My time at Sandrock was not distinctly my own - feedback

[Harris]

Disclaimer: This piece assumes you have completed the game and as such contains story spoilers.

Preface

Just like Portia, Sandrock is a story-driven game. The story is a primary method of progression through the game, and in turn the areas, resources, tools and recipes you unlock are mostly needed to advance the story. What does this major design decision mean for the game:

Bloated and repetetive story

The game believes it needs to have a main story reason to introduce areas - the canyon, Badlands, Northern Plateau, Dead Sea et cetera. There are so many areas that the story eventually starts to feel contrived and convoluted, or simply put - it overstays its welcome. Logan, Duvos conspiracy, building Catori World that everyone will forget about after the quest is over, building Portia road where you won't even see the buses - it all starts look like an excuse to make you visit a new area.

Like Pathea posted recently in the PC Gaming subreddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/17m452d/our_openworld_simulation_rpg_my_time_at_sandrock/): "Sandrock's script dwarfs that of Portia, surpassing it by over five times in length".

But the problem is the longer it drags on, the more frequently it starts to repeat itself and feel creatively bankrupt:
- pixel hunting investigation we have to do several times throughout the game is a chore
- Andy/Bronco the Kid quests are pointless and unnecessary
- Elsie character development should have been a side story
- Grace's leaving and writing letters feels redundant and makes her look like a budget Nia
- Penny's arrival and concert is entirely unnecessary, because we already have Luna doing the same thing
- Ginger's arrival feels more like an ad for Portia than anything else etc.

"Second class" content

I already wrote a lot on the "deep as a puddle" problem, but I'm just gonna say that Sandrock has the same problem as Portia - after you finished the story there's no reason to keep playing.

And that is because it feels like 95% of the development effort went into the main story, and everything that is not main story feels incredibly shallow in contrast. As soon as you finished it, the world just dies. The dialogue becomes static. You no longer get any interesting commissions. Side quests lack effort and voice acting. Post marriage quests are a joke and an afterthought.

No replayability

Because of what I just explained, the game being fully linear and there existing nothing to motivate one to play beyond the main story, I feel my time at Sandrock wasn't distinctly mine. Everyone else is gonna end up with medal of hero of Sandrock, there are not really any stories to share or secrets to find. And while there are some 20 love interests, their lack of depth and content makes them not enough to encourage a new playthrough. So in effect, Sandrock becomes a "one and done" deal.

"Open-world RPG"

Another quote from Pathea I'd like to digest:

"But we'll avoid using Early Access in our future games, it's long term process hurts a lot at stories and player's experience. We also want to make our games "BIG", that's we'd call MTaS an RPG instead of Life Sim, even if players do get more tolerant when they feel like it's a casual game."

While I am happy to hear they won't have to rely on EA for the future games - because I believe the story bloat and the "what more could we add" mentality are the consequences of that - I find it interesting that Sandrock is being thought of/marketed as "open world RPG".

As an open-world RPG, Sandrock fails badly. It's not an open world game, because you are strictly limited to main story progression, so there's no open world per se. And it's not really an RPG either, because the characters lack depth, your freedom of choice is limited to saying "too much on my plate" in side quests and the perks/gear progression is way too straightforward and simplistic to justify any builds. From this perspective, Sandrock looks to me like a game that tries too hard to appeal to everyone at once. To cozy farming sim enjoyers. To open world RPG crowd. To tryhard survival games lovers. And last but not least - to the existing audience of Portia fans with all those references and old characters visit.

What Sandrock does best (and what the sequel should do)

Sandrock is ironically at its strongest in the endgame:
- you can do anywhere and do what you want;
- you are no longer forcefully teleported in the morning to do main quest;
- you are no longer bombarded by side quests on a timer;
- you have a horse, so don't have to run around;
- you have a greenhouse, so don't have to waste ages making biocrust;
- you have a helper, so don't have to waste time on trivial things like cleaning sand;
- you have a power drill, so mining is fast and fun;
- you have ways to manage stamina etc.

