Nightingale: A Look at the Apex Creature Bosses You’ll Battle

ign.com:

Nightingale is a stylish, shared-world survival crafting RPG built by a team of ex-BioWare developers, and its fantastical setting is home to many interesting, beautiful, and horrific beasts. One such class is the Apex Creature, a collection of fierce foes that serves as a boss of sorts for their particular biomes. We got a look at the Sun Giant in a Gamescom trailer back in August, but during our recent visit to Inflexion Games, we experienced battles with two more: the dragon-like Humbaba and the giant tree-like Eoten.

You can watch a full battle with a Humbaba in the video above, but we also had the opportunity to speak about these impressive creatures’ designs with Neil Thompson, Nightingale’s art director and head of audio; and Steve Klint, Nightingale’s concept art director.

The Apexes are meant to be the iconic creatures of each biome, so the designers wanted them to represent the environment well. Because of their importance, their designs went through much more iteration than your average ambient creature – they wanted them to be unique-looking.

Thompson said they always knew they were going to implement some sort of “Apex Creature” combat, and Humbaba was the very first one. A very early piece of concept art displays Realm Walkers pulling Humbaba, then known as Ishmael, through a portal. The idea behind it was to create a beast reminiscent of the white whale that you, as a Realm Walker, would have to hunt and take down–an homage to Moby-Dick. It’s one of many homages to our very real history and lore present in Nightingale.

The Humbaba resembles a huge, lumbering land dragon more than whale, but doesn’t quite fit the bill as a generic dragon or dinosaur either. Thompson explained that the team explicitly didn't want creatures that would look sci-fi-esque, so they wanted to avoid a more classic dinosaur look. Because Nightingale is uniquely a gaslamp fantasy rather than medieval fantasy, its creatures are a little more out-of-the-ordinary from what you