TheLastBaron

Stardew Valley

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So I hadn't even heard of this until yesterday but it's pretty much a Harvest Moon-alike and it looks super cool. I really liked the old Harvest Moon games, but haven't been a fan of anything that's come out in the past 10 years or so (though I haven't played all of them, maybe some are good). This looks cool though. Has anyone played it yet? I'll probably pick it up and give it a go when I have some free time.

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I've played through the first season so far, and I'm fairly optimistic about it.

 

A disordered list of things I like:

  • Terraria's inventory system works really well for a Harvest Moon-style game, because switching tools is not a chore unto itself.
  • You are limited to giving villagers gifts twice a week, which lends to just handing stuff out spontaneously instead of creating obsessive "gifting runs" that ended up defining the bulk of even my early Harvest Moon experiences.
  • None of the marriage candidates appear to be pre-pubescent, unlike certain Harvest Moon games.
  • After you figure out how fishing works, it's pretty entertaining. It feels like Flappy Bird, even if it doesn't look anything like it.
  • There are at least two alcoholics in town, which seems to have been the hallmark of Harvest Moon games I actually enjoyed.
  • When you cut down trees, they explode into a dozen little branches, Terraria-style.

 

Stuff that I don't really like:

  • The only way to save is to sleep, which I think works out to roughly every 30 minutes.
  • The fishing tutorial was vague enough that I had to brute-force my way to understanding it. It only took 2 or 3 attempts, but it wasn't a good moment for my trust in the game.
  • Walking diagonally has been scientifically proven to be slower than waling orthogonally, and it feels kind of bad.
  • You have to go to the options to turn on auto-run when there is no reason to ever walk.
  • The otherwise pretty neat side-job system only gives you two days to fulfill requests, which feels like the bare minimum amount of time to reasonably complete them.
  • There is a Wal-Mart clone in town that is threatening to ruin the local business and do other devious corporate things. I always liked that the Harvest Moon games made the case for rural life by just being super idyllic, rather than by defining itself in direct opposition to something.

 

Things I am not yet sure or ambivalent about:

  • It seems like the farming system is potentially nearly as baroque as the later Harvest Moons, but I also don't feel like I'm being actively shamed for not understanding how to make my crops 5-STAR GRADE S+++.
  • I have avoided getting animals so far because I hated livestock in every Harvest Moon game, so I can't speak on Stardew Valley's livestock one way or the other.
  • Mining is engrossing enough, but I never liked combat systems in my farming sims. You can kill a slime with a sword in this game, but I don't want to.
  • Some of the villager interactions ring with a low-intensity pathos that the earlier Harvest Moon games excelled at, with the notable exception of almost every single marriage candidate.

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Hmm, interesting. I've been eyeing Story of Seasons for a while but never pulling the trigger since my wife and I share the 3DS so I never know when I'll get the chance to play it.

 

Edit: Also, holy crap, 1833 good reviews, only 23 negative on Steam. That might be the best ratio I've ever seen.

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Hmm, interesting. I've been eyeing Story of Seasons for a while but never pulling the trigger since my wife and I share the 3DS so I never know when I'll get the chance to play it.

 

Edit: Also, holy crap, 1833 good reviews, only 23 negative on Steam. That might be the best ratio I've ever seen.

Story of Seasons falls into the same trap as most of the recent Harvest Moon games: If take a break from it for more than a week or two, I am completely lost. I think it's a significant improvement on A New Beginning (it is less up its own butt with ANB's "you can build and move everything" mechanics), but it's still a game weighed down by twenty years of feature creep.

 

Also worth noting that one of my gripes about Stardew Valley has already been fixed (the "auto-run" option is automatically turned on), and the devs are working on making diagonal movement feel better. I feel better and better about the game as I go along. It's a really good farm sim.

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This game popped up out of nowhere for me too. I've only really played Harvest Moon: Back to Nature, but I used to love that game. Will probably be picking this up soon.

 

Was this game made by just one person? Really impressive.

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Story of Seasons falls into the same trap as most of the recent Harvest Moon games: If take a break from it for more than a week or two, I am completely lost. I think it's a significant improvement on A New Beginning (it is less up its own butt with ANB's "you can build and move everything" mechanics), but it's still a game weighed down by twenty years of feature creep.

 

Also worth noting that one of my gripes about Stardew Valley has already been fixed (the "auto-run" option is automatically turned on), and the devs are working on making diagonal movement feel better. I feel better and better about the game as I go along. It's a really good farm sim.

