Sons of the Forest spurred Nightingale’s devs to change their tree-chopping tech

Inflexion’s Aaryn Flynn on what Nightingale learned from the popular survival game

Marco Wutz | May 8, 2023

Sons of the Forest spurred Nightingale’s devs to change their tree-chopping tech /

Games centered around survival and crafting are as numerous as grains of sand on the beach ever since Minecraft made that category one of the most popular genres on the planet. For the developers hoping to break into the genre that’s both a curse and a blessing: Competition could not be more tough, but there are plenty of other products to take inspiration from when it comes to problem-solving or usage as a benchmark.

Aaryn Flynn, former General Manager of BioWare and now head of Inflexion, told GLHF in an interview that his team, which is currently working on Nightingale, is not only working closely with the community to make sure player feedback results in actual changes, but is open to outside influence as well. He named Sons of the Forest, this year’s biggest survival game so far, as one of those sources of input.

Specifically, Inflexion looked at the tree-chopping tech in the title and immediately knew it had to step up its own game in that regard to remain competitive – Sons of the Forest served as an important benchmark and spurred the team into action.

“Tree chopping is such an important part of a survival crafting game,” Flynn explained. “You've got Ark’s version, where you can punch a tree, and Valheim does the same, and then Sons of the Forest came along and it's beautiful – it’s an incredibly elegant, beautiful bit of tech art. So we definitely went back to the drawing board after that and thought long and hard about how to do it better. So hopefully we can get as good or close.”

Nightingale is a multiplayer survival crafting game set in a Victorian-era fantasy world with magic, fey creatures, and lots of strange lore waiting to be uncovered by the players – or Realmwalkers, as they are called. Their goal: to return to Nightingale, the city of the arcane, from which they were cut off by a cataclysmic magic event.

Nightingale is planned to launch into early access on PC in the first half of 2023.

Published May 8, 2023

MARCO WUTZ

Marco Wutz is a writer from Parkstetten, Germany. He has a degree in Ancient History and a particular love for real-time and turn-based strategy games like StarCraft, Age of Empires, Total War, Age of Wonders, Crusader Kings, and Civilization as well as a soft spot for Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail. He began covering StarCraft 2 as a writer in 2011 for the largest German community around the game and hosted a live tournament on a stage at gamescom 2014 before he went on to work for Bonjwa, one of the country's biggest Twitch channels. He branched out to write in English in 2015 by joining tl.net, the global center of the StarCraft scene run by Team Liquid, which was nominated as the Best Coverage Website of the Year at the Esports Industry Awards in 2017. He worked as a translator on The Crusader Stands Watch, a biography in memory of Dennis "INTERNETHULK" Hawelka, and provided live coverage of many StarCraft 2 events on the social channels of tl.net as well as DreamHack, the world's largest gaming festival. From there, he transitioned into writing about the games industry in general after his graduation, joining GLHF, a content agency specializing in video games coverage for media partners across the globe, in 2021. He has also written for NGL.ONE, kicker, ComputerBild, USA Today's ForTheWin, The Sun, Men's Journal, and Parade. Email: marco.wutz@glhf.gg