Baroque wilderness-builder Nightingale has not been doing brilliantly since Ed Thorn described the launch early access version as "a numbers grind disguised as a gaslamp survival game". We had moderately high hopes for it before the early access release - I personally enjoy the fairytale setting, with its pop-up Pucks and magic umbrellas, but I also think I've raised enough hovels on procedurally generated maps for one lifetime. Still, I'd quite like it to come good, if only so I can justify op-eds about Lewis Carroll, and I'm somewhat encouraged by what I've heard of the game's forthcoming Realms Rebuilt update.

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Baroque wilderness-builder Nightingale has not been doing brilliantly since Ed Thorn described the launch early access version as "a numbers grind disguised as a gaslamp survival game". We had moderately high hopes for it before the early access release - I personally enjoy the fairytale setting, with its pop-up Pucks and magic umbrellas, but I also think I've raised enough hovels on procedurally generated maps for one lifetime. Still, I'd quite like it to come good, if only so I can justify op-eds about Lewis Carroll, and I'm somewhat encouraged by what I've heard of the game's forthcoming Realms Rebuilt update.

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For Baldur’s Gate 3’s biggest fans who haven’t stopped talking and thinking about it since it launched, it probably doesn’t feel like Larian Studio’s Dungeons & Dragons RPG was released a year ago. Yet, here we are, a full trip around the sun since the RPG left early access and was finally unleashed on the world. For…

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Nightingale now has an offline mode as part of its latest update.

The early access survival crafting game's update 0.3 also introduces new quest NPCs Joan of Arc and Edgar Allan Poe among others, as well as new tiered creatures, Bound enemies, and questlines.

Developer Inflexion stated earlier this year that offline play was a priority, despite the game's focus on co-operative exploration.

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The gorgeous world and delightful gaslamp fantasy designs of Nightingale really caught my eye, but a rocky launch via Steam Early Access has left the survival game with mixed reviews, with Inflexion Games CEO Aaryn Flynn admitting he was “not satisfied” with the launch. The developer has just taken a first big step on the road to recovery, however, with the release of Nightingale update 0.2, which brings a pretty sizable count of upgrades to the table as the team works on offline mode and increased build limits.

This whole round of suvival game focus started for me because the makers of No Man’s Sky, Hello Games, announced their coming title, Light No Fire.  The promise of that got me worked up on the genre once more.

Light no Fire… not in 2024 at least

That led to me looking into some possible Valheim alternatives… Valheim being my current gold standard for open world, co-op suvival titles… during the Steam Winter Sale.  I actually bought some things and played them!

But none of them quite scratched the right itch and while I got more suggestions, eventually I just wanted to play something, so we kicked off a new Valheim world.  Done and done, right?

Of course, the day I put down the credit card to rent a server for 30 days and roll up a fresh world one of the possible alternative candidates, Conan Exiles, goes on sale for half off.  I wasn’t willing to experiment for $40, but for $20 I might have.

But I was committed and wanted to play something, though I wasn’t so invested in Valheim that I couldn’t have been derailed… but nothing quite caused me to be so moved.

First up was Palworld, or Pokemon with Guns, which by reasonable measures… dollah dollah bills… has been a huge success and has sold millions of copies.   This seemed to be right up my alley, to the point that G-Portal even had server rentals for it right away.  This featured on a number of blogs I followed.

I thought about jumping into this… but wasn’t quite convinced.  Close, but not quite there.

Then there was Enshrounded, which is also on my Steam wishlist and which also tickled the shared world co-op aspect of my desires, and which was also featured on G-Portal server rentals, and which had also grabbed the interest of some other bloggers.  It sounded good and I thought about grabbing it, yet another early access title.  But I haven’t so far.

And then this week Nightengale landed on Steam, once again in the suvival co-op crafting genre, and once again grabbing a few people I know, including a couple of the bloggers in the neighborhood. (Belghast was on about it yesterday, as was Bhagpuss.)  It is in early access and might need some work, but it did catch my eye.  Private servers are not a thing it seems, instead you can share your part of their world with just your friends if I read things correctly… which also means when thier servers are down you’re not playing.

