Forget that 'Builder' Part, How About Being a Governor?

Well, that's the major shift in focus for the newest entry in Pathea Games' 'My Time At...' series, My Time at Evershine.

The Kickstarter is now live, has already passed it's initial goal, and is well on its way through the stretch goals.

I guessed correctly that the events in My Time at Sandrock led directly to the North Development Plan and recruitment of you as the new Governor of the Evershine Settlement. 

In case you didn't know, you're the Govenor now.
From the My Time at Evershine Kickstarter page.

The North Development Plan is an ambitious plan by the Free Cities' Alliance to repopulate the area near the border with the Duvos Empire. That northern border has been empty since the last invasion by Duvos, and you can bet dollars to doughnuts that that area is still coveted by the Empire. The Duvos Empire has not exactly been quiet, given the events in My Time at Portia and My Time at Sandrock, so you can bet you're going to see them again in this newest project by Pathea.

Judging by the YouTube video, the character design is looking more mature than that from the first two My Time games, but given the switch in perspective from that of a Builder to a Governor, it seems a good time for such a change to be made.

Apparently Pathea has learned a thing or two about tightening things, such as reducing the number of romanceable characters* from a metric ton (my opinion) to a more reasonable number of 8. They are also tightening the story a bit further, which is also fine with me.

Oh, and I won't spoil it for you, but apparently Pathea has learned a thing or two from the last two Legend of Zelda entries. (You can watch the video for those cues.) Given that it seems they've been building the game in-house over these years, that they were able to integrate more capabilities to their series is a welcome addition. 

(Now, can you PLEASE take these learnings and fix the pathing in My Time at Portia?)

***

Will I support the Kickstarter?

Well, they don't exactly need me right now since already they've shot past their initial goals, so I'm content to ride out the development cycle and purchase the game when it goes live. To be honest, I'm rather shocked by the number of people who backed the game at the $500 and higher levels, because that's not exactly small potatoes.** I am impressed, however, and I will eagerly await this release when it gets closer. 

The little crew at Chongqing, China continues to impress me with their vision and work ethic, so best of luck to them in getting this project to completion.

*If you so choose, that is.

**That's not my money, though, so I kind of just shrug and move along.

How Much Choice is Too Much?

One of the reasons why I prefer an MMO such as WoW Classic Era is that it simply doesn't have that much choice when it comes to in-game activities.

Sure, you can go wherever you want in the two continents, you can go into dungeons, Battlegrounds, and raids (if high enough level), and you can even do some repeatable quest grinding out in Silithus if you're so inclined. Or just hang around and fish or just kill things. It sounds like a lot, but compared to a lot of other MMOs it isn't.

Even compared to other video games it isn't that much.

In the early part of the Summer, I played through My Time at Sandrock, the sequel to My Time at Portia. 

That was about the best I could do to create
another Redbeard. Considering I was supposed
to be a "youngster" of about 18-20-ish, it'll do.

Compared to the original game, the new one has several quality of life advancements and presents more of the post-apocalyptic world than ever before. The story, while a bit grimmer than that found in My Time at Portia, is well done.* If you've ever played a sort of building / creating game such as My Time at Sandrock, you know that romancing and potentially marrying a character is a big part of the game. 

And that, my friends, is where I fell down on the job.

There are potentially 21 romanceable options to choose from, and based on my own personal preferences I've whittled it down to 9.** Well, I couldn't make a decision, so I kept putting it off and putting it off, and then... The game ended. 

Damn.

That wasn't what I had in mind. I was going to focus on someone, but I found the options presented to me so appealing that I couldn't make a choice before the game ended.*** All of the characters spoke to different aspects of my personality and what I found attractive, yet no single option presented itself above all others. 

Again, in my experience real life doesn't operate like a video game in that manner --the Tinder-fueled appeal of hookups notwithstanding****-- so when you get right down to it, I had nine options to choose from and I couldn't select one. When everything has a certain level of appeal, trying to decide which option to choose leads to a form of analysis-paralysis.

***

This is not a new phenomenon, as it's been studied before. One of the more recent studies, conducted by researchers from the University of Buffalo's Department of Psychology, discusses how trying to make a choice between options that have a high level of importance make people freeze with indecision based on the number of choices presented. Maybe selecting what you want for dinner from a menu may not be a life altering choice, but if you present it in the context of a first date or a business lunch with a client, the stakes are raised and selecting poorly may cost you in other ways.

Or, to put it another way, take a look at Covenants in a recent Retail WoW expansion, Shadowlands.

