Watching the last dev bite and how you guys talk about being hurt by the mixed reviews is sad.

You missed what made Nightingale exciting. We start in a random world, play a bit and then we build portals with affix and mods card and hop into totally random worlds. That's what brought the excitment.

You went opposite ways. You started by releasing early access with a very controlled world generation : 1 card to pick a whole preset world including environments, monsters, difficulty, ressources, all already set.
And one minor card for a single flashy effect.

It didn't work quite well, because it didn't meet the expectations.
You should have doubled down on the RNG aspect. Think No Man's Sky, not Enshrouded.
Not that Enshrouded is worse, its just your game was sold as a "No man's Sky" type of game.
That was your selling point

Let us open portals to totally random world, let us build them with some weird cards and put a heavy load of RNG into it.
Let us create worlds where low level enemies coexist with high level one, so some bad encounters might happen. Make those enemies random, make the world random, make everything random.

No you doubled down on the controlled environment. You killed "random worlds" by forcing us into """hand crafted""" worlds with some narrative elements.. dude your NPC are having a stroke 24/7, they barely breath, they are at best scarecrows. How do you want us to be invested in the narrative, and why do you actually want narrative to be so important. That's not what's interesting in those games, Its at best good for some lore, but it should clearly not be your top priority. Specially with so poorly animated NPC

The whole point is to get fked up by some crazy random world generation. Find world we're not ready for

My little pinky tells me the path you've chosen have something to do with the whole "perma-online system" you cooked.
To be fair, it could have been a nice little thing to add.
A nice little thing, no more.
No.

You basically made huge sacrifice for it. Worlds are all the same bcs otherwise it would probably cost too much to host. Building is very limited otherwise you'd have too much cost.
There was no plan for terrain modification from the start because it would have been too hard to maintain.

Its not only about what we're missing, but also about what we have to play with. Lag, portals taking years to load.

And the sad part is : no one care. I don't care about meeting strangers in my world, i want to play with my friends. It could have been a cool gadget thought. Except you killed your own game for this gadget.

Just release dedicated servers, close your own, help people transfer their worlds and character. Throw in the bin your "hand crafted worlds" and please, PLEASE, start working hard on your random world generation to make it the main attraction. The main gameplay loop. That's the only bright path for Nightingale, that's what we were excited about when we saw the trailers, that's the promise we've been holding into.
Alot of resentment towards the game come from this : you promised something Nightgale is not. Something it could have been clearly, but you made bad decision to keep your bad designs decisions alive. Cut the crap, stop the madness loophole, stop the sunk cost fallacy loophole, and just make it a game about traveling portals to random, dangerous, exotic worlds. No more "world difficulty rating" bs. Progression and finding high level dangerous enemies and ressources should be about exploration not about putting gradually increasing and very controlled "difficulty cards" into portals to explore the same exact worlds with the same exact enemies but 10 level higher bis repetita jesus fking christ

Make it happen and i'll take a knight vow i'll be walking around the world spreading the information. Until then, i can't recommend it, the game is not what it pretends to be, and actually went the opposite way.

I do love this game, or more so I love it's potential. The core concept of the game inspires creativity and adventure and the depth in the amour crafting system is my personal favourite in the genre. The environments are beautiful and the build pieces and system further fuels that creativity.
The downside is the devs are under resourced and have failed to deliver on a fully realised story. The environments, though beautiful, lack that story telling context. The story is here but it lacks impact on the world. Despite all the world building, the story feels hollow and as though it has been stretched out with arduous resource gathering requirements and loading screens. The portal system is clunky and has become a chore to use and the few biomes we have to portal to are all the same in essence.
This could all be put down to early access, however, many of the systems have already been retouched and somehow got worse imo. The most disappointing for me is Nightingale City. I'll grant the team some grace and acknowledge the great work that is here, though it is far from complete. The buildings feel like they have just been pasted in and the had a few enemies scattered around. once you're done killing them, the city feels deserted.
Its been three months since the city update dropped and we have not heard from the devs. This is not a game I want to see die before it is fully realised and I'm looking forward to see how they build on the brilliant foundation they have laid here.

Easily one of my favourite survival games to date. I wouldn't compare this game to any other survival game, simply because I find any comparison to be either misleading or just unrealistic to make.

It has a unique setting, and a genuinely amazing aesthetic. I've played it at launch, and after it's major patch/rework, and in both instances it was a genuinely fun game. It has had some growing pains since it's release, but it has a very dedicated and passionate team that has done nothing other than improve on the game since. The story is interesting, well written, and engaging (more so after the changes it has undergone since launch).

The progression can feel somewhat tedious at times, but every step of your progression feels worth it. The developers have taken great care to ensure that the game is fun to play, while also staying true to their original vision. The love, care, and pride that has gone into the creation of this game really is noticeable.