Gameplay Feedback - could be much better.

[Tamaster]

At around 15 hours in, these are my considerations and feedback about garden paws' gameplay, what could be improved, adjusted, and so on.

1. Gameplay is too repetitive without any diversion to break the routine. Quests are all the same, always fetch quests without any even slight variation to them. The game prides itself in having 500 quests... but all the exact same thing over and over again.

My Time at Portia, Stardew, as examples, had combat and other social activities, fairs, and so on to do while not grinding for money or materials - also quests were a lot more varied and meaningful in said games. This game has none of it. It's either focused on selling stuff to make money, or gather stuff to fulfill quests. Period. There is little else to do of meaningful at all.

The grind is huge and there are not enough meaningful rewards to justify it. Quests give out rarely something worthy it, most give only miserable amounts of gold, or nothing. The fact progression is only tied to completing fetch quests and nothing else, no combat, no skill trees, no other things to progress into other than money-making and facilities, makes the game very dull, very soon.

The thing is: there might be a lot of things to do in the game but actually very few of them actually have any real meaningfulness gameplay wise. Like: taming animals, why the hell should i do that? Does it give me passive bonuses or something? No it does not (that i know of, maybe Taming has some use i did not yet discover, but i dont have high hopes). Finding cosmetics: does cosmetic sets give abilities or advantages? No. And so on for all the other stuff you can "do" but actually has no point in being done.


2.
The game has several quality of life problems that make it frustrating or anyway irritating at times. The "swim timer" taking players back to the shore after a certain time spent in water is a pointless mechanic, though can be worked around by building wooden bridges, at least.

Auto stacking is poorly made and players cannot stack in a crate only items that are already present inside it: it's either everything or nothing to transfer. Or doing it manually is the only other option.

There is way too little stamina during each day, while stamina regen items such as lemonade, grilled fish, etc. give a miserable amount of stamina each - this results in players not being able to do as much as they would like to during each day.

Co-op players cannot transfer money to one another, so if one of them has all the cash he will need to phisically go somewhere to unlock a cave, buy something etc. - they can share profits, true, but it just divides by 2 the total money amount, making it even longer to get to amounts necessary to buy stuff.


3.
Exploration is mostly meaningless, with Treasure Chests giving out just some mostly useless plants and not more meaningful rewards, such as for example stacks of wood, stone, or more rare materials or unique items. They give out cosmetics rarely, true, but also they have no practical effect on gameplay and are just for show.

Taming animals also gives no benefit. Opening up caves or finding hidden spots leads to nothing meaningful most of the time, just bunches of geodes, some useless chest again, and so on. Just once i happened to open a cave with Crystals in it which was actually something useful - for a change.


4. The world is too small and players can see all of it very soon, the sense of discovery dies out quickly because of this.


To sum it up: decent game for this genre but should have learned more from the already good ones on the market and expand itself more - as of now it may have a million quests but they all are the same, in terms of ACTUAL content, meaningful content for players i mean, the competition has the upper hand big time. the biggest problem is it's repetitive, very repetitive and without enough side activities to mitigate this, as seen in other games of the same genre.

[mskitty]

Taming or feeding animals gives you resources you need to make things with like eggs, milk, fur, wool and so on, and once they are tamed or full grown you don't have to feed them anymore which is one good thing. You need the geodes for the minerals for crafting items.

Considering that this game is made by a mom and pop dev team you can't expect to get the same kind of quality as in a game like MTAP. I think the worst thing is that there is no "sort all" for the storage and none of the work stations are capable of drawing out of the storage so you are constantly going in and out of the boxes and that aspect alone is a severe grinder.

I don't expect many improvements to made to this game, somewhere on this forum somebody posted that this game is in early release even though it does not say that on the store page, I guess it was some kind of error that it got left off the description but that explains why this game is so rough and if any improvements are made it will probably be a long time down the road so you either play it for what it is or stop playing.

[Tamaster]

Originally posted by mskittynips:

Taming or feeding animals gives you resources you need to make things with like eggs, milk, fur, wool and so on, and once they are tamed or full grown you don't have to feed them anymore which is one good thing. You need the geodes for the minerals for crafting items.

Considering that this game is made by a mom and pop dev team you can't expect to get the same kind of quality as in a game like MTAP. I think the worst thing is that there is no "sort all" for the storage and none of the work stations are capable of drawing out of the storage so you are constantly going in and out of the boxes and that aspect alone is a severe grinder.

I don't expect many improvements to made to this game, somewhere on this forum somebody posted that this game is in early release even though it does not say that on the store page, I guess it was some kind of error that it got left off the description but that explains why this game is so rough and if any improvements are made it will probably be a long time down the road so you either play it for what it is or stop playing.

Alright i guess taming is decent enough then. Ye i knew about the geodes for gold etc.

I see, then i guess this game is one of those that release from early access and then still needs updates for ages - i don't get why they simply didn't wait more for full release.

[mskitty]

Originally posted by Tamaster:

Originally posted by mskittynips:

Taming or feeding animals gives you resources you need to make things with like eggs, milk, fur, wool and so on, and once they are tamed or full grown you don't have to feed them anymore which is one good thing. You need the geodes for the minerals for crafting items.

Considering that this game is made by a mom and pop dev team you can't expect to get the same kind of quality as in a game like MTAP. I think the worst thing is that there is no "sort all" for the storage and none of the work stations are capable of drawing out of the storage so you are constantly going in and out of the boxes and that aspect alone is a severe grinder.

