Highlights

  • Nightingale's exploration-focused gameplay suffers from lack of diversity in rewards and visual appeal over time, potentially impacting longevity.
  • The crafting system in Nightingale presents quality-of-life issues, with materials possessing stats leading to confusion and inventory management problems.
  • While Inflexion Games is actively working to improve Nightingale's issues, significant changes may be needed for a more seamless gameplay experience in early access.

The year is off to a great start with survival games, including hit titles like Enshrouded and Palworld, both currently in early access. Now, Inflexion Games' Nightingale is bringing up the tail end of things with a survival experience unlike any other set in the mysterious Fae Realms, where secrets and dangers wait around every corner. Nightingale has certainly proven its worth thus far, but it still has its issues nonetheless.

Nightingale is currently in early access, so issues are, to some degree, to be expected. Many of these issues revolve around Nightingale's quality of life, but some are found in its exploration, which is an especially tough pill to swallow considering Nightingale's main feature is exploration. However, being that Nightingale is in early access and Inflexion Games is already hard at work to make it a better experience, these are problems that can be improved throughout the game's early access period.

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How Nightingale Can Improve Its Gameplay Throughout Early Access

Nightingale Has Quality-Of-Life Issues in Its Crafting That Need to Be Addressed

When it comes to Nightingale's quality-of-life pitfalls, the majority of them exist within the game's crafting system. Nightingale's crafting system has garnered the most player feedback so far, as it essentially flips the normal crafting mechanics of every other survival game on its head and does things backwards, so to speak.

Rather than allowing players to craft increasingly strong items with better stats using basic materials, Nightingale's materials possess the stats instead, which ultimately leads to one type of material having varying rarities and tiers. This results in overflowing inventories with a multitude of items that all look the same but have different stats.

This is all especially difficult to deal with because of the limited space in Nightingale's inventory and storage containers. Even if players are under the weight limit, they can still run out of space in their inventory due to the enormous amount of materials they are expected to hold. Additionally, rather than allowing players to craft or build using materials from a nearby storage container, they are required to first have those materials in their inventory, inevitably resulting in players spending a significant amount of time running back and forth more than necessary just to build something.

While this would likely take a complete overhaul of Nightingale 's crafting system, condensing each material down to one basic type might be enough to change things overall.

Nightingale's Long-Term Exploration Needs More Diversity

Nightingale is primarily based on exploration, as one of its core mechanics involves players essentially "crafting" Realms using different Realm Card combinations to determine the Realm's biome and type. Each realm is then procedurally generated to allegedly offer a brand-new exploration experience every time. Unfortunately, while the game begins by honoring that notion, the longer players spend time in the world of Nightingale, the more likely they are to begin to notice how similar everything looks.

Games with procedural generation tend to have the problem of everything looking rather "copy and paste" after a while, so some of that is to be expected. Because Nightingale thrives on exploration, it can't afford to fit in with that group of games. After a while, though, everything in Nightingale starts to look the same.

Players will likely begin recognizing different structures as locations they've visited before just 15–20 hours into the game, and the lack of diversity in the rewards for exploration doesn't help either. For example, most chests provide different potions and ores, and that's about it. If exploration was more rewarding and provided more than beautiful scenery to look at, it might benefit Nightingale's longevity.

None of this is to say that Nightingale gets it all wrong. In fact, it does a lot of things right that its competition can't currently compete with. That said, the hope is that Inflexion is taking note of and planning to improve Nightingale's current issues that may prevent it from being enough to pull players from other games like Enshrouded and Palworld.