Former Mass Effect devs are "not satisfied" with their new survival game Nightingale, worry it's "almost too open-world," tease "elevated version" coming this Summer

Nightingale, the survival game from former Mass Effects devs, is getting a big Early Access update aimed at improving the overall experience and player sentiment.

Inflexion Games, the studio led by former Bioware boss Aaryn Flynn, launched its debut project in Early Access back in February, and despite praise for its building, crafting, and Victorian-era fantasy world, reviews for the game on Steam were 'mixed' at the time. Nightingale has since released some substantial updates, with the "biggest one" targeting gameplay and quality of life, and it's now moved up to 'Mostly Positive' Steam reviews.

Even so, the road to 1.0 is long and Inflexion still isn't happy with the current state of the game, promising sweeping changes to many of the game's core systems, including its procedurally generated Realms, in an update coming later this Summer.

"It has to be said, we are not satisfied with where the game is at, we're not satisfied with the overall sentiment, we’re not satisfied with our player numbers," Flynn said in a video update. "And so a lot of the effort this past few months has been things we can do to, again, bring that vision we've had for many years around Nightingale to all of you ... that's been the focus now, since about May."

Flynn noted that there are things about Nightingale that the devs are happy with, specifically "the procedural generation system and a lot of the tools that have been built to bring those Realms to life," as well as the "Gaslamp fantasy stuff" generally.

However, art director and head of audio at Inflexion Neil Thompson laid out the general plan for getting Nightingale where Inflexion wants it. "You are a Realmwalker, we want you to have adventures in those Realms." Thompson said, "I think a tremendous amount of the work that we've been doing is to fulfill that promise, fulfill the promise of adventure, whether it's to do more work within the Realms to make them more engaging, more content within them, more unique. Those things are