I am sure there was also something else out there that popped up… Last Epoch maybe, or was it some other title… I don’t remember all of them.  But it did feel like the universe had decided to mock me a bit for my desire for a Valheim-like co-op experience by throwing all of these new and tempting options at me after I committed to the Valheim.

Then again, I am happy playing Valhelm right now.  It has an ease about it that can soak up hours of time,  We have been moving through the opening biomes at a quick pace, but that has been helped along by mods and familiarity, which isn’t a bad thing.  I suspect that we will slow down a bit at the plains, and that the mistlands will take us long enough to conquor that the ashlands will have finally arrived by the time we finish off that boss, which will give us another biome to master.

So I feel the temptation of these other titles, the fear of missing out if I am not there at the beginning the way I was for Valheim.

On the other hand, if those titles are any good, they’ll be there waiting for us.  And I also know that the last three years has seen Valheim improve a great deal.  As the song says, fools rush in… and sometimes they get the best seats, and other times they pay the price for being too early on the scene.

Hello! Welcome back to our regular feature where we write a little bit about some of the games we've been playing over the past few days. This week: first impressions, mazes, and zombie apocalypses.

If you fancy catching up on some of the older editions of What We've Been Playing, here's our archive.

I've been playing a lot of Nightingale in the last couple of weeks, and I think there are good ideas there but also a lot of frustration. The game is too eager to have you grind, and it suffocates all of the more interesting things it's trying to do. I wrote about this in much more detail in my Nightingale Early Access impressions piece published yesterday.

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Somehow, I've spent nearly 40 hours playing Nightingale, but I'm still searching for the fun. I've seen glimpses of the game I feel we've been promised - the Victorian fantasy where friends glide through the air on umbrellas, fighting mythical beasts together in strange fae lands - but only ever glimpses. Mostly, I've been in dogged pursuit of an excitement that eludes me, hoping it'll be around the next corner I turn, in the next gear tier I unlock. But every corner seems to just bring another corner, and so around and around I go, getting somewhere but never there.

It's a shame because as a concept, and even in practice, there are things I love about Nightingale. The setting! A Victorian world of old-fashioned explorer garb and backpacks, of canvas and ironwork. And the fantasy world lurking just beside it, filled with unexplained phenomena and menacing faerie folk. It's pulled almost one-to-one from the pages of Susanna Clarke's brooding fairytale Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, which I adore - they've even cast Marc Warren from the television adaptation to reprise his role as a faerie, which he does with sinister brilliance again. In Nightingale, the doors to the faerie realm have been blown wide open, and humanity scattered throughout the immeasurable archipelago of rae realms. Now, humanity is trying to find a way home, hopping through portal after portal as it tries to get back the eponymous city of Nightingale.

It's a refreshing set-up that's perfect for a survival crafting game, because it can be broken into myriad small realms to adventure on. These self-contained realms can be procedurally generated and offer varying threats, treasure, resources, depending on whatever seed you generate them from - the seed in this case being cards, which are another of the game's big ideas. These are craftable and collectable and open doorways depending on the cards you use. Match a desert or forest biome with a card representing a certain difficulty, and it will then appear. It's a great idea that works brilliantly with the setting of Nightingale to make the game feel distinct.

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Not long ago, a few of us from the RPS Treehouse wandered through first-person survival 'em up Nightingale with its boss Aaryn Flynn, and then had it out about the game's crafting menus. I was one of the folks who wasn't so hot on what we'd played, and I'd hoped that the early access version would prove me wrong.

Alas, I am sad to report that I still do not like Nightingale. From what I've played so far, the game is an awkward marriage of survival game and live service loot grind, which makes you feel divorced from the very world you inhabit.

