Nightingale studio says it’s prioritising an offline mode following fan feedback

23.02.2024 - 14:31 / videogameschronicle.com / Aaryn Flynn / Tom Ivan

Nightingale studio Inflexion Games has said it’s prioritising the development of an offline mode for the recently released game.

The PVE survival-crafting title, which is the debut project from ex-BioWare boss Aaryn Flynn’s new studio, hit Steam early access on Tuesday.

“Set within a rich Victorian gaslamp fantasy setting”, it has players travelling through mystical portals to explore a series of dangerous realms in search of Nightingale, the “last haven of humanity”.

While it can be played solo or cooperatively, the game currently requires all users to be online, which has contributed to it receiving “mixed” reviews so far on Steam.

“Always online when playing alone is idiotic,” wrote one player. “It compounds the frustration when I have to wait for a server to become available so I can play alone. Then when I do ‘Log in’ to this seemingly single player experience I find that not all of my work has been saved and now I have to rebuild.”

“This is a fantastic and fun game so far however, I’m playing single player and am often getting ‘network error’ due to having to be online ALL the time,” wrote another.

“The online thing is infuriating,” said a third player. “I am basically running around my base quite ACTIVELY crafting, yet I keep getting booted for inactivity.”

“We’ve seen a lot of discussion in recent days around our decision to make Nightingale online-only at our Early Access release. We understand that this can be frustrating for a number of reasons,” Inflexion said.

“Our vision for the game since inception was to create an interconnected series of Realms, with the idea of allowing for co-operative exploration in mind – a universe bigger than a single Realm or server. That meant we made a choice early in development between supporting co-op from day one or focusing development on an offline mode.

“Co-operative gameplay associated with having party members across multiple Realms was the more technically challenging problem and therefore the one we chose to tackle first,” it continued. “Looking back on that decision, we misjudged what some of you were looking for in your experience.

“We are now prioritizing and developing an offline mode that we plan to release as soon as feasible.”

Inflexion added that work on quality of life updates, new content and bug fixes is continuing “uninterrupted” by development of an offline mode.