Greetings, Realmwalkers!
Last week we jumped into Discord and answered questions from the community. Couldn’t make it? Fear not - we’ve got you covered. Our panel for this Q&A:
- Aaryn Flynn, CEO
- Neil Thompson, Director of Art and Head of Audio
- Leah Summers, Head of Production
- Michael Carter, Lead Designer
- Scarbs, Community/Question Asker
Take a look at the edited transcript below:
Scarbs: Hey everyone! Thanks for coming along. Let’s start with the first question: What are the priorities for Nightingale’s development in the months ahead?
Aaryn: The most immediate thing we're doing is we've got an update we're targeting for the end of the month here, which is going to preview our listen server functionality. This is going to let you all play the game without having to connect to one of our hosted servers. That's been a long-standing requested feature.That will be in preview, meaning you'll be able to connect to it with some console commands and try it out at the end of the month here, and then we'll keep working on it.
I should also say, as well as that, we've also got some fun new gameplay stuff coming too. We’ll talk more about that at a later date. Although, I will say that we have a sword coming.
Michael: We do have a sword coming! As well as an alternate for the Slingbow.
Aaryn: We struggled to think of the sword as a Victorian-era weapon. Hence, we didn't prioritize it, but so many folks wanted it, and we're able to do it. So the the sword is coming.
Scarbs: Big reveals happening! Okay, so next question, what's the state of the new tilesets and rounded and corner pieces that were mentioned previously?
Neil: We have multiple new tilesets coming. I'm not sure which drop when but we're putting them in soon.
Leah: We're just prepping them. They'll probably come closer to the holiday. So that's really exciting. We recently did an update to the structure system that allows you to build without support - that’s been really exciting! We’ve been enjoying seeing what everyone's been doing with that new functionality. And then after we kind of get the new tilesets going, we'll start to look at the curved pieces and the other pieces. So not before the holiday, unfortunately, but we are absolutely going to get you a new tileset for sure.
Neil: So we've got a Herbarium tileset that is based on the Crystal Palace, which is coming in Nightingale City. There is a Western tileset which is super cool. And, most excitingly, I think there is a Fae tileset coming as well, which is very exotic, but still fits with any existing tileset. So you can build a quasi-human Fae estate, which will look awesome.
Aaryn: Someone is asking about decorations. I think you've got some more decorations on the hopper too, right?
Leah: Yeah, we have a lot of decorations lined up. That's for sure.
Aaryn: We're talking holiday, potentially for some of that stuff?
Leah: For holiday, yeah. Lots of lots of new decor, lined up.
Aaryn: Rugs? Not yet but we will make a note for rugs that's a good note.
Scarbs: A bunch of questions have been coming in. Are there any plans to implement display armor?
Michael: No current plans. You or NPC is sort of your armor display for armor right now, but that's certainly something we could look at.
Scarbs: Next up: any plans to expand augmentations?
Neil: Potentially! We'd like to and we want to make the right choices there. We’re also looking at
Improving the functionality of augmentations to allow you to assign different augments to different benches. That should be coming soon.
Scarbs: Question: are we going to see items scattered around the world (bath tubs, sinks, etc) become functional items for players to use?
Michael: We've talked about that stuff. It could be like an augment or something you use to furnish your house. But no plans right now.
Aaryn: I see a question about having multiple NPCs. Yeah, that's actually in the works, and so some of that will be coming - hopefully sooner rather than later. We really enjoy expanding the NPC gameplay, and so we want to do more and more with that over the course of the next, you know, two updates I would say.
Scarbs: Someone is asking about whether we can extend the Halloween event... I don't think we said when that's ending.
Leah: That will come down with our next update towards the end of the month. However, we will leave all of the rewards in the tech tree so that you can still claim them.
Aaryn: Yeah, it's a tough one, right? Because, on the one hand, you want to incentivise and reward players who make it on time. But on the other side of it, everybody hates missing out on the stuff. And so it seems like, in general, it's just better to always have this content accessible to people who missed it. And, yeah, it's totally FOMO, right? It feels awful to be like, “Why does that person have that cool hat? Oh, because they were there for this.” Our current thought process is to keep that stuff available. It’ll be available in some tier unlock.