I say "ironically" because you need to spend some 200 hours before Sandrock finally starts to look like an "open world RPG" it is advertised as.

I feel Sandrock should have drawn inspiration from Skyrim, namely:
- allow the player to go anywhere and do anything from the start
- make the main story shorter and much less important, basically make it optional
- put much more emphasis and depth on the side content (Civil Corps, becoming a shopkeeper like Mi-an?)
- deeper RPG system, less focused on random "lootboxes" and Diablo-like item tiers and more on the ability to tailor your character build to your preferences.

Romance

Another strength of Sandrock is called Nia. With Nia Pathea showed they are capable of depth and I think they should only capitalize on that going forward. A lot of us in the community love the romance/relationship aspect of My Time, and we'd like to see more depth/content/meaning to our love interests. Right now, romance is little more than a process of turning NPC into your free workshop helper.

I think games like Witcher 3 is what they should look up to - just a few love interests as opposed to 20+, but really well-developed and fleshed out. If the choice of a romantic partner is one of the pillars of replayability for this game, then I want the "Nia playthrough" to feel sufficiently distinct from the "Mi-an playthrough" if I'm going to do another run of a 100+ hours game.

[Lightingale]

Originally posted by Harris:

I think games like Witcher 3 is what they should look up to - just a few love interests as opposed to 20+, but really well-developed and fleshed out. If the choice of a romantic partner is one of the pillars of replayability for this game, then I want the "Nia playthrough" to feel sufficiently distinct from the "Mi-an playthrough" if I'm going to do another run of a 100+ hours game.

Yikes.. comparing this to the Witcher 3 boggles the mind, to be honest. It's nowhere near the same game. While romances do seem to be the main drive for replayability, it offers a lot more choices that aren't necessarily catered to a narrow demographic. I do get your point about having more content for each romanceable character, but I appreciate the diversity MTAS offers.

[Obstinate]

It's okay to be finished with a game. You've put something like 10 continuous days worth of play into this game. I think it's pretty rare to find a game that can retain novelty and interest after that amount of play time.

FWIW, I do not like your suggestions as someone who is just starting on Sandrock. I do not want to play Diablo, I want to play Harvest Moon. Sandrock seems pretty much like what I want. Lootbox-style fake-novelty is not what I desire.

[SimuLord]

The My Time games—both of them—are an interesting twist on the action RPG, because they're using the mechanics of a "cozy game" to tell a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end. They are, in that sense, a subversion of the formulaic shoehorned-crafting grindathons that we all got bored of around the 15th time Ubisoft did one.

As an RPG, Portia and Sandrock ain't exactly Red Dead Redemption 1 and 2. But they make a wonderful (and well-written with a lighthearted tone) framing device for cozy game and life-sim mechanics that are a sign that Pathea "knows where the fun is" in their games. (I have a bit of a rant about "knowing where the fun is" on the Traveller's Rest forum on Steam—dig through my comment history if you want to go hunting for it.)

And, of course, one's experience with a game is highly subjective. Sandrock is my personal Game of the Year for 2023 (a game isn't eligible until it comes out of Early Access.)

Rimworld was that for me in 2018 when everyone was fawning over Red Dead 2, and I picked Papers, Please over The Last of Us in 2013, so I'm not kidding when I say that if you're not in games media with an implied mandate to kiss the ring of the AAA industry, it's a highly personal and subjective decision to choose a favorite. I'm sure the Game Awards will fawn over Tears of the Kingdom or Baldur's Gate 3 (lol Starfield), they don't need me to do it for them.

[Ihateeverybody]

Originally posted by Lightingale:

Originally posted by Harris:

I think games like Witcher 3 is what they should look up to - just a few love interests as opposed to 20+, but really well-developed and fleshed out. If the choice of a romantic partner is one of the pillars of replayability for this game, then I want the "Nia playthrough" to feel sufficiently distinct from the "Mi-an playthrough" if I'm going to do another run of a 100+ hours game.

