Remove time wasting mechanics that artificially inflate playtime

[Tomek]

There are several improvements that would help remove unnecessary, annoying and time wasting elements that add nothing to the gameplay.
I have seen many of these issues reported separately on the forum, but they all share one common trait. They take a toll on the player in the form of wasted time while adding nothing to the difficulty or the satisfaction of the gameplay.
The main idea is that we should spend as much time as possible doing things that are enjoyable and genuinely challenging, not slow and tedious tasks that artificially inflate the total playtime. Please do not follow the path of many developers who confuse tedium with difficulty.

Here are just a few suggestions to improve the experience with regard to unnecessary time waste:

1. Instant fishing on catch. Fishing currently takes about five seconds every time we want to catch a fish. We are paying with our real time. It is not even a real minigame like the ones used for other resources. It does not require timing, it gives no sense of satisfaction and it is simply a waste of the players valuable time.
2. Auto loot for harvesting resources, faster harvesting and actual rewards for hitting perfect timing. The issues are similar to fishing. We are paying with our time. It is slightly better because getting a Perfect gives a bit of satisfaction, but you still make us pay in real time and that is unacceptable.
3. Put all services and shops in one place. You created a beautiful town and I understand that you want to show it, but you again make us pay with our real time by forcing us to run back and forth. This adds nothing, it brings no enjoyment and it only wastes the time that could be spent on more interesting activities in the game.
4. Shopkeepers should not speak every single time we walk up to them. Every time I want to use a service I must click through at least two lines of text, and after many hours of play I really do not want to listen to that anymore. They can speak while I browse their inventory or when I approach them, but please do not make these lines mandatory to click through every time. Once again you make me pay with my time for something that gives no enjoyment and does not test any skill except patience.

Some things require separate consideration, for example inventory management and the question of whether we really need such a restriction on how many items we can carry. You should think about whether this actually benefits the game in any way, because right now it only forces us to return to town not when we want to, but when some imaginary space runs out. Must I really go back and visit my house to deposit resources, run around town to sell loot, and click through mandatory lines of dialogue I do not want to hear just because other developers impose the same on their players? Break this terrible trend!

There are probably many more examples, but you get the gist. When you implement features, think about hopefully millions of people playing your game (it is great otherwise, so I hope and wish you at least that many) wasting five seconds of their precious time on this earth to catch an artificial fish. If you could reduce that to one second, then for one million players catching 100 fish each, that would save 400 million seconds of life, which is roughly 13 years of life in total.

[sBAM]

1. Fishing will get a minigame
   

   

2. You are getting more XP and more loot if you hit that perfect timing. I don’t have anything against auto loot, but i personally don’t see a reason to implement that, picking up the loot only takes maybe 3 seconds.

3. All the shops are already in proximity of each other. Having everything at one spot/npc isn’t realistic and doesn’t exactly make much sense in a world and character building way.

4. I think that those make the Npc’s really feel “alive” and it doesn’t even take a second to click through the dialog. Adding an option in the settings to turn it off wouldn’t hurt either though.

5. I agree that we need more space for items, especially when we get higher tier items in 1.0 and beyond, but not having a limit to what you can carry doesn’t solve anything. It just leads to players mindlessly running around, not thinking about what to pick up. Additionally, forcing players to take a break from what they are doing and interact with Npc’s and mechanics, can be a good thing. It just needs to be balanced, so it’s somewhere in between, where neither of those cases is predominantly over the other.

[Lombix_4]

Everything @sBAM wrote is “correct”/“I agree with it” I would have written it too if he hadn’t commented first.

But the general idea of ​​removing things that are just wasting time, I agree, and even though all the things that have been said here are minor things they add up.

Like the animation to collect loot, it is a bit too long (it could last half as long or even less), and why it is not cancelable?
I remember thinking the same thing in Dark Souls, Elden Ring solves this problem (by having the dramatic animation only for key items), but in this game where you are always collecting loot the problem is there again and it is even more serious because the loot is everywhere and it is very important to collect it, and the game is designed to be replayable.

There’s a strange delay when changing inventory pages (both the character’s and the shop’s ones). If I have to go 3 pages forward and click the button 3 times, it only goes forward one page because there’s this delay (even if it’s made to avoid double clicks, it should be an option in the settings, not a default setting).

I think the worst problem in this theme is still the wrong implementation of the RNG, such as rerolls with embers (more on that here: The RNG Problem, Enchantment System Vs Gem System (Refined)) or the fact that to find a particular loot you have to be lucky because there is no direct and guaranteed way to get it (and I’m not referring only to unique weapons but also to building materials such as boar tusks, and many others).

In this game if you just want to play with things you find by chance without trying to get things you don’t have, the building experience is ok but in the moment you try to make a build and you need something you don’t have based on the RNG it can take a couple of hours or days to complete the build.

And this then connects to the inventory problem, where the game is full of different loot and your inventory fills up quickly then you have to go back to the city and you can’t sell random things because you probably need them in the future for something you don’t know (like when we get a skull we can’t know what we might need it for in the future, if you’ve played the game you know it’s needed for some armor but you don’t know if you’ll ever need it because you don’t know if the things that require it interest you or not since obviously you don’t know every recipe in the game) so you put it aside, but the chests have a very limited inventory and you’re always placing new chests.

And all this is a great waste of time, given that it would be enough to have a chest for each section of the inventory to have things quite organized.

The construction materials are too redundant, there should be less since there is no need for example for the mermaids to drop 3 different loot (skull, claw and tail) when these materials are used then it competes without a criterion, i.e. why do I need the heart of a bear to make mash gloves?

Is it because I have to go to the area where the bears are to get a piece of equipment of this level?

This is not how it works, as you can find high-level gear without ever interacting with bears or going to advanced areas.

But even if that were the case, Why the bears don’t have a single drop that I can use for everything (any recipe that contains bear parts), what gameplay reason is there for having three different drops from the same mob (and all 3 drops have the exact same role)?

The only two possible gameplay reason that I can see:

1. Immersion: having multiple body parts instead of just one makes the game world seem a little more real (too bad he then we use a bear’s heart to make chainmail gloves, so immersion goes to hell xD, and in any case, creating a gameplay problem over an immersion detail isn’t a good idea).
2. Since the various body parts have different rarities, the player might be happy to have found the rare drop, Too bad this is not the case since if you are looking for the drop to do something in particular, the process is so long that the player feels at most relieved that his frustration is over, and if he finds the drop randomly he doesn’t know its use and therefore he doesn’t even notice it as a rare drop.

At this point, let me trade or transform these pieces into beast blood or beast essence Or something, a more universal crafing maitirlal, like: Beast Blood I, BB II, BB III, BB IV etc. based on the rarity of the loot and the type of beast. You can then use this beast blood to upgrade the gear in more universal ways like the Smithing Stones from Elden Ring, instead of having this mixed and confusing system that serves no one and has the only result of being more grindy and time-consuming.

With a similar system you can also keep the rarity system of the drops as the rarer drops give a higher amount of BB (and money as they already do), although I would prefer if they dropped the BB directly instead of the body parts so as to save time and confusion, or as I already said that each animal/creature drops only one crafting item and not 3.