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My thoughts on Vintage Story from the perspective of a Minecraft builder


NeoBeat

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(reuploaded under correct forum, oops!)

Hello everyone. In the past week, I stumbled across Vintage Story through my YouTube feed, and after learning more about the game, I've been trying it out for the first time. From my (short) time playing the game both in survival and creative, I'd like to offer some thoughts about some of the features and gameplay elements that pertain to my play style.

Off the bat, I believe VS has unbelievable potential both as a survival crafting game and a sandbox building game; coming off of a long stint of burnout from Minecraft, the features VS offers have been extremely refreshing for me. I feel that I have much more creative freedom to build more cohesively and intricately with the array of decorative items and block variants - without the more detailed elements like support beams, sideways slabs, roofing blocks, catacornered blocks/items, etc. feeling "out of place" and pushing me away from using them, as Minecraft mods offering the same features tend to do. The style that VS achieves, seemingly much more akin to an RPG than a pure voxel game, allows for much more immersion during my playthroughs. However, I have noticed a few things that somewhat hindered my experience during my time spent playing. I'm aware that VS is still in early access and these critiques may already be in the process of improvement, but I'd like to offer my feedback either way.

 

- Menus/UI

Aside from things like basic fonts and sparse descriptions of options, which are most likely products of a game still well into development, I find the menus concerning items/blocks, particularly in creative mode, to be cluttered and confusing to navigate. Many of the items present in the creative menu seem like they could be very much condensed and simplified, such as rows and rows of slots containing every layer height of terrain. More thorough categorization of materials like different wood/stone types would also be appreciated (and would greatly reduce the almost overwhelming amount of choices!). I also find the current worldedit menu to be a bit clunky (though the existence of a vanilla worldedit system at all is a dream come true for me). I'd also recommend that anything selected in the survival handbook stay pulled up after closing/reopening the menu, as I find a lot of time is spent trying to find the last place I left off after trying to learn a new mechanic/feature in survival.

- Blocks/Items

While building in creative, I found that many of the decorative blocks and items have some inconsistencies between variants that are a bit confusing. For example, the beds in the game having a "standard" handful of variants, and about twice as many "aged" variants caught me off guard, where many other blocks and items have consistent variations across their respective materials. Other small things stood out to me as well, such as stairs not having any corner variants (this may be intentional, but I figured if roofing blocks would have corner variants, stairs would as well). One very positive note is how many items can be physically placed down - using hides/pelts as rugs proves to be a very nice touch to medieval builds!

- Movement

Movement was one of my biggest obstacles during my time playing. The player character's movement feels very slow and sluggish, and creative flying can be a pain when trying to build and use worldedit simultaneously. Specifically, I would recommend making it so that the player does not move vertically when using WASD in the air at an angle (looking up or down), as it can make navigating very touchy constantly having to adjust your height. For survival, the same slow/sluggish movement critique applies, in addition to some interactions with blocks being a tad wonky; actions such as pillaring up with blocks can be buggy at times.

- Worldedit

As I said earlier, discovering a built-in worldedit system was a huge plus for me, but I do feel that the current controls (in addition to movement issues) can hinder the usefulness of the system. Having used it so much, I would love to see the system adopt more attributes from the WorldEdit minecraft mod (a situation of "if it ain't broke", I suppose), as using your character's location in space to rotate/flip/repeat selections feels much more intuitive than typing in coordinates and adjustments from a distance. I'd also suggest having the /replace system take into account the orientation of blocks/items when rotating/flipping (admittedly, I hadn't had a chance to do much replacing during my time playing, so if this already exists with the system, apologies).

 

Hopefully these didn't come off as too nitpicky, as I have greatly enjoyed my time playing, and would love to see the systems in place improve and become more robust as development continues. I could very easily see myself sticking around long-term with Vintage Story as a builder, and see a substantial amount of potential in the game.

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