Tuesday, February 27th 2024
Nightingale Devs Working on "Offline Play" Mode
Hey Realmwalkers, we've seen a lot of discussion in recent days around our decision to make Nightingale online-only at our Early Access release. We understand that this can be frustrating for a number of reasons. Our vision for the game since inception was to create an interconnected series of Realms, with the idea of allowing for co-operative exploration in mind—a universe bigger than a single Realm or server. That meant we made a choice early in development between supporting co-op from day one or focusing development on an offline mode.
Co-operative gameplay associated with having party members across multiple Realms was the more technically challenging problem and therefore the one we chose to tackle first. Looking back on that decision, we misjudged what some of you were looking for in your experience.
We are now prioritizing and developing an offline mode that we plan to release as soon as feasible. Keep an eye on our social channels and Discord for updates in the coming weeks alongside other things we're working on. Thank you to everyone who has stepped into the Realms with us so far - the journey has just begun and we look forward to sharing it with you all.
UPDATE: to address questions we've received, development on other updates (QoL, new content, fixes, bugs and other work) continues uninterrupted—we'll have more news on those to share in the coming days.
Sources:
Nightingale Steam Profile, Nightingale News
Co-operative gameplay associated with having party members across multiple Realms was the more technically challenging problem and therefore the one we chose to tackle first. Looking back on that decision, we misjudged what some of you were looking for in your experience.
UPDATE: to address questions we've received, development on other updates (QoL, new content, fixes, bugs and other work) continues uninterrupted—we'll have more news on those to share in the coming days.
- The Inflexion Team
17 Comments on Nightingale Devs Working on "Offline Play" Mode
Whenever I see the specs of a single player game saying "Online connection required", I read it as the devs/publishers saying "Screw you, we're going to treat you all like criminals by requiring you to be logged in to our crap servers at all times to play a single player game!", to which I respond: "Go F*%& yourselves! You're not getting my money and I know who to avoid in future like the plague!"
These people think they are doing anyone a favor coming up with an "offline" mode as an afterthought and coming up with these silly excuses afterwards? How pathetic.
If it hasn't been setup to do so now after 20 years of steam being up; it's never going to be setup for you to be able to do off platform/offline play.
I doubt that will last for them.
But the Steam launcher itself comes with an offline mode. If you have downloaded/installed your offline capable games you can enable offline mode and Steam will happily let you play those games offline like Space Lynx commented. You just need to be connected to install games.
I need no such thing for G.O.G with their offline installer after downloading.
Each appmanifest file is named with the AppID of the game it references, you can find out the AppID for a game at steamdb.info.
If you're talking about "keeping a game for a later time to re-install it" you can also store the game by archiving it and later "re-installing" it from that archive - even in offline mode.
So I don't really get the issue you have. With both (Steam / GoG) you have to be online to download the game. With GoG you install it after the downloads while Steam is installing it while downloading it. After the download (for Steam DL/Install in one go) you can go offline and be happy with any and all offline capable games?! I know, Steam is not ideal - but it is now in an acceptable stage I think, while I also have a GoG account and love the DRM-Free options it provides I wouldn't say it's vastly superior to Steam. Both platforms have their own right to exist in my opinion.
After the download I can also store it for a later use as offline container to re-install it, even with the offline steam-client. Yes, you still need the steam client in offline mode and can't just run a setup.exe, but that's the only difference.
And again - this only counts for games which have a pure offline-mode, which, sadly are fewer and fewer and even GoG won't change the fact that you have to log in to accounts even for pure single-player-games to unlock all features (which sucks way more than a required game-library-tool like steam).
Like I said, I agree that steam isn't ideal or the best, but it's far from bad - and GoG while great also doesn't solve the underlying problem Game-Devs create more and more....
But yeah. It's mood point to argue about, and not worth it going back and forward about personal preferences anyway, the main point was that offline mode is available, even though you still have to have the client running in the background (which is the main point you're making and is a valid point, of course, but not the point of "offline is not possible" which started the argument) :) .
Have a great day :)