How worth it is pushing on with story stuff/is it just me or are the default distances kind of silly?

[Jubal]

So, I finally reached the second story location, about 8000 blocks or two full days of journey by elk from home, and now apparently I need to go the same distance again in the same direction for the next location? And for all I know there'll be further ones still? For a game that uses a single rare item for limited spawn resets (I have one left with me, plus one back at home) and which makes replacing your main transport mode very costly, that feels incredibly excessive in terms of distances and especially in terms of supply lines and loot: I am now already 8000 blocks from home, with two trunks full of stuff from this location which would take an age to get back: it's a long round trip to go home and get more trunks, and getting enough facilities together here to make more trunks to hold future loot is also a huge investment of time because it requires an anvil, and I'm... not really sure why I'm doing any of this? Either from an out of world or in-world perspective?

The next location sounds interesting, but it's also SO far away from home that it's not going to be somewhere I can move near or visit at all regularly. It's wildly too far for me to be able to do anything useful as regards preparing better routes there, and I don't have that much physical IRL gaming time to take an entire ingame month per round trip even assuming I do every round trip perfectly and never mess up (which also means every round trip has to be done in the most boring way and I'm very disincentivised to explore). So getting to the new locations doesn't really add to my gameplay because they're too far from home to be especially useful, and I'm not totally sure what else I'm getting out of any of this.

Before anyone says it, yes I'm vaguely aware that you can probably adjust these distances at world gen. But I didn't know that when I started my main world and I don't have time to make a new one: I think the default story location distances are about double what's reasonable for a "standard" player. I don't feel like I get anything extra out of the distances being further: the challenge isn't different, because it's all the same biome I'm not really seeing anything new about the world, and I'm minimising non-vital exploration because on the x-deaths-to-go-before-reset system I need to minimise danger much more than maximise interest in exploring. In general it feels like the game's pressure at this stage becomes to just do lots and lots of these pretty slow trips, because it combines very static home facilities with very long journey times and large quantities of moderately valuable but also awkward to transport loot.

But yeah, interested to hear other thoughts or whether I'm really missing something here.

[Rainbow Fresh]

30 minutes ago, Jubal said:

I'm... not really sure why I'm doing any of this? Either from an out of world or in-world perspective?

Well, the simplest answer would probably be "They are called story locations for a reason". Or in other words, your reason you would want to go there is because you want to learn more about the story of this world. Find out what clusterfuck has gone down to lead to all this. Or maybe you are just interested in seeing some actual content in the world, that isn't just the same trees in the same plains, the same rocks filling the ground and the same couple cobblestones littering the world in the same "ruins". But instead actually big, cool, fleshed out locations with lots of detail in love put into it. Or you just want the shitton of loot you'd otherwise have to work long and hard for.

Mind you, I'm not saying any of these reasons are rock-solid, kill-all-doubt reasons for why you must, absolutely, under any circumstances go there and do that. Far from it. If you don't feel like its worth it, maybe it's not. Nothing and noone in this game's story content is keeping you from anything; Homo Sapiens mode exists, after all.

Edited 10 hours ago by Rainbow Fresh

[Edwin_Blacktallow]

I would agree, the default distance is far. And when you only have so much time to play just walking for an hour, not really feeling like you are getting closer to your goal and then having to stop does suck.

I try to peek into surface caves and find broken translocators, they can get you a fair distance but which direction that is is pretty random. Also as far as I'm aware you always end up deep underground, so pack a lantern, a pickaxe and some ladders to get back to the surface. You might get lucky and end up with a chain of translocators with short walks between them that help you traverse longer distances.

Another option would be mods, now I belive this game should be a challenge. But I also believe it should be fun, I use a few quality of life mods to help balance that out. One is bed spawns, chuck a bed roll down, sleep in it and when you die you end up where you slept. If you still drop loot on death and your saturation is reduced it is still something you want to avoid, so death dosent become meaningless, but it's less of a set back, that way you can get back in the action, and back to the fun.

Over all I would say the story locations are worth the effort. Vintage story does a great job at making the journey difficult, and it should be. You need to plan, you need to think about what you are doing before wandering off into the wilderness, I think that's great.

Don't feel disheartened if you need to head back home before moving onto the next location, think about everything you learned on your journey. Make a plan, take time to prepare and get back out there!