You'd think that Blizz or Wowhead would have a usable
graphic, but nooo.... I had to go to a boosting service's
website, Boosting Ground, to find a good version.
Still, just remember that you're DEAD if you're looking
at this. Well, theoretically so, and handwaving is involved.

When you reach the end of the main questline where you have visited and quested in all four Covenants, you're asked to choose one. One of those four would provide a good buff to your abilities, but if you choose the wrong one, you originally had to work hard in-game to be able to switch Covenants to the "correct one". 

If you don't have any knowledge of which Covenant to select --"What is this Wowhead you speak of?"-- you kind of just have to wing it. Knowing WoW players as any MMO player worth their salt does, if you don't pick the "correct" one you're going to get crapped on in group content. And let's be honest, switching Covenants as originally designed would have put you far enough behind any friends you play with that, well... Yeah, the stakes are pretty high here.

Sucks to be you, homie. 

                    --Blizzard, probably

So while the number of choices isn't high, the stakes were high enough that the potential was there to simply freeze with indecision.

Blizzard eventually learned their lesson and eased the restrictions on Covenant selection, lowering the stakes a bit, but one place where they haven't really learned their lesson is in the volume of activities found in Retail WoW.

***

In Retail WoW you don't suffer from a lack of things to do.

This is no means an exhaustive list, but off the top of my head as a Classic Andy here's what you can do in Retail WoW:

• Quests
• Main Questline
• Leveling Questline
• Max Level Questline
• Side Quests
• Daily Quests
• Weekly Quests
• Monthly Quests (are these still a thing?)
• Grind Reputation(s)
• Darkmoon Faire
• Transmog Collecting
• Professions
• Crafting Orders
• Weeklies (no more dailies, is that correct?)
• Just craft/gather to sell (or wait for a queue to pop)
• Delves
• Dungeons
• Normal
• Heroic
• Mythic+ (Coming soon!)
• Raids (Coming soon!)
• LFR
• Normal
• Heroic
• Mythic
• Battlegrounds
• Arenas
• Various 2x2 through 5x5
• Solo Shuffle (have I got that right?)
• World PvP
• Marked as PvP (or whatever it's called now)
• Duelling
• Are there flying races that could technically be put in here?
• Pet Battles (Is this still a thing?)
• OLD STUFF
• Things to do from previous expansions
• Level an alt
• Sit in a capital city and talk smack on Trade Chat

On the face of it, all of this choice must be good, right?

But to me, I look at this list and kind of mildly freak out. It's like going to Jungle Jim's here in Cincinnati and trying to figure out what hot sauce to buy:

Look, this is only half of their display; the other
side has just as many different hot sauces.
From Reddit, but since I go several times a year,
I can confirm that this is accurate.

If you know what you want, great. If you're planning on following whatever Wowhead or Icy Veins tells you to do, kudos. If your guild has already mapped out what you should do --and you're fine enough with being told explicitly what you're supposed to do with your time-- go for it. But if you're new, interested in trying something new, or you have no particular choice in mind, well... Good luck with that.

Yes, this list above does cover a wide range of activities, but if you're new/returning to the game, the number of choices alone can induce analysis-paralysis.

Or you feel like you have to do all the things, and that induces burnout. Just ask Battle for Azeroth or Shadowlands veterans about all of the activities you were expected to do if you were on a raiding team, as if you were just checking off boxes on a daily checklist at work, and they'll tell you the burnout was real.*****

All of these choices might not be readily apparent to long-time players, because they've slowly been added to over the years and as a consequence they're used to them. It's only when you take a step back, walk away for a while, and then return do you realize just how much there is to do and how it can easily confuse people. And that's not even counting all of the systems changes over the years. 

The problem is that the game is going to be 20 years old in a few months, and 20 years is a long time for a video game to acquire baggage. But every time Blizzard actually cuts things from the game --didn't this happen with trimming abilities back in Warlords or Legion or something?-- you get a certain subset of the player base who goes absolutely ballistic. 

The thing is, to grow the game Blizzard will have to do something about this huge list. Something will have to get trimmed out, and some players are going to get butthurt about it. Otherwise, Blizzard will only cater to those who have kept up with the game, and that's a finite number of people. Those people over the years have already prioritized and ranked what they're going to focus on, so they don't have the analysis-paralysis that new or returning people will have. 

Unless someone already has things planned out for you...

To be honest, I'd imagine that there will be
a Generative AI solution for all of this work
in a year or two. Just have an addon play
the game for you and do all of the busy work
before you need to re-engage in time for raiding.
From Maru and Reat via Reddit.

