Nightingale Was Originally an MMO-Scale Game, But Inflexion Changed Paths to a Survival Crafting Gam

System · January 2022

Nightingale Was Originally an MMO-Scale Game, But Inflexion Changed Paths to a Survival Crafting Game | MMORPG.com

In a new interview, Inflexion's Aaryn Flynn talks how Nightingale's concept changed from an MMO to more of a survival crafting multiplayer sandbox with optimism and interdependence.

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Scorchien · January 2022

"Flynn notes that they have some friends on the New World team"

I'm out

Sandmanjw · January 2022

Sounds like a mess to me.

Start out a MMO, then not. But it is multi-player..

Now a survival and crafting...but with interdependence and choices that matter and change the game world.

Sounds like they just could not make a choice so gonna throw a bit of everything out there and see what happens.

Definitely an wait and see what the heck it even is type a game.

Asm0deus · January 2022

Scorchien said:

"Flynn notes that they have some friends on the New World team"

I'm out

Hmm yeah it's not something I would boast about and I like New World.....still interested in this game though.

Iselin · January 2022

It actually looks interesting. It's done by a small studio made up of ex-Bioware people in Edmonton, Alta. Kind of Steampunk + magic, alternate Victorian era universe setting.

No PvP at all and focus on story and PvE with the usual crafting focus of survival games.

Rungar · January 2022

looks ok but haven't really seen any ideas yet.

Samhael · January 2022

Sounds like it almost would have been an interesting game. But not with their current non-MMO direction.

Kyleran · January 2022

Translation, survival style crafting sandboxes are much easier to make, especially for a smaller team.

Not a bad move really, better to accept one's limitations and cater to their strengths.

Valheim's recent success probably had some influence on their decision as well.

elveone · January 2022

The artstyle is great. Too bad it is wasted on a generic survival game.

Scot · January 2022

Shocking move this is not.

Scot · January 2022

Torval said:

As opposed to being wasted on a dumbed down generic MMO? It's a bit early to tell, but this doesn't appear to be generic survival at all and anyone saying so makes me suspect they are not familiar with survival games at all. Generic is RUST and the many island clones it has spawned.

What is generic about this being a survival game that wouldn't be generic as an MMO? If anything MMOs are one of the most generic genres. Most all centered around instance raiding. From EQ2 to LotRO to Rift to WoW to FF14 to ESO, they're all designed around the exact same game play loop.

Its not the generic side of this that I am commenting on, its the developer reflex. "We don't think the MMO is developing so well...OK survival/crafting then!". What "other path" would you suggest they could have decided to go down?

LynxJSA · January 2022

"survival crafting game" and "feature-lacking MMO" are pretty much the same thing, so when failing to create an MMO, the "survival crafting" thing is a great way to pitch your unfinished garbage.

Rungar · January 2022

i imagine they can do more moving over to survival such as building anywhere and other considerations. Likely a smart move to go smaller.

elveone · January 2022

Torval said:

As opposed to being wasted on a dumbed down generic MMO? It's a bit early to tell, but this doesn't appear to be generic survival at all and anyone saying so makes me suspect they are not familiar with survival games at all. Generic is RUST and the many island clones it has spawned.

What is generic about this being a survival game that wouldn't be generic as an MMO? If anything MMOs are one of the most generic genres. Most all centered around instance raiding. From EQ2 to LotRO to Rift to WoW to FF14 to ESO, they're all designed around the exact same game play loop.

For starters there isn't a generic progression system in MMOs. Compare the skill system in EQ2 to Lotro to Rift to WoW to ESO. You could argue that they all have generic MMO combat but you can have different classes that play significantly different between different games and constructing a build in those games is also significantly different from one another. The gameplay loop as well might not be that inspired but grinding dungeons is still a lot better than grinding chopping tree animations.

Lithuanian · January 2022

They could do unique mmo. Imagine one where nobody is The Chosen One to beat all evils, claim One Ring, free all creatures... Where one starts as simple survivor who has to [slowly] build a hut, care about food, drink, weather...
And where there are no levels. No level 12 hero being outrun by lvl.112 one. Where you care about nature around you, your neighbours (if that evil Were-boar comes again, he may destroy neighbours and then come for you...). Where there are no quest givers, because your quest is to survive and reach some magic city.
I could see opportunity for such online game. Especially in steampunk enviroment.

Kyleran · January 2022

elveone said:

Torval said:

As opposed to being wasted on a dumbed down generic MMO? It's a bit early to tell, but this doesn't appear to be generic survival at all and anyone saying so makes me suspect they are not familiar with survival games at all. Generic is RUST and the many island clones it has spawned.