[LadyWYT]

Honestly I feel the distances are shorter than what they should be. I know why the devs decided to adjust the distances from what they originally were, and in the long run that was probably for the best in terms of game design, but the story also lost some of its impact with that change.

42 minutes ago, Jubal said:

The next location sounds interesting, but it's also SO far away from home that it's not going to be somewhere I can move near or visit at all regularly.

It's certainly not everyone's cup of tea, however, the distance is what makes the world actually feel impactful--that is, it's going to require some planning and cost you something to see those places. If you plan poorly or run into trouble, then you'll have to improvise a solution, since turning around and going back home isn't necessarily going to be an option. That travel difficulty also means you'll need to be careful about what items you choose to pack, what items you buy from NPCs, and what loot you take from locations, since you won't be able to just go back home and drop off your loot whenever your bags are full.

In contrast, worlds that are very compact are very convenient for travel, but can easily wind up with stories that feel just a little bit silly rather than serious. Take Skyrim, for example--it's supposed to be a vast wilderness inhabited by dangerous creatures, dotted with ancient ruins, and otherwise sparsely sprinkled with something resembling civilized society. And to an extent, that's true. However, it's also difficult to take that setting seriously when there's a village or farmhouse over almost every hill, or you can run from one end of the country to the other, on foot, in a single day and still have daylight to spare. Even moreso when an NPC asks you to make a delivery to the village next door, that they couldn't make themselves because it's "too far to travel". Really? You couldn't just...go for a short walk and do it yourself?

It's also worth noting that from a design perspective, the distance also helps the player uncover the story in the proper order, without skipping steps or otherwise venturing into areas that they maybe aren't yet prepared for. For example, it's possible to skip chapter one entirely, as well as most of chapter two, and still have the story make sense. However, the player would probably be pretty disappointed to do that and learn that they missed half the plot in the process. More "rails" could be added to force players to complete various steps before the story progresses, however, that's not ideal as that kind of design removes even the illusion of choice from the player.

[Jubal]

2 minutes ago, Rainbow Fresh said:

Well, the simplest answer would probably be "They are called story locations for a reason". Or in other words, your reason you would want to go there is because you want to learn more about the story of this world. Find out what clusterfuck has gone down to lead to all this. Or maybe you are just interested in seeing some actual content in the world, that isn't just the same trees in the same plains, the same rocks filling the ground and the same couple cobblestones littering the world in the same "ruins". But instead actually big, cool, fleshed out locations with lots of detail in love put into it. Or you just want the shitton of loot you'd otherwise have to work long and hard for.

I think part of what I'm saying here is that the "seeing some actual content" bit involves such an excessive amount of seeing basically the exact same landscapes that the time ratios are out of whack by a mile. It's so many, many multiples of time travelling very similar or identical landscapes to actually finding and interacting with something interesting, especially if it's so far away I can't usefully interact with it again later. And it's not interesting or challenging work to reach those things, because the game's mechanics make it a take-no-risks incentive structure not one where you ever push yourself.

9 minutes ago, Rainbow Fresh said:

"They are called story locations for a reason". Or in other words, your reason you would want to go there is because you want to learn more about the story of this world. Find out what clusterfuck has gone down to lead to all this.

This bit is fair enough. I have partly enjoyed the lore so far, and the locations are cool, but I think part of the game's problem right now is that the world so extremely self-evidently doesn't make any sense that the only motivator is "huh yeah I'm vaguely curious about this I guess". I'm not always sure where the storyline is trying to go: there's bits where it appears to reference our primary world a bunch which feels weird in the obviously fantasy setting, there's bits where the world seems to be trying to feel grounded in how it works with the rifts/rust/Jonas stuff being an active divergence from this very grounded we-care-about-crop-rotation mechanics setting, but then a lot of bits that aren't in the Weird/Magic element also don't feel like they're trying to make sense. I think if it presented its core mysteries in a punchier way that might help, and maybe more early dialogue with traders could help with that. The traders seem... sort of remarkably unbothered by everything, and I think that doesn't really set up much sense of mystery: the writing doesn't always make it clear what you as a character do or do not know about things already, and gives you pretty limited options to ask a bunch of very obvious questions of the only people you meet (and I'm not suggesting the traders should know the answers, but they should help the player frame what the mystery and stakes are here).

