Before the official announcement, Nightingale called itself an online role-playing game (RPG) as early as 2019, the first game of a new studio created by former BioWare general manager Aaryn Flynn under Improbable, the creator of cloud-based multiplayer platform SpatialOS. The company later said the game would focus on the player's impact on the story, citing Neverwinter Night's player-created content as inspiration. Under the studio's new name, Inflexion Games, Flynn recently talked about what has since become a shared-world survival game set in the magical Victorian era. Despite genre tweaks, it sounds like Nightingale is still rooted in BioWare's classic RPG game.
Following the announcement of Nightingale by revealing a trailer at last week's Game of the Year Awards TGA 2021, Flynn and Eurogamer discussed the studio's approach to the game and players' plans to solve world problems through a choice-based approach.
"When we started the studio, we decided we were going to make a fictional history game, and we particularly liked the Victorian era," says Flynn, "the idea of this fictional history work was something we didn't explore at BioWare." Maybe Mass Effect could be a futuristic fictional history game, but we didn't really touch that. ”
Nightingale's unique fictional history is set in a magical Victorian era, where magical portals allow people to travel to other worlds. When the network between portals collapses, the characters named "Realmwalkers" that the player will be playing are trapped in these parallel worlds, where they must survive and find their way back to the magical city of Nightingale.
Commenting on Inflexion Studios' passion for setting and creating worlds, Flynn said, "We thought about what we would build on this game and what players would do in the game. We wanted to create a highly interactive world where players could actually do what they wanted to do. ”
Flynn discussed the two parts of the announcement trailer for the game launch, saying that "[in the trailer] there was a very nice moment to show the two sides of the game world — a giant bending down to accept a gift from a player." It's one way you can solve that battle. The trailer also shows another way — multiple players in their own camp trying to stop the same giant trampling on them. Flynn continues: "Every challenge will have a different ending, and every decision will have different consequences. ”
Finally, he mentioned that nightingale worlds will have NPCs that distribute quests to players.
Nightingale hasn't set an official release date yet, but Inflexion Studios says testing of the game will begin in 2022.