Nightingale Interview: Getting Into The Nitty Gritty Details With Aaryn Flynn

thegamer.com:

When Nightingale was revealed during The Game Awards in 2021, it instantly shot to the top of my most-anticipated list. The upcoming survival-crafting game will be the debut title from Inflexion Games, a new studio founded by BioWare veterans and led by ex-BioWare general manager, Aaryn Flynn. Nightingale takes place in a 19th century-inspired world where groups of explorers known as Realmwalkers use a network of portals to travel between customizable, procedurally-generated worlds. I sat down with Flynn at this weekend’s Summer Game Fest Play Days event in Los Angeles to talk about how Nightingale both conforms to and pushes against the established survival-crafting conventions.

One of Nightingale's contributions to the genre is the aforementioned ability to travel between realms, AKA Realm Diving. While most survival games take place on one large, open-world map with separate biomes to explore, each biome in Nightingale is an entirely new world with their own unique environments, resources, and threats. This week, Inflexion revealed the Realm Cards, a system that will allow players to control the specific features of each realm, including weather, time of day, and the specific challenges you’ll face within them. “The more Realm Cards you play the harder it's going to get in there,” Flynn explains. “So you have to balance that against the challenge you want.”

Realm Card recipes are either found by exploring or earned by completing quests, and once obtained, can be used to craft a new realm to explore. Exploration isn’t the only objective of the card system though, Flynn offers one example of a die recipe that requires a specific mushroom that only blooms in one biome, at night, when it’s raining. Every biome has its