izigame.me

Amidst the recent influx of negative reviews, I've felt the need to toss in a strong recommendation for this game if literally any other aspect of it looks appealing to you. I am almost coming onto my second year of playing this and I will happily admit: I don't even know what the base game final boss looks like (I only just beat Into the Mist last month after forgetting any dungeons existed past Infernal Stronghold), because I have had so much fun everywhere else. And mind you, this was a project started originally by a solo dev. There are no big flashy animations, no sounds other than from my mouse, and it's as high-octane as you want to make it. It's what I am looking for as someone who loved the progression of RuneScape but hated the stress of constant micro-managing. Now I can have fun feeling like Hal in that one episode of Malcolm in the Middle where he tries to replace a light bulb and ends up repairing the car engine. I love those moments when I fall down a rabbit hole of sidequests: Wanting to lvl Astrology -> Needing more Owl Familiars -> Realizing if I made some Fox Familiars first I could then passively lvl them while I make Owls -> Noticing that lvling up the Necromancer Potion first would give even MORE familiars -> Needing Big Bones to create and level those -> Confused as to how I am now fighting Giants to lvl Astrology. This is all to say, based on my tastes and playtime, I can't deny my bias towards Spreadsheet Simulator: DnD Edition (affectionately).
I also can't ignore (and can't help agree a bit with) the frustrations that I see people have about the nerfs to Township and their time wasted. But that is what is so funny to me and so hard to describe. As someone who played since around Alpha v0.21, it was almost immediately obvious to me how op the Trader would be to the early game (esp after the April rework) so it made sense to me that it would slowly be weaned as evidenced by the fact that the dev team mentions in almost every patch note since Township's release that there is still on ongoing focus on rebalancing. I will agree, more open communication about the future of such a new skill that people were already making mental calendars for and maybe a more public explanation for the justifications behind the nerfs would have been better in prepping player expectation.
I do think it's just silly that there's almost 100 negative reviews in 2 days for a team that has so many open channels for contact along with plenty of spaces for community engagement. There is an old standard my mom would use for buying luxuries that I sometimes take into consideration: people would generally pay ~$15 for a movie ticket which gives you a cool experience and about 2 hours of fun. This game (+ the metric f-ton of additional content that Herald provides), for roughly the same price of $15, has ACTIVELY entertained me so far for over 550 hours -- not even taking into account the class time where I'm happily daydreaming about Big ol Ron. The other reviewers with hundreds of hours claiming that they'll not give a single dime more after imo getting hundreds of dollars "worth" of enjoyment seem like a very hair-trigger submission on a site that shows realtime review aggregation that can then have immediate consequences to the developers who have already given them so much and have taken the time to reply their reasonings to posts on Reddit. At the very beginning of an announced month long anniversary celebration with almost weekly new events and content too! Admittedly, the Township nerf hit just as I finished the 95 tasks for the outfit upgrade so I guess I got grandfathered in to parts of it, and it does suck that I no longer can access the potential 10 mystic sharks per Food Box III; however, it does not merit some of the really negative things I see in these reviews. Let's not forget the people on the dev team are also humans. Plus if I were them, and if I'm being honest, I would be super nervous post-Jagex publishing support as I'm sure the recognition also leads to more pressure, stress, and business meetings (that could've been an email) which would both overwhelm me and also probably add a lot more red tape to the development process. It is abundantly clear to me that the Melvor team is so passionate about this game and genre that I can only hope we can one day see it mirrored in the AAA game releases nowadays.
Anyway, rant over, I think that about covers most of what I've seen. I don't care to have any ontological debates about the value of time wasted or the determiners of satisfaction but any insights people have would be appreciated. Overall, I am not super invested about swaying every opinion on this, today was just a day of putting up with frustrating people and coming home to see this super niche backlash presented me with the perfect outlet for this energy.