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alright, so here's my first impressions of Dreamlight Valley after playing it for an hour: the premise of the game, that people have somehow forgotten Disney characters, would be loving hilarious from a megacorporation, if it didn't feel like a propaganda prelude to a future attempt at extending copyright protections to an even more insane length than already is on the books. Steamboat Willie enters the public domain on Jan 1st 2024, this game will hit 1.0 in 2023, it's hard not to cynically view the timing as more than just convenient. i already despise how long copyright terms are, the thought of Disney possibly getting away with extending them further is nauseating to me okay but now on to the actual game gameplay is similar to animal crossing new horizons and they want you to get into the loop as quickly as possible. you find the pickaxe, shovel, fishing rod, and watering can all within one quest. the one thing separating the two is the lack of a bug catching net, but maybe they'll add that in the future. the game has a real-time clock, and i'm not sure how that will impact someone like me who typically plays games at night. will the stores be closed every time i want to play? I'll find out tonight i guess. like animal crossing, stores will change merch daily. when you start out, the opening area is flooded with purple thorns, which is sort of the magical version of "your new farm is all junked up!" that kicks off most games like stardew/harvest moon. removing them is as simple as hitting a button to pull 'em out, and often times the thorns will be covering up a resource, sometimes seeds, sometimes money, sometimes a chest, sometimes a recipe or a memory (more on this later). it's hard for me to tell if this level of generosity is simply because of the early access period while people have to buy in (outside of gamepass) to play, or if there's a level of insidiousness gameloft is hiding and waiting to spring on me by the time i'm deep into the game there are story quests, friendship quests and realm quests. story quests of course introduce new gameplay elements or involve expanding the game area, so the first big one was to unlock the Dream Castle, which requires 2000 Dreamlight. don't worry, we're not in IAP Town yet. Dreamlight is basically the game's equivalent of Nook Miles from New Horizons, where doing tasks and getting achievements will give you dreamlight, like removing thorns, mining materials, selling things, catching fish, etc. It didn't take long to get enough to unlock the Dream Castle, which is revealed to be a hub connecting you to other Disney realms that you will go to, to recruit famous Disney characters to come back to the village to live. at launch, given that it's Early Access, there appear to be 4 realms available, with an additional 24 blank doors that presumably will become not blank over the next 6-12 months. You get to choose one of 3 realms to enter first (and will probably have to unlock the other realms with more dreamlight), I chose Ratatouille, but Wall-E and Little Mermaid are also available. From there you do some movie-related tasks to help the character out with their dilemma and then they'll join you I assume (I stopped my session in the middle of the Ratatouille quest). you can gift things to characters and they'll have friendship quests that seem relatively basic like "hey i think it'd be neat if you cooked this!" and you do that and then your friendship with that character grows. apparently as characters level up, they confer perks to you in terms of additional resources gathered (they pitch it like it's automation but I don't think that's what it actually is) there are projects to build buildings and improve them by scrooge mcduck which, again, is not IAP territory, it's the regular currency. at least the first two times I did this, the building was instantaneous, so IDK if at some point they will take the tutorial training wheels off and say "okay, from now on, building will take a couple of days like in animal crossing" or if it will always be instantaneous. scrooge's place is a furniture shop, and had a decent amount of stock for the first version of it (4 full-body clothing, 4 partial clothing/accessories/hairstyles, 4 large furniture, 4 small furniture). the other thing that i built was goofy's stall where you can buy seeds and sell your stuff, and it's important to note that it's outside, so hopefully that means if stores DO close at night, that you'll still be able to buy and sell stuff. upgrading it looked pretty cheap at least the first time but i haven't done that yet. something i should mention that is a little unusual is that your character talks? they have dialog like any other character, even if it's relatively basic. just something i thought was a bit strange compared to other life sims. it's still create-a-character, and it's relatively OK as far as those go. you can be at least a little fat, although no matter what you do with the eyes, nose, mouth, chin, etc, you're gonna have a