Online-only games have been a huge point of contention in the gaming community this past year, and it only took Nightingale two days to respond to the community’s pleas.
On Feb. 22, Inflexion Studios announced through its official Nightingale Discord that it is prioritizing an offline mode for the game, which it plans to implement as soon as feasibly possible. An offline mode was never originally planned for Nightingale, and it’s admirable (to say the least) that Inflexion were willing to make such a massive shift in priorities so soon after the release. In fact, Feb. 22 was the day Nightingale was originally supposed to be released.
Online-only games seem to have become increasingly popular lately. From Payday 3 to Skull and Bones to Helldivers 2, plenty of new titles have forced players to connect to online servers—and to be quite frank, it hasn’t seemed to ever really pan out in the way the devs were hoping it would.
In cases like Helldivers 2, it’s easy enough to see how server capacity issues are the result of the game becoming significantly more popular than the devs planned. But when you look at Palworld, which blew up in a way absolutely nobody ever imagined and was saved from boundless criticism and perpetual maxed out servers by the inclusion of an offline mode, it feels difficult to argue how there’s any good reason to not include an offline mode for any game—if for no other reason than as a safety net.
In the case of Nightingale, Inflexion said why the studio initially planned the game as online only in the same announcement it revealed plans for a solo-mode—and really, the logic is sound and justifiable. Because Nightingale is centered around the usage of portals for Realmwalking, the devs wanted to create the feeling that other players’ worlds were simply a portal away—not a server away. In other words, the existence of multiplayer servers is a lore-friendly part of Nightingale.
In this game, you don’t just invite someone to join your session: you craft a Realm Card for them to open a portal to your server. These same Realm Cards are the ones used to explore various procedural generated Realms as part of the game’s core, and the decision to make game invites so lore-friendly really is awesome.
What’s more awesome is how open-minded Inflexion proved in their willingness to listen to the community and adapt. They had a good reason for making the game online only, but being unable to connect to the game at all because of server instability definitely trumps that reason.
There isn’t a date for when an offline mode will be added to Nightingale, but the message in the game’s Discord makes it clear that it’s a top priority right now. The message also says to keep an eye out for updates in the coming weeks, so it’s probably fair to assume it will launch mid-March at the earliest before you can play Nightingale offline.