Yikes.. comparing this to the Witcher 3 boggles the mind, to be honest. It's nowhere near the same game. While romances do seem to be the main drive for replayability, it offers a lot more choices that aren't necessarily catered to a narrow demographic. I do get your point about having more content for each romanceable character, but I appreciate the diversity MTAS offers.

I have played Sandrock many a time.

I played Witcher 3 once. Never did the DLC. For comparison I did Witcher and Witcher 2 at least twice each. I don't hold Witcher 3 in much regard.

Different Strokes for Different Folks. It's all good for us to like different things.

[Harris]

Originally posted by Lightingale:

Yikes.. comparing this to the Witcher 3 boggles the mind, to be honest. It's nowhere near the same game.

That's the point! You can read about the devs' vision of making Sandrock "BIG" and an "open-world simulation RPG" and what comes to mind is definitely not what Sandrock ended up being. Open world implies freedom to go anywhere and do what you want - or at least complete story segments in the order of your choice (like Far Cry). RPG implies either elaborate build and progression, and/or very strong narrative side with deep characters, biographies, choice&consequence. Sandrock lacks everything I just described, which prompted me to bring up other games that accomplished this.

Skyrim is a great example of a game where main quest does not dictate how you play, where you have great freedom and where replayability is strong, because every playthrough will give you some new experience, location or secret you missed before.

And I brought up WItcher 3 as an example of a game with a few, but very fleshed out romantic options with lots of screen time.

Originally posted by Obstinate:

I do not want to play Diablo, I want to play Harvest Moon. Sandrock seems pretty much like what I want. Lootbox-style fake-novelty is not what I desire.

Oh, but you miss the point. Sandrock is ALREADY a Diablo. There are already green, blue and purple tier of quality on everything from your chair to your horse. There are already scrap "lootboxes". I don't want to play Diablo inside my Stardew Valley as much as yourself, but that's the direction they've taken for Sandrock. However, that's the direction they took very subtly. As a result, rather than a full-fledged RPG, Sandrock is best described as the game "with elements". Elements of RPG. Elements of a survival game. Elements of farming sim. Elements of crafting. On their own, they are rather shallow though, which is perhaps the consequence of them going for a "BIG" game.

At its core, the point of my feedback is that "My Time" should be, quite literally, MY time. That I should feel compelled to post a screenshot on Reddit afterwards to which people would react "wow, I had no idea this was in the game!". Instead, it is 1:1 the time of the next guy - minus the choice of romance which is anyway fairly shallow and don't go beyond a couple side quests. Sandrock should build upon and emphasize the minute-to-minute gameplay, expand player freedom, offer choice and consequence. While Sandrock technically does accomplish its goal of being a "BIG" game, it is mostly due to dozens of hours of dialogues and cutscenes rather than variety or depth of things you can do there.

[syzara]

I'm mostly hearing that you want this game to be a thing that it isn't, and a lot of other games pass the text here, but it changes nothing.

I enjoy this game for what it is, and I prefer it not to change to anything you seem to envision.

Now let's take Skyrim, as I've played that a lot so I can actually say something about it. Yes it's open world, but it has the story and the NPC's of a sandbox and they are so memorable that I don't remember any of it and never bothered to finish the main story. I sincerely don't get the 'every time a new experience'. The romances are a just helper units, they are very interchangeable. You can cook and plant things, and make gear, and some pre-made buildings. It's nothing like Sandrock tho, and it doesn't try to be. Sandrock is a building game with fighting elements. Skyrim is a fighting game with house elements.

Anyhow, if you combine all the things of all the games you mention and like bits of to something new, you get a game nothing like Sandrock. I don't know if it would be fun or not, that's not even my point. I just think it has entirely nothing to do with the game in existence and I honestly don't know why you'd expect it to be like that.

Edit to add: I am going to add why I very specifically love Sandrock, more than Portia even. It's one of the few games that goes the extra mile after the 'story end' to actually *make sure you leave Sandrock much better than you found it*. It's a thing I miss in many games, but feels especially sad in building games. I don't want to fix just the farm/old workshop or w/e, I want to make things better! And I'm fine with it getting somewhat worse first. I mean what's a story without drama. But still. My point stands.