kind of generic pretty face. there's an OK amount of black hairstyles for people wondering about that although there could be more natural hair styles imo so where does the Gamelofting come into play? best as I can tell, it's via "events" which is the sort of battle 'pass' of the game. much like dreamlight you can get tokens just by doing basic tasks, and then you can unlock event items with the tokens, and advance from page to page by unlocking a number of items on each page. the launch event is a Pixar Fest event, so you can get things like an Incredibles uniform. but some items are Premium only, and so I guess that's where Premium currency finally rears its head? basically for special event cosmetic unlocks. if that's as bad as it gets, that's honestly pretty banal and not that big a deal. if you're wondering, yes there's stamina, but no, it's not mobile game energy that you have to pay to refill. you can just restore stamina by going back to your house or by eating food, same as Stardew. the game has cooking and crafting and there's a lot of recipes to find for both. I've already found a number of crafting recipes just from removing thorns and digging things up. the crafting station, at least for now, is in Scrooge's furniture shop, but I have to assume that you'll be able to build your own craft station eventually. also important to note you can place furniture both inside your house and anywhere outside, like New Horizons. this actually is a part of a Scrooge quest of advertising his shop as you craft signs and place them around the village. i haven't played dreamlight valley enough to give it a proper review, but at least as far as opening impressions go, it hasn't turned me off yet, it's pleasantly decent, it runs ok on the Xbox One X (solid 30fps). as I mentioned before, the EA launch seems to have 4 Disney realms to go to, and it looks like there are sort of 4 'areas' of the main village and then 4 villages to go to, or something like that? you'll be using dreamlight to open areas up, one area required 5,000 (the Dream Castle required 2,000). the dreamlight concept being similar to nook miles is a good way to incentivize longer play sessions, as well as all the recipes to find and craft. the thing that animal crossing will have over dreamlight valley is personality, because nintendo's characterization in animal crossing is allowed to be sillier and unusual than disney would ever allow for their on-brand on-model characters. but at least in terms of gameplay, it's similar enough that it might scratch that itch e: oh yeah, one thing i can appreciate is despite the store page's indication, there ARE plenty of generic clothing and furniture options and it's not just a 100% nonstop unrelenting Brand explosion. i got some simple red jeans and a couple pairs of ordinary glasses/sunglasses, and there's plenty of non Disney themed furniture to buy from the shop in addition to the "look, it's the dress from that movie!" or "here's a BnL hat from Wall-E" The 7th Guest fucked around with this message at 16:30 on Sep 6, 2022 |
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Sep 6, 2022 16:22
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The 7th Guest posted:Dreamlight Valley That's funny, "Disney propaganda" were pretty much my exact words after the first like 10 minutes of the game. The intro plot is extremely eyeroll-worthy: "oh no, everyone forgot about Disney stuff, and all the magic in the world died" lmao That said, I'm finding the general gameplay loop to be enjoyable enough. The controls are a little bit floaty, at least on PC; sometimes I have to fight to aim when digging to hit the exact spot I want, or not accidentally talk to whoever's following me around. But it's satisfying to complete the story quests and little dreamlight goals. Decorating is super easy to do, I love that I can move nearly everything -- including most of the buildings, thank goodness! -- with just a few clicks and no forced waiting time. I wish Animal Crossing made designing your town as simple and convenient as this! I also like that there's plenty of plainer clothing and it's not all over-the-top Disney garb all the time, but there's also a system to customize your clothes with decals and things that you can unlock. So if you want to make your plain black hoodie have a Pirates of the Carribbean skull on it, that's something you can do too. I'm probably going to keep playing it for at least a little bit.
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Sep 7, 2022 05:18
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After bugging the Re:Legend people again, I've been handed the second Steam key from my pledge level. It's been five-ish years since the Kickstarter campaign ended and the game finally came out of early access on the fifth of this month. The game is appealing to me - gather resources, plant crops, fight, tame monsters, use the monsters to help you farm, etc - but the full release seems to have several bugs I hadn't experienced during the years of alpha gameplay. tomorrow, maybe.