 

I actually haven't played a ton of Harvest Moon games (the first couple, and the most recent Rune Factory really) so I don't know if the feature creep would be cool (having all those new options) or frustrating (not understanding mechanics from earlier games.)

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I actually really liked Story of Seasons for a few reasons - it made farming much much faster than the older GBA & DS games & it got rid of the dungeon style mine altogether.

I might try out Stardew Valley, as it looks up my alley, but I think I might wait till the new Story of Seasons comes out and which speaks to me more. The flexibility of playing on my 3DS for this type of game is really appealing.

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Have they announced a new Story of Seasons? I was looking around trying to find a press release but came up blank.

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http://nichegamer.com/2016/01/story-of-seasons-good-friends-of-the-three-villages-revealed-for-the-3ds/

 

Yeah, I buy only a handful of games each year, and don't know if I can justify 3 harvest moon (type) purchases in 2016 (i got A New Beginning earlier this month, because I was jonesing and had a 3ds gift card).

If they say that story of seasons is delayed to 2017 for US release, then I'll probably just make the stardew jump.

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Looking at past games it looks like it's generally a year between the Japanese releases and localized releases so I'd imagine it'd be a summer 2017 release here.

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For anyone who has played it, how difficult is this game? I could imagine a  game like this being either really relaxing or incredibly stressful. Part of me wants to escape from my day to day problems with a happy farming game, but another part of me is scared that failing at a virtual career will only deepen my anxieties about my real life one.

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I found this slower paced than I expected (I know, what should I expect from a farming sim) and less story oriented. That being said, I had fun playing for about 4 hours yesterday, but I'm likely to just play a day or two occasionally rather than playing al day again.

 

It does make me want to grab Story of Seasons though.

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For anyone who has played it, how difficult is this game? I could imagine a  game like this being either really relaxing or incredibly stressful. Part of me wants to escape from my day to day problems with a happy farming game, but another part of me is scared that failing at a virtual career will only deepen my anxieties about my real life one.

 

I'm about 10 hours in and it's been extremely chill so far. There aren't really any hard failure states (your farm can't go bankrupt or anything), so playing "poorly" just means you aren't earning money as quickly. I haven't played much Harvest Moon, but the pacing feels a lot like Animal Crossing where you set your own goals and do them at your own pace.

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After playing a few minutes of HM: Friends of Mineral Town (too small screen, DS Lite buttons uncomfortable to hold down shoulders) and HM: Magical Melody (SD is UGLY on my 55' TV and I can't find my NGC MEMORY card) I finally caved and bought this.

I'm glad I did. The graphics are gorgeous and the controls on a 360 pad are glorious. The use of the right stick for menus is good. This will be my new chill out game.

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The only thing kinda 'hard' about this game was getting the hang of the fishing, I'm fine with it now, but those first few days it was kinda frustrating, since that's also when I really needed to catch some damn sardines! Could this be the Dark Souls of fishing sims??? I also know I wasted some time getting going in my first fall and it's really nagging me.

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After playing a few minutes of HM: Friends of Mineral Town (too small screen, DS Lite buttons uncomfortable to hold down shoulders) and HM: Magical Melody (SD is UGLY on my 55' TV and I can't find my NGC MEMORY card) I finally caved and bought this.

I'm glad I did. The graphics are gorgeous and the controls on a 360 pad are glorious. The use of the right stick for menus is good. This will be my new chill out game.

 

Oh, I didn't know it had controller options. That might make a big difference for me.

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The only thing kinda 'hard' about this game was getting the hang of the fishing, I'm fine with it now, but those first few days it was kinda frustrating, since that's also when I really needed to catch some damn sardines! Could this be the Dark Souls of fishing sims???

 

I've been playing this via Steam streaming to my Mac laptop, and fishing is impossible. Maybe it's the slight input delay from streaming or maybe I'm just terrible at fishing, but... man. Fortunately, there are mods that disable the minigame. I'm sorely tempted to install one.

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So I have dumped an insane amount of time into this game already despite having only gotten it on Wednesday or Thursday.

 

I adore this game. Unlike the SNES Harvest Moon, there's no time restraint on whatever goal you can achieve (and whether or not that "finishes" the game I have yet to see). The result is that you can play it at your own pace. As a result, the game also doesn't require you to adopt all forms of money making to make progress for the most part. As your character earns ranks in each of the skills, you eventually get to make some pretty defining choices. Like in the "Farming" skill you ultimately choose if you want to be better at growing crops or raising animals. Sticking to one or the other exclusively are pretty lucrative options (though crops, if you play video games hard mechanically, will super-outdo animal raising).

