Survival game Nightingale is making big changes after the developers looked at games like Palworld and Enshrouded: 'It was really the structure that stood out'

Some big changes are coming to co-op survival game Nightingale this week. The Realms Rebuilt update planned for September 12 will add new weapons, spells, dungeons, and bosses. It'll also expand build limits on player bases, overhaul the progression system, and even add cats (in hats). 

Biggest of all might be the change to Nightingale's core questline and the new "storied realms" players visit while following it. In a departure from how Nightingale's realms have worked since it launched into early access in February, these new realms will be "handcrafted" as opposed to procedurally generated, each having its own theme and aesthetic. 

"Ultimately, what we realized about the procedural nature of the realms was that the procedural generation and procedural assembly of these things is really all in service of telling stories, and of letting players discover stories," Nightingale studio director Aaryn Flynn told PC Gamer. "When you peel it back, when you recognize that that's why we built all this tech and did all that is to tell stories, you can then ask yourself, 'Well, are we doing that?' Are we being successful in that?' And we're being only moderately successful with that."

The new format for the main quest means "players now have a lot more structure" in their adventures—and structure is one element of Nightingale that Flynn says has been missing.

"We went through Enshrouded, Palworld, V Rising, we went through a lot of the bigger, quite successful survival crafting games, not just in terms of sales but in terms of player perception. And it was really the structure that stood out as something they offered that we were not offering," Flynn said.

Many of the changes in the Realms Rebuilt update come from player feedback, such as increasing the structure cap on bases. "Players told us that they want to be creative and wanted to go explore the limits of the building system, but those limits were too small, too narrow. And so we've redone the whole tech on that," Flynn said. Nightingale's bosses have been revamped as well. "We got a fair bit of appropriate criticism on weak boss battles. They were all pretty much variations on a theme. So we've come up with a bunch of unique bosses you fight as well," he said.

The opening section of the game where the player learns the basics of survival and crafting has also been reworked. The original system "was very functional, but I'd say the big lesson there was we had focused too much on tutorializing, and not nearly enough on hooking, on really, really engaging players," Flynn said. "Players ultimately need to be engaged, and they need to feel like they're in love with this world, and we put too many barriers up in the name of educating them on how a system worked or how a gameplay mechanic worked. We put too many barriers up to actually make them fall in love with the world. And so this new approach hopefully does a better job of that."

You can check out a deep dive into Nightingale's Realm's Rebuilt update below.