*I can see that --in terms of gameplay-- people may look at Sandrock and think it's pretty much exactly like Portia. That being said, story-wise there's quite a few differences. Well, that and the personalities involved. The moment I arrived at Sandrock, I took an instant dislike to my new boss and I liked the other new builder, which was the reverse of what I experienced at Portia. There are twists and turns to the story, and there were at least a few times where it went in a direction I didn't expect. 

**Of course, real life doesn't work like that, but bear with me on this one.

***Yes, the game does apparently continue after the credits, but... Come on. The game ended. That's like the "Just one more turn..." option in Civ IV after you win the game. You've already ridden off into the sunset, so to speak, so whatever you do doesn't really change anything.

****I could go into a long post on how my psyche works in terms of the hookup culture and how on the surface it might seem fun but that hookups aren't appealing to me, but that's not something I'm going to talk about. Besides, My Time at Sandrock isn't a hookup-fueled game anyway; you first have to become a friend with the person and then you can move into a relationship. That is, if the person agrees to do so, as some of your romance options can push you off and say "nope, not now, I'm busy" or "maybe later" or something to that effect. In that respect, that can be more representative of real life than the "you hit 8 hearts and now they'll say yes" that you get in some games such as Stardew Valley. Even if you do enter a relationship, there's no guarantee that they'll agree to marry you in the end either. (I found that out in My Time at Portia.)

*****As in most expansions, if you come back to it after it's been supplanted by newer expacs, you'll find things not that bad. That confuses the point, however, since you don't have to grind and grind and scrape your way through upwards of two years of doing similar things on an endless treadmill, so yeah it feels better. I discovered that doing the Quel'Danas grind was not my cup of tea in TBC Classic when you have people in guild and outside of guild yelling at people to DO YOUR DAILIES! to progress the story in the Isle. But when I did it on my own back in Cataclysm, I had fun just noodling around Quel'Danas. My past self would never have believed you if you told him what happened in TBC Classic.

A Few More Portia Thoughts

Even though I'm no longer playing My Time at Portia like a maniac, I still am playing to see where the stories go.

And, really, to see which NPC to romance.

I just kind of cringe at the "play date" portion of the game, because it feels like what a child would think that an adult "hanging out" or "date" would be like. Most adults I know wouldn't want to spend an entire play date swinging on swings or riding a seesaw. While those are obviously not required activities, you have to burn through a certain amount of activity in each play date, and that going back and forth from the game room area of the restaurant to sitting down and talking (either inside the restaurant or in the square) just burns up time you don't have.

I'm kind of a "bang for the buck" kind of person, and burning a lot of those "activity tokens" by traditional kid's playground activities delivers the most, so I end up using them a lot in spite of the "Really?? I mean REALLY??" aspect of them.*

One last thought about the play dates: why on earth would an NPC request to meet at one location and they say "Hey, let's do XXX!" which is about 1/2 hour walk away? Why not choose a better location for the starting of the play date in the first place? I get that it might be my choice when I initiate the request for a play date, but when the NPC initiates a date and selects a specific time/location, and then it's all on them to select an activity nearby.

***

There are some cut scenes that make me really want to push the game further, just to see what happens to the story. There's the main story, of course, and there's also the personal story of several characters. The thing that gets me is that only some of the NPCs you can romance have a fully interactive storyline, which kind of bugs me a bit. The ironic thing is that while the game kind of pushes you in the direction of one female and one male NPC --if you play the game you can figure out which is which fairly easily by the side quests they ask you to do-- one of the NPCs you have to actually go and seek out has a couple of cut scenes that are so fully fleshed out that it seems that at some point the devs believed most people would go and try to romance this character.**

I recognize that this is about as "romantic" as a G rated movie is concerned --no Mass Effect stuff (or even SWTOR stuff) here-- but in some ways the story is a bit more adult than I expected. It's a curious blend of kid friendly yet teen/adult-ish content.

***

My Time at Portia has the same save characteristic that Stardew Valley has: saves only happen when you go to sleep for the night, so you lose any activity if you quit the game during the day. This has led to me "pausing" the game by hitting the escape key or another key (such as i for inventory or m for map) and then doing something else around the house for a while because I don't want to lose my place in game. This has the unfortunate side effect of seeming to Steam like I'm playing it for a lot more hours than I really am. I think it told me I'd been playing it for over 100 hours by now, but over that time I think I've only truly played about 30 hours or so.

***

One final side note on MTAP: the adventurer's guild is known as The Flying Pigs. That might sound goofy to people, but me, I'm totally amused.

But not for the reason you might think.

