Aaryn Flynn is one of the names that people associate with the ‘golden age’ of BioWare. Playing a major role in the creation of RPG classics like Jade Empire, Dragon Age Origins, and Mass Effect, his contributions helped shape the gaming landscape as we know it today. That’s why his departure from the studio was met with equal amounts of trepidation and curiosity. Now, a few years removed from the release of Anthem, along comes 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Nightingale.
The survival RPG with a focus on player co-operation bears all the hallmarks of a BioWare classic in terms of characters and world building,꧃ but seeks to transplant these qualities into a mould they conventionally aren’t suited for. It’s a bold idea, and one that already has tails wagging both at the studio and across the internet foll🍰owing the game’s reveal.
“Very early on, we hit upon this desire to do this contemporary fantasy setting,” Flynn tells me. “That’s a pretty big space, and differentiated from anything we’ve done in the past. We wanted to offer players something that’s relatable, something they can understand when they sit in the world and see it. At the same time, it gives us the freedom to go in a direction that is fantasಞtic🎉 and special and unique.”
Flynn stresses how Nightingale seeks to take advantage of alternate history, painting a world with figures and events we find familiar while building 🍷upon them with foreign concepts and fantastical creatures we’ve never seen before. You play as Realm Wal👍kers, beings who are capable of jumping between different planes of reality to embark on expeditions, fight monsters, and advance the human world through new and exciting discoveries.
“There’s the magical city of Nightingale which is the centre of all magical study in the Western world,” Flynn explains. “At the turn of the 19th century and through a sort of cataclysm or apocalypse, the portal network that Nightingale helped construct collapsed and unfortunately left many stranded. Loads of people who are not proficient at using this stuff but have been a part of it are now lost in these realms and they have to start to survive. That’s the setup, and the mystery behind that will come ou♌t as part of our initial storytelling.”
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Nightingale will launch as an early access experience, which is fairly common for survival games like this where the lore and mechanics are often improved upon and dictated by player feedback. But it’s rare to see a narrative-driven game like this that seeks to place an importance on story and characters take such an approach. Flynn wasn’t willing to expand on specific details, but it seems beyond some basic foundations, many of these elements will be built alongside the game itself. “I’ve got a former colleague from BioWare who taught me something that I’ve always loved - and that’s how great stories come from great characters,” he says. “I love the idea of infusin💙g characters into this world building that we’re doing and always imagining these characters and asking what’s their motivation? What are they about? What’s their background? Why are they doing things?
“Once you’ve got your characters, that’s an element of world building, but you want to spend a lot of time ensuring the world gets built out in a way that is relatable and understandable and is appreciated by players. I think the Mass Effect and Dragon Age teams did amazing jobs at this when they did that because those worlds draw people in time and time again and just have so many stories to tell. We want to make sure our world building [in Nightingale] is top notch as well. As you see the world, hopefully it’s pulling you in and making you say. &l🌟squo;I want to be in this world, I want to know what’s going on, I want to explore it, I want to discover it’ and we want players to be a part of a community in this world.”
It’s too early to talk about whether Nightingale will eventually replicate the depth of character relationships found in Mass Effect or Dragon Age, especially when it comes to forming friendships or even romance in the face of this fractured setting. Future updates will eventually see players reach the city of Nightingale, a sprawling hub area of sorts that exists outside of makeshift communities an♛d survival shelters we will feasibly spend months piecing together. Speaking of characters, you’ll be able to make your own.
“We have character selection, character customisation, and you get to decide what kind of Realm Walker you want to be,” Flynn says. “Beyond that there’s also customisation through the course of gameplay so different outfits, different colours and all those kinds of things. We wanted to demonstrate to our players that this is a fantasy world, and we’re not going to throw in the Army Rangers or SAS even if, practically speaking, that’s what you’d do. We want players a chance to say I want to express myself, I want to be unique, I want to be special, I want this to be a world I’m choosing to go to and a game I’m choosing to play in the way I want to play it. Hence the exaggerated and cool looking outfits and a nice great hat. Gotta have a big hat if you’re go🃏ing into the fantasy realm.”
Nightingale is a survival game - so the act of gathering resources, building shelter, and fighting enemies will be present and accounted for. All of these qualities will grow 🎉and expand through early access, and the development team seems keen to establish a consistent theme of community if players come along for the ride. “Realm Walkers are encouraged to come together and start communities,” Flynn explains. “There is an opportunity to collaborate and cooperate and to achieve more because you’re together. You’ve gotta start somewhere with building in a game like this, so we onboard players and get them to understand the basic rules, but we want it to be very open-ended and driven by the choices that our community makes, and by the freedom of getting to go into what they want to do.”
You’ll need to build a base that doesn’t just look good, it will need to serve practic🌌al pu𓂃rposes when defending from enemy attacks and providing each and every player with a space to call their own and decorate. I imagine rival explorers might also come along and pilfer your belongings if you aren’t careful, causing PvP rivals or a headache for those who prefer solo play - which I’m told is a perfectly valid approach to take in Nightingale.
As for the future of the survival genre and how it intersects with RPGs, Flynn believes we are entering a time in the medium where storytelling is far more malleable, and building distinct worlds and characters is no longer dedicated to a select few games. “The great thing about the games industry is that everybody in it gets to offer their own expression of what they think and players can be the judge of that,” he says. “We all want our players to ju🌳dge us fairly, that’s how it works, so we really want to put our best foot forward out there. But I really like how you said it, I think there’s a lಞot of opportunity for storytelling and world building in this genre of gameplay, and I think we’re gonna see a lot more of that from other studios as well in the future. The gameplay is fantastic, it’s super fun, and now comes the ability to enrich that with great world building, storytelling, and characters. All the things that have been done in the past in traditional RPGs are now going to make their way into this genre.”
Nightingale is set to release in Early Access on PC later this year.
