Stardew Valley and Immersion

No, the citizens of Pelican Town are not having a debate on baptism; I’m talking about the state of being completely absorbed in a game and Stardew Valley has succeeded at this more than many larger open world MMOs with “realistic” graphics that I’ve played. I know I’m not the only one who has been charmed by this single player farming game either, and I suspect that many of its fans feel the same way I do about the game’s capacity for immersion. Stardew Valley excels at drawing the player into Pelican Town and into the lives of its inhabitants as its newest community member.

Stardew Valley hasn’t cornered the market on immersion though, Black Desert has also received a lot of love on this front, and I can understand why. The game is visually stunning and the mechanics (or lack thereof with regard to fast travel) are intended to draw the player into the vast and breathtaking world. However one thing Black Desert and most open world MMOs will always lack is a sense of place and belonging. Whereas in those titles adventuring is the name of the immersive game, in Stardew Valley it’s about exploring your own backyard. If the typical MMO is expansive with regard to breadth, than Stardew Valley takes the opposite route and draws the player in deeper and deeper into an otherwise minor local.

Here the women of Stardew Valley get together to exercise; it reminds me of a Charlie Brown dance recital.

 

The value of this for immersive gameplay struck me when I discovered something new this past weekend about one of the inhabitants, Penny. One of the features in Stardew Valley is the option to befriend and ultimately marry one of the single NPCs in town. I’d playfully considered a few of the female candidates—Abigail because of her affinity for all things adventurous and nerdy; or Hailey because quite frankly she seems to despise my character and I like the challenge. Then I came to realize that Pam, the old drunk who lived in the trailer down by the river did not live there alone; Penny was her daughter. I liked Penny, she was quiet but kind, tutoring a few kids from town but otherwise found at the library or with her nose in a book under a tree. I didn’t realize why she loved her books so much until I became aware of what she was trying to escape. The realization made me want to get her out of that life and onto my character’s farm instead.

See what I mean? How easily these characters and this narrative can draw you in overtime as you get to know the individuals who make up your new community? At first you know very little about these characters and lack compassion or interest toward any of them. But as you have conversations with them and learn of their familial ties and friendships that begins to change.

This farm is still small compared to the land I own, but it’s come a long way since my first fifteen parsnips.

 

And this social and narrative gameplay is only one portion of what I find immersive about the game. Ownership becomes a large factor in this as well. One of the key activities in the game is that you develop a thriving farm, slowly but surely over several years. There are other activities you can pursue as well—fishing, adventuring in the mines, making sure the big box corporation doesn’t steamroll the town. Basically, you have this sense of daily ownership and responsibility on the farm and in the community. By the end of spring I really began to feel a sense of belonging within the community with the produce I was providing and I had developed a routine of my own for daily, rural life.

For example, each time I would wake up to another day in game I found myself going about my routine in the following manner or similar: watering my crops, visiting Pierre’s shop if I had anything to sell, stopping by the library or one of Penny’s other preferred hiding spots to say hello and possibly give her a gift, checking several of my crab pots on the waterfront, and then fishing a bit with Willy before stopping by the local saloon and then heading home for bed. It’s as ordinary as you can imagine and it’s refreshing. I absolutely adore the gameplay of this title because of how quant and ordinary it is. It’s a storybook kind of ordinary though, isn’t it? Not the kind we actually experience, but the kind we oftentimes wish we could, which is of course the premise of the game.

Time for a relaxing dip at the bathhouse.

 

Immersive gameplay doesn’t require a big budget, photorealistic graphics, and boundless regions of content. No, immersion can be found with a touch of the everyday fantasy of quiet living and a whole lot of heart. Stardew Valley has both of these in spades. From the personal connection to the growth and success of your farm, to the ever growing intimacy experienced with the townsfolk as their stories unfold, there’s a lot to get lost in, in Pelican Town. If you ever come for a visit, you’ll find me at the docks fishing or on my farm just west of town. I’ll keep another cold one in the fridge just in case you stop by.

Hunting in Black Desert

Yesterday I reached level 20, which meant not only could I finally use my pet for the Tamer class but I was also given a reward for reaching that level, much like claiming the daily rewards. One of the options was a magic crystal that would increase my XP for one of the crafting skills. I recognized most of them—gathering, fishing, cooking, etc., but one of the crystals said “hunting.” Huh. Since the game is terrible at explaining how to get started in just about everything, I searched online a while to figure out what exactly it was and how to get started.

I’m glad I did because it sounds interesting and I would have never figured it out on my own. And I’m assuming others might be interested as well and equally unsure of how to get started, so I thought I’d write a simple guide.