4 minutes ago, Edwin_Blacktallow said:

I try to peek into surface caves and find broken translocators, they can get you a fair distance but which direction that is is pretty random. Also as far as I'm aware you always end up deep underground, so pack a lantern, a pickaxe and some ladders to get back to the surface. You might get lucky and end up with a chain of translocators with short walks between them that help you traverse longer distances.

Another option would be mods, now I belive this game should be a challenge. But I also believe it should be fun, I use a few quality of life mods to help balance that out. One is bed spawns, chuck a bed roll down, sleep in it and when you die you end up where you slept. If you still drop loot on death and your saturation is reduced it is still something you want to avoid, so death dosent become meaningless, but it's less of a set back, that way you can get back in the action, and back to the fun.

I'd considered this and started to explore this option, but nothing went in remotely the direction of The Plot. I'd hoped that plot locations were going to keep being scattered around base, rather than just strung out in an endless line. Because I can't very practically translocate with my elk, that also rather reduces this as an option I guess - also fixing translocators takes a lot of temporal gears and I never seem to have many of those. Also my translocator rooms all look horrible since someone on the bugs github told me to do a visual remapping command and now a lot of them have ugly question mark blocks in

8 minutes ago, Edwin_Blacktallow said:

Over all I would say the story locations are worth the effort. Vintage story does a great job at making the journey difficult, and it should be. You need to plan, you need to think about what you are doing before wandering off into the wilderness, I think that's great.

Don't feel disheartened if you need to head back home before moving onto the next location, think about everything you learned on your journey. Make a plan, take time to prepare and get back out there!

I do actually like the planning aspect! Working out what tools and supplies I need for a journey is something I enjoy, and I usually go well prepared. In the current situation, the only and main reason I'm "unprepared" for the next stage is not having hauled even more storage kit with me, something the game gave me absolutely no way of knowing I might need in the first place.

I guess I think the game kind of takes it to a point where your optimum strategy is to not engage with the world, which is a pity for a game that is about building a very engage-with-able world. I love learning things on journeys and reflecting on that, and part of my frustration is that I feel that curiosity is discouraged by the mechanics: the travel is long, the benefit of curiosity during that travel is very low and the penalty gets extreme as it's larger the further from home you get. When travelling, you should ideally not be stopping, because any stop is a point at which an enemy you might not have noticed could attack, and you should not be travelling anywhere with low visibility, so avoiding forests and scrub, and you should not be travelling at night, and so you end up doing very cautious daytime travels and it feels anxiety-inducing because of the large punishment for failure but without it actually providing a challenge because all I'm doing is trying to avoid holes and bears, endlessly, for miles of the same blocky countryside. And the punishment for failure is that the game wastes enormous quantities more time as you walk back to wherever you were somehow. The things I most like doing which feel like good "journey challenges" - reconnaissance, clearing paths, ideally taking time to lay paths, mapping safe routes, etc - are just about viable within 5k-7k blocks, but basically become really time prohibitive for a 15,000 block journey.

2 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

It's certainly not everyone's cup of tea, however, the distance is what makes the world actually feel impactful--that is, it's going to require some planning and cost you something to see those places. If you plan poorly or run into trouble, then you'll have to improvise a solution, since turning around and going back home isn't necessarily going to be an option. That travel difficulty also means you'll need to be careful about what items you choose to pack, what items you buy from NPCs, and what loot you take from locations, since you won't be able to just go back home and drop off your loot whenever your bags are full.

In contrast, worlds that are very compact are very convenient for travel, but can easily wind up with stories that feel just a little bit silly rather than serious. Take Skyrim, for example--it's supposed to be a vast wilderness inhabited by dangerous creatures, dotted with ancient ruins, and otherwise sparsely sprinkled with something resembling civilized society. And to an extent, that's true. However, it's also difficult to take that setting seriously when there's a village or farmhouse over almost every hill, or you can run from one end of the country to the other, on foot, in a single day and still have daylight to spare. Even moreso when an NPC asks you to make a delivery to the village next door, that they couldn't make themselves because it's "too far to travel". Really? You couldn't just...go for a short walk and do it yourself?