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Sep 7, 2022 05:48
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Arsenic Lupin posted:I was so drat pissed off that after all the sobbing I'd done it all turned out to be a hallucination in a hospital ward. I was invested, dammit. God indie devs obsession with dreams/dying dreams/hallucinations is the loving worst. It was a tired cliche when loving Dallas did it in the early 80s. It's never clever or revelatory. Also, because I'm contractually obliged to, I'd say that if you want something that feels like a life sim but is more of an RPG, the Atelier series really scratches that itch. Particularly the Arland and Mysterious sub-series. Run an alchemy shop, explore and fight for ingredients, help out your town and friends. Only sometimes do you have to save anything.
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Sep 7, 2022 06:34
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Dreamlight Valley has a absolutely terrible running animation. No sense of weight at all and it's like you're running on ice the whole time. I'm not sure why it bugs me so much but it does. and yeah, 'Disney propaganda' pretty much sums it up  I'm a sucker for customizing stuff though so I'll probably play around with it a bit
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Sep 7, 2022 08:24
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They'll probably not allow me to invite Tamatoa to be my roommate so who cares!
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Sep 8, 2022 04:19
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Metis of the Hallway posted:My Time at Portia is addicting even though I think it is a fairly terrible game. The mechanics are mostly annoying, none of the writing is very good, it's quite ugly, and YET. I have hours and hours of playtime. Hey, gently caress you, I wrote two of the missions for My Time at Portia in a weird 'working for a random Chinese company' experience. ... But, you're right.
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Sep 8, 2022 04:33
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Playing exocolonist and I am pretty impressed with it so far. I knew from previous posts things take a turn but I wasn't expecting how quickly and constant it would keep things escalating. I'm at year 5 so I still have a good chunk to go and the earth peeps just arrived so time to see how that shakes things up. The sense of scope is striking. Its funny to compare it to something like Tokimeki Memorial which also feels "big" for being a stat raising sim, though the two games go about that in very different ways: walk around maps, constant status quo changes, vs the more in depth scheduling and stuff like clothing systems that actually matter depending on the game.
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Sep 8, 2022 06:39
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Varsity posted:Hey, gently caress you, I wrote two of the missions for My Time at Portia in a weird 'working for a random Chinese company' experience. Lmao, sorry! That's cool though, I would never have expected to run into a writer for that game here. What was it like working for them? Which missions were they? Maybe I liked them, actually!
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Sep 8, 2022 07:42
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ok well, i just did an entire play through of that game in one session lmao sorta disappointed with the ending, seems very easy to survive and ended up not having much omph for something the character says "i been planning for my entire life". but i guess the real challenge is just going to be doing future playthroughs and juggling all the events in mind. was terrified anemome ending was time sensitive at first when i danced with her and then immediately afterwards she was kissing vance, horrifying, but it made it all the more delightful when she dumps that loser there are some bits i am not fully onboard with (ie, the politics seem sorta soft imo) but overall i am really happy with this. its nice to get a stat raising sim doing its own thing in the space and trying new stuff, i hope it may end up inspiring other projects because the genre can really use more games. i think the potential of the genre is often overlooked in the west.
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Sep 8, 2022 11:03
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Now save Tammy and overthrow the fash.
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Sep 8, 2022 11:06
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i already did the revolution on my first play through!!! i am an expert in the genre B) going to do the former tho
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Sep 8, 2022 11:08
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sexpig by night posted:I guess this is gonna be a life sim game, is that Disney game coming out this week getting any early reviews? The Disney dork in me was amused by the character creator being surprisingly solid but the combo of Disney and a mainly mobile game dev is making me think it's gonna be more along the 'you're out of Disney Energy, spend five bucks to get more' lines than 'it's like Animal Crossing but for the most insufferable people (me)'. Only complaints so far are several bugs (opening recipes/clothing bags results in nothing happening) and some bad quests (Remy asks me to make ratatouille but doesn't explain the ingredients - took me several failed attempts before i googled it.) Another quest had me talk to Goofy but nothing happens.
