Nightingale’s Ex-Bioware Devs Say They Never Want to Return to 'Old School' Game Development

18.01.2024 - 20:07 / ign.com

Nightingale wasn’t always a shared-world survival crafting RPG. Though it’s always retained its gaslamp fantasy flair during its nearly five years in development, at one point, Nightingale could have been an MMO. That change came from the natural progression of developer Inflexion’s preferences and vision, but much more has changed because of consistent, constructive feedback from thousands of players during closed alpha playtests over the last year.

Inflexion CEO Aaryn Flynn has been so impressed by the experience he said, “I don’t know how you go back and do it more old school like we used to do it.” Where the traditional way of game dev includes getting plenty of smart, creative people in a room, doing their best with what they think is going to work, “there’s no substitute for having players engage and them being so generous with their time,” Flynn explained. “They’re extremely thoughtful, clever… They know what they want to play.”

Rather than being developed in a vacuum with just the developers’ eyes on the game, players have had their hands on Nightingale since early on, participating in playtests, providing feedback, taking surveys, and otherwise interacting in a Discord server directly with the devs. This feedback – and the mountains of data collected during playtests – has resulted in noticeable additions like a third-person view and even an arachnophobia mode, among many, many more changes both noticeable and nuanced.

“We work very hard on a lot of the systems that help us collect feedback and pair it with telemetry,” production lead Leah Summers explained. “We've got analysts on the team, and so we are putting a lot of value in how to get feedback, how to organize feedback at scale so that we can bring it back to the dev team to say, ‘Hey, this is what's really important to players.’”

Telemetry essentially is the collection and analysis of data that help developers determine the whys and hows of what players do in a game. The feedback is collected by players submitting their issues into a program that can then be upvoted by other players. For example, they might say, “The fueling is hard to use.”
“Instead of the Discord becoming this giant thread that we have to parse through, the players will just say, ‘Hey, I put this in, can you go vote it if you also feel it?’” Summers explained, “And so they crowdsource and advocate for their own issues too, which is pretty cool.”

Nightingale’s lead designer Bjorn Taylor said they very heavily changed how the game opens based on feedback, just to make sure people were having fun. “It's the first time in my career I've had the opportunity to have this much interaction with fans during development. And yeah, it's awesome,” Taylor said.

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