Town Upgrades, Danos Projects, are anything but a QoL change

Wicked Feedback
1

Greatings Developers, fellow Cerim.

Together Update made improvements to the game; however, today I want to talk about a clear downgrade - the town buildproject system.
I know, in the past, there was some feedback to remove the wait timers on building projects. Then, I was indifferent to the topic; today I am not.

The timers are gone, but in a true Monkey Paw action the resource requirements were double. One could argue this is reasonable, if there were an infinite amount of resources available. BUT THERE ARE NOT! A map has a fixed amount of resource nodes, so that the amount the player can acquire is quite finite.
The next problem is, players now have to spend twice the time to gather resources to meet the quota. Thus, progress time that was gated by a passive timer is now transformed into an active resource grind.
The absolut worst part is - building projects now require refined resources, like Iron bar not Iron ore. This means, you now have to wait at the furnice or the sawmill till raw ingredients are refined. It alos means, you have to frequntly queue new logs/ores, which even more busy work than a ticking timer.

In summary:

  • The resource amount was doubled, which doubles the gathering time of finite resource nodes
  • Wait timers are remobed BUT…
  • …building projects now require refined resources, so that the “removed” timers are transfered to resource refining facilities
  • Together Upgrade did no QoL improvements to building projects, wait timers were reshuffled on top of doubled cost.

This development is anything but player friendly.

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I am not sure if the resource cost was doubled due to the assumption that many people will contribute to it. If that is the case, as a solo player, it would be nice to have these costs halved at least in exchange for not letting people join my world

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This could be the idea behind the raise. It is still a bad idea thoug, since there are only so many resource nodes on a map, regardless how many players are in a reals.

And it still royally screws solo players.

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It seems to me that even in the beta the costs were increasing, and then they increased them even more after the change.

Since materials have to be farmed and not obtained simply by exploring well, the projects have always been a bit strange, in Ori and the Will of The Wisps there was a key item for the projects and the progression was much more beautiful and satisfying.

It’s strange how clay granite and salt stone become literally useless after you finish the projects.

In my opinion it makes no sense to use iron and wood both to strengthen weapons and to build projects and now that the costs have increased it is even more evident as problem, I talk about it here: The Crafting Materials are an Unintuitive Mess.

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This is quite interesting to read, because I haven’t played before the Together update, meaning I was just faced with the refinery gate.

It, along with inventory runs, is what made drop the game for now, because it forces you to either sit idle next to a refinery or just come back every X minutes to actually progress.

These timed mechanics (daily, and the refinery) are somewhat always present in this type of survival crafting game, but it’s so out of place for such a well crafted and narrative rich game. It just cheapens the well crafted game they have.

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