Scarbs: It's been asked a lot: the ability to actually sit on chairs…
Aaryn: Not in the immediate future, but we are working on tech that will allow us to do that.
Scarbs: We've got the Pawn, the Rook, Bishop and Knight Automatons, and the remains of a Queen Automaton. Will we see a King Automaton?
Aaryn: Things are worse than Queens, though? How would you fight a King? The Queen is being worked on right now. The Queen's getting a lot of love in various corners of the studio, so I think that'll be out, probably not this year, but certainly early next year. But I don't think we have any plans for a King right now - although I appreciate the completionists in this chat.
Michael: The original design for the Queen involved you having to fight the King, which was a smaller creature.
Scarbs: Can players get crop plots that have snap points?
Aaryn: That’s a good note. Let’s make an action item to make that happen.
Scarbs: There’s also a question asking for the ability to place seeds from the hotbar (rather than through the menus)...
Michael: Farming is something we want to tackle as an update. It's taking a backseat to other concepts we're working on right now. It is on our list of things to improve, along with some fishing updates as well - more cozy gameplay focus in the future.
Scarbs: More feature requests: any plans to improve the organization of augmentations, so you can figure out easily how augments affect different benches?
Aaryn: There's an augmentation overhaul coming soon. Our current thought process is that you should be able to select the argument you want to affect certain benches, as long as within range. That should help. There’s still work being done there though.
Scarbs: Cool. Any chance of implementing individual loot drops?
Aaryn: Instance loop drops, I think, is what you mean by that? So the boss loot is instanced. So you know, when you do a Vault or when you do a story boss, those are currently instanced. Everyone gets their own drop of that. That doesn't mean we can't pursue it on other creatures at this point. We haven't, but it's, it's not outside of the realm of possibility, but not something we’re currently pursuing.
Scarbs: Are there any plans to enhance chat features, making role-playing easier? Having multiple channels in chat, the ability to move the chat window, and stuff like that...
Aaryn: Nothing at this time. But it's a good note. We can look into it.
Scarbs: And are you guys planning to update the character creator dashboard? Because there's a bunch of stuff still in there, obviously, which is coming soon. What are the plans for that?
Neil: Yeah, there are some bits and pieces that we want to tie off, specifically around things like makeup and possible tattoos and things like that. So, yeah, we'll continue to work on that.
I keep seeing Kahz posting the same question, so we should probably answer that one. It’s asking about more playable content in terms of biomes and so forth. The big next release in that regard will be Nightingale City.
Aaryn: That will be end-game content. We are also talking about adding another end-game piece of content in this next update, or the one after that. Basically, over the next two updates we will be dripping new end-game stuff for players.
Neil: I think the City will be awesome as well. I guarantee it. That’s my personal guarantee.
Aaryn: Answering a question in chat: no, the next biome isn’t winter. The original vision for the game was to have unique biomes and unique locations. And so winter being a season, ideally, winter can come to any kind of biome, right? I guess you could argue about desert… but the point is, we want to separate out the idea of biomes and seasons. So we are doing some work on seasons right now. So stay tuned for that, and you should see some cool stuff coming that way by the wintertime. Hint, hint, nudge nudge. Hint…
Scarbs: Is there any movement or update on mounts or vehicles? We've talked about penny farthings, airships, etc.
Michael: No major plans there. Hopefully, your umbrella is good at traversing and once you put the spec into it it’s fast enough for most players. But anyway, no plans right now.
Scarbs: The game has a lot of visually distinct resource nodes and materials, as well as crafting recipes. Are there plans to make materials more visually cohesive to the raw ingredients with more visual vibrancy and variation?
Aaryn: There are some limitations around doing that, but we're also very keen to bring a higher degree of control with item customization at some point in the future, which will allow for this kind of more unique connection between the refined resource and the thing that you actually craft with it.
Scarbs: Here’s a question: will you add the ability to override a building piece without demolishing the pieces?
Aaryn: Oh, we've talked about this, yeah. Just swapping one wall in for another.