My hometown of Cincinnati has a marathon that is known as The Flying Pig Marathon. It's called that because of Cincinnati's historical connection to the pork packing industry. In the 19th Century, so many hogs and pork processing was peformed in Cincy that it garnered the nickname "Porkopolis". To honor that part of the city's past, for Cincinnati's bicentennial back in 1988, the (then) newly created Bicentennial Commons had statues of flying pigs atop columns like so:

Courtesy of WVXU***

And so when I saw the posters and statue in Portia for The Flying Pigs, my first thought was "someone from Cincinnati must have worked on this project".


Not very likely, given that Pathea Games is a Chinese company, but still....




*Apparently play dates and dating options get better the farther you progress along the storylines, so we'll see.

**Maybe the baser instinct in me says that the devs figured this because "big boobs!", but it's not like she's the only character with a voluptuous build in the game.

***The article the pic came from is Cincinnati's Flying Pig Icon Wasn't Always So Beloved by WVXU and contains a 25 minute audio portion for those who want to listen to the story.

Building for Fun and Profit

I've mentioned before that I play and enjoy the game Stardew Valley, which can be a welcome diversion from other games I play. It's definitely not a deep game by any stretch, but it is a fun and satisfying game. Well, I think I've found a competitor to the "let's play farmer" Stardew Valley.

In the last Steam Winter Sale, I acquired a few titles to play when I wasn't playing any of my "regular" games. Among them was "My Time at Portia", a game that I'd kept my eye on for quite a while. It hadn't been garnering the same overwhelming interest that Stardew Valley had, but the concept of a "builder" type of game in the same Stardew Valley genre, but in 3D* intrigued me. However, I'd been holding back from purchasing the game as it had spent a long time in early access. I do enough IT work for my job to not want to volunteer to be a beta tester, which is what early access effectively means, so I was content to wait for MTaP to officially be released before purchasing the game.

Well, it went live back in mid-late 2019, so when it went on sale in December I finally decided to pull the trigger. My Time at Portia sat around in my Steam Library for a few weeks, and I finally decided to download the game last week to see whether it meets expectations.

My answer is a "sort of yes", but I also haven't stopped playing the game this past week.**

***

My Time at Portia (MTAP for short) is set in what is described as a "post apocalyptic world", but it is far removed from the type of post apocalyptic world that, say, Fallout resides in. There are ruins a-plenty to explore, but most of the countryside and the area around Portia are pretty much an idyllic farming community. You learn over the course of playing the game that there was a 300 year age of darkness across the land after some cataclysmic war --likely a nuclear war with a Nuclear Winter causing the darkness-- and it was only after a plucky adventurer named Peach brought back the sunshine that the world began to recover.

Yeah, I know. 'Peach'? Really?

But regardless, that's just background so you'll find monsters and ruins and whatnot to explore out there in the world, ala D&D or any other setting of that sort.

I'm going to try to avoid some of the finer details here, since you have to discover the game yourself, but I can cover some broad strokes here about the game itself.

You are a builder, taking over your father's old shop that he'd left abandoned years ago. You never really knew your father, so you're just learning a bit about him and Portia, the community he lived in, as you go. The game itself is part construction game, part dating/getting-to-know-the-community game, and part story about Portia itself.

The basics of the game are pretty simple: You go get commissions to build things from either the Guild Hall or from townspeople who reach out to you directly. Typically you have a time limit on how long it will take to get something built, and the early game especially is spent trying to build up your equipment so that you can then actually build things for people. Oh, and acquiring the raw materials to do so from the surrounding countryside (and the ruins). There are abandoned ruins, which are great for ores, stone, and the occasional ancient relic you need to make something with; a countryside with trees, shrubs, and wild animals you can use to get raw materials from; and townspeople/farmers/ranchers who do own shops that might have what you need as well. As you progress, the requests get more and more elaborate, forcing you to upgrade and stockpile raw materials to try to stay one step ahead of the requests. Oh, and you can also upgrade your house and land as you see fit, so there's a metagame surrounding how you want to organize your pad.

Setting that aside, there's the metagame of the townspeople itself. You have a scale of diamonds (for townspeople you can develop friendships with) or hearts (for townspeople you can romance). Interactions with townspeople on a daily basis will raise their approval of you, and as you progress you learn more about them and you unlock the ability to hang out with them. For those who can be romanced, once you get high enough in the heart listings you can then confess your romantic interest in them and the "playdates" turn into "real dates".***

And above this lies the overall story that the devs wanted to present about Portia. When I think I'm at the point where things will slow down, storywise, it picks up again.

***

Okay, that's pretty much how the game goes, mechanically speaking.

