So which game you like more and why? Recettear or Potionomics?

[poring]

Being much newer, Potionomics has much nicer graphics, obviously, but there are just some things Recettear did so much better.
Little things like one liners spoken every now and then gives some character, and spoken dialogue between Recette and Tear is another layer of that.
Didn't finish the game yet, but people complain about game being just a speedrun for buying out the shop's mortgage.
The biggest issue I have so far is how much of indecision is if they wanted to make shopper/haggling game or tumblr dating sim. I'm all dandy for whatever devs feel like supporting but trailer kinda hid that part and that is sort of annoying. I'm ok with "relationship" system where you and other citizens build regular relationships, talking, business and so on but not so keen on "romantic" aspect. Why put that in.
Another thing is item progress, or what people call, RNG. In Recettear whole dungeon crawling and item hunting was handled much better. Obviously, if you wanted rarest ingredients there was some grind, but you could fix your shop's debt by normal economics and errand - buying items in the town, doing a quest/dungeon, and doing business in the evening. If you were skilled, you could do dungeon maybe 2-3 times and then just progress whole game without leaving the town, and just then after you've paid mortgage, you played for fun, item list completion, relationship and so on. In Potionomics it seems like devs have an idea and then another, and more people came in, and general core play got diluted to not make anyone involved sad their cool idea wouldn't get used. Oh, and they decided you have what, 40 in game days for it all?
At this point I really want to love the game, it's just few days since it came out, but I am very much afraid things like endless mode are planned for paid DLC since it's industry standard nowadays to sell 60-75% of the game and rest as a paid DLC.
I've posted this here as a discussion and not on the sale page because I want hear what other genre enthusiasts have to say and strongly believing developers have great game which just needs some more tweaking and polishing.

[Feral Ball]

Recettear, hands down. I actually reinstalled Recettear again.
Maybe if/when Potionomics gets and endless mode, I'll jump in.

[AncientSpark]

I think the other things are personal preference, but I cannot imagine how anyone thought the way of obtaining items in Recettear was anything but tedious. Yes, you can get by in the game by dungeon crawling only 2 or 3 times, but those times were not fun at all and you had to play the game a very specific way to get around going to dungeons. This was worsened by the haggling in the game being quite a bit more arbitrary, so it was very very easy to get RNGed out of the game and have to resort to dungeon crawling to recover.

Potionomics is by no means perfect (the QoL surrounding potion brewing is kind of atrocious), but the gameplay loop surrounding ingredient obtaining was pretty consistent and almost all RNG in it is taken out by the fact that adventures don't spend any of your free time, so you can do it consistently with some basic prep. Once you do that, it's pretty easy and has almost no tedium. Not to mention stuff like slime feeding which is, admittedly, just a tad broken.

[Stormsong]

Potionomics. Ancientspark covered why, so I won't rehash it.

[poring]

Originally posted by Avecess:

Recettear, hands down. I actually reinstalled Recettear again.
Maybe if/when Potionomics gets and endless mode, I'll jump in.

Might do the same actually.

Originally posted by AncientSpark:

I think the other things are personal preference, but I cannot imagine how anyone thought the way of obtaining items in Recettear was anything but tedious. Yes, you can get by in the game by dungeon crawling only 2 or 3 times, but those times were not fun at all and you had to play the game a very specific way to get around going to dungeons. This was worsened by the haggling in the game being quite a bit more arbitrary, so it was very very easy to get RNGed out of the game and have to resort to dungeon crawling to recover.

Potionomics is by no means perfect (the QoL surrounding potion brewing is kind of atrocious), but the gameplay loop surrounding ingredient obtaining was pretty consistent and almost all RNG in it is taken out by the fact that adventures don't spend any of your free time, so you can do it consistently with some basic prep. Once you do that, it's pretty easy and has almost no tedium. Not to mention stuff like slime feeding which is, admittedly, just a tad broken.

Apart from poor dating sim, which is less then third of Potionomics, the core being potion maker and seller is pure RNG when you take in consideration that potion making is based on resources you totally have no control over. In Recettear there was grind for those elusive ingredients for endgame gear and items, true, but from what I've read in Sylvia's case, sometimes you get so screwed that people have problems passing first week, which wasn't the case in Recettear.
Older tittle was more linear all in all, progression and difficulty. Potioniomics are way too random. Also, leveling up in Recettear was more like in any RPG - do dungeons, get gear, do harder dungeons. And adventurers pocket was 25 slots you could fill with consumables. It limited your haul, but also let you enter the dungeons with better chances. I had runs with Mint that barely made her trip worth the time and resources put in in the first place. And also, in Recettear you did spend 1/4 of daily time IIRC per dungeon. In Potionomics you spend 1 block of time to send Mint, 1 to go back and do other stuff, and another 1 block of time to get resources back, so 3/8 of available time if I'm not mistaken.

