After playing Nightingale a few times for an early entry check, I wasn’t entirely convinced by its mix of survival and Destiny-esque power level grind. I also wasn’t that enthusiastic about the many bugs and the difficult interface. Still, the developers are hard at work fixing things, as the latest patch eliminates major crashes and material losses on builds and further improves the user interface.
Nightingale’s latest 0.1.1 patch is a huge list of changes, all of which you can find on their official patch notes page. And the headline act here is fixes for various crashes, including those that occurred when loading into The Watch, when playing tutorials, when mining and chopping trees, and if you happened to be playing on an Intel processor. Perhaps the most reassuring change is that forced quits should not result in a complete reset of your progress. If my progress had been reset during the review, I would have crumbled into a pile of common rarity logs.
Not that many changes have been made to the building, but there are some useful solutions to vexing problems. For example, materials are not lost when destroying partially built structures and in Build Encounters (if NPCs ask you to help them build something, by which I mean they will ask you to build the whole thing and do nothing). you won’t encounter scenarios where you can’t add resources to blueprints.
The game’s clunky user interface was a major sticking point for me during my early access review, so it’s nice to get some confirmation that I hadn’t imagined some of the smaller annoyances. Guidebook entries should no longer require two clicks to open. I always thought I clicked more than once during my time in the review mines! I knew it!
While the patch is certainly welcome, Nightingale’s gear score hunting, lackluster portal realms, and weightless combat strike me as things that need fundamental change – not to mention an offline mode, which Inflexion has promised to add. It remains to be seen if the game can weather the storm and turn those “mixed” Steam reviews into positive ones.