First gonna start with that I love love this game. Everything outside of the town stuff has me hooked but once you enter the town the momentum takes a harsh drop for me. I appreciate how gorgeous the town is, and I see where they are going with the vibes with it being multilayered and vertical. However this was a pain and a drag to get to do a lot of the things asked of you in Town.
I had done it before when No Rest started with the Early Access, didn’t care for the town stuff but did it anyways because I was hooked with the rest of the game , took a long break, came back and the pain to do all those things again hit harder for me. When doing it for the first time, there was a little sense of awe, but even with the first time the “time to return to action” was a bit long and I felt that. Looking at games like Diablo 2, you spend some time in town, but all that is on the player. Players can take their time, or go go go. You have that option in D2. In this, the first time has you spending way to much time in this, and even returning to this space is a low point for me when I have to manage this space.
For first timers you got to navigate this large space, figure out which layer of this town cake you need to be in, and it’s just too much running around. Side quests to having you navigate this space is there to help you learn the lay of the land as many games are designed to do to learn the space, but it’s at the cost of not returning to action in a decent time. I get there are games like Elden Ring or Monster Hunter that may have you spend time in the town, but you also have the option to make your time there as quick or as long as you want.
Then there is the town building. I enjoy gathering resources, minding for ore, gathering lumber. I enjoy using these resources to rebuild areas of the town, but what I don’t like is needing to save money to buy houses and filling in that space. I enjoy survival games, but it is not clicking with me here. Perhaps because I already don’t like spending time running around in this space in the first place, so to also add time to craft, place, rearrange, move, and so on is a real drag for me. On top of that I enjoy the vendors and smiths outside of the house, so to have to build something inside a house instead of interacting with vendors is an odd choice for me. I liken it to Resident Evil 4 and Resident Evil Requiem. In RE4, you interact with a vendor with loads of personality. He’s fun to listen to, and you get a sense of joy to interact with them. In RE Reqium, you get a vendor but this time it’s a box, and there is not personality to it. The box serves the same purpose as the vendor, but you miss out on the personality and life that the RE4 vendor brought. In Monster Hunter I love going to the cats to cook my food. In this I don’t want to interact with these spaces that have no life to them in a game as bleak and dark as this. I like interacting with the vendors outside instead of inside my sad home.
What I would like to see changed though I doubt any of this will do much since so much of this town and how it’s structured is so cemented into the game.
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Fast travel in town. Games like Monster Hunter World have large spaces too. I understand that some people like the immersion to walk this space especially when so much work is put into them. I enjoy using this space (in MHW) to walk around and look at everything as I hit all the spots I need to hit, but I also have the option to teleport around to these specific spots for times I want to go go go. If I am forced to ruuuuun all the way up the tower or elevator to talk to the old guy to get my upgrade, and then runnnn all the way down because I forgot to talk to the smith, then that is a problem. There is no redo Sacarament since that art and level design is locked in, so whatever eases navigating this space is a plus for me.
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Don’t force player to have to build a house and all the things required that comes with having to need a house. Needing a house to then have to build chests, to then having to sort items in those chests, to then having to build multiple chests because one is not enough, to then having to resort things again, to then having to arrange these chests, in game where the selling point is all the stuff outside of the town…is well please please don’t have me do this. I play survival games because they are structured as survival games, and perhaps there is a world where that can work in a ARPG such as this, but it’s just not clicking here for me. Let players who want to just build up the town, and it’s vendors, and only that. People who want to have a house, build all the things that a vendor would do but instead are inside all in one place, and all that can have that if they so choose want to interact with that. Things like multiple chests…. please just having multiple tabs and where one chests is shared, so a chest next to the vendor and a chest in your home have the same shared stuff. If there are no vendors for things you would be doing on your own in your house, then yes those would need vendors.
I was excited to have my friends play with me, but I knew as soon as we got to the town they would drop off and sure enough they did. For the same reasons too. It’s not a case of short attention spans or anything because we play survival games, and we play games where the “return to action” may be long. However there is a difference when a game is sold to us that it’s this amazing ARPG, but you have these points of the game that slow you way down, and done so in a way that we don’t engage with it.