The ancient Crossways await
Our approach to Realms Rebuilt is to retain the core fundamentals of what players enjoy about Nightingale while refining, expanding, and enhancing the structure to create a more immersive experience. This is the biggest and most significant update to Nightingale’s Early Access experience to date.
In the last blog, we dug into several major changes coming to the Realms, including a new progression system, structure limit increases, information on the progression reset, and highlighted a trove of new weapons and magick you’ll have at your disposal.
Today, we’re stepping into the Realms themselves. From the moment Realmwalkers set forth in Realms Rebuilt, they’ll notice a very different Faewilds than the one they’ve become acquainted with in the past six months. From gravity-torn deserts to corrupted forests, the world of Nightingale is changing.
Let’s take a look at these improvements in detail.
Handcrafted Realms
We’ve previously discussed that one of our major goals moving forward is to make Realm exploration a more rewarding and immersive journey for players. As part of that work, the team has been exploring different ways to make the Realms feel more unique and differentiated throughout the game, elevating the sense of adventure for Realmwalkers. The foundation of this approach is our new ‘Storied Realms’.
Realmwalker’s taking a brief glide through one of the new Storied Realms, Sylvan’s Cradle
The Storied Realms are handcrafted Realms set within the existing biomes, each designed with its own theme, aesthetic, and challenges. Storied Realms will be introduced as part of a new campaign that will arrive with the next update (more on that below). As you progress through the main questline, you’ll unlock unique Realm Cards - each leading to a new Storied Realm to discover and explore.
Your journey through the Storied Realms begins as soon as you step into your new Abeyance Realm. Every player now starts in a Forest Abeyance housing the important mystical landmark: The Crossways. This collection of ancient portals is your gateway to the Storied Realms, acting as the hub of your new adventure.
Early steps of a new journey to come
That’s not the only location worth paying a visit to. Among other sights to see and discoveries to be found, this handcrafted Abeyance also features a number of locations where tools and recipes can be unlocked as part of your Progression Tree, including the new bow.
The Bow Tool Site offers up some target practice for Realmwalkers
While Storied Realms become the defacto worlds for mainline quests, procedurally-generated Realms will still play an important part in your journey as a Realmwalker. Their role remains the same - use Realm cards to open Portals (either your own or ones you discover in the environment) and explore each location for further adventuring, new challenges, collecting valuable essences, and to harvest rare resources.
As with everything else in Early Access, we’ll continue to refine and expand Storied Realms content. But this is very much a big step forward for Nightingale. The handcrafted approach creates a more immersive environment, offering more opportunities for meaningful discoveries and adventures. This new approach also benefits future updates, increasing the speed the studio team can create new biome and Realm content.
Finally, for players who like more options when it comes to planting their roots and setting a Respite Realm, you’ll be able to set your Respite point at any of the Storied Realms or player-opened Realms you discover on your journey.
A New Campaign
As mentioned above, Storied Realms are a central part of a new campaign in Nightingale: Realms Rebuilt. Puck is back with all new voice work from the incredible Marc Warren. He’ll be guiding Realmwalkers through each of the handcrafted Realms, featuring a series of new quests and challenges, while encountering some familiar faces from Nightingale’s cast of stranded survivors out in Faewilds.
While the fundamental premise of the story remains the same (Earth has fallen, the Portal network collapsed, and what remains of humanity is adrift looking for Nightingale), in Realms Rebuilt the player journey has been…well….rebuilt! As a Realmwalker, you will reawaken the ancient portals of the Crossways, recover secrets long buried and reclaim wonders once thought lost. This new adventure takes you across previously unexplored Realms from the corrupted woods of Sylvan’s Cradle, to the gravity-torn desert of Welkin’s Reach, and beyond.
The chaotic deserts of Welkin’s Reach
We hope your love of discovering the unknown will continue to guide you through these fantastical new Realms where Fae creatures roam, fellow survivors await salvation and deadly threats lurk in the shadows. We look forward to your feedback on the new campaign and can’t wait to hear about your new adventures.
Sites of Power and Boss Battles
The more structured approach to the main campaign opened up the opportunity to punctuate each story milestone with a challenging finale. We’ve seen how much players have enjoyed some of the more formidable creature encounters in Nightingale, whether stumbling upon an Eoten in the forest or taking on an Apex creature in one of the Hunt Realms. We wanted to expand those types of encounters and weave them through Nightingale’s revamped story.
The first part of this is new Sites of Power, providing engaging combat encounters and intricate puzzles that test the skills each Realmwalker has developed up to this stage. These dungeons replace the current Sites of Power that were found across the Abeyance but are now set within new environments and contain different content.
The entrance to the new Abeyance Realm Site of Power
Each one of these dungeons also culminates in completely new boss battles. We wanted to bring more variety to boss encounters in the Sites of Power and these deadly adversaries are designed from the ground up and are set within distinctive locations, and pit players against creatures with unique abilities.
One of the new Site of Power boss arenas
New Points of Interest
Another part of these changes to the Realms will be more Points of Interest (POIs) and the challenges you find within them and elsewhere in the Realms. The favorites are still around - the Bastille of Intellect and Agility sites, etc - but we’ve bolstered the range of POI challenges with new activities.
Concept art of a Bound Heart, which spawns Bound until it’s destroyed
As mentioned in the previous blog, we wanted to put more emphasis on Essence rewards when completing POIs, whilst expanding the type of encounters that players can expect. So we hope you both enjoy the new challenges you’ll face and feel suitably rewarded for your time exploring the Realms.
Next Steps
While we still have new biomes and other content in the works (triangular tileset pieces are coming soon), we’re excited about the new adventures Realms Rebuilt will introduce to players once it goes live later this Summer. We’ll talk more about some other features to expect in our upcoming Dev Update, and you may want to keep your eyes peeled at Gamescom for a sneak peek at what’s to come.
We look forward to everyone sinking their axepick into this new update we’ve been working hard to bring you. It’s been a tremendous effort from the studio team that marks a step forward for Nightingale’s Early Access, as we continue to add and expand to the game on the road to 1.0.
Until next time, fare thee well, traveler.
- The Nightingale Team