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Sep 8, 2022 11:53
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PancakeTransmission posted:some bad quests (Remy asks me to make ratatouille but doesn't explain the ingredients - took me several failed attempts before i googled it.) I sorta enjoyed being rewarded for remembering the dish from the movie 
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Sep 8, 2022 12:01
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Metis of the Hallway posted:Lmao, sorry! That's cool though, I would never have expected to run into a writer for that game here. What was it like working for them? Which missions were they? Maybe I liked them, actually! The quests I wrote for Portia were a few of the friendship/relationship missions for Remington, and looking through the wiki, they definitely Engrish'd them up a bit. They were actually 'writing tests' for a still undisclosed project I worked on for them that I haven't seen any mention of in their PR stuff. They paid well (they had recently had a chunk of their company bought by Tencent), but were kind of unfocused and from I could tell, they never gave any of their indie US-based writers much direction. I feel like they wanted to bypass some US localization by hiring a few indie authors since they had their own writers who actually spoke Mandarin and English. The relationship eventually fizzled out as they kept changing scope, setting, etc. Kind of hard to write missions when the gameplay is vague and everchanging, but I did write a bunch of random lore. The worst part was using WeChat, which is like a government monitored WhatsApp. It took weeks to get approved as a non-Chinese user, and you had to have references/approvals from current users. Felt quite weird to use, and I didn't want to get anyone 'disappeared' for mentioning the wrong thing, haha. Varsity fucked around with this message at 15:05 on Sep 8, 2022 |
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Sep 8, 2022 15:02
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New Horse game just dropped. Cribbing a bunch from the Harvest Dew framing. Horse Tales: Emerald Valley Ranch https://twitter.com/MaliceDaFirenze/status/1567785460142841856?s=20&t=8Iwf9xV1Kse6Xq6A05Bayw For Horse Girl gamers, by Horse Girl Gamers Edit: I can't stop reading The Mane Quest posted:IN SHORT KirbyKhan fucked around with this message at 19:13 on Sep 8, 2022 |
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Sep 8, 2022 18:40
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Ah, my favorite genre. I'm surprised not to see Kynseed pop up in the discussion yet. It's solidly EA, and I haven't checked in on its build state in quite a while. But I think there are some good and interesting bones there, including a legacy effect where your character ages and dies; you then play as your character's descendant, things change in the village, etc. There's a pretty big map to explore, plenty of your standard farm/fish/friend activities, and I found the art to be quite pretty and distinctive. They definitely lean into the discovery pillar of play, and I like that. I'll have to go back through my steam library and see what all I've picked up and put down in this genre. At the moment, Dreamlight Valley is eating my gaming hours. I am pleasantly surprised at some (SOME) of the design choices in the game, and completely unsurprised by the Gameloft jank. I'm playing on Switch, so the crashes are frequent and the performance is frankly shameful. It's not ruining the experience or anything, and they're patching it this week, but it is definitely still EA. I do really appreciate that they knew adults would play this game, so it's got much, much less handholding than ACNH. I don't think they thought any adult straight cis men would play it, though - the animations for the male avatar are rather limp-wristed, and the run cycle is definitely more of a mince. The quests aren't as terrible as they could be, there seems to be a heck of a lot to unlock, and I haven't snapped the economy like a twig yet after twenty hours or so. I'm tentatively optimistic. It has voiced lines from the official VA for most of the characters, even if some are just pulled from existing recordings. There are some really nice laid-back arrangements of familiar tunes. The music changes based on which villager you're schlepping around as a buddy. I like hearing Mickey idly whistle the little tune from Steamboat Willie from time to time. I also played the spiritual predecessors of DV, Disney Magical World and Disney Magical World 2 on the 3DS. They were life-sim-style too, and I liked them well enough, though they were significantly more grindy and random-drop-oriented. Also they had combat which was VERY tedious. But more important for me, a closeted Disney Adult, was that those two games did not pay for rights to use licensed music, which was a big loss IMO. I gotta have my nostalgic earworms coming out those tinny little speakers.
