Nightingale wasn’t always a shared-world survival crafting RPG. Though it’s always retained its gaslamp fantasy flair during its nearly five years in development, at one point, Nightingale could have been an MMO. That change came from the natural progression of developer Inflexion’s preferences and vision, but much more has changed because of consistent, constructive feedback from thousands of players during closed alpha playtests over the last year.
Inflexion CEO Aaryn Flynn has been so impressed by the experience he said, “I don’t know how you go back and do it more old school like we used to do it.” Where the traditional way of game dev includes getting plenty of smart, creative people in a room, doing their best with what they think is going to work, “there’s no substitute for having players engage and them being so generous with their time,” Flynn explained. “They’re extremely thoughtful, clever… They know what they want to play.”
Rather than being developed in a vacuum with just the developers’ eyes on the game, players have had their hands on Nightingale since early on, participating in playtests, providing feedback, taking surveys, and otherwise interacting in a Discord server directly with the devs. This feedback – and the mountains of data collected during playtests – has resulted in noticeable additions like a third-person view and even an arachnophobia mode, among many, many more changes both noticeable and nuanced.
“We work very hard on a lot of the systems that help us collect feedback and pair it with telemetry,” production lead Leah Summers explained. “We've got analysts on the team, and so we are putting a lot of value in how to get feedback, how to organize feedback at scale so that we can bring it back to the dev team to say, ‘Hey, this is what's really important to players.’”
Telemetry essentially is the collection and analysis of data that help developers determine the whys and hows of what players do in a game. The feedback is collected by players submitting their issues into a program that can then be upvoted by other players. For example, they might say, “The fueling is hard to use.”
“Instead of the Discord becoming this giant thread that we have to parse through, the players will just say, ‘Hey, I put this in, can you go vote it if you also feel it?’” Summers explained, “And so they crowdsource and advocate for their own issues too, which is pretty cool.”
Nightingale’s lead designer Bjorn Taylor said they very heavily changed how the game opens based on feedback, just to make sure people were having fun. “It's the first time in my career I've had the opportunity to have this much interaction with fans during development. And yeah, it's awesome,” Taylor said.
Previously, the tutorial was quest after quest, with a list of them popping up on the UI, and suddenly the quests would stop, leaving players unsure of what to do. The solution was to implement more open-ended quests, giving players an opportunity to take their time to do the things they wanted to do – from building an estate to just looking out over the ocean – without feeling the pressure to be forced to do something.
The frequency of Puck’s appearance also increased based on player feedback, along with the quality of life improvements of being able to hold a button to collect materials, or press Tab to open and close the menu. Some feedback and data gathered was more surprising than others, too.
For example, there are four difficulty settings. Most would expect the middle two to be the most popular, but the two lowest settings won that contest. “To me [that] says that most players tend to value the creative expression and freedom aspects of the game versus hard combat,” Taylor said. “Which was a bit surprising – not an issue. [So we] move even further in that direction.”
A funnier tale: The team completely removed a Minor Card from Nightingale due to the mass confusion it caused among players. A main feature in Nightingale is the ability to open portals to different realms using a combination of two to three cards: a Biome card, a Major card, and a Minor card. While the Biome and Major cards are required to determine the environment and general difficulty or purpose of a realm, the Minor cards are optional, impermanent additions and affect small things like weather or creature behavior. One such card would invert players’ controls upon entering the realm, causing everyone to assume there was a bug.
“Nobody saw the UI element that said you have a fake curse,” Flynn described. “It was just like, ‘Oh my God, I went in this realm and now up is down and left his right. It's so stupid, what's happened here?’”
Some things, like user interface “friction” points, are fairly easy to identify when something is wrong and when it’s right based on player feedback. When the UI is doing its job, no one complains about it. Other potential friction points must be discovered through data, of which a lot is collected and analyzed.
Summers listed some of the “high-level… very basic” metrics they track during playtests:
- Retention rate.
- Did people who played on the first day play on the second day?
- How many players logged in?
- How long did they play, and what was the average time played?
- How far did they progress?
“But then when it comes to things like balancing the game; figuring out friction points in the game, we'll look through every individual step or how we expect players to play,” Summers continued.
Sometimes that involves noticing when many players stop playing at the same point and investigating feedback to figure out why that might be. In one playtest, 80 percent of all deaths were caused by the same ailment – low “hope” – which they identified via telemetry. Put simply, the mechanic at the time caused players to take more damage at lower levels of hope, but being downed reduced hope, putting players into terrible death loops. And so, the team changed how the system worked, proving that telemetry is invaluable and is another great thing about playtests, Taylor said.
“It’s a real combination of quantitative analytics and qualitative back-and-forth feedback via the written responses and via the chats we've developed with players from Discord and such,” Flynn explained. “It's a nice balance, and I've been really happy with how many developers have embraced it as a great process for them.”
As for the future of Nightingale, the team hopes to continue implementing player feedback as they get it in Early Access.
The way Inflexion handles their build is unique, in that Nightingale’s newest build that’s being actively worked on is essentially always playable. During my studio visit to Inflexion, I effectively played the build that the devs were working on just the night before – “fairly unheard of for a game studio,” Summers commented.
Because they have a “zero regressions policy” and keep on top of anything that’s going bad, Nightingale’s team is able to be more reactive and implement changes faster. The difficulty in the implementation lies in the increase in feedback they could receive once Nightingale is launched in Early Access. In alpha, they handle feedback from 10-15,000 players. The number will jump exponentially in Early Access.
“If you look at Baldur's Gate 3, I think [Larian Studios] did something truly remarkable by launching their game and then having almost three years in early access, and learning from their players,” Flynn said. “I think they definitely showed that approach can work for any experience… It can and should be a valuable evolution for the overall culture of the industry.”
For more on Nightingale, don't miss a look at the Apex creature bosses you'll battle and how they came to be.
Casey DeFreitas is the deputy editor of guides at IGN. Catch her on Twitter @ShinyCaseyD.