What is generic about this being a survival game that wouldn't be generic as an MMO? If anything MMOs are one of the most generic genres. Most all centered around instance raiding. From EQ2 to LotRO to Rift to WoW to FF14 to ESO, they're all designed around the exact same game play loop.

The gameplay loop as well might not be that inspired but grinding dungeons is still a lot better than grinding chopping tree animations.

I'm the odd gamer out here, I asteroid mined in EVE for over two years and can say generally I prefer grinding for resources over grinding dungeons, depending on the risk / effort / reward ratios.

I earned more ISK per hour asteroid mining than any other activity I had done previously, increasing my holdings from 15B earned the previous 7.5 years to 80B during that time despite a loss rate of perhaps 15% to 20% so I really earned about 20B Isk more in that short time frame.

So for me grinding was better, but YMMV.

Scot · January 2022

LynxJSA said:

"survival crafting game" and "feature-lacking MMO" are pretty much the same thing, so when failing to create an MMO, the "survival crafting" thing is a great way to pitch your unfinished garbage.

Not dissimilar to what CoE is now doing, but we have to be sure anything will come out.

Aeander · January 2022

I like the world, but every single word of "first person survival crafting" turns me off. It's a perfect intersection of everything I don't like.

Yanocchi · January 2022

My first thought was that Nightingale might resemble Pillars of Eternity. It is not exactly an MMO either, just a shared world mini-scale solo / multiplayer game.

ashiru_1978 · January 2022

Kyleran said:

Translation, survival style crafting sandboxes are much easier to make, especially for a smaller team.

Not a bad move really, better to accept one's limitations and cater to their strengths.

Valheim's recent success probably had some influence on their decision as well.

They are not really "sandboxes" - just empty games with empty randomly generated worlds (by a tool) with a crafting and hunger simulator.

That would translate to me, who can't make games, but wants to make one, but doesn't have talent, so I get some tool to generate me a map, I implement some generic crafting system, some hunger/thirst system, slap some monsters on the map and sell it for $60 as a groundbreaking state of the art game, because I'm too incompetent to create scripted content like NPCs, quests, events, anything.

This is what the "survival sandboxes" games of today are - lazily put together crafting simulators with no content sold as games.

OldKingLog · January 2022

Scorchien said:

"Flynn notes that they have some friends on the New World team"

I'm out

Whoops.

Kyleran · January 2022

OldKingLog said:

Scorchien said:

"Flynn notes that they have some friends on the New World team"

I'm out

Whoops.

Sort of like your financial advisor saying he was friends with Bernie Madoff....

elveone · January 2022

Torval said:

It sounds like you're unfamiliar with survival types except maybe watching RUST on YouTube "let's play" videos.

MMO skill progressions is the same basic template across games. It isn't hard to abstract them down to their core design - direct healer, heal-over-time healer, glass cannon damage dealer, direct damage, elemental/conditional damage types, induction vs inductionless. If a class feels different it's only because they changed some numbers, timers, and the icon clicked to activate it. How about the 3 armor categories and their associated boons and penalties.

Crafting is about as shallow and one dimensional in MMOs and is virtually the same across different titles. A crafting system in an MMO is considered "deep" when the player gets to tweak a few stats in a narrow range or play RNG with "crit" output results. Clicking 4 buttons in EQ2 (always in the same rotation) isn't really any different than clicking 1 of them in LotRO. You mock "chopping tree animations" for survival craft gathering when MMOs offer a dumbed down version of gathering with the same tree chopping.

The number of MMOs that allow building and world modification can be counted on one hand and even those are the most generic least consequential and impactful way of allowing creativity. Survival craft builders offer open ended building and creativity. In 7 Days to Die I can create any kind of building I want. I can build from scratch or refurbish and reconstruct an existing building. My building can be damaged by mob attacks and needs to be defensible. I also need to build my own crafting facilities because the game doesn't setup static safe crafting stations.

Grinding in MMOs can be fun and I enjoy that sometimes, but I don't try and pretend they're deep and diverse because they're not. It's a big reason the genre is in a massive rut. I think their mass appeal comes because they're so samey and dumbed down to the lowest common denominator that the barrier to entry is low and they're easily adopted. Characters never eat, sleep, or have manage their personal condition in any way. Character maintenance is as simple as repairing gear (if even that) and clicking on a healing potion or spell. That appeals to the gamer masses.

That's all fine and like I said I enjoy the MMO fun sometimes, but don't slag on other genres you apparently know nothing about that offer deeper crafting, complex and creative building. Some survival types offer nuanced character building as deep as any MMO. Moreover other genres like ARPGs actually do offer a deeper build experience.

