So the original inspiration for Nightingale came from a story that myself and our art director, Neil Thompson, had read called "Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell." This is an amazing book about two wizards   who rediscover magic during the Napoleonic times and how they ultimately understand it and use it to change the course of world events. It's based around the idea that what happens if you pierce the veil effectively between worlds and what are the decisions that arise as a result of that? We fell in love with the Victorian era quite early on, a really creative time as far as human invention and the gaining of knowledge is concerned. And then we imagined our own world where players could   open portals to these fantastic realms, meet fae,  meet all sorts of really cool things. And once we started to pair those two things together  multiplayer world, multiple worlds, and this   Victorian setting, that was really the birth of  Nightingale. From the very beginning, one of the things that really stood out to me was the idea that people needed places and that we could create a space and a place for players that enable their creativity through this amazing new IP. The basis of the world is that there has been  an ongoing relationship between the fae and humanity that's been going on for centuries,  if no longer, millennia even. Humans started out worshiping the fae and so learned magic from them. Eventually that transformed into humans thinking they were almost equal to the fae. And so they extricated themselves from our world, taking most of the magic with them. During that time the seed of magic has been planted in the world and so alongside science and art, the Renaissance comes the study of magic as this amazing new thing for humans to explore. Nightingale is set in alternate reality, which means that we can talk about   events throughout history through the lens  of the fae's relationship with humanity.  So then fast forward hundreds of years,  and the magical city of Nightingale has   been this city where humans from all over the  world have come to study magic and understand   it and build portals out to these magical fae realms and learn about that, and that's the genesis of our Realmwalkers.

The Realmwalkers are those brave souls who survive and thrive in the realms as they make their way back to Nightingale City. But our story starts at the end of the world. A cataclysmic event has descended upon the earth. This thing called The Pale begins to surround the world of somewhat unknown origin. In a desperate attempt to survive, they try to  use earth's portal network to get to Nightingale, assuming that's the last bastion of humanity. That  Nightingale has the strength of magic to hold back The Pale. Those who were trying to escape The Pale through the various portals around the planet have just been cast asunder effectively and they're lost within the labyrinth of the realms. It's ultimately up to players to decide  how they want to tackle challenges in the realms as they make their  way back to Nightingale City. So the fae are split into various courts. Currently within the game we have the Winter and the Summer Court, and each of these courts has their different motivations in terms of their behaviour around humans, and their relationships with the humans. The Winter Court uses the bound as a weapon against humanity. The bound being a grotesque mimicry of what humanity is and setting that against humans to eradicate them. So when players awake after coming through this this broken portal network and find themselves lost in these realms, that's where they meet Puck. He's the character you've seen in our trailers. So you might know him from "A Midsummer Night's Dream", and he acts as your benevolent fae guide through the beginning of our story. As an alternate history, we have the opportunity to reimagine the stories of those characters in a way that hasn't been experienced before. Humans have been out in the realms for centuries, so it's entirely possible to come across the ruins of civilizations that have lived in the realms before, that have just been lost.

You know we have stories and NPCs that connect these events and connect people currently living in the realms that you know have been leading completely separate lives to humanity just within the fae realms themselves. With the advent of magic in our universe, We get to experience how people like Ada Lovelace would have interacted with magic. We get to bring in people from  fiction like Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and how they would operate in a world like this,  and making it all seem believable and real   When we started making Nightingale it was our ambition to  invest a lot into world building, having a survival   crafting game that had lore and richness in the  NPCs, and quests, and things to discover, and it all sits well together and gives you a sense of reality, gives you a sense that this is a real set of places that you're going to. So I'm really hopeful you discover all that when you play.