Is there an "endgame" of sorts?

[Devilfish]

I'm asking because while I really did enjoy this studio's previous game, Yonder Etcetera, I never really engaged with it. It gave me tons of things to do but not really any ingame reason to do them. I just puttered around the map aimlessly doing stuff until I ran out of stuff to do and just didn't open the game again.

So if the point here is also to run around and look at pretty things and just hang out in this world for a while, that's fine! But it's also not for me and I'd like to know before I buy.

[phadin]

This world's two major systems are interconnected.

1) Grow islands on the Evertree. This is mostly about gardening type actions. Getting rid of weeds, planting, watering, and seeing what happens to the island over a few days of care and expansion. Then harvest the various items to turn them into essences.

2) Grow the town at the base of the tree. This occurs through recruiting people, a few of which show up available each day, as well as building structures using the essences you gathered from the tree's resources. Expanding the town and meeting conditions lets you open new districts and the tree can grow new branches for additional islands.

There is a storyline, revealed through exploring the areas around the town, finding the vaults, and collecting the songs of the evertree. The story is revealed by exploring vaults in the various town districts and collecting items from them to return to the tree, though it's a fairly basic story. It does have a satisfying little end to it when you finish it after getting the item from the last district. After the end of the game,e you can keep playing to continue shaping your districts and populating them as you want, as well as to grow new or unusual islands.

[löyly]

Your in-game aim is to get rid of The Withering and restore the Song of the Evertree so that both the tree and humanoid settlements can thrive again. For that, you get clear missions that are pinned in the corner of your screen, usually "explore the newly unlocked region to locate the next song fragment" - "return the song fragment" - "raise harmony in your new settlement to 100%" (plus you have a list of things that help with that at the town's "harmony stone"). There's also rather large number of badges you can collect for all kinds of stuff and get rewards for, if that's your thing.

I don't know how much play time you'd get out of strictly following the main mission and only doing the bare minimum to "beat the game", but I think it's about 20 hours at least? You'd certainly get a lot more out of it if you have some own motivation to either make your towns look really nice or experiment with world-creating or both, or finding all the secret locations or whatever. But from what I remember of Yonder, Grow is a bit more structured.

[Devilfish]

Thanks so much for the detailed answers, I appreciate it!

[GlitterGek]

Let's get one thing right. MMO's have end game. Think of this like a console game, you play it you finish it, you move on to another game. Many games do not have dlc's. It's reached it's conclusion so it's over.