Survival crafting adventure game Nightingale has achieved fair success in its first weeks, peaking at around 32,000 concurrent players, and earning strong reviews across the board. But while it’s going relatively well, it appears a significant chunk of players have taken issue with one particular game quirk: that even in solo mode, players are required to join the queue for an active server.
In response, developer Inflexion Games has promised to implement an offline game mode. Per a new blog post, it appears the studio underestimated the desires of players to jump in alone, and to forgo “always online” requirements.
“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 Games 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.”
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“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. Looking back on that decision, we misjudged what some of you were looking for in your experience.”
“We are now prioritising and developing an offline mode that we plan to release as soon as feasible.”
Development for other features, including quality of life improvements, new content, and bug fixes will continue as originally planned, with the game’s upcoming offline mode also being worked on concurrently.
While the game was envisioned, from the start, as featuring interconnected realms, with players able to link up with friends and other players, it appears ongoing demand will reshape gameplay in future.
When offline mode is introduced, Nightingale may well attract a whole new audience base of players who enjoy crafting and surviving alone. Inflexion Games has promised transparent updates in the weeks and months ahead, so stay tuned for more developments.
