by svino » Thu Jun 06, 2013 6:39 pm
Thanks for everything Jorb and Loftar.
I have played Haven and Hearth and Salem extensively and many, many other games. However I have yet to find games as innovative, and with a balance between complex and fun as, the games you make. I really admire many of the development decisions that you have taken and the general software structure of Haven and Hearth. I sincerely hope that you will keep developing on Haven and Hearth.
For some reason, there is something wrong with Salem. I think it is because of the bile system and proficiency system. In Haven and Hearth we have lots of stats that we can increase purely by working hard, and we have lots of proficiencies we can increase by studying curiosities which in the end, we don't have to work so hard for once we get our crafting up, but will take time to increase. It's a perfect balance between hard work and you reap what you sow type of gameplay.
In Salem it's not as well executed because there are only 4 meaningful stats really. All the proficiencies don't really matter a lot yet, and even if we want to increase them we have to spend a lot of time finding and studying them. It doesn't really take a long time to study in Salem so we have to sit around and look at our characters grow endlessly to increase proficiencies there.
In Haven and Hearth the game never has to stop, there is no reason why you would stop developing your character ever, but in Salem there is actually a finite point where you can't develop your character any more and when you have 100% pure anything it feels like that you have won the game, aka there is no real reason to play anymore. In Haven and Hearth there is no limit to how long you can keep growing better and better crops. As long as we can keep our quality numbers growing we are actually kind of happy. You could never get that in Salem because there actually is a limit, and once your quality numbers stop growing or start growing VERY slow, you get unhappy.
Salem did have some nice things though that Haven and Hearth probably won't ever see. Stuff like height and climbing was actually pretty cool.
I absolutely love the mining system, the animal husbandry system, the farming system, the LP system and the silk system and I hope that you can keep innovating fun game mechanics/systems to keep players busy and entertained with meaningful stuff to do while they level up their character.
I actually have a small of request to Haven and Hearth that I think would improve the game with the right execution.
Could you think of a way to increase the decoration and personalizing of villages?
In the last couple of worlds I have seen many, many villages. Some of these villages are decorated with tile patterns or drawings which are insanely cool. I also saw some plots in Brodgar with hops planted under the walls to decorate the walls. I've also seen many different amazing layouts of villages. I'd love to see more stuff that could be used to decorate and personalize my village. Maybe it could be simple stuff like statues/decorations of actual hearthlings or objects, or walls colored based on the materials used. Or more development-heavy stuff like custom built buildings, as in a house where you lay down the build plan limited by the materials and carpentry skill used? I'm not really sure what it could be, but I love to experience the innovation in the villages that I pass through. You can be sure that some madman will build a house out of gold just to say that he did it if you implement the feature.
Also some small things that you will read every day at the critique and ideas forum:
Could you get rid of alt banks? Why can't we have hearthlings drop a bag on their hearthfire when they log out so that people can't hide all the pearls that they took from me?
Why was levels removed from animals? It would be cool to find high quality bears where size of the animal would be an indicator of their quality.
I'd love to see a 10-man boat!
We need some unique plants in thicket!
Gardening in Salem was cool but not so useful because of the metagame, does it have potential here?
Can you come up with meaningful ways to support the happiness mechanic?
Can you fix coinage in a way so that villages can have an internal economy of some sort so that we can create big public villages like Brodgar? All we need is just to make sure that the coins we use is made in Brodgar, so the amount of coins is fixed.
In the end I can't express how happy I am to see that you guys return to develop on Haven and Hearth as I thought that this game was just going to fade away in time. I hope that you can keep creating innovative crafting mechanics and implementations of any sort.
Thanks J&L from svino.
