STORY OF SEASONS Pioneers of Olive Town Free Download GAMESPACK.NET

STORY OF SEASONS Pioneers of Olive Town Free Download GAMESPACK.NET Anyone who has played a Story of Seasons game before knows the plot of Pioneers of Olive Town: an enterprising young 20-something escapes the bustle of city life and takes over their grandfather’s old, dilapidated farm outside of a small, rural village that’s struggling to keep its inhabitants entertained. To turn things around you grow crops, raise animals, talk to the townsfolk, and repeat. Pioneers of Olive Town isn’t trying to change that, but it adds a huge amount of land to manage and crafting mechanics to work with, and that fleshes out that familiar loop into a full, pleasant take. For those of us who have been playing Stardew Valley non-stop for the last five years, it’s a much-needed refresh. Pioneers of Olive Town is stuffed with things to do, and while the seasons pass rather slowly, I was surprised at how much I was packing into a day – as well as how much more I still wanted to do at the end of each one. At any given point you’re working toward rebuilding a structure, clearing a new segment of land, planning another excursion into one of multiple mines, saving for the purchase of a new tool upgrade, trying to finish a quest to develop the town.TOP/BEST ADULT VIDEO GAMES IN UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (USA)

STORY OF SEASONS Pioneers of Olive Town Free Download GAMESPACK.NET

It’s pretty standard stuff for the most part. But there are simply too many of these! Some of them even perform very similar functions, like the Maker machines that convert thread into cloth but then entirely separate ones to turn wool into, well, different cloth. Or the separate machines for converting rice and beans into powders, converting herbs into seasonings, and salt and pepper into spices. I could have done without, like, half of these machines, especially since by the time I was a few seasons in, half my farm looked like an industrial district between all the machines I had running at once and all the storage boxes I had to set up to keep all their products organized for when I would inevitably need them to build something. Story of Seasons would be much improved if growing your farm didn’t necessitate something like a fourth of each in-game day playing an entirely different management sim instead of the actual farming sim I wanted to play. It’s a hassle to have to fuss with machines instead of all the other, far more fun bits, like exploring the enormous farm I’d inherited.

STORY OF SEASONS Pioneers of Olive Town Fox Costume.

As with prior games in the series, Story of Seasons starts you with a small, overgrown bit of land that you will slowly clear of trees, rocks, and grass with tools like an axe, a hammer, and a scythe. You’ll also repair dilapidated structures, like a chicken coop, using the materials you get from clearing the land (and, later, from running those materials through like 20 different machines). Early on, the stretch of land you start with seems like plenty to deal with and certainly enough space to farm in. Crossing the bridge to the southwest of your farm reveals a plot of land twice as big, equally overgrown, and with new run-down structures of its own to repair. And there are even more sections of land beyond that. Look, the farm is just huge, okay? By the time you repair the horse stable, you’ll need the horse to get you back and forth across the stretches to do your daily chores. That means plenty of space to build and grow whatever you want, including crafting ridiculous decorations like, I kid you not, a giant topiary cow. The size does unfortunately make it obvious that Story of Seasons is struggling to run at a steady framerate, especially when you’re running across an area with a lot of things on screen.OMORI

STORY OF SEASONS Pioneers of Olive Town Free Download GAMESPACK.NET

And the farm’s scale can become time-consuming later on because puddles, weeds, and trees grow back quickly. If you want to keep the land clear, you’ll be spending a lot of time running over your entire farm hammering down unwanted sprouts. The worst offenders are puddles and even larger ponds, which appear in abundance each time it rains and require repeated, tedious use of a bucket to drain if you want your space back. The big draw in Pioneers of Olive Town is supposed to be renovating Olive Town, turning it from sleepy burg to vibrant tourist attraction. That’s what Mayor Victor says shortly after you arrive, at least, when he ropes you into being Olive Town’s unofficial tourism director and promoter. It’s not true. Tourism duties consist of random tasks Victor shoves your way at an even more random rate, although “tasks” might be rather generous. You have three or so requests on the town’s request board, all asking for fairly basic materials. However, you only need to finish one request, which reduces any sense of accomplishment and makes one wonder why the mayor needed your help anyway. Apparently, the residents of Olive Town are selectively capable of taking on basic tasks and get motivated when someone else does the work first.

A Farm of Endless Possibilities.