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Nightingale is one of the prettiest survival games I’ve seen, yet its launch via Steam Early Access has been met with a rather tepid response from players. Released just over two weeks ago on Tuesday February 20, the Nightingale player count has fallen to just over one fifth of its launch peak, while Steam reviews sit at a ‘mixed’ 61%. Inflexion Games CEO Aaryn Flynn says he is “not satisfied” with parts of the launch, saying, “there’s much more to do.”

Nightingale has been one of the most highly anticipated survival crafting games of this year. Unfortunately, its early access launch has highlighted the game’s shortcomings that need to be highlighted. Here are five things Nightingale needs to improve before its 1.0 launch.

Offline Mode

This has been something players immediately clamored for. Because of Nightingale’s always-online framework of dedicated servers hosting realms, it’s clear the developers underestimated players’ desire to play offline and host realms on their own. This is especially true when not long after Nightingale’s launch, Inflexion games clarified that an offline mode was coming very soon.

Player-created builds have always been the staple of survival games, from Minecraft to Palworld. Now, Inflexion Games showcases its own spin on customization through Realm cards, providing different recipes based on your biome. So, to show off these designs, here are the best Estate bases in Nightingale.

Stave House

YouTuber Kiitarie has taken advantage of the Stave material recipes to create this lovely build. It almost feels like it is straight out of a Sims 4 gallery, with the added bonus of being right at the cliff’s edge. On top of the creative exterior design, the interior proves just as welcoming.

This whole round of suvival game focus started for me because the makers of No Man’s Sky, Hello Games, announced their coming title, Light No Fire.  The promise of that got me worked up on the genre once more.

Light no Fire… not in 2024 at least

That led to me looking into some possible Valheim alternatives… Valheim being my current gold standard for open world, co-op suvival titles… during the Steam Winter Sale.  I actually bought some things and played them!

But none of them quite scratched the right itch and while I got more suggestions, eventually I just wanted to play something, so we kicked off a new Valheim world.  Done and done, right?

Of course, the day I put down the credit card to rent a server for 30 days and roll up a fresh world one of the possible alternative candidates, Conan Exiles, goes on sale for half off.  I wasn’t willing to experiment for $40, but for $20 I might have.

But I was committed and wanted to play something, though I wasn’t so invested in Valheim that I couldn’t have been derailed… but nothing quite caused me to be so moved.

First up was Palworld, or Pokemon with Guns, which by reasonable measures… dollah dollah bills… has been a huge success and has sold millions of copies.   This seemed to be right up my alley, to the point that G-Portal even had server rentals for it right away.  This featured on a number of blogs I followed.

I thought about jumping into this… but wasn’t quite convinced.  Close, but not quite there.

Then there was Enshrounded, which is also on my Steam wishlist and which also tickled the shared world co-op aspect of my desires, and which was also featured on G-Portal server rentals, and which had also grabbed the interest of some other bloggers.  It sounded good and I thought about grabbing it, yet another early access title.  But I haven’t so far.

And then this week Nightengale landed on Steam, once again in the suvival co-op crafting genre, and once again grabbing a few people I know, including a couple of the bloggers in the neighborhood. (Belghast was on about it yesterday, as was Bhagpuss.)  It is in early access and might need some work, but it did catch my eye.  Private servers are not a thing it seems, instead you can share your part of their world with just your friends if I read things correctly… which also means when thier servers are down you’re not playing.

I am sure there was also something else out there that popped up… Last Epoch maybe, or was it some other title… I don’t remember all of them.  But it did feel like the universe had decided to mock me a bit for my desire for a Valheim-like co-op experience by throwing all of these new and tempting options at me after I committed to the Valheim.

Then again, I am happy playing Valhelm right now.  It has an ease about it that can soak up hours of time,  We have been moving through the opening biomes at a quick pace, but that has been helped along by mods and familiarity, which isn’t a bad thing.  I suspect that we will slow down a bit at the plains, and that the mistlands will take us long enough to conquor that the ashlands will have finally arrived by the time we finish off that boss, which will give us another biome to master.

So I feel the temptation of these other titles, the fear of missing out if I am not there at the beginning the way I was for Valheim.

