The greatest challenges of a game draw in players. World bosses in survival games often represent the pinnacle of challenge for players in their respective titles, and in Nightingale, they come in the form of Apex Creatures.
Apex creatures take their name from apex predators, creatures who are at the top of their respective food chains and are safe from being preyed upon. That’s a fitting name to give video game bosses, which tend to be dominant features in whatever environment they find themselves in, and makes a bold claim about the challenge these creatures pose in Nightingale. Game ZXC recently spoke to Inflexion CEO Aaryn Flynn about the Apex Creatures in Nightingale and how Realmwalkers will go about confronting these massive challenges
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Aaryn Flynn Teases The Strength of Nightingale's Apex Creatures
These terrifying bosses are out among the Fae Realms, but they won’t just be stumbled into by wandering players. Instead, players will need to specifically seek them out and then challenge them. The latter is important, as Game ZXC's preview of Nightingale saw us go up against the Apex Creature known as The Humbaba, and if weren't for the high-end gear provided to us by devs, there's no way we would have survived.
Apex Creatures are part of the Realm Card system that players can use to customize the places they’ll visit, turning the game’s three basic biomes at launch into one of an estimated 20,000 variations of Fae Realms. Some of these can be specifically crafted to contain an Apex enemy.
To find Apex Creatures, Realmwalkers must pair a Hunt Card with a Biome Card. Be warned, realmwalkers with high-level gear stand a much greater chance against these creatures.
Using a Hunt Card as part of the realm crafting process will allow one of the game’s three initial Apex Creatures to spawn. These creatures represented a key part of the endgame experience and should not, under any circumstances, be confronted ill-prepared.
Apex Creatures Have Apex Rewards
Those challenges will, naturally, net players great rewards that will fuel the game’s endgame loop, making hunting down the Apex Creature an activity most players will engage with fairly frequently. Thankfully, if adventuring with friends beyond a player’s level, the fact that specific Realm Cards need to be used to encounter the creatures should prevent players from encountering an Apex Creature unprepared.
At launch, we will have 3 Apex Creatures: Sun Giant, Elder Eoten, and the Humbaba. Apex Creatures are significantly more powerful than typical enemies you’ll encounter in Nightingale … Each Apex Creature has unique behaviors.
Those Apex creatures stand in contrast to around 40 other types of enemy encounters players might bump into among the Fae Realms. Those will take the form of wildlife and the mysterious humanlike Bound, who relentlessly stalk Realmwalkers and are connected to Nightingale’s Fae. Apex Creatures eclipse both wildlife and Bound in both power and complexity, however.
Nightingale
Nightingale is a PvE survival-crafting game developed by Inflexion Games, which is composed of former BioWare devs. Players must make their way across the Fae Realms, find their new home among the Realms, and discover what happened to the titular city. They can do so solo or via co-op, all under the guidance and tutelage of Puck - an ally, but can players truly trust him?