 

I agree with the OP about gift-giving limitations. I played Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town and oh my god, to see any sort of progress in making friends with people you had to dump so much time and effort (even to the extent of having an inefficient farm). I do wish there were better cues on who would like what gifts though. One thing I noticed is that marriage candidates are labeled as being single regardless of your character's gender, so I'm wondering how sexuality works out in the game. I hope it's open-ended because why not having it work that way?

 

The combat is sadly a required aspect of this game. Luckily it's as shallow as I was hoping - swing weapon at things a few times until they die. Some screenshots of the game made it look like it was an action RPG with lightning magic and such and I was prepared to avoid spending money to play it. But anyway, yeah, combat is necessary because in the mine you have to protect yourself while you just roam around for minerals and other valuables.

 

One of the main projects in the game you work on is the town Community Center. In a nutshell it's a fixed set of gathering quests to unlock functions or areas of the game. There's two ways to handle it. The first way, which lends to the rural-living aspect, is to gather "bundles" of items. It's stuff like having one of each of the main crops from spring, then summer, etc. Or bundles of the things you can forage in each season. The other option, which I call the "sell-out" option, is to help the Wal-Mart-like entity buy the community center and turn it into a warehouse. From there, rather than gather stuff, you just buy the unlocks with raw cash.

 

As far as villagers go, the game pretty much has one of every fictional character archetype possible. As an example, among the teenagers there's the emo kid who stays in the basement 'til night time and he smokes away from his parents, and there's also the kid who skateboards and I think plays rock music.

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Fishing was a nightmare for me initially, but it gets a lot easier once you get a better rod and level your fishing skill a bit. I'm catching about 90% of the fish now, but there are still some that seem to be deliberately extra erratic.

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The rod is an illusion. What actually makes fishing easier is experience - both the mechanic and just you the player having time spent with it. It reminds me of the fishing in Breath of Fire 3 a lot, though the major difference is you can't manually manipulate the bar you need to keep over the fish icon. The fishing in BoF3 was boss as fuck, my favorite fishing mini-game ever. This game easily takes second place.

 

But yeah. As you gain levels in the fishing skill, the bar you use during the mini-game to reel in the fish gets larger. Attaching bait is a big plus I would promote because the frequency of hits grows by a large margin. Using tackle is meant to be a difficulty slider. If you have a good handle on things you don't really need it. Unless you're using the treasure hunting tackle.

 

By the way, for all the skills in the game, at level 5 you pick a branching path to specialize on, and at level 10 choose a final specialization based on that previous choice. So for the farming skill you can pick between more valuable crops or more valuable animal goods at level 5. At level 10 for the crops option you can choose faster growing crops or more money return on artisan goods (wine and such). The level 10 animal goods choice is befriending coop animals faster (chickens, ducks, etc) or befriending barn animals faster (cows, sheep, etc) (befriending being important to making animals happy; more happiness means more product / better product).

 

I bring this up because I want to steer people away from one of the level 5 fishing options. The one that makes crab traps have a reduced cost to build. Crab traps are the most useless thing in this game and I'm mad at myself for picking it. Better to get the 25% fish sale price increase, and from there choose to make it 50% or have more treasures found. Crab traps usually trap garbage, but even when they catch things they're meant to the monetary return isn't worth a damn.

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I'm trying to figure out what happens when you get the glittering boulder removed (the purple glitter rock by the mine entrance, in the river). It's one of the community center milestones. If it turns out it does something crazy like making crab traps more worthwhile I'm gonna scream.

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Picked this up, it's really quite good. Honestly, in a holistic sense it might be the best game I've played in a long time. I can't really complain about any aspect of it, except for the most middling of things (Inventory feels a little clunky, the map is really big and it takes forever to walk places) and those are fading into the background fast, and kinda making everything more satisfying (I shouldn't bring every tool to every job, and having to plan the day around an hour or two of walking actually provides some meaning to those decisions. It's... weirdly lifelike? Actually reminds me a little of a summer spent gardening for a farmers market.).

I did find one bug though, anyone else have this? If you scythe at a basic wooden fence it duplicates it without removing the original fence, seemingly twice per fence piece? It's kinda handy actually, with the fence decay and all. A tiny bit of research suggests it's only an issue with the GOG version of the game. It gets a little annoying when you are actually trying to scythe down crops surrounded by fences though.

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I'm hooked, this game is terrific (and has way more stuff going on than I expected!). 

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