Tomorrow sees the release of the Nightingale's Realms Rebuilt update, which aims to revitalize the ailing Early Access gaslamp survival craft 'em up. As the developers outlined in a new blog post yesterday, it aims to do so with a new hand-crafted campaign that sits alongside the existing procedural worlds, along with new weapons, spells, boss fights, dungeons, and more.
“The Nightingale core questline has been completely recreated thanks to the incredible feedback we've received from the community,” the post begins. “Realmwalkers now embark on a more immersive and important quest as Puck takes players on a journey across gravity-torn deserts, corrupted forests, and beyond to revive ancient Crossway portals. Each of the new Storied Realms has been crafted by hand, filled with challenging enemies, ancient discoveries, and all-new puzzles and dungeons.”
The update will remove some of Nightingale's building limits, allowing for “larger and more detailed” structures to be created. It also includes a new tileset for building.
Players can now adopt up to 20 pets, up from the original release, and a few new ones are also being added. According to the hat-wearing guy in the screenshot above, this includes cats.
The post also claims an overhauled progression system, outfit customization, simplified crafting, and UI improvements.
These changes appear to target many of the elements that Ed criticized in his Nightingale review back in March, which he criticized as “a strange marriage of survival gameplay and live-service loot grinding” and called both confusing and tedious.
I'm glad the developers are trying to address these issues, but I doubt it'll do much to draw players back in. Speaking for RPS, we won't be revisiting the game ahead of a potential 1.0 release, as there's simply too much out there for us to write about them all – and I suspect many players feel similarly about their own valuable time.