On the other hand, if those titles are any good, they’ll be there waiting for us.  And I also know that the last three years has seen Valheim improve a great deal.  As the song says, fools rush in… and sometimes they get the best seats, and other times they pay the price for being too early on the scene.

Hello! Welcome back to our regular feature where we write a little bit about some of the games we've been playing over the past few days. This week: faewilds, tins, and liars.

If you fancy catching up on some of the older editions of What We've Been Playing, here's our archive.

I've been playing Nightingale for a couple of days fairly intensely now, and I'm not entirely sure what to make of it. It starts off really brightly, really full of, apparently, interesting new ideas. A Victorian setting, a faerie realm story idea, where everyone is scattered across these pocket realms, trying to find their way home. There's a semblance of story here, a whiff of RPG to go with the survival crafting core, and a clever card-based mechanic for generating your own realms and then messing with them. And yet, two days later, I'm still waiting for the game to hit its stride.

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Sometimes I wonder whether every genre fantasy RPG or RPG-inflected game is essentially a journey towards the Big City. Most such games start you off on the periphery of the world, out in the sleepy and/or brutish hamlets of FirstActShire, Chosen One County, and send you on a loose quest towards the cosmopolitan centre, where you'll typically learn about the ultimate villain of the piece, gain access to the juiciest concentration of shops, crafting facilities and quest-givers, and glean some hint at the location of the endgame dungeon. Sometimes the quest takes days of playtime, as in Baldur's Gate 3. Sometimes it takes less than an hour, as in the original Destiny. It's a common-enough device that when an RPG starts you off in the Big City, like Dragon Age 2, or creatively "provincialises" the Big City, like Roadwarden, I feel slightly unnerved.

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Nightingale’s dapper cast of cross-dimensional pathfinders are right about one thing: realmwalking is dangerous business. Attempt to tele-portal between realities on the Steam Deck, for instance, and you may find yourself trapped in the Stygian void, naught but a frozen loading screen tip for company and suspended hopelessly for all eternity. Or until you hold down the power button.

This crashing tendency alone means that while Nightingale can technically run on the Steam Deck, even without resorting to rock-bottom graphics settings, the current early access build isn’t yet ready for regular handheld play. That’s nothing developers Inflexion Games won’t tell you themselves – they’re "not considering [the Deck] officially supported at launch," after all – but if you were thinking of giving this gaslamp fantasy survival sim a portable whirl, you might want to let that call to adventure go unanswered.

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Credit to Nightingale, I’ve been enjoying the early access form of Inflexion’s gaslamp fantasy survival crafter a fair bit more than I did its older stress test build. The UI is cleaner and tighter, and I’ve had more space to explore (and enjoy) the mysterious nooks of its magic 'n' moustaches world. There’s potential here, but it’s very much the raw kind, especially when performance needs as much work as it does.

Besides relying on upscalers like DLSS for truly smooth running, Nightingale currently has a serious stuttering problem, and bumping into an ugly graphical artefact or even a hard crash is worryingly common. I’ve pulled together an optimised settings guide (down below) so that you don’t need to drop the visual quality lower than is strictly necessary, but do keep in mind that this is early access with emphasis on the early.

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After launching Nightingale into early access on Tuesday, developers Inflexion Games (led by former BioWare CEO Aaryn Flynn) have quickly realised a big miscalculation: lots of players want an offline mode. The gaslamp fantasy survival game requires you be online even if you want to play by yourself, which dovetailed poorly with server issues at launch to frustrate folks. Inflexion say that early in development they needed to make a choice between focusing on co-op or offline first, and now think they made the wrong call. They plan to remedy this, but it's not yet clear when they'll actually add an offline mode.

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How do you craft Nightingale twine? Nightingale is a crafting game, so naturally there are tons of crafting and building recipes to discover as you progress through the Faewilds. Many of those will ask for twine, which isn’t a natural resource, and must itself be manufactured.