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Sep 11, 2022 07:14
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I feel like Disney's usual environmentalist storytelling is undermined by me digging up half the savannah to grow soy to sell to a hypercapitalist in a tophat
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Sep 11, 2022 13:42
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CK07 posted:Ah, my favorite genre. I'm surprised not to see Kynseed pop up in the discussion yet. It's solidly EA, and I haven't checked in on its build state in quite a while. But I think there are some good and interesting bones there, including a legacy effect where your character ages and dies; you then play as your character's descendant, things change in the village, etc. I'm waiting for this one to get further along but I'm really hoping it loves up to its promise! I love the idea of the legacy thing but I'm not sure how well it'll work; seems like an awful lot of content for them to create, depending how long a character can be expected to last. Dreamlight Valley-- I just don't know how I feel about it. I'm waiting to see how viciously predatory the microtransactions end up being at full release. If it's not too godawful then I'll probably play it but goddamn the release of Temtem with its MTX poison has really put me off that sort of thing at the moment.
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Sep 11, 2022 16:14
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the point I've gotten to in Dreamlight Valley, all the quests have gotten to rather grindy amounts of resources required, and I feel like crafting furniture takes far too many resources as well. I'm still having fun with it regardless, but I can see it really turning people off go the game pretty quickly once they get further in. Either way I don't think paying $30 for the founders pass is really worth it, if it's going to be free to play later.
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Sep 11, 2022 16:33
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Snooze Cruise posted:i already did the revolution on my first play through!!! i am an expert in the genre B) I'm debating whether I want to commit to a third playthrough to actually get the good ending where you actually make peace with the Gardeners as you need a LOT of things to go right in order for it to happen. It's a very cool game, and I enjoy how reactive it is to the various routes you can chart through it, it feels very real and alive in more ways than most of that genre. Somehow it did lose some of the emotional impact on the second play through, possibly because I was spending almost all my time in the colony rather than going on expeditions. It plays perfectly on Steamdeck if anyone is curious btw, no tweaks needed.
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Sep 12, 2022 20:44
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https://twitter.com/caylenb/status/1569713936328716288
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Sep 13, 2022 17:59
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Thats where youre wrong fucko! Im playing all these loving Farm games!
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Sep 13, 2022 18:08
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A Wonderful Life has an endpoint at least...I think...was never able to get to the final year in the original game.
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Sep 13, 2022 18:17
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Hihohe posted:Thats where youre wrong fucko! Im playing all these loving Farm games!
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Sep 13, 2022 18:22
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its been happening for all the remakes so no surprise but wonderful life is going to have gay marriage so thats good i hope harvestella is good...
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Sep 13, 2022 19:04
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Hihohe posted:Thats where youre wrong fucko! Im playing all these loving Farm games!  Also, AFAIK there is no release date for Haunted Chocolatier.
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Sep 13, 2022 19:20
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Hihohe posted:Thats where youre wrong fucko! Im playing all these loving Farm games! I posted it for the list. But yes, I am playing a lot of these as well lol.
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Sep 13, 2022 19:20
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they forgot story of seasons doraemon 2, and dinkum 1.0, and dreamlight valley 1.0, and roots of pacha 1.0, and
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Sep 13, 2022 19:37
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The 7th Guest posted:alright, so here's my first impressions of Dreamlight Valley after playing it for an hour: After playing the game I am not sure how Dreamlight Valley has anything to do with copyright law or how it even matters (even when Steamboat Willie enters the public domain, folks who would want to use the mouse are going to have a hell of a time not running afoul of trademark law) Anyway the premise isn’t that people have forgotten Disney characters (indeed the game doesn’t really bother introducing anyone because it assumes you already know who all these characters are), it’s that you the player have forgotten your childhood dreams with these characters, because you are a burnt out, jaded adult If you like Animal Crossing, Dreamlight Valley scratches the same itch, except instead of random animals with one of a few preset personalities, you get Disney characters. It is early access so expect bugs and crashes. Instead of paying 30 bucks to play an somewhat polished alpha version of the game, if you are interested go with game pass.
