The upcoming video game Nightingale has some twists, but those won’t include supporting 1,000 players.

Why it matters: The game, classified as a “survival crafting” adventure, is a survivor itself of a major change in business plans.

Details: Nightingale debuted in December at The Game Awards, wowing the audience with its unusual setting: a magical version of Victorian-era England, replete with gaslamps, guns, dragons and lots of portals.

• In February, the game was back in the news as its Canadian studio, Inflexion Games, was sold by unproven British tech start-up Improbable to Chinese gaming giant Tencent, which has been looking to back more Western-made games.
• Nightingale invites players to battle computer-controlled enemies through a fantasy version of the Industrial Revolution, offering them the chance to build bases and communities in the virtual world.

Nightingale had been in development under Improbable since late 2018 and was meant to be a tech showcase for the start-up, Inflexion CEO Aaryn Flynn told Axios.

• “The original genesis of the studio was to build a game that would show off their technology: SpatialOS, their big, massive scale networking,” Flynn said.
• The game was similar in many ways to the Nightingale the public has seen but would use SpatialOS to render a virtual world with 1,000 players in it.
• The tech proved difficult to work with and Improbable and Inflexion agreed on a split late last year. That wiped out the 1,000-player idea. “We had a prototype, and that seemed pretty cool. But as you can imagine, it creates its own creative challenges,” Flynn said.

The current plan is for Nightingale to support solo players and small groups of players, otherwise leaving intact the settings and design ideas forged during the Improbable era, Flynn said.

• Inflexion is targeting a late 2022 release, first in Early Access for PC on Steam, with more features added in the future.
• Survival games are among the most popular genres on Steam, with hits like Valheim and V Rising blowing up in the past year.

The bottom line: Flynn believes there’s room for more and hopes Nightingale’s distinct setting will help set it apart.

• “We're always nervous to reveal something you've spent years working on,” Flynn said. “You think to yourself: ‘My God, what if it doesn't resonate? What if people are just like, ‘What? I don't want to play that.’ But it's been great. Everyone's been super positive.”

Mexican cartels are using violent video games to recruit kids and teens into their ranks, Noticias Telemundo Investiga's Aldo Meza reports, in a story also published by my colleagues at Axios Latino.

Driving the news: Cartel members using generic nicknames make contact with kids through the messaging services of online mobile games like Free Fire, which authorities say is harder for parents to monitor.

• The cartel “gamers” ask the young players to exchange phone numbers so they can coordinate playing times and message more frequently, a 14-year-old who escaped a recruitment attempt in October told Telemundo.
• The cartel members eventually offer the children up to $800 a month to travel to the U.S.-Mexico border and act as lookouts to check for nearby government patrols or vehicles from enemy cartels, Telemundo found.

Authorities in Oaxaca, where one victim lives, say there have been more than 30 reports of attempted cartel recruitment through video games in the past year.

• Cybersecurity police say the real number in Oaxaca and other parts of Mexico could be much higher because it’s likely kids are afraid to report any recruitment attempts.

What they’re saying: Garena, the company behind Free Fire, said the situation was “deplorable” and that it would take stringent action to better monitor dangerous activity.

• The Mexican government urges parents to use parental controls and create email addresses their kids can use strictly for video games to avoid exposing private data and unwanted contacts.

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🤔 The next Final Fantasy (number XVI, or so) will explore more adult themes, according to a GameSpot interview with its director.

😲 A new video game called EmilyBlaster is a shoot-'em-up based on the poems of Emily Dickinson and is featured in a new novel about a game designer, The Guardian explains.

⌨️ Blizzard says it will release the next World of Warcraft expansion, Dragonflight, by the end of the year, Eurogamer reports.

🇩🇪 Sony PlayStation is the latest gaming power player to say it is skipping August's Gamescom event in Germany, traditionally one of the biggest gaming events of the year, Games Industry reports.

Video game studio Aspyr has published a very unusual cheat code for its recent Nintendo Switch port of the classic role-playing game Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic II.

• “Triple-click the left thumbstick, open the cheats menu, select warp, and warp to OND504.”

That cheat is Aspyr’s workaround for players who are getting stuck in a cut-scene deep into the game. The company recently published the code on its support forums.

• Players have been complaining about the bug for the past week, prompting a confusing Twitter reply from Aspyr that led to numerous press reports that no players could complete the game.
• An Aspyr rep tells Axios that only a “small number” of players ran into the issue.
• Whatever the case, they can now cheat around it.

What’s next: Aspyr says the bug will be fixed in an upcoming patch.