After helping define the modern RPG with Mass Effect and Dragon Age, BioWare legend's new survival game could thrive in a "melting pot of creativity"
Feb. 20, 2024Interview| As Nightingale launches, Aaryn Flynn examines the changing face of the survival genre
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“I think it’s cool to see survival crafting having a moment,” says Aaryn Flynn. For the formerBioWarechief, who left his mark on everything from Baldur’s Gate 2 and Neverwinter Nights to Mass Effect, Dragon Age, and even Anthem, that “moment” is certainly good news – as Flynn and I speak, his upcoming survival game,Nightingale, has been through stress tests, press demos, and is now only days away from launch after more than five years of work.
“There might be short-term competition,” he admits. “Obviously,there’s only so many dollars to go around. But I think long-term it all nets out and everything’s elevated. And so it just puts more visibility into the genre, it gives us all more ideas, and it’s a bigger, more interesting melting pot of creativity.”
Gaslamps into the future
Nightingale thrives on that creativity. A ‘gaslamp fantasy’ shaped by a Victoriana aesthetic and the blurring of the line between fact and fiction, it is in many ways entirely unlike any other survival game. Puck – the fairy from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream – is your guide through its mysterious realms, speaking to you through the hollow eyes of a Venetian mask, and characters from Shelley and Stevenson fill out its world alongside real historical figures.
Nightingale’s alternative history diverged from our own in the 19th century when inhabitants of the mystical Fae Realm – who had been shaping human development for aeons – revealed themselves to humanity. With the help of the Fae, humanity built portal generators to allow them to move between different realms, and Nightingale uses ‘Realm Cards’ to help shape the environment and effect of each Realm; one card might bring torrential rain, while another might conjure a deadly Blood Moon.
I watched in horror as the man who helped shape Dragon Age and Mass Effect got chewed up by his own survival game
Flynn tells me it took the team nearly 18 months to bring the realm system to life, and that it was only made possible by the switch to Unreal Engine 5. Before the realms slotted into place, Flynn tells me that Nightingale would have looked “like a more typical survival crafting game.” He levels that accusation at the game himself, admitting that “it does look like a pretty typical survival crafting game; you get a bit of early, crude gear, you chop some trees down, you build up your first base.”
That’s a somewhat deliberate early game, shaped in part by the desire to be familiar to fans of the genre. But there’s a clear desire to move past the ‘sticks and stones’ genre staple that’s plagued survival games for years: “We talked a lot and debated a lot about whether we should start with a pretty classic ‘I got nothing on, and I pick up a stick’. And we made those decisions.” The realm cards offer “more magic, more aesthetic, more differentiation,” and Flynn hopes that they’ll help shape a long-running meta, but while he says that ‘sticks and stones’ has its advantages, he also makes a request: “Don’t ask me if I’d do it again if we started the project again.”
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“It gave us confidence in some of the things we were doing here. Because Valheim is a really beautiful, distinct world – a bit of magic, a bit of mystery.” Creatively, Flynn admits that the Nightingale’s aesthetic was chosen because it helped energize the development team, pushing them to “make cool things” in its world, but there’s a palpable sense of relief in the transformative effect that Valheim had on the genre.
“They’re all so different, and that’s great. I think it’s fascinating – those games are all a different mix of aesthetics and mechanics and creative energies. The only thing they have in common is that I think they’re all 30 bucks. But from there it goes in every direction, and I think that’s really cool, it’s just a really neat place to be.”
It’s fair to say that our list of thebest survival gameslooks very different today than it did five years ago.
I’m GamesRadar’s news editor, working with the team to deliver breaking news from across the industry. I started my journalistic career while getting my degree in English Literature at the University of Warwick, where I also worked as Games Editor on the student newspaper, The Boar. Since then, I’ve run the news sections at PCGamesN and Kotaku UK, and also regularly contributed to PC Gamer. As you might be able to tell, PC is my platform of choice, so you can regularly find me playing League of Legends or Steam’s latest indie hit.
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