Nightingale has been one of the most highly anticipated survival crafting games of this year. Unfortunately, its early access launch has highlighted the game’s shortcomings that need to be highlighted. Here are five things Nightingale needs to improve before its 1.0 launch.
Offline Mode
This has been something players immediately clamored for. Because of Nightingale’s always-online framework of dedicated servers hosting realms, it’s clear the developers underestimated players’ desire to play offline and host realms on their own. This is especially true when not long after Nightingale’s launch, Inflexion games clarified that an offline mode was coming very soon.
It’s likely offline mode will arrive much sooner than Nightingale’s 1.0 launch, so that’s certainly a good thing. Part of the problem with a game like this always being online is people playing from outside the U.S. are experiencing high ping just playing by themselves. That just doesn’t cut it for a survival crafting game.
Optimization
Nightingale uses Unreal Engine 5 alongside a lot of the engine’s powerful visual technology. Technology like Lumen, a powerful global illumination where sun and moonlight bathe the world in light and color that bounces realistically. While a performance hit would be expected using these technologies, the frame rate dips far too often.
My gaming laptop struggles to keep the game running at a consistent 60fps at 1440p on settings that are far below max. Even worse is when enemies are spawning in and fighting because it’s in those moments that the frame rate tanks far below 60.
For example, it looks poor when you climb the Fae towers fight enemies as you do so. In those moments, the performance is even lower than in the lush outside world, and that need to be improved come launch. Ultimately, Nightingale should be able to run well for everyone, not just those who have the hardware to run DLSS 3.0’s frame generation. Especially after Inflexion Games dropped support for FSR3’s more accessible frame generation.
Crafting Quality of Life
In Nightingale, you’re going to be doing a lot of crafting and that’s all well and good. The problem arises when you discover that the materials needed to craft anything have to come from your own inventory. Miraculously, crafting doesn’t take into account what you have stored in storage. Which is a quality-of-life feature that Palworld and Enshrouded had from day one.
Thankfully, it seems like Inflexion Games already knows that players want this feature. It doesn’t help that the crafting systems in Nightingale are some of the more complex in the survival crafting genre. It doesn’t help that there are multiple tiers of the same crafting bench. That’s on top of later game recipes needing crafted items from a previous crafting bench’s crafting bench’s crafting bench.
So, the easier crafting can be made for the sake of the player, I think is a good call on Inflexion Games part.
Revamped Points of Interest
One of Nightingale’s biggest selling points is its exploration. With how each realm is randomly generated, there are plenty of interesting places to see. At least, that’s how it should be. Unfortunately, the various realms and their points of interest aren’t as interactive as they should be. For exploration, it’s important that the things you find have some kind of impact.
It’s a shame then that Nightingale’s points of interest largely lack that impact. The best Nightingale produces are the few puzzles that are engaging, but it is everything around them that lacks interaction. All the crates and urns and other Fae-looking objects do little beyond letting you break them down into basic materials. Breaking them open to find random rarer resources, items, essences, and gear of varying quality with enchants and charms would make exploration much more exciting.
It all hinges on two ideas that need fulfilling for rewarding exploration: not knowing what to expect and find, and what you eventually find being helpful and fun in one way or another.
Combat & Enemy Overhaul
The last building block for a better Nightingale involves better moment to moment combat. A lot of the game’s current combat woes are derived from enemies and how they move. Simply put, there’s very little buildup to their movements from an animation perspective. That fact is also hurt by how enemies always bum rush you straight on and rarely use tactics or attacks that aren’t jumping at you and clawing at you in a very stilted way.
I say stilted because their movement after the attack animation always makes them immediately stop on a dime. That makes the fight feel overly gamey and is not satisfying because of that. It also makes ranged combat more difficult than it needs to be because of how jerky their movements are. So, in my mind, the solution stems from slower, more gradual animations that I know Unreal Engine 5 can produce. On top of that, AI tactics and attacks that are more varied and unpredictable would certainly improve how combat feels.
Additionally, added heavy attacks that take more stamina and pierce through enemies (that should also be able to block and dodge) would be excellent changes too.
It’s these additions, along with bug fixes, that would definitely make Nightingale a much better survival crafting game for its 1.0 launch. Here’s hoping Inflexion Games looks into some of these.
In the meantime, why not check out how to build your first portal in Nightingale.
