Back when Nightingale was announced at the Game Awards in 2021, I was kind of two minds. One one hand, it was steampunk, which is subjectively the worst kind of punk out there, but on the other hand the idea that we could travel between different “worlds” based on a combination of property cards seemed extremely cool despite it sounding a bit like what shysters were trying to sell at the time with the idea of a “multiverse”. Nightingale was about humanity fleeing not into the future or the past, but another realm entirely, the Fae Realms, to escape a calamity of their own doing, and finding themselves less than welcome as they traveled through various biomes and circumstances to seek the now-lost human city of Nightingale.

Reception of the early access launch seemed OK if I remember correctly; not too many people overly excited, but not too many people hating on it either. It’s biggest controversy was that it was a live-service title which, as we all know, is a trigger-word for many people these days. Developers Inflexion listened, though, and moved up what they claimed was their plan to create an offline mode as well which unfortunately didn’t earn them as many kudos as I think it really should have. Since then, Inflexion has been released updates on their roadmap and yesterday marked the release of their largest update yet which they are calling “Realms Rebuilt”.

At the top of the list of improvements is a new campaign. I had gotten a hold of a few of the original story missions prior to yesterday’s release but never got far enough to actually recognize it as such. The NPCs we had to talk to in order to get quests were scattered through a specific chain of realms we had to work towards opening, and to be frank I spent more time realm-walking looking for materials to build out my home base, called a respite. Now it seems that Inflexion has split realm generation into two classes: story and procedural. Story realms will be hand-crafted and should be expected to contain the NPCs we need to meet for story progress, while procedural realms can offer resources, challenges, and other interesting activities we can undertake. A new building tile set has been added to give players the opportunity to create more lavish homes, more pets have been added, a transmog system has been included, and of course more cards can be crafted to allow us access to the new realms, and to allow us to transform realms to our advantage.

Most of the changes will, of course, matter more to those who have played before as anyone coming in now would only know the game as they first encountered it, but I played about two hours yesterday and have thusfar been pleased with the results. For one the onboarding experience has been streamlined significantly, removing the two or three realms we had to pass through by way of the tutorial to just one which also happens to be our abeyance realm, or home realm. Encounters with both enemy and friendly NPCs happens a lot sooner and in new ways and places, and while the enemies are still acting a bit dumb, I think there’s been at least some improvement; they no longer just stand there and let you beat them down. One welcome change has been to how we unlock building blueprints. Previously we had to buy them from vendors located in specific realms which meant we had to jump between realms quickly and early to build up a good stock of blueprints. Now we can spend Essence, the currency we get from various sources, to unlock elements via a tree-structured screen. Not only is this more convenient, but it also takes some of the guess-work out of the original system which had players hunting for which crafting benches could create which materials.

So far there I have encountered only two issues when playing in the online mode: a significant loading time when I logged in for a second time yesterday, and a massive lag spike which rubber-banded me back a good few minutes in my actions once the server caught up. To be fair, these were the only two issues I had and I am willing to give Inflexion the benefit of the doubt that they were caused by patch-day issues. I’ll report back if such situations persist over the long-haul.

Overall I am happy with the changes Inflexion has made to the game. Looking back at it now, the original progression did feel like a first stab while the update makes it seem (so far) like a refinement of lessons-learned. Several QoL changes are also welcome, like the new popup radial menu for quick access to potions and food, the new follower management screen, the arrival of previously missing art for some inventory items, and the new buildable item progress tracker which, for me, is a much better way to work. The real question now, for me especially, is will these changes be enough to keep me playing? I fell off the wagon before for the usual reasons, but aside from the same contrivances, Realms Rebuilt almost feels like a sequel which refines the ideas of the original and has taken feedback to heart. If you didn’t like the conceit of the original EA release then I don’t think this update will do anything for you, but if you were lukewarm on the game on account of the design choices, flow, and first-iteration feel, then I think enough of the game has been updated to make taking another look worthwhile.