But yeah, agreed on personal preference. I just like to have more control in time based games and less redoing the game play because of bad RNG.

[hunter1944a]

The thing about Recettear was it wasn't sudden death, it was rewind while keeping most advantages. So much is great about Potionomics, and the devs have already patched and done some balancing in just a few days. But starting a new game after failing a competition doesn't appeal much to me, and being done after the last competition isn't exciting either. I didn't play Stardew just to get a score at the end, but to enjoy playing. Sandbox or Endless or giving me a chance to redo competitions much later in the game (when presumably I've actually been able to get ingredients and ingredients for upgrades) would make Potionomics top notch.

[SFF]

Recettear doesn't hardlock you into a game over for a single mistake, so that.

[zero]

personally: Recettear.

as much as i like the card mode of this game, recettear understands what it is better: it is you in a shop selling stuff, that is the core gameplay loop, and it never changes or pretends to be nothing its not.

yes, both this game and recettear have a deadline system, but for this game, its the mixed up competing as opposed to just earning enough money to pay off your debt like it is in recettear.

like if all they did was lower the debt or changes the values each week and removed compeition, you could feasibly play this in a more natural way

[AncientSpark]

Originally posted by keik:

Apart from poor dating sim, which is less then third of Potionomics, the core being potion maker and seller is pure RNG when you take in consideration that potion making is based on resources you totally have no control over. In Recettear there was grind for those elusive ingredients for endgame gear and items, true, but from what I've read in Sylvia's case, sometimes you get so screwed that people have problems passing first week, which wasn't the case in Recettear.
Older tittle was more linear all in all, progression and difficulty. Potioniomics are way too random. Also, leveling up in Recettear was more like in any RPG - do dungeons, get gear, do harder dungeons. And adventurers pocket was 25 slots you could fill with consumables. It limited your haul, but also let you enter the dungeons with better chances. I had runs with Mint that barely made her trip worth the time and resources put in in the first place. And also, in Recettear you did spend 1/4 of daily time IIRC per dungeon. In Potionomics you spend 1 block of time to send Mint, 1 to go back and do other stuff, and another 1 block of time to get resources back, so 3/8 of available time if I'm not mistaken.

But yeah, agreed on personal preference. I just like to have more control in time based games and less redoing the game play because of bad RNG.

This immediately tells me you did not do enough adventuring. Yes, resources are random in the sense that each individual adventure gives random rewards, but when you are going at an adventure every day (and later, 2-3 adventures per day due to multiple characters), you can explore all but the rarest ingredients extremely quickly. The point is to open new resources to Quinn or allow for upgrade expansions (you can get to the point where you're outdoing the contest requirements by 2 *grades*, i.e., Masterwork vs Grand during week 3, not just stars).

Also, potion requirements just aren't that strict in general. Don't get so attached to perfect stability; very stable or even normal stable is fine for 90% of the game. Because of that, you can get delayed from the best ingredients in a region for the entire week and have it not matter at all. This is very different from Recettear where, while haggling was not entirely RNG, the logic behind haggling was so obtuse that it might as well be random, so it was very possible to get into a backslide of money loss, compared to just "slightly worse potions" really not being a huge detriment in general.

Also, no, you can spend exactly 1 time period per day doing adventuring; the time you go out to travel. All socializing and adventurer handling is assigned to the same time block in traveling; the only additional time costs in Travel is either Hangout or Rank Up. Not only this, you can return the next day and have your ingredients ready from adventure and then send them out in the same moment. Because of this, you can do your adventuring rotation as part of other socializing, so it's actually just free. Even if you do a 2x Travel rotation per day, this is almost assuredly because you want to do more hanging out; the adventuring takes no time at all in those cases.

[poring]

Originally posted by AncientSpark:

This immediately tells me you did not do enough adventuring. Yes, resources are random in the sense that each individual adventure gives random rewards, but when you are going at an adventure every day (and later, 2-3 adventures per day due to multiple characters), you can explore all but the rarest ingredients extremely quickly. The point is to open new resources to Quinn or allow for upgrade expansions (you can get to the point where you're outdoing the contest requirements by 2 *grades*, i.e., Masterwork vs Grand during week 3, not just stars).

Also, potion requirements just aren't that strict in general. Don't get so attached to perfect stability; very stable or even normal stable is fine for 90% of the game. Because of that, you can get delayed from the best ingredients in a region for the entire week and have it not matter at all. This is very different from Recettear where, while haggling was not entirely RNG, the logic behind haggling was so obtuse that it might as well be random, so it was very possible to get into a backslide of money loss, compared to just "slightly worse potions" really not being a huge detriment in general.

