Good day, Realmwalkers! Once again, welcome to a Nightingale dev update. Hold onto your breaches because we have a lot to talk about today. Let’s start by discussing what they have been up to recently.
Release Date
Since so many of you have undoubtedly already seen it, they announced February 22, 2024 as the release date for early access. They had anticipated this to happen a little sooner. In their September developer update, they wanted to go into more detail about why they are switching, what they would be doing with the extra time, and what early access means to Inflexion.
First of all, they have experience doing this and, believe me, they dislike publicizing delays. They believe it is crucial for them to realize their vision for Nightingale and meet some community expectations, even though it is never an easy decision to make and it does disappoint many people. They put a lot of emphasis on quality, which is why they are spending their time getting everything ready for the early access launch.
Early access means different things to different studios. For them, it has always been about establishing a solid foundation for player experience. One that they could then build upon with the community. And if you have been part of their testing community, you will have seen that the game has changed over the last year. All of this is due to the numerous improvements they have made, thanks to your feedback.
There are still some rough edges, so this extra time is going to help them in smoothing some of these out, specifically bugs and some quality of life refinements. And even though February will still be an early access launch, they only get one public launch. So that first impression is super important to them.
Although we understand that delays might be annoying, this new deadline allows their team to complete their job, take some time off to recharge, and then return in full force to support the launch of Ealy Access and continue development.
You would know that they attended Gamescom this year if you saw the release date revealed live. For more Nightingale Development Update, scroll down!
Gamescom
Gamescom was their first-ever in-person community event and also the first time they have ever had a public booth at a conference. Hundreds of people came by to take photos with their life size Portal, enter in for some intel hardware, and as well as take photos with their cosplayers of both Puck and the Lady in Red, who they now call the Scarlet Woman.
The Portal was made by a team over in Germany and they did a fantastic job of adapting it to be the showstopper for the floor. Then their cosplayers, Clem and Lara, were a delight to work with. They also did a great job of making their various costumes.
Some of their employees met with journalists and content producers in a private setting to give them a live demonstration of the game.
Therefore, even though the preparation for and execution of the Gamescom event required a lot of labor from numerous teams, it was an absolute joy for them to meet so many of you in person and share their love for the game with you. Additionally, there were additional reasons why that Gamescom week was crowded.
August Playtest
From August 25th to September 5th, they had another closed playtest. Over 7000 Realmwalkers explored the Faewilds and the most dedicated Realmwalker clocked in at 194 hours played. As always, the playtest gave them a lot of things to look at and to focus on. The developers are thanking us for jumping in to the Realms and giving them feedback.
They have been happy to hear that many design updates and tweaks they did for this playtest have resonated with players. Their visuals, art style, music, sound design, continued to get high praise. As for new call outs for this specific playtest, players got to test a new onboarding flow. Overall, it seems to have reduced friction substantially and helped players get through that early game experience.
The team loved seeing better completion rates and a ton of nice comments. In terms of accessibility features, they were able to add two that were really popular. In the first, players can continue performing an action by holding down the action button. Holding down the mouse button, for instance, will make it easier to chop down a tree than repeatedly clicking. The second is that you can now press a button to vacuum up stuff rather than having to go around and pick them up one by one. These two elements are wonderful for enhancing quality of life and should be helpful for those who have mobility problems.
The substantially expanded character creator, which is still very much a work in progress, was another thing gamers got to check out. In addition to being able to change your overall eye color, or Heterochromia, you will also be able to change the color of each individual eye. Here is a sneak preview of stuff to come.
You can also change your character’s age. They are super excited to show off more features as well as final character creator functionality in the upcoming months. And for those of you that just want to jump into the game and start playing, they will also have some character presets that you’ll be able to choose from.
Things They Are Working On For Improvements
They have been letting former participants bring friends and test out the co-op features for the last few playtests. Depending on the playtest round and the availability of keys, these people were only permitted to invite 1 to 5 people. Now, because of the protocols they put in place, the entire process of getting a friend in has always been a little bit tricky. However, because there were 10 times as many participants in the previous playtest, there were ten times as many friends attempting to enter this playtest. As a result, there were ten times as many problems as in the prior playtest.
They are currently examining their systems to try to determine what went wrong there and how to make the process simpler for those of you who had trouble getting your friends into the previous playtest. Additionally, they really want your pals to attend the subsequent one.
The game’s actual textures, UI, and animations still need to be finished, among other things. The goal is to have them all finished in time for the early access launch, even though they won’t be entirely finished for the next playtest.
For this playtest, they heard loud and clear that their bench and augmentation systems for them needed some refinement to make them more approachable to players. They are looking at the options available to them right now, but the idea is to make them less complex and make your workshop more streamlined going forward.
On top of that, they have some balancing things that they need to do for the late game, as well as making their POIs or Points Of Interest more rewarding to investigate.
Another issue that popped up is that the AMD 580 and 590 cards experienced some launch crashes, which they hadn’t had before. Their team was able to investigate this specific crash and the reasons why it was causing issues in these specific cards and have been able to update the game to resolve it. So anyone who had these cards and couldn’t play in the previous playtest, they hope it’s resolved for you in the next one.
Several players left feedback this time that they were experiencing lower fps compared to previous playtests. So their team is investigating as to what could be causing it. Optimization is an ongoing process, so it’s going to be another while until they can share expected PC performances for various different build types.
The earlier problem with people’s profiles not loading because they were too large has been fixed. They did notice that some people were having difficulties accessing their respite zone. About halfway through the test, this error was partially fixed on the server side. The remaining errors are then being looked into to see what caused them, with the aim that they can be fixed before the following playtest.
NDA
On a side note, you may have noticed that some community members have not abided by the playtest NDA. So they wanted to give a bit of context when it comes to this topic. Ahead of each playtest, they communicate to players that they might run into technical issues or some systems in the game that aren’t quite finished. Quite often, they don’t share the exact details or discuss any behind the scenes things that they are working on or planning on changing down the pipeline.
They do this because they want to see what players think about the current state of Nightingale without their influence. This is the best way to see whether our assumptions about different gameplay features or mechanics ties with what players are thinking.
The majority of the time, they are already in agreement and working on some of the player feedback behind the scenes, but they have realized that it can be aggravating when players are unaware of things like what will be intended for early access launch or what is still in development. As a result, they do advise their play testers to keep their feedback to themselves because the product is still in the testing stage. It does occur on occasion. However, they do hope that this explains the context for some of the comments you may have seen.
Nightingale Dev Update Conclusion
Realmwalkers, this isn’t all of the feedback and things that they are working on in the coming months, but it’s kind of hard to nuance some of these things without everyone having played the game and also, for the sake of brevity. They will make sure to keep everybody updated as they continue to add things to the game.
As of right now, that is all we know about Nightingale Dev Update. However, keep an eye on this page as more information becomes available. For further information, go to the MMO Wiki Nightingale Homepage. In addition, you can find more information about the Nightingale Release Date Trailer in our Official Community Discord. Good luck out there, Realmwalkers!
