Nightingale’s art director Neil Thompson is shooting a giant in the face. This hands-off guided demo for Inflexion’s upcoming open-world survival adventure has kicked things up a notch, and chaos is just around the corner. In addition to Thompson, two other team members explain that the giant is one of several Apex Creatures you may encounter. If you try to antagonize these beasts, you’ll be in for quite a fight, as I’m about to discover. In order to appease these mighty beings, you may offer them an offering, but they may not always accept it. Thompson fires a shot right between the giant’s eyes after handing him a spyglass he doesn’t like. The giant’s wrath is awakened.
Thompson is sent hurtling high up into the air by a red laser-like beam from a medallion around the giant’s neck. As a result, an umbrella comes in handy in Nightingale, allowing you to gracefully and, more importantly, safely float back to the ground. There’s still the angry giant to contend with, but what really catches my attention is the curious setting comprised of different realms, and all of the gear that fits the alternate Victorian world the team at Inflexion created. With a penchant for history and a keen interest in the Victorian era, Nightingale catches my attention, and I take the opportunity to ask Thompson why the team chose to create a PvE survival crafting experience set in this era.
At BioWare, we have done a lot of high fantasy with Dragon Age, and sci-fi with Mass Effect. We wanted to move away from those things,” Thompson says. We both were inspired by the book Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke, set in Napoleonic times, in which magic is viewed as an academic pursuit: “What happens when you break the veil between the worlds and what the consequences are?”
When we started putting realms, portals, and magic together, we realized we didn’t want to be in the Napoleonic period or sci-fi,” Thompson says. “We’re both really very interested in the Victorian period, it’s a very rich period, rich for the amounts of exploration and technological innovation that was going on. And it just seemed a perfect match for us. You know, we could send our realm walkers out, they can be kitted up with relatively modern equipment in terms of guns and so forth. But still not so prepared as you might be in a sci-fi environment where you’ve got armor and all the rest of it. And it all kind of came together from there.”
With Nightingale set to launch in Early Access, the team has already taken player feedback into account when incorporating features like a third-person perspective and an arachnophobia mode that removes spider legs and replaces them with tiny wings. Nightingale has a number of interesting concepts at play, and I’m already looking forward to seeing just how it evolves as the team continues to refine it.