Neil: That should be in the new update.
Leah: Yeah. That one is in the new build update. It won't have, I think someone asked about, like, wallpapers or painting. No, but we've, we've started with being able to swap things out on the fly.
Scarbs: Will further clothing customization be acded in the future?
Aaryn: The Glamor Bench was kind of the start of this process, but we're just going to keep going with that so that you can customize it more. One of the things we did on the dev side very early on, was we were able to go in and individually change the colors of the threads. We’re hopefully going to find a way of allowing players to do that too, because it is incredibly fulfilling.
Neil: And that functionality would be on the glamor bench or glamor station. Sorry, when it comes.
Scarbs: We have one of the tough questions come in, so it's worth answering now, and we can sort of dig back into the gameplay stuff. After the news that we had reductions to the studio size, does that mean more focus on specific projects instead of spread out? Will bigger updates take longer to come, or would be more, smaller updates? Basically, an update to the state of play…
Aaryn: Obviously, it should go without saying, we're really sorry to lose so many folks from the studio. They're all amazing developers. They're all super talented. So that part makes it so hard when we have to say goodbye to friends and colleagues, and sometimes folks we've known for, you know, a very long time, right? And hopefully we're all still friends outside of work. So that's that is the hard news. And again, there's no changing that.
I guess there are two ways to look at where we go from here. One is that we still have a healthy number of folks contributing to Nightingale right now, and it's now incumbent on us too, and I think this is what you were alluding to Scarbs, is have them focus on only the most important things. Nightingale is a very broad game. It's sometimes broader than it is deep, and we want to add depth to the places that we now have confidence you're all enjoying, or other people are enjoying. That's things like the combat and then the building/estate management. Those are the two big areas, and both of those can also then be connected to the end game content that folks have been alluding to. Nightingale City is the element of that. And so that becomes our job as development leaders is to focus our team on the most important things, and those are the two things.
Scarbs: Asking something tangentially related, moving forward, how will the studio balance feedback on the website and Aha, particularly topics that don’t get as much engagement as others? How do you balance, you know, what's important through all that feedback?
Leah: We actually put a lot of stock into the feedback. This week, we spent over two hours going through it with some members of the team to make sure we had heard the feedback. Maybe it was filed in our backlog, we tried to update the statuses on the AHA board. I mean, there's lots in there, so it's obviously challenging to get through everything. But, you know, we are, we are always looking and trying to be on top of it as best as possible.
Aaryn: We should probably respond to the question from Lazarus there about like Nightingale closing down, right? There is zero intention for us to close Nightingale down. You're hearing it from us that we are continuing to work on Nightingale, and part of the reason we made the changes to the studio that we did was to enable us to continue to work on Nightingale and to support it in the long term. There's 134 people in this audience. You are all evangelists for Nightingale. I assume otherwise you wouldn't be here. So spread the word!
Neil: [Addressing chat question about Marc Warren still voicing Puck] Yes, Mark Warren will be voicing pop for new content.
Leah: He’s in the booth right now!
Neil: Someone was asking about half-wall pieces for the Regency set. You know, if we could set up a discord channel where people ask for extra pieces based on the tilesets that already exist, I would happily go through that and build them.
Scarbs: We'll move on from the studio-based questions. We'll go with a nice, easy one. I think I know the answer to this question. Will we get magic arrows like we have magic ammunition?
Aaryn: It's been worked on as we speak. But they will be a bit different than the magic ammo we have. They'll be more exciting, hopefully.
Scarbs: Are there going to be more co-op quests and, you know, multiplayer-related material or will future updates be solo-orientated?
Aaryn: That's a good question. You know, obviously, we look at the metrics and the analytics, and we see most people are either solo or with asynchronous co-op. We want to make sure that the vast majority, if not all, of the content that we make is enjoyable when you're solo and in multiplayer.