Also, no, you can spend exactly 1 time period per day doing adventuring; the time you go out to travel. All socializing and adventurer handling is assigned to the same time block in traveling; the only additional time costs in Travel is either Hangout or Rank Up. Not only this, you can return the next day and have your ingredients ready from adventure and then send them out in the same moment. Because of this, you can do your adventuring rotation as part of other socializing, so it's actually just free. Even if you do a 2x Travel rotation per day, this is almost assuredly because you want to do more hanging out; the adventuring takes no time at all in those cases.

Yes I didn't do that much higher region adventuring and I will soon do a second run since you as a player are bombarded with mechanics in first 10 days. IIRC things like vending machine and orders were introduced gradually so you could focus on dungeons in Recettear if you wanted to have streamlined income. In Potionomics everything is thrown at you, you must do speed dating, speed dungeons for ingredients. Kudos for expeditions but those are RNG like most of thing in this game. So far I had plenty of ingredients containing AB and C, and D & E being rarer. Same for treasure chests. There's just too much random things. I can't be sure that going for an adventure will surely guarantee that I will have things I need, I can only hope RNG will be on my side.

[Myth Alric]

I loved Recettear but after beating the game, I ended up losing motivation to continue on. Which sucks because there is a ton of stuff you are supposed to do after 'winning', and I know I missed a lot there quitting after I "won", but it just felt like a grind at that point.

Which is why I think l like Potionomics better. Even though some complain about the contests and time line, having that goal and deadline gives a much clearer goal than 'go grind the dungeon levels to unlock all the character stuff'.

[zero]

Originally posted by Myth Alric:

I loved Recettear but after beating the game, I ended up losing motivation to continue on. Which sucks because there is a ton of stuff you are supposed to do after 'winning', and I know I missed a lot there quitting after I "won", but it just felt like a grind at that point.

Which is why I think l like Potionomics better. Even though some complain about the contests and time line, having that goal and deadline gives a much clearer goal than 'go grind the dungeon levels to unlock all the character stuff'.

i mean thats the thing though: you have the choice to contiune after the main story, to keep ever expanding, simply for the fun of it.

you cant really do the same here, you just have to stop.

[Will]

That’s such an old game I hardly remember playing it.
I think this one is better, IF they can restructure the default “campaign” so that it remains challenging, doesn’t game over at a single challenge, and let’s you keep playing after winning.

[χø£¡Ŧ|ź]

Shop management > Recettear
Potion making > Potion Craft: Alchemist Simulator
Graphic > Potionomics

The game looks gorgeous. However, the design is extremely misleading. You entered this game anticipating Recettear or Stardew. Actually, the game is similar to Slay the Spire.

[Tenebrais]

I haven't finished Potionomics yet, and the fact there's no post-game free play is a little disappointing to know but since I haven't actually hit the end it only matters so much. So keeping that in mind...

Potionomics feels so strongly like an upgrade to Recettear. As in, it looked at Recettear, found all of its flaws, and fixed them. The biggest one is obviously the way you acquire your stock - Recettear put way too much focus on the mediocre roguelike, so Potionomics has you send adventurers out without your supervision. Haggling in Recettear was both one-dimensional and very misleading, so Potionomics replaced it with proper gameplay mechanics. Equipping heroes in Recettear was a frustrating exercise in randomness, Potionomics just has you supply them directly when you send them off. The dating sim elements of Recettear (there's no actual dating - Recette was a child - but there was still a significant mechanic of visiting friends, viewing their story cutscenes and building a relationship) got in the way of making optimal use of your time; Potionomics fits socialising in with your regular rounds and gives you gameplay benefits for seeing the cutscenes. Paying off your debt in Recettear meant awkwardly gambling on how much is an appropriate amount of your money to invest vs locking away to pay off, Potionomics doesn't take that money out of your funds. Hell, even the fact that Recettear sets up a rival that it doesn't then do anything with gets addressed with a series of rivals that actually rival you.

The one thing I think Recettear does have over this is that it's less stressful. The atmosphere in general is more chill (Recette being an innocent child vs Sylvia being a sassy adult that's much more capable of feeling threatened), there's a massive mercy mechanic if you lose in Recettear vs just reloading a save and trying again, and having only a single dimension to your victory condition is less flustering than brewing three specific potions and building a good enough deck to sell them. Plus, of course, having a postgame with no defeat condition at all so you can fill out all your relationships and play the weirdly excessive amount of dungeons.

Overall, Potionomics isn't perfect but its flaws are fairly minor, and it's an entirely worthy entry into the genre. I have a lot of love for Recettear but I think if I replayed it now I'd get frustrated by all the things a newer game does better.

[Myth Alric]

Originally posted by zero:

i mean thats the thing though: you have the choice to contiune after the main story, to keep ever expanding, simply for the fun of it.

you cant really do the same here, you just have to stop.

Well the problem with that other game though, is the main story is extremely short and you are actually missing out on a lot if you don't continue. It is made, as if you should continue but the main motivation to do so is removed. Which I didn't like as much.