Nightingale to add offline mode "as soon as feasible", as devs say they "misjudged" player demand for it

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.

Nightingale is one of those there build-o-craft-a-survival games, with a gaslamp fantasy setting which sees Victorian explorers traipsing across dimensions full of magical creatures and doing what Victorian explorers are wont to do. Our Ed, Edwin, Kiera, Jeremy, and Ollie all ventured into a preview version before launch for a cooperative play while chatting with Aaryn Flynn. Edwin also said it "feels like one of the weirder Elder Scrolls RPGs", which I must confess piques my interest. They did broadly feel it had UI problems, after which Flynn talked with Edwin about plans to work on that (amongst many other things) across early access.

Now the game is out for everyone in a live early access state, even a cursory scan of reviews from players on Steam reveals many griping about the always-online requirement, especially combined with the server troubles that some have reported suffering. Always-online is always frustrating, especially in a genre which commonly supports offline play.

Inflexion Games reflected on this realisation in a blog post last night:

"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.

"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 prioritizing and developing an offline mode that we plan to release as soon as feasible."

They later added a clarification that offline support isn't their only focus. They say work on other updates—including bug fixes, quality-of-life features, and new content—"continues uninterrupted". Given how technically foundational a feature an offline mode apparently would be, I might not expect one to arrive in Nightingale super soon.

Nightingale is out now in early access on Steam and the Epic Games Store. The initial plan is to launch in full within 9-12 months, though Inflexion say they will "make sure that Nightingale will only leave Early Access when it's ready."