The dream for Nightingale was always to do strictly multiplayer content, right? That's what we had a lot of fun imagining. I mean, there's four people in this room right now who play this game together, and we have a lot of fun when we do so. And so we like the idea of this, but, but, you know, truly when we do that kind of content, we often get conflicting statements being made, like “Oh, I don't play that way” “I can't enjoy that.” “That's not fair. You're not prioritizing the things that I want to work on,” etc. So we definitely feel we have to strike a balance there and figure out how to, how to kind of make that work for everybody. And so generally, what we do is we try to make everything possible with solo play.
But I would love to make strictly, you know, three-person, six-person content, and say, You got to group up, and you got to do that, because I have a lot of fun when I play the game that way, right?
Scarbs: Are there plans for player factions, player guilds, like I just mentioned, larger Realm sizes, both in geography and in multiplayer, account social controls for Realms, loot separation, which came up earlier, and bosses that require multiple players to defeat, etc.?
Aaryn: That's a lot…So I can, I can sort of speak to the intention of more multiplayer content. So once again, a lot of the current player base plays solo or offline, which means there's no chance of them even joining an online player environment. In terms of content, we're creating this new content around end game. The loose idea I'll give to you is it gets harder and harder, forever, until you die. Obviously, you can do that solo and have a good experience doing that, but if you want to take on super deep-end game content, you will want a group of six people doing that content, because that is how you're going to get as deep as possible.
Scarbs: Are there any plans with Vaults in terms of the size and shape and scope of them? More variations in puzzles, variations of previous bosses…
Aaryn: The vaults are relatively untouched in the next update. Maybe in the future we can do more to add features. This new content we're talking about for the end game is sort of parallel. You'll be getting similar rewards, not exactly the same rewards.
I don't want to prioritize the extroverts over the introverts. I respect the introverts, and I want to be able to play as much of the game as possible, if not all of it. But at the same time, we're also trying to say that people who want to play with their friends, they want to have content that they can enjoy together and that's cool, too. And so we have to figure out the balance to strike there. And so typically, the two things we consider are to make it available for solo players and then secondly, to consider interesting and novel ways that playing with your friends can make an experience better or different. And that's hard, that's a hard design problem.
Scarbs: This question has been asked a couple of times: Will there be improved metadata on Realm Cards in the future? Make it easier to understand what Realm Cards are being played, which player owns then, and easier for players to share content with each other?
Aaryn: We looked into this on the UI side, and there are some technical, uh, issues that we need to sort out to let us do this. I can certainly take it back to the team. Some of that other metadata was a bit of a bridge too far a few of the times we looked into it, but we can definitely check again.
Scarbs: I think I've seen some confusion from your answer earlier around listen servers. Can you give more clarity? Are they player dedicated servers?
Aaryn: So it's a step in that direction, right? So a listen server is a functionality that lets you play the equivalent to offline mode. So you're just playing by yourself. There's no outward network connection at all. But if a friend comes along and wants to join you, you can actually have them connect to your game and still have their character come over to your game. So, that's why they call that a listen server in the in the Epic/Unreal parlance.
Yeah, I bet Satisfactory does do this… I think many games do this, like Valheim. Mikey, I bet does many, many games do this. But then from there, there's another step you can take which is called a dedicated server, which is where just the server binary runs on a box somewhere, and everybody can connect and disconnect from it and do that (which is actually how Nightingale works right now). You can use G Portal or Nitrado for that and pay for a hosted service that way. So this listen server functionality is a step in that direction.
Scarbs: I’m going to pivot now back to sort of the granular feature questions and specifics. So will material appearance ever determine the appearance of structures such as, like you're building a house or a shack out of yew or hardwood and it reflects those resources? Also questions about being able to paint estate walls.
Aaryn: Currently, you put any wood into any structure, right? So that would require some back end stuff - it would get pretty complicated pretty quickly in terms of how that would function. Setting up, a hammer, or something that can change those walls, is something more achievable.
Scarbs: Someone's asking if we get more repeatable side missions or quests like more dungeons or things like base defence?
Aaryn: it's been discussed in terms of both base defence has been discussed many times at the studio. It's a bit of work, and there are some questions to be answered with how that works with people getting the houses destroyed. But in terms of daily quests and stuff, that's not something we’re currently pursuing deeply. But as we talk about hiring NPCs, something along the lines of the longer your NPC is with you, they might give you a quest. Is something we are thinking about pursuing.