In order to unlock the twine recipe in Nightingale, there is a particular workbench you must first build, and even that can be tough to find - the crafting game certainly gives you a number of hoops to jump through to make, well, pretty much anything. Don’t worry, though, as we’re here to tell you exactly how you can get your hands on Nightingale twine, and gathering plenty of Nightingale Essence Dust is one of the first steps.

After days of basically edging the community with videos of new kiss animations, Larian Studios has finally released Baldur’s Gate 3’s patch six. The roughly 21GB update brings new kisses for your lovers, quality-of-life improvements, and a slew of bug fixes. Here are a few of the highlights:

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Inflexion Games has just announced that its PVE open-world survival crafting game, Nightingale, won’t support AMD FSR 3.0 at its Early Access launch. According to the team, FSR 3.0 introduced major crash issues. So, in order to ensure better stability, the devs have temporarily removed it. Inflexion Games is currently looking into addressing these stability … Continue reading Nightingale won’t support AMD FSR 3.0 due to crash issues →

The post Nightingale won’t support AMD FSR 3.0 due to crash issues appeared first on DSOGaming.

Before founding Inflexion in 2021, Aaryn Flynn worked at BioWare. He's got credits on some of the studio's best-loved games, from Baldur's Gate 2 through Star Wars: Knights Of The Old Republic to Dragon Age: Origins and the Mass Effect trilogy. He was BioWare's general manager for several years, but left the company in 2017 following the release of the less-regarded Mass Effect: Andromeda. New survival sim Nightingale is his first early access project, and it's certainly been a learning experience, with Flynn obliged to rethink many of the things he learned about gamedev during his BioWare days. Speaking to me ahead of Nightingale's launch, Flynn talked about the difficulty of making headway as a new developer in an industry where the most successful competing live service titles have effectively become part of the landscape - indeed, a force of "gravity".

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Inflexion's fantasy survival sim Nightingale releases into Steam early access today. Our pre-launch impressions? Well, the procedurally generated landscapes are engrossing, a blend of British fairytale influences with many a hushed forest, spidery swamp and tempting ruin. We're also pretty keen as a team on the game's Realm cards system, which lets you shape those fairytale worlds both before and after you portal into them. But we were less enthralled by HUD and user interface elements such as the crafting menus and hotbar, which we found ornate and circuitous to the point of confusing.

Speaking to me after our co-op hands-on - in which guides writer Kiera made friends with a tree monster only for somebody to shoot it - Inflexion's CEO Aaryn Flynn explained a bit about how the game will evolve during its early access period, which Inflexion estimate will last 9-12 months. Thankfully, it sounds like fine-tuning the UI is a priority, though Flynn is "cautious" about committing to a full-blown roadmap.

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Are the Nightingale servers down? Nightingale might take you between a series of stunning Realms, but no matter which you're currently in, there's no escaping server downtime. If servers go down unexpectedly, or are taken offline for maintenance, you'll have to spend some time back in the real world.

As with all online games, there are multiple reasons why you might be kicked from the servers. Nightingale is no different, and there are a few Nightingale error messages, including those you might see during Nightingale scheduled maintenance. If you can't get into the survival game right now, read on to find out if there's something wider going on with Nightingale servers, or if it's something on your end.

Among the things I like bestest about Inflexion's alt-Victorian fantasy survival game Nightingale is its Realm cards mechanic, whereby you generate and modify worlds by playing Major and Minor cards. Major cards are used at portals to conjure up a particular biome or world type and set the difficulty, including an approximate choice of resident NPC factions, local fauna and resources. Minor cards are played within worlds to mess with their workings. You can lower the gravity for optimal umbrella gliding conditions, alter the weather or summon a Blood Moon (sorry, Zelda) that reduces your max health.

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By now you'll probably have read quite a bit about our preview adventures in Inflexion Games' upcoming fantasy survival adventure Nightingale - including our slightly raucous attempts to interview CEO Aaryn Flynn while instant KO-ing tree monsters and abusing our supplies of ice bullets. But outside this guided co-op session, several members of the RPS Treehouse were playing it on their lonesome last week, too, getting to grips with Nightingale's particular flavour of sticks-and-stones crafting, cooking up meat and berry wraps to keep ourselves fed, and generally being cajoled and maybe even lightly seduced by our fae Shakespearean guide, Puck.