Having an extended challenge and planning requirement is impactful, I agree. What I'm arguing isn't that there shouldn't be planning and cost, but that the mix of spawn and distance and the fact that the game doesn't actually give you a lot of improvisation flexibility makes the optimal strategy for meeting the challenge time consuming and dull rather than creating interesting situations where it makes sense for me to improvise and work things out. I can't "improvise" a repair to a suit of armour, for example, that's something I can only do from home with these crafting mechanics, and I certainly can't improvise if I don't have a temporal gear available. I can obviously improvise building camps, and spending a bunch of time making clay jars for storage or whatever, but again, the incentive feels very heavily against doing that and in favour of just making you take days more game time to go home and sort things out, because the punishment of having to do a 12k block corpse run is never going to be worth any risk, so rather than improvising and taking interesting risks the thing the game won't penalise you for is just taking a big extra chunk of time.

I think there's also a balance regarding world sparseness and VS, whilst I see the attraction of its sheer scale, feels silly in the other direction to me: yes, a full day of walking won't get you right across any country larger than Liechtenstein, but even premodern Liechtenstein had several villages in it, and with a long day's walk (14hrs on foot) from my current location I genuinely could be in another country and in a different city, having passed through a minimum of four settlements along the way assuming I took a relatively un-settlement-y walk: the actual road would take me through thirteen. Obviously VS is post-apocalyptic and we can assume a radically sparser population, but it doesn't make internal sense even with that caveat: a landscape (un)settled with villages at the density of VS would have an rapidly collapsing, dying population with each village getting crushed by genetic bottlenecking over the generations and certainly wouldn't be able to support me having a random building trade vendor a few miles over the hill. So I struggle to take VS much more seriously than Skyrim on that front? Skyrim feels artificially cluttered, but VS feels equally very visibly artificially empty (besides that my nearest neighbour in game sells luxury goods out of a cart that never moves and has no means of moving, never leaves his cart, never has any customers, never gathers food, and is apparently invulnerable.)

[Teh Pizza Lady]

Well you ahve to keep in mind that the story locations only exist because of the story and we only have 2 out of 8 planned chapters.

Why is this important?

Because the village didn't even exist until chapter 2 was implemented and it put in 3 story locations by itself. I expect more locations of even grander scale and if that's the case, you won't want to be stumbling across them while trying to eek out a meager survival in this game. I think 8000 blocks of distance to travel isn't far enough, especially since they give you a half-price discount on an elk to get there just for beating the chapter 1 boss.

[LadyWYT]

1 hour ago, Jubal said:

I think part of what I'm saying here is that the "seeing some actual content" bit involves such an excessive amount of seeing basically the exact same landscapes that the time ratios are out of whack by a mile. It's so many, many multiples of time travelling very similar or identical landscapes to actually finding and interacting with something interesting, especially if it's so far away I can't usefully interact with it again later.

I think that's an issue that really only applies right now, simply because the world still hasn't been fleshed out that much yet. Yes, there's a good variety of flora and fauna to see, but it also doesn't take a lot of effort see most of that variety either. It's also a drawback of sticking to a realistic world, since it means that not as many creative liberties can be taken. You're not going to find ice spikes or mushroom forests, to use an example from the other block game.

It's also worth noting that procedural dungeons are only starting to be added to the game. Once more are added, that should provide more interesting landmarks to see along the way--landmarks that will certainly tempt players to get sidetracked from their journey, or at least mark on their map to come back to later.

1 hour ago, Jubal said:

And it's not interesting or challenging work to reach those things, because the game's mechanics make it a take-no-risks incentive structure not one where you ever push yourself.

Honestly I don't think this is quite a fair assessment of Vintage Story's design. The player can certainly approach it as a "take-no-risks" situation, but like you said--that tends not to lead to a very fun experience. I think a more fair assessment is that Vintage Story places a lot more importance on risk management: that is, the player needs to plan more carefully than they might need to in other games, simply because their actions will have consequences, and those consequences might not be easy or pleasant to recover from. 

 

1 hour ago, Jubal said:

Having an extended challenge and planning requirement is impactful, I agree. What I'm arguing isn't that there shouldn't be planning and cost, but that the mix of spawn and distance and the fact that the game doesn't actually give you a lot of improvisation flexibility makes the optimal strategy for meeting the challenge time consuming and dull rather than creating interesting situations where it makes sense for me to improvise and work things out. I can't "improvise" a repair to a suit of armour, for example, that's something I can only do from home with these crafting mechanics, and I certainly can't improvise if I don't have a temporal gear available. I can obviously improvise building camps, and spending a bunch of time making clay jars for storage or whatever, but again, the incentive feels very heavily against doing that and in favour of just making you take days more game time to go home and sort things out, because the punishment of having to do a 12k block corpse run is never going to be worth any risk, so rather than improvising and taking interesting risks the thing the game won't penalise you for is just taking a big extra chunk of time.