Scarbs: Are there any efforts being made to reconcile the newly free-floating structures with the lore of the game? So there's a bit of a controversy within the community right now that, now that we've removed the necessity to have pillars holding things up, estates can float around. Are we going to sort of contextualize that within the lore of the game?
Neil: We didn’t have any plans to…
Scarbs: You've got to think about it now.
Neil: This is a tricky one, right? Because this comes down to a desire to allow players to express themselves creatively as they wish, with the tools that we provide them. We never initially had the idea of player-built floating structures. It was always much more physically based, right? You needed to have support. So we kind of find ourselves in a conflict with how do we allow players to express themselves? Moving those constraints, yeah, sure, you can have fun with it. Now we've got to figure out a reason for why that happens. I mean, I can give you one right now, off the top of my head, if you like, and then we can write it into lore.
Scarbs: Maybe take a minute,
Aaryn: The struggle then becomes if we put a justification in, if we say “this is the reason” the risk is that it becomes a point of friction. Like, maybe you have to get a unique tileset to do it, or you've got to have some spell to do it. So we went this way because it was the simplest. And it will probably end up staying this way because it's simple and clean and people ultimately have fun with it, even if they have to kind of look the other way briefly while they knock out a pillar.
Neil: You could just say, you know, if you knock a pillar our the Fae winds will support you. Don't use that one. But we used to have things like this. If you remember, before Realms Rebuilt, you couldn’t put a spell on a weapon unless it was upgraded and that was a weird consideration we made. We ended up taking that out. We’ve always got to be careful with how we handle things like that.
Scarbs: Speaking of spells, are we going to get more enchantments? Maybe non-combat orientated ones.
Aaryn: I can speak to that. Yes, more enchantments are coming. In terms of non-combat ideas, we were talking about a localized rain cloud. But we want to make sure that we have a clear distinction between spells and Minor Realms Cards - and we have a bunch of weather related Realm Cards. We don't want to cross over too much. But we are thinking about non-combat spells.
Scarbs: Speaking of magic upgrades, are there any plans to make etched ingots have more stats than their standard ingot versions? It would be cool if etched, added magic or other cool attributes.
Michael: Yeah, that is something we've talked about. So there's lots of discussion in terms of parametric crafting. Etching is one of those things where it's an upper level. Same thing with carbon wood. We are actually looking at those and their functionality and reviewing whether they should give an additive bonus. So we've talked about that, but there are challenges there.
Scarbs: Are decorative only plants a possibility, such as hedge flowers, vines?
Neil: Yes! Why not. I was more taken with the question about non Euclidean estate building. What I'm assuming there from the question is that you want a scenario where there aren't stairways from room to room…yeah, there's a science fiction novel that I can't remember the name of, but it's based around that technology where a guy just has a house built on multiple planets, and each doorway is a portal. So it's bathrooms on an ocean world, and it's just a platform to meet…
So you could build an estate like that across multiple realms with with builder portals that would connect you to each room in your estate. That would be, I'm not sure if anyone's done that, but it would be pretty fabulous.
Scarbs: With the idea of parametric crafting, will there be additions of interchangeable part types with specific stats? So even more modular…
Aaryn: That sort of already exists more as an accessibility feature than anything else, right? Often we call for cloth, but you can use durable cloth. So things like that are things we're pursuing - more alternatives are effectively possible. We have certain challenges with the system but in terms of, if we wanted to do more component parts, we could explore that.
Scarbs: That's it for today. Thank you to everyone for coming along. I'll hand it back to Aaryn and co. to say their goodbyes.
Aaryn: Thank you so much for your continued support. This is really fun to do. We actually really enjoy these things. We're really, really excited to just make some new stuff for you all, and have you enjoy it.
Michael: Thanks so much for what's my first time here. So thanks for being so welcoming.
Leah: Thanks!
Neil: Bye!
And that’s it for this Q&A. Do you want to get involved in future live Q&As with the studio team? Jump into Discord here and look out for announcements on when we’ll be hosting the next one.
The Nightingale Team