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Sep 13, 2022 21:21
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The 7th Guest posted:they forgot story of seasons doraemon 2, and dinkum 1.0, and dreamlight valley 1.0, and roots of pacha 1.0, and loving STOKED for roots of pacha. there's also Potion Permit but that one's apparently slated for late 2022 also, does witchbrook even have a release date? last i heard from it was ages ago.
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Sep 13, 2022 21:55
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potion permit is in two weeks actually!
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Sep 14, 2022 06:28
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Anyone try the Harvestella demo yet? The twelve-year-old inside me wants to trust in Square Enix, but it looks..iffy.
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Sep 14, 2022 07:26
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I wanted to try it but the game is also coming out on pc and I would prefer playing it there so I dunno if I am going to bother with the switch demo.
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Sep 14, 2022 07:53
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How much depth is there to Dinkum? Is it more animal crossing-ish or is there a bit more progression to it?
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Sep 14, 2022 09:01
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https://twitter.com/awildjessichu/status/1570068410423476229
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Sep 14, 2022 17:38
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Evrart Claire posted:How much depth is there to Dinkum? Is it more animal crossing-ish or is there a bit more progression to it? Lots more progression/depth than animal crossing IMO, but not a crazy deep game. You can make farms + automate stuff somewhat with items, lots of progression in vehicles and tools etc. It’s sort of like animal crossing and stardew jammed together, although the NPC relations stuff is still super early days.
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Sep 15, 2022 07:39
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Moonlighter is on sale till September 28th for $4. Half the time you dungeon crawl, half the time you sell the stuff you stole. Buying it, will advise. https://store.steampowered.com/app/606150/Moonlighter/
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Sep 22, 2022 00:15
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New game out - Potion Permit!   https://store.steampowered.com/app/1337760/Potion_Permit/ So, if you don't want to listen to me babble, it has a free demo you can download and try for yourself. Biggest warning: it's absolutely designed for controller support, and has no mouse support. So if you want to use kb+m, you need to get used to using the WASD keys for movement and JKL keys for inputs, where J and K are your main buttons. It's a standard Harvest Moon/Stardew Valley plot so far: welcome to the town where you're taking over a ruined building to establish yourself and make friends with all of the townsfolk! The big difference is that you're not farming - you're doctoring! Er, medicining? Herbing? Eh, whatever, you're gathering ingredients from the local forest and using them to make potions to sell for loot that you will immediately re-invest into decorations to make your shabby home less obivously-filled-with-holes. The second big difference so far is that at the start of the game, people actively hate you: you're following in the footsteps of the previous chemist who came here from the big city, and apparently he hosed everything up in a big way, so there's a lot of potential for interesting plot or maybe it just gets washed over once you get enough mini-games done, dunno, I haven't gotten through all of the demo yet. But those minigames are a big draw. Obviously, you're foraging and fighting just like in HM/SV, and there doesn't seem to be anything special or interesting about that, it's an HM/SV clone, not an ARPG or Zeldalike. But making potions is a puzzle where you're placing pieces into a grid to cover spaces, and there are limits around what kinds of pieces you can use and how many of them. Likewise, diagnosing patients has a button-timing mini-game, and of course there's a fishing game. So there's plenty to do that seems to require more thinking and planning than just hitting buttons to shove seeds in the ground. yes i know hm and sv have a lot going on in planning and allocating resources and energy that is very thought intensive and why those games are a lot of fun and talked about in the management thread Reviews so far are mostly positive, with the main complaint being the complete lack of mouse support for menus. Also some people complaining that there is no cat option, you must have a dog.
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Sep 22, 2022 17:33
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skeleton warrior posted:Also some people complaining that there is no cat option, you must have a dog. ownage!!
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Sep 22, 2022 17:43
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