Tencent buys Nightingale developer Inflexion Games

Inflexion Games, the studio founded by former BioWare boss Aaryn Flynn, has been sold to Chinese conglomerate Tencent.

Flynn's new outfit is currently making Nightingale, a Victoriana-inspired fantasy survival crafting game which it revealed late last year.

Development will now continue, though changes have been made as Inflexion is no longer part of Improbable, the company behind the rather vaguely-defined cloud computing tech SpatialOS.

Last month, Improbable announced it was effectively doing a Google Stadia, and quitting internal game development. This left Nightingale's future in question.

Today, Flynn told GamesIndustry.biz that the shift away from using Improbable's tech had been ongoing since last summer.

Now, Nightingale will be "a more intimate, single-player or small group player experience", Flynn said.

"We made that decision last summer in conjunction with some other things we want to do with the game. That was largely driven from a game design standpoint and where we want to take the game," Flynn continued.

"More and more, we were investing in elements of our survival crafting experience and we made the decision that to ensure we could ship this game and not find ourselves in the very long development cycle that many MMOs do, we would walk away from those things."

Indeed, Nightingale was initially pitched as an online multiplayer RPG, before its full reveal last December saw it redefined as a "shared-world survival crafting game".

Nightingale is set just before the turn of the 19th century in an alternate Victorian world where magic has existed for hundreds of years. This magic allowed humanity to build a network of portals (basically, Victorian Stargates) to other fantasy realms.

Speaking to Eurogamer last year, Flynn said the game's setting was inspired by the brilliant Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke, as well as a long-time desire to create an alternate history game - something BioWare is yet to touch.

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