This is where I would note that planning is important. No, you can't necessarily improvise armor repairs while on the road. However, if you know you're traveling to a village, you can bring gears to barter for repairs and other goods, in addition to just making sure your equipment is in good shape before you leave base. Likewise, if it might be a while before you can make repairs then you might be picking your fights a little more carefully than you normally would. Corpse runs can be avoided by improving skills and practicing good situational awareness, as well as remembering to pack along a few temporal gears. If the player has crafted a terminus teleporter then it becomes as simple as spending a temporal gear to teleport to the last point of death.

Basically, travel planning is important because there are things the player won't be able to easily do while they're traveling, so they should make sure they've taken care of those things beforehand and otherwise packed supplies as appropriate. Otherwise, planning has no purpose and the player can play rather carelessly since mistakes aren't going to actually cost them anything.

2 hours ago, Jubal said:

When travelling, you should ideally not be stopping, because any stop is a point at which an enemy you might not have noticed could attack, and you should not be travelling anywhere with low visibility, so avoiding forests and scrub, and you should not be travelling at night, and so you end up doing very cautious daytime travels and it feels anxiety-inducing because of the large punishment for failure but without it actually providing a challenge because all I'm doing is trying to avoid holes and bears, endlessly, for miles of the same blocky countryside.

I have to disagree here. Traveling in daylight, avoiding rough terrain, and making camp at night is rather realistic and how travel should be...or at least, it should reflect those qualities. As it stands currently, the most efficient travel method is to move at a constant gallop, day or night, using the minimap to avoid holes and otherwise diving off cliffs and swimming across lakes as needed. As long as you're moving, you'll outrun enemies and they won't really get a chance to attack. There's no penalty for riding your elk at a full gallop with no rest or making it swim across an entire lake either. Likewise, the elk is rather tough and tends to heal fairly fast, so careening over the edge of the hill you just climbed and letting the elk absorb the impact isn't a big deal either. I think it would be a little more interesting if the elk had actually stamina and needed to rest from time to time, or suffered penalty for large drops, so that the player had to actually be mindful of treatment to keep their elk in optimal travel condition. For example, an elk at Good weight might move faster than an elk at Normal or Low weight, and elk could lose weight if they've been ridden hard without rest for a couple of days. In that case, the player could ride hard and cover a lot of ground quickly, at the expense of needing to make camp and rest a day or two to allow their elk to recover, or they could choose to move at a slower overall pace but not need to rest much at all.

 

2 hours ago, Jubal said:

especially if it's so far away I can't usefully interact with it again later.

Circling back to this point--one thing I forgot to mention earlier, is that while chapter 2 locations are quite far away, the devs built in a "fast travel" option that you unlock after completing the travel. It does have a recharge time attached to it, so you do need to be mindful about when you use that feature, however, it's a great way to travel back and forth between your base and the "main hub" of chapter 2, essentially.

[ifoz]

2 hours ago, Jubal said:

This bit is fair enough. I have partly enjoyed the lore so far, and the locations are cool, but I think part of the game's problem right now is that the world so extremely self-evidently doesn't make any sense that the only motivator is "huh yeah I'm vaguely curious about this I guess". I'm not always sure where the storyline is trying to go: there's bits where it appears to reference our primary world a bunch which feels weird in the obviously fantasy setting, there's bits where the world seems to be trying to feel grounded in how it works with the rifts/rust/Jonas stuff being an active divergence from this very grounded we-care-about-crop-rotation mechanics setting, but then a lot of bits that aren't in the Weird/Magic element also don't feel like they're trying to make sense.

The lore is interconnected once you start figuring stuff out, but it's intentionally very vague on the surface in an attempt to hook the player with that element of mystery.

The references to the real world are actually pretty important, though do be warned this next part has timeline/world spoilers.

Spoiler

Vintage Story is set in an alternate timeline of our real world's 1300's, though significantly more advanced thanks to Jonas. Jonas' technology itself is somewhat based on real medieval alchemy myth, specifically regarding the Prima Materia. This is also why it's more of a grounded fantasy setting - while it is set in the real world, it's a version of the real world where medieval alchemy myth was in fact functional science. The world was also scrambled geographically when the Grand Machine activated, which is why it no longer resembles the real world's geography/layout. Pretty much real world but with alchemy, and then a bunch of stuff was messed up.

