We’ve had an eye on Inflexion Games’ multiplayer survival sandbox Nightingale since its debut last year – in fact, it was meant to hit early access this fall but delayed to next year, meaning it’s still in closed alpha right now. At Geoff Keighley’s Game Awards tonight, Inflexion dropped a new trailer for the alternahistory “Victorian gaslamp fantasy” game showing off how players will cave-dive, face off against creepy horrors, and glide the skies using Mary Poppins-esque umbrellas.
Ahead of the show, Inflexion – the Edmonton-based studio with plenty of BioWare credits under its devs’ belts – met with press to reintroduce the game. The devs stressed that Nightingale will be co-op PvE with no PvP planned, setting up shop on PC specifically with console potentially to follow. The team is still emphasizing that this is a “shared-world survival crafting with RPG elements” and not an MMO; in fact, servers are capped at six players at a time in a “friends-only” co-op system. The game will also be balanced and aimed at solo players, meaning that multiplayer is option, never required. But the team also talked up the game experience as a “thriving virtual world” across its community of players aka Realmwalkers, so clearly it has bigger ambitions.
MMO fans will be particularly excited to know the game will offer a base system called Respite Realms that players can build out and expand with the crafting system. However, don’t expect mods or player-run servers; servers for this game are unified and run by the studio.
The press event also re-explained the game’s card system, which has seemed to be a challenging concept to convey over the last year, judging by the convoluted dev blogs on the topic; the realm cards are essentially tickets to other worlds that can be used in combination as seeds to change the attributes and elements of the world from the environment and climate to creatures and resources – like the building blocks of a zone, but in the players’ hands.
Early access – and season one – is currently planned for the first half of 2023, with plans for expanding seasonal content beyond that.
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