero intention for us to close Nightingale down. You’re hearing it from us that we are continuing to work on Nightingale, and part of the reason we made the changes to the studio that we did was to enable us to continue to work on Nightingale and to support it in the long term.”
On the subject of those firings, Flynn remarked that Inflexion still has a “healthy number of folks contributing to Nightingale” and that those developers would direct focus on making certain aspects like combat and estate management deeper; he didn’t directly answer the question of whether reductions in staff would mean smaller or less frequent updates, saying instead that “our job as development leaders is to focus our team on the most important things, and those are the two things.”
The vast majority of the Q&A otherwise focused on gameplay matters. Some of the answers provided by devs noted efforts on improving character creation, adding a way for crafting bench augments to be more individually applied, word of work on a new biome (that won’t be winter), and discussion on adding more multiplayer-focused content while striking a balance of keeping things solo-friendly. The team is also working on “listen servers” – aka the ability for players to hop into a friend’s offline game without requiring a constant network connection or a private server.