With so many folks playing it - some diehard survival heads and others who are mostly just glad to be having a break from Palworld for a spell - it quickly became apparent that lots of us had quite different takes on how Nightingale worked as a craft 'em up. I swear, I don't think our RPS Slack chat has ever seen such passionate discussions about UI layouts and hotkey assignments, so we thought it might be fun (and useful) to try and distil some of those thoughts for you. Will Nightingale succeed in capturing survival newcomers with its peculiar blend of gaslamp tea leaves, or will it chaff like a Victorian corset for the survival hardcore? Join us as we discuss some of its finer points below.

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Twas brillig, and the RPS editors did gyre and gimble in the wabe: all mimsy were the studio executives, and the guides writers outgrabe. If you’re still reading, congratulations, you’ve either got a dangerously high tolerance for bad literary jokes or you’re really eager to hear about Nightingale, the new survival sim from Inflexion, which launches into early access on 20th February. A quick recap on Nightingale, in case you missed our early access preview today: it's a strongly British-influenced "gaslamp fantasy" experience in which players travel alone or in groups between procedurally generated fairy realms using magic portals. You can build bases in each Realm, go on story quests and hunt the wildlife for crafting materials.

Last week, RPS adventurers Edders, Kiera, Jeremy, Ollie and myself had a chance to play co-op with Aaryn Flynn, Inflexion’s CEO and former general manager at BioWare, while chatting to him about the game over Discord. The resulting, not entirely planned group interview lasted two hours and consisted mostly of people yelling at each other about ice ammo and tree monsters, but we did find time for some proper Q&A. Please find below an abbreviated transcript.

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The major thing Inflexion's fantasy survival sim Nightingale gets right is that it makes procedural generation feel like sorcery. "Procgen" has become a ubiquitous concept in game design and especially survival game design, and I fear we've all lost sight of how magical it is to summon a landscape full of idiosyncratic flourishes from a hidden dataset. It's partly, in fairness, that many semi-randomised settings feel indistinct, smooshed together with little of the character you'd get from a "hand-made" environment and setting. Nightingale slices through the ennui in a couple of ways.

One is that this is a relatively storied and text-driven survival experience, with a self-summoning fairy narrator, Puck, who immediately buries you in Shakespearean turns of phrase as he weaves the history of a multiple-dimensional universe of "Fae" realms, roamed by creatures of Irish, English and Scottish myth and legend. I'm not sure Puck will be everybody's cup of tea as principal quest-giver and narrator - according to Inflexion boss Aaryn Flynn, some early players have struggled to make head or tail of his dialogue. But he helps conjure up an eldritch mood that sets Nightingale apart from most genre fantasies, including the Dragon Age titles Flynn once worked on at BioWare.

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We usually talk about games adding in upscaling measures right before a launch, but in a strange and unfortunate twist, Nightingale developer Inflexion Games is removing AMD FSR 3 due to crash data it has analyzed.

Nightingale is aiming to become one of the best survival games on PC, but until it figures out the underlying problem with AMD FSR 3, some players might find the best performance hard to come by. The Nightingale system requirements don't suggest you'll need an overpowered gaming PC to get it running, but upscaling and frame generation tech is a useful tool for improving game performance no matter the base strength of your rig.

How do you get the Nightingale Twitch drops? Nightingale is a fantasy RPG set in a beautiful Victorian Era world, so if glorious aesthetics are high on your list of must-haves in a new game, Nightingale has it in spades.

And, if looks are important to you, then you probably want to make sure your character looks the part in the survival game, which they certainly will with these free Nightingale Twitch drops. No matter which magical Fae world you wind up in, show off to your Nightingale multiplayer friends and NPCs with the cosmetics below.