How Victor was elected mayor is beyond me. I’m sorry to inform him, but paving the town’s streets and adding new light posts is maintenance work and not innovative planning guaranteed to transform Olive Town into a tourist utopia. Or maybe it is. My notebook said Olive Town was pushing 60 daily tourists just by the first summer. “Invisible tourists” would be more accurate since I only ever saw three or four randomized NPCs wandering around at any given time. Then again, internal logic isn’t one of PoOT’s strong points. I wasn’t capable enough in animal care to purchase a pregnancy kit for a while, but in an early event with Bridget, the animal shop co-owner, she praised me for recognizing her cow was pregnant. If you’re excited about customizing the town or having a significant effect on how it develops, don’t be. It’s just one of PoOT’s many half-developed ideas mired in poor execution. The other big appeal — and equally big flop — is your farm. PoOT drops you in the wilderness, and you’re supposed to build your farm from scratch and tame the wild in the process. That translates to doing everything you normally do in Story of Seasons, but with more grind and significantly less satisfaction.Lost Ark

STORY OF SEASONS Pioneers of Olive Town Free Download GAMESPACK.NET

Taming the wilderness means gathering a high number of certain materials to build a bridge or clear rubble. Why the carpenter needs 30 silver ingots to move a pile of rocks is baffling, but it unlocks new farmland and new resources to hoard. Each section of the forest conveniently houses a dilapidated farm building and an animal for that building. Generate enough resources, build your barn, and “tame” the wild animal by petting it. Early on, you come across wild crops you can ship to unlock their seeds at the local store. It’s a nice idea that doesn’t last beyond your first few weeks. And that’s all the pioneering Olive Town has to offer. When you aren’t caring for your crops or animals, you’re chopping down trees or spending 12 hours or more in the mines, desperately trying to farm enough ore or lumber for the next upgrade you want. Another huge issue is the lack of personality in the townsfolk. For some reason, they have only the sparsest of dialogue, and even when you’re actually dating them, that doesn’t change too much. Outside of events and working in the various shops, they mostly wander aimlessly around the town, or stand like statues next to their beds, waiting for the day to end.

New Adventures Off the Beaten Path.

However. Much like most Story of Seasons games, the world brightens up after the first couple of seasons, and things start to get more interesting. Once you’ve befriended someone up to two hearts, you’ll get some insight into their favourite gifts, which means a fast-track to seeing their “heart events” – the cutscenes that further your friendship. The heart events are short but sweet; we spent the most time with Bridget, so we were treated to a story of her learning to trust other people through animals. Likewise, the Maker issue doesn’t ever go away, but it does get better. Once you’ve got a decent set-up of all the Makers you need, it’s pretty quick work to fill them all up, and becomes part of the farm routine. Later on, you’ll even unlock Giant Makers, which can process a few items at a time, although they’re expensive to build, so you’ll likely be stuck with the ones you get as rewards for levelling-up your skills. There are 12 skills to level up in total, including fishing, cooking, communication, and mining, all of which cap at level 10. The more you level these up, the better you’ll get at them, and the more materials of a better quality you’ll get as a result.

The skill progress is a nice addition, and makes progress pretty steady and satisfying, as long as you’re focusing your attention on multiple skills at once. There are still a few bottlenecks, like the fact that cooking takes half an hour, even if you’re just making Hot Milk. What’s more, you can only cook one meal at a time – even if you want to just make multiples of the same thing, you can’t – and the Seed Maker, which is the only way to turn high-quality crops into higher-quality seeds, is slow, and can only process one crop at a time. Mining, farming, fishing, and animal care will take up most of your time while you wait, though, and all of them are as satisfying as you’d hope for, in a game that’s about those things. The animals are extremely cute, if a little… deformed (there’s no way a cow with that big of a face could survive), and it’s easy to unlock new ones, since they appear wild on your farm every season (in the first year, at least) and you can tame them to add them to your collection. Mining is a test of stamina and occasional mole-battling, and though there aren’t skips to help you to get to lower levels immediately, it’ll eventually take you the best part of a day to get to the bottom of the third mine.

STORY OF SEASONS Pioneers of Olive Town Free Download GAMESPACK.NET

Fishing is similar to how Stardew’s system works, and there are bait types and fishing rod upgrades to help you out. As for what your farmer looks like while they work, the character customisation is pretty good – plenty of outfits, hair changes, even eye colour changes if you want – but the furniture and general house decoration is weirdly limited to a very specific, small area of your house. You can’t change the wallpaper or the floor, either. This area gets bigger as the house upgrades increase the size of the place, but you’ll never be able to place furniture anywhere you want, sadly. One of the biggest caveats of all this is that the farming absolutely tanks the framerate. This is an issue that the developers know about, and are working on, but running through ploughed-and-planted fields, or even empty ones, will reduce the framerate to about 5 frames per second. Add this to the weirdly long loading screens, and you’ll be wondering what’s going on behind the scenes. We actually had one loading screen that was still going after three minutes, and had to restart the game, but that was a one-off – all other loading screens were sub-ten seconds. Still, that’s a long wait. Farming Simulator 17

ADD ONS/PATCHES AND DLC’S: STORY OF SEASONS Pioneers of Olive Town Panda Costume