The first thing you need to do is go to Velia and find the guild manager, Laiano Pietro. From Laiano you can rent a practice matchlock ( a hunting rifle) that you will use for two dailies to earn hunting XP.

Location of the guild manager (you should be able to make out my character’s icon on the west side of town).

 

Once you have the matchlock, head down to the fishing docks and find a little otter-man named Crio who will give you a quest for hunting seagulls along the beach. You’ll definitely need to turn on all quests to be able to see the hunting one he offers. Equipping the musket is just like equipping a regular weapon only it makes your character walk slower and disables jump (space bar causes you to kneel down and aim instead) so you’ll want to get in position before equipping.

Crio’s location on the docks

 

From that point it’s a simple point and click shooting mini-game with moving targets. They aren’t that difficult to hit but the seagulls have to be close because the matchlock doesn’t have much range and sometimes the camera angle can make it difficult to aim your weapon but I found it worked best to just let the birds fly close to where I was aiming rather than moving around a lot to track the birds and risk the camera clipping grass or a wall. You only need to shoot two birds to complete the quest, then return to Crio for your reward and for hunting XP.

Location of the Cattle Ranch

 

After that, you’ll want to travel down to a cattle ranch set in between Heidel and Lynch Farm Ruins. There’s a little wooden house with a villager there who will give you a quest to set up a scarecrow because the eagles are scaring his cows (uh, sure why not). Once that’s complete he will give you a second quest to hunt the eagles. This time you only need to shoot one and then you can complete it for more XP. After those first two quests I was about 83% of the way through level 3 hunting. I tried shooting more eagles to see if that would increase my hunting skill but it didn’t; only the dailies will give you XP.

“Wait for it….”

 

Eventually you can rank up and make your own musket but I’m not sure how that works just yet. Ultimately the goal is to get your hunting skill high enough to go after whales and crocodiles. Whaling sounds interesting if I can find someone with a good boat, but I think the crocodiles are probably what I’ll go after. I don’t really know what benefit there is to hunting these things but it sounds like fun. The gathering and crafting skills in BDO seem like a huge time investments but hunting is something I can spend a little time on daily while still focusing on combat quests or playing other MMOs.

Finding My Niche in Black Desert

If you had asked me right after Daum announced the launch date for Black Desert in the NA and EU what I would be doing the week of March 1^st, I would have told you, “Nothing but playing BDO of course!” I had even considered taking off work the first few days of early access so that I could really take advantage of the head start. But the beta put a damper on some of my excitement and my interest in TSW started to peak again around that same time and so in one week of having access to Black Desert I’ve only played somewhere around 9-10 hours.

During that time I was watching the pictures flood in on Twitter and the first impression pieces take center stage on my RSS feed and while I was happy that so many people were enjoying the game (and still are!) I hadn’t really found my own groove yet. It turns out, I’m not much of a sandbox guy, or at least it’s going to take me longer to ease into that new paradigm than it might for other players. Adjusting the quest tracker to display all available quests (as Matt suggested in his first BDO column) turned out to be overwhelming for me, spreading my attention too thin and making me feel like I wasn’t accomplishing anything. So Monday night I turned it back off, only allowing combat quests to display, and I’ve been enjoying the game so much more ever since.

It’s actually an excellent feature to have in the game’s UI; the ability to choose which types of quests to focus on and which to ignore. And of course in time I can change things up, switch on the life quests and turn off the combat ones, or turn them all back on again. For now it’s helped me to make the game more familiar to my previous experiences; a central story driven questline (albeit an odd one) with a lot of kill “x” mobs quests that move me from one area to the next on the map and allowing me to explore the world in an “on rails” manner, which for now I prefer.

I realize this is something along the lines of being stranded on an island for years with nothing but fish to eat and at the first opportunity to dine at a real restaurant with a myriad of choices I order… the fish. But that’s okay, because the whole point of a sandbox is that you find your niche in a world with as many options and opportunities as the developers are able to imagine and bring to life in game and then figure out how your chosen path (or paths) relate to the world and its inhabitants as a whole.

For me, that means going in to these Imp camps and laying waste to every last one of them. I like leveling up this way and it does give me Imp specific drops that I can trade for a greater return from vendors if I sell them in larger stacks so I’m still able to participate (sort of) in the economic side of the game. Eventually I’ll look into things like fishing, cooking, boatbuilding, and trading but for now I’m content to use the training wheels provided by Daum and use them to explore the world on my own terms. My terms just happen to require a lot of kill quests and hand holding, that’s all.