I don't expect many improvements to made to this game, somewhere on this forum somebody posted that this game is in early release even though it does not say that on the store page, I guess it was some kind of error that it got left off the description but that explains why this game is so rough and if any improvements are made it will probably be a long time down the road so you either play it for what it is or stop playing.

Alright i guess taming is decent enough then. Ye i knew about the geodes for gold etc.

I see, then i guess this game is one of those that release from early access and then still needs updates for ages - i don't get why they simply didn't wait more for full release.

I don't get it either other than they want the money coming in, if I had known this game was early release I wouldn't of bought it, I bought a early release once and it was awful so I refunded it after 45 minutes of play. If you look on wiki there are several things for this game that says WIP (work in progress)

[Tamaster]

Originally posted by mskittynips:

Originally posted by Tamaster:

Alright i guess taming is decent enough then. Ye i knew about the geodes for gold etc.

I see, then i guess this game is one of those that release from early access and then still needs updates for ages - i don't get why they simply didn't wait more for full release.

I don't get it either other than they want the money coming in, if I had known this game was early release I wouldn't of bought it, I bought a early release once and it was awful so I refunded it after 45 minutes of play. If you look on wiki there are several things for this game that says WIP (work in progress)

Yeah definitely looks like it came out of the oven half-baked. It's not bad mind you but it just feels like it could give out so much more and also needs a lot of polishing and little tweaks that are sorely missing out.

[mskitty]

Originally posted by Tamaster:

Originally posted by mskittynips:

I don't get it either other than they want the money coming in, if I had known this game was early release I wouldn't of bought it, I bought a early release once and it was awful so I refunded it after 45 minutes of play. If you look on wiki there are several things for this game that says WIP (work in progress)

Yeah definitely looks like it came out of the oven half-baked. It's not bad mind you but it just feels like it could give out so much more and also needs a lot of polishing and little tweaks that are sorely missing out.

Totally agree.

[CardboardJourney]

This game was and is designed and managed by 3 people. They are constantly updating it. With a new update with a dungeon coming fairly soon. There is a sort all function now. With over 300 hrs in this game. Starting when a lot of the stuff we have now wasn't in. I understand the frustration. This game was designed to be kinda a lazy game. Build, farm, raise animals and do quests at your own pace. If anyone needs any help or tips. Im always open to answer to the best of my knowledge.

As for the In Progress status. This game was meant to have the Early Access tag. However how I understand it is Steam Messed up and they later had to add it into the description. Once the game was posted steam isn't able to remove and reset to put the correct tags.

[mskitty]

Originally posted by EloquentXSilence:

This game was and is designed and managed by 3 people. They are constantly updating it. With a new update with a dungeon coming fairly soon. There is a sort all function now. With over 300 hrs in this game. Starting when a lot of the stuff we have now wasn't in. I understand the frustration. This game was designed to be kinda a lazy game. Build, farm, raise animals and do quests at your own pace. If anyone needs any help or tips. Im always open to answer to the best of my knowledge.

As for the In Progress status. This game was meant to have the Early Access tag. However how I understand it is Steam Messed up and they later had to add it into the description. Once the game was posted steam isn't able to remove and reset to put the correct tags.

That blue arrow does NOT sort anything it just transfers stuff out your backpack into the box you have open, I tried it once and it put coal, flowers, geodes and other things into my egg box which is the box I opened, and it didn't even group the eggs from my backpack with the eggs in my box it just put them in the open slots. Sorting is being able to open only ONE box hit sort all and have the items go into every box, the eggs go into the egg box in the slots that have less than 30 to group with the same item, the coal go into the slot that has less than 30 coal in a different box to group with the same item, the stone go into the slot that has less than 30 stone in yet another box so that it groups with the same item. We still have to go from box to box sorting everything if you like to have some sort of organization and it's very time consuming and irritating. I guess if you have never played MTAP and seen a sort all storage system you probably don't understand what I mean and why the storage in this game is so ridiculous.

And what is the point in the game of having specific crates for each item if the game is not capable of putting those items into their designated crates? Why do we have eggs crates if the game can't put eggs in the egg crate, or bottles in the bottle crate, seeds in the seed crate, etc... If this is the way the game is going to work then we should have only one type of storage crate.

[CardboardJourney]

Next to the Naming icon. There is a little circle arrow thing. It sorts.Only sorts whats in the Box though I think. Dont really use it much. You have to manually put in what you want. I think all the different crates are for decoration mostly. I dont even use them. I use Storage sheds for everything. Then just label them. I just started on MTAP so idk how that is yet. So no there is no sort all for all crates. I would suggest it to the devs on the Discord. I have like 30 sheds or more full of items. I just got used to it.

[mskitty]

Originally posted by EloquentXSilence:

Next to the Naming icon. There is a little circle arrow thing. It sorts.Only sorts whats in the Box though I think. Dont really use it much. You have to manually put in what you want. I think all the different crates are for decoration mostly. I dont even use them. I use Storage sheds for everything. Then just label them. I just started on MTAP so idk how that is yet. So no there is no sort all for all crates. I would suggest it to the devs on the Discord. I have like 30 sheds or more full of items. I just got used to it.

I got several of the different storage boxes as gifts from the npc's from doing quests so I make use of them, I just got a storage shed from the egg hunt and I'm using that right now for overflow. I'm not on the discord but I would hope that the devs read through the forum once in awhile. When you get a little farther into MTAP you will see how sub par the storage system is in this game and why it is so frustrating.

[mskitty]

I tried the circle arrow and it is just for sorting what is in that box which is kind of useless, I think most people can figure out how to put the same items together in one slot when they are putting things away.