Feedback

[löyly]

First of all, thank you so much for sending me a review copy! There's a lot I love about this game, but let me pay you in constructive criticism :P

- You wrote earlier this year "our goal is for you to be able to avoid combat if you desire" and "if you prefer just to farm, build, gather, and socialize, you can do so mostly unimpeded".
Unfortunately, I have not found this to be true. That world is absolutely full of bandits, aggressive animals and whatnot. I run into them pretty much as soon as I leave my plot, they are often difficult to get rid of (though this point may be a bit performance-related) and I quite often pick up even more "followers" along the way. I've been trying to explore the caves for the main story, but I've found it super stressful. If I'd bought this game myself, I would have regretted it. A story mode would be so nice.

- I've found crafting unpleasantly grindy. It doesn't help that I'm still unsure if rocks respawn eventually and I want to keep some on my plot. It probably doesn't help that it took me ages to figure out how to use that tool upgrade kit, because the anvil description only mentions it's for weapons and armor. And that price is for just ONE tool? And I need to get HOW much iron ore to upgrade my pickaxe to the tier that can get me the iron ore required to do the upgrade in the first place?? I've played for 16 hours and I still haven't managed to upgrade a single tool.

- A tutorial for farming (and tools...) would have been really helpful. I found preparing soil so difficult that I wasn't motivated to do much farming. After an embarrassing amount of hours it dawned on me that I should have used the sickle (that I overlooked while picking up the whole bunch of tools) to remove the grass first and actually see what I was doing...

- The inventory. How does it make any sense at all to have a limit for each type of item? Why can I only have 20 vegetables in one stack when they are much smaller than stone or wood that stack up to 50 (but with the amounts you need of those and the few material slots, that's still not good)? The storage chests are grindy to make and those feather prices are A. way too expensive and B. can you at least let us know how much we'll need for an upgrade, that was SO frustrating. And even more frustrating: when I finally had enough feathers for a second tiny inventory upgrade I was just going to check how much it would cost to get an extra skill point, but suddenly I just got that upgrade instead without any kind of confirmation :/

- Speaking of those skill cards. Seriously? Just one? Does that change at some point, other than through remembering the feather spawn points (i.e. immersion breaking) and grinding for them but also needing them because the inventory is too limited?

...I've now checked out the game on a better PC with ultra settings, and either that dangerous region (to check enemy reactions with higher fps) had more feathers or they more or less weren't visible with the lowest settings.

- Maybe reaching nitpicking territory now, but does the vegetable stew really have to contain animal fat? It would be nice to have at least one vegetarian meal for each season's vegetables.

Other than that... and the (potential) bugs I'll report in the bug thread... awesome work

[GnomeSlayer]

Please tell me there is a story here - I don't want to just play a grindy game. Thank you
GREAT REVIEW!

[löyly]

As I said, there's a lot of good stuff too. I was just using this thread for the things that I'd like to see more work on and that I didn't want to elaborate so much on in my store page review. There's absolutely a story, and a lot of world-building and lore in side quests and things you find across the map.

[infektedsyringe]

I've been playing the game since launch and my only real gripes are that your characters vocal noises are all the same tone (regardless of gender or personal preference... The ability to change between like 4 or six different tones would be nice... or just the ability to turn off our characters vocalizations and let me use my imagination) and that, in combat, parrying is more of a feat of luck then skill considering you don't see the attack icon until they are literally already bashing/skewering you (unless of course it's because I'm a level nothing and it eventually gets easier with levels)

[löyly]

Originally posted by löyly:

- I've found crafting unpleasantly grindy.

Did you sneakily change the materials needed for the upper floor from 50 wood and 50 stone to 200 hardwood and 50 stone?!

I'd be ok with having the upper floor as a highlight for later, if I had enough space for all those pictures and other wall decorations downstairs - but there's only one single wall for that because we can't rotate wall decorations. Would be nice to have a few windows and a kitchen too...