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Nightingale’s most innovative feature defies survival game conventions
28.02.2024 - 17:15 / digitaltrends.com / Tomas Franzese
In most survival crafting games, there’s one large world filled with multiple biomes for players to explore. That’s not the case with Nightingale. While there are procedurally generated realms to explore, players are the ones who craft them with an innovative Realm Card system. Anytime players feel like they’ve amply explored the realm they are in or feel like they need to go to a new one to gather resources, a portal must be found or built.
To activate it, players choose cards that set the parameter the next generated realm will follow. Once they step through the portal, they’ll find a world that feels unique. The beauty of this system is that it makes the player feel like they have more control over their experience without completely forgoing procedural generation. I spoke to some developers at Inflexion Games to learn just how this gameplay system came together.
Dealt the right hand
Once players are in the bulk of Nightingale’s gameplay loop, they’ll understand how the Realm Card system works. Players earn Realm Cards through exploration, quests, and general progression, and they must choose a biome card and a major card to create a new realm at a portal. Biome cards set the kind of world it will be — Forest, Desert, or Swamp — while Major Cards set the main theme and types of encounters in that realm, like Fae gardens or ruins.
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From there, Nightingale’s procedural generation takes over and creates a new realm under those parameters. To shake things up further, minor cards can be played at Realmic Transmuters found throughout a generated realm, often at the end of various towers or combat encounters. Minor cards add further modifiers, like lowering the gravity, making certain resources more plentiful, and forcing certain survival game mechanics like hunger or stamina to drain slower.
Although their modifiers can’t be stacked, players can change what minor cards they are playing at a Realmic Transmuter to modify the game world on the fly. It’s a clever system that lets players take an active role in shaping the experience. According to Inflexion’s Head of Production, Leah Summers, the idea for this system came about early on in the project.
“It fit with the idea that we wanted players to have unprecedented agency over the world,” Summers tells Digital Trends. “One of the conceits that fit really well with Neil’s art direction was the idea of cards. We had lots of card art and interesting card motifs through the UI and whatnot. What if we had these cards control all these different parameters, adjust
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