Solo survival players, rejoice: Nightingale is 'prioritizing and developing an offline mode'

A fantasy monster — (Image credit: Inflexion Games)

Survival game Nightingale launched into early access this week and the gaslamp fantasy is enjoying a strong start thanks to a rewarding tutorial, lots of interesting worldbuilding and RPG trappings, and a novel realm-creation system.

Unfortunately it's stumbled a bit when it comes to technical problems, which appear to be the main reason its Steam reviews are currently mixed. There's also another big issue for a lot of players (myself included), and it's one we've seen plenty of times in the past: Even when you're playing Nightingale solo, you have to play online.

This has been a big issue for me personally over the past couple days, as I had to quit the tutorial because I kept getting disconnected from Nightingale's servers. Just about every new multiplayer game has server problems at launch—just look at Helldivers 2—but it's only irritating in this case because there was no need for me to be on a server. I'm playing alone, not in co-op. Why do I need to join a server at all?

Developer Inflexion Games has heard the anguished cries of solo players everywhere, and today announced there are plans to add offline play. Yay! Wait, how did they say "yay" in the Victorian era? Ticketyboo?

"Our vision for the game since inception was to create an interconnected series of Realms, with the idea of allowing for co-operative exploration in mind—a universe bigger than a single Realm or server," says Inflexion Games in a post on Steam, and so it decided to focus on "supporting co-op from day one or focusing development on an offline mode."

"Looking back on that decision, we misjudged what some of you were looking for in your experience," Inflexion says. "We are now prioritizing and developing an offline mode that we plan to release as soon as feasible."

That will hopefully un-ruffle some muttonchops among the Nightingale community. There's no word on how long that mode will take to develop, but we'll let you know when we hear more.

Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he'd stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He's also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own.