Most survival types give players control over their servers and worlds in a way MMOs never do. Most also offer low level modding which lets players create and craft an entirely new play experience from the vanilla game. This is why I asked if Nightingale can be self-hosted or if it's just a small scale shared-world RPG.

If grinding scripted instanced content with 6 other people on a gear treadmill makes a game an "MMOs" and that's better for you then go for it. There is no need to put other genres down just because one game decided that mass adoption didn't fit their game vision like they first thought.

Newsflash - the game didn't decide against the mass adoption genre - it embraced it.

Survival games are really popular because they offer very non-creative people a modicum of creativity without any real risk. Building in a survival game is fun in the same way building a lego model is fun - it is a deliberately dumbed down system for kids to enjoy. Oh, you can be creative with lego but let's be honest - what most players do is not really creative at all. And if it was the lego element alone then survival games would have been a thousand times better than they are. The main gameplay loop in a survival game is clicking on things and waiting a bunch of times. And that is dull as hell. That is why the truly creative stuff is on custom servers where people have unlimited resources to build rather than in the generic survival mode.

The survival in survival games is extremely dull and not really that much of a challenge for the most time. If you feel like wasting days for a few minutes of excitement is your thing then go for it. In MMOs at least you are tinkering with numbers and optimizing your choices. That is if you are not a mindless drone copying their builds from the internet. Or if you are not playing one of the mind-numbing games that just give you all the skills for a class to put on your hotbar and f**k all customization to hell. But guess what - there is no character customization in survival games or a very minimal one which is extremely easy to optimize. And guess what - even the five archetypes of characters in MMO games that you pointed out are already more than the ones in survival games where you have a guy with a stick, a guy with a gun and a guy with both.

Yeah, crafting in most MMOs is mindless. And so is crafting in survival games. The only difference is that in survival games you have to do it a bunch of times getting progressively better tools and better workstations and you have no other progression. You are doing literally the same thing the whole game over and over and over and over again and none of it is actually challenging or creative. Building your own crafting stations is not a feature - it is just another tedious step in the process. Do you know what makes that kind of crafting okay in MMOs? It is not the main feature of the game but just a side thing to do on the down-time. While in survival game - it is the main attraction. You literally have the dullest part of an MMO as the main feature defining the gameplay loop of a survival game.

Yeah, MMOs are currently in a rut but so are survival games. Yeah, MMOs can be dull but survival games are almost guaranteed to be dull because of their core gameplay loop. Yeah, the visual style of Nightingale might be wasted on an MMO in comparison to a pure RPG or an action-adventure game but it is definitely wasted on a survival game in comparison to anything else because the main gameplay of a survival game is punching trees and picking up rocks for hours on end.

[Deleted User] · January 2022

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elveone · January 2022

Kyleran said:

elveone said:

Torval said:

As opposed to being wasted on a dumbed down generic MMO? It's a bit early to tell, but this doesn't appear to be generic survival at all and anyone saying so makes me suspect they are not familiar with survival games at all. Generic is RUST and the many island clones it has spawned.

What is generic about this being a survival game that wouldn't be generic as an MMO? If anything MMOs are one of the most generic genres. Most all centered around instance raiding. From EQ2 to LotRO to Rift to WoW to FF14 to ESO, they're all designed around the exact same game play loop.

The gameplay loop as well might not be that inspired but grinding dungeons is still a lot better than grinding chopping tree animations.

I'm the odd gamer out here, I asteroid mined in EVE for over two years and can say generally I prefer grinding for resources over grinding dungeons, depending on the risk / effort / reward ratios.

I earned more ISK per hour asteroid mining than any other activity I had done previously, increasing my holdings from 15B earned the previous 7.5 years to 80B during that time despite a loss rate of perhaps 15% to 20% so I really earned about 20B Isk more in that short time frame.

So for me grinding was better, but YMMV.

OK, just a question - did you enjoy the gameplay itself or the profits? And how much time did you spend making those 80B? Just wondering because that is what - about $1200 in Plex? Or was it before that time?

olepi · January 2022

Normally, "sandbox survival" game is code for no content, the players are supposed to provide their own content through PvP. But this game has no PvP?

Interesting.

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Nightingale Was Originally an MMO-Scale Game, But Inflexion Changed Paths to a Survival Crafting Gam

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Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV

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Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV

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Nightingale Was Originally an MMO-Scale Game, But Inflexion Changed Paths to a Survival Crafting Gam

Comments

Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV

Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV

Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV