How Nightingale Will Draw From the Lessons Of Mass Effect And Dragon Age In Crafting Its Magical World
Arryn Flynn is enamored with the idea of a sense of place. His Improbable studio in Edmonton, Inflexion, attests that it's devoted to "creating places," and by extension communities and spaces that feel meaningful to those who inhabit them. It's a goal that carries some significant weight coming from a studio staffed and led by the creators of Mass Effect's Normandy and Dragon Age's Skyhold.
Flynn says it was this desire that served as the ultimate seed for Nightingale: Inflexion's upcoming survival crafting game set in a Victorian fantasy world.
"[There's] this notion that a place is something that has human meaning in it, it's a construct for us mentally and physically, that we invest ourselves in, we put ourselves out there to be socially connected to other people," CEO Aaryn Flynn tells IGN. "And taking something as high level and almost abstract as that, and saying, 'How could we build places as game developers? What could we do there?'"
Initially conceived as an online game where huge numbers of players could come together in the same space, Flynn says that over time it became apparent that this was not the right path. The team was able to overcome the technical challenges with the support of its parent, Improbable, but an MMO-scale game with the goals Inflexion had for Nightingale wasn't as enjoyable as it could be. So they scaled it back to a more intimate, cooperative experience to be played with friends.
"We have some friends on the New World team for Amazon," Flynn says. "And they very much went the opposite way, right? The story that gets told there, I've at least heard it, is they started off as a tight, survival-inspired game. And then they brought in the Amazon technology to make it an MMO. And credit to them,
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