Does it scratch my builder's itch? Yes.

Does it scratch my interest in the story? Yes.

Then do I give it a resounding seal of approval? Kind of.

Why the "kind of" response? Well....

1. The graphics, while pretty to look at, aren't designed to appeal to me.
   
   Oh, don't get me wrong, the landscape is really nice, and the buildings/stuff you build are rather nice in a cartoony kind of way. I'd describe that as Wildstar meets Thomas Kincaid, I guess. However, the character design has more than a bit of Rugrats style cartoon in them, and the Rugrats style did not appeal to me. On top of that, you can tell that the character designs were angling to try to appeal to both adults and kids, so some of the marriageable characters look adult (such as Arlo or Petra or Phyllis), and others look like adults with kid-style faces (Sam is the best example here). The character designs also had a certain "street caricature artist" aesthetic to them as well, which kind of bugged me from time to time.
   
2. It needs more polishing.
   
   Even after its official release, I find small bugs here and there, mainly in the writing.
   
   Let me put it out there before anybody else asks: I could tell that the development team's native language was not English almost from the start. There are certain speech patterns that native English speakers have that non-native English speakers have a hard time picking up, and once I noticed the first mistake I started finding them throughout the game. What makes it worse is that about 1/5 of the voice actors' lines are different than the lines on screen. You can tell that changes were made, but QA didn't align the voice actors' lines with the on-screen lines. Given that the voice actors' deviations typically made less sense than the written ones, I suspect that the written lines were the ones that got more polish**** than the spoken lines, and the dev team didn't have the budget to re-record the voice actors.
   
3. The path finding. Oh, the path finding.
   
   Have you seen videos of some of the worst Skyrim path finding bugs? Or maybe the Skyrim spoof? Yeah, it's like that. At one point you're on a quest with an NPC deep in one of the ruins, and I turned around, wondering where on earth the NPC had gotten. Turns out said NPC was underneath the catwalk I was on, walking through the instant death goo below. /sigh
   
   I've also seen bugs where an NPC keeps trying to get on a horse and the NPC keeps flickering between on the ground and on the horse. These are pathfinding issues that have seemingly been solved in most other video games, so the dev team really needs to tweak their code in this space.
   
4. The stereotypes.
   
   If you're looking for deep characterization, video games typically aren't people's first choice. That being said, the NPCs are a laundry list of stereotypes: The Hot Farmgirl, The Idealistic College Student, The Church vs. The Scientists*****, The Greedy Competitor, The Tomboy, The Sassy Waitress With the Brooklyn Accent, The Farmer's Daughter Living with the Elderly Grandma, the Hot Girl with the Mysterious Illness, etc. They even have seven brothers who look and sound like they came right out of an episode of The Sopranos.******
   
   The NPCs would also say the same couple of lines over and over again, depending on where you were with the story, so you quickly got used to the same thing over and over and over.
   
5. The Pacing
   
   At first I thought the game was going to be fairly slow paced, but once you get into the mid-game everything seems to have a timer on it and there seems to be not enough time for me to get into tweaking my house and workspace the way I like it. The game burns through a daily clock much faster than Stardew Valley does, and I have to constantly be on my toes to organize my build schedule properly.
   

Okay, given that list, it's a wonder why I'm still willing to give the game the benefit of the doubt. That's because the issues aside, it's still a fairly well made indie title. I'd be tempted to say that the dev team is likely more familiar with creating mobile games rather than regular PC/XBox/Playstation titles, and there are aspects of MTAP that seem to fit in better with mobile games --particularly the character graphics-- but it's still a decently built game overall. If the dev team continues to fix the bugs --and more importantly get an editor to clean up the language translation issues-- I think that MTAP will do fairly well for itself.

The game is obviously not for everybody, but when it's on sale it's worth a gander. If you like Stardew Valley you might like MTAP.

But I really need to get back to MMOs now....





*And in third person view, no less.

**I finally got around to logging back into WoW and also playing a few other games last night. Nothing fancy, just wanted to work on Cardwyn's Tailoring.

***Really, it's called "Play", and I'm not making this up.

****Although they could REALLY use a lot more polish than this.

*****Okay, this is still a pretty valid trope.

******True Story: Back when I was at college, I went with a group to a conference in New York City. On a Saturday night, we went into Little Italy to get some food. I kid you not, there were tons of little Italian-American restaurants there complete with a guy out in front --typically dressed in a loud suit-- who would try to get us to go inside. No matter which restaurant we passed by, the guy would also have that heavy NYC accent that made the whole thing feel like we'd stepped into a bad gangster movie.