 

2 hours ago, Jubal said:

think if it presented its core mysteries in a punchier way that might help, and maybe more early dialogue with traders could help with that. The traders seem... sort of remarkably unbothered by everything, and I think that doesn't really set up much sense of mystery:

This is something I do think could stand to be improved, but that also sort of makes sense. Considering the timespan between when everything went down in the old world and the time we actually play in, humanity has had a long time to get accustomed to rifts/monsters/other temporal weirdness. For the traders, that stuff would just be a part of everyday life.

As said though, I really hope trader dialogue is expanded upon eventually. Being able to ask more direct questions to get the player curious about the world would be nice, and make a lot of sense given the perspective of their Seraph.
Stuff like different traders also giving different answers to questions is something I think would be fun, since it'd both encourage interacting with more traders and establish that they are unreliable storytellers, but that there might be a kernel of truth in their folklore.

 

2 hours ago, Jubal said:

So I struggle to take VS much more seriously than Skyrim on that front? Skyrim feels artificially cluttered, but VS feels equally very visibly artificially empty (besides that my nearest neighbour in game sells luxury goods out of a cart that never moves and has no means of moving, never leaves his cart, never has any customers, never gathers food, and is apparently invulnerable.)

I think this is something the devs are working on - in a recent developer stream, Elvas discussed their future plans for NPCs and traders. He said that eventually, they would like for the game to somehow map paths between trader outposts, and have traders either trek or cart their wares between one another. Given the newer NPC systems added in 1.20, I'd also expect traders will gain things like the ability to sleep at night, dress warmer in the winter and eat at certain times of day in the not too distant future, as those things are already possible.

Edited 5 hours ago by ifoz

[DarkGold]

I've completed chapter 1 but not started the chapter 2 journey yet (chapter 2 location is marked on my map, haven't set out, got distracted prospecting for cinnabar and pentlandite). After hauling all the loot from chapter 1 back to my base, I figured doing the same in chapter 2 would be more of a pain, so I initially stopped between chapter 1 and 2 to progress from iron to steel so that I could put sturdy saddlebags on my elk.

I'd already come up with a compact outpost design for chapter 1, that required about 20 slots of inventory to carry the materials for it (cobblestone, bed, door, storage vessel, etc). Refining that design a little further, to reduce inventory needs and add a stable, is something I will do before I leave. The goal being it fits it in my elk's bags.

This is part 1 of my journey plan; construct a couple of outposts along the way. But this alone doesn't seem like it will make hauling several trunks of loot back painless, so that's why I've been distracted searching for pentlandite. I see cupronickel is useful in building some things I think might make life easier (haven't built them yet, not sure, I've just been looking at the Jonas parts I've found so far and seeing what the handbook says about what I can build with them).

I am 1 Jonas part and some cupronickel away from a very interesting item I would like to try building that might trivialise return trips. I think I'll need to power it with temporal gears, but I have been trading with Treasure Hunter traders for a long time now, building up my rusty gears by selling them longbows and buying temporal gears off them when they have them for sale.

I have also had to build up the courage to explore some underground caves and ruins to try and find that final Jonas part I need. I even decided to carefully pick some fights with some really tough monsters who stuck around a short while after temporal storms in the hopes they dropped the part I was looking for. I usually don't fight fair. Fences are useful for fighting Shivers. Bows (which I tried and found underwhelming at the start of the game, so put away in a box for years) turn out to be very useful for fighting Bells.

I have found these intermediate pursuits pretty engaging, so in my experience, I'm excited to eventually see what chapter 2 holds, but didn't feel the need to rush straight there from the end of chapter 1.

Edited 5 hours ago by DarkGold
Correcting typo

[LadyWYT]

2 hours ago, ifoz said:

This is something I do think could stand to be improved, but that also sort of makes sense. Considering the timespan between when everything went down in the old world and the time we actually play in, humanity has had a long time to get accustomed to rifts/monsters/other temporal weirdness. For the traders, that stuff would just be a part of everyday life.

As said though, I really hope trader dialogue is expanded upon eventually. Being able to ask more direct questions to get the player curious about the world would be nice, and make a lot of sense given the perspective of their Seraph.
Stuff like different traders also giving different answers to questions is something I think would be fun, since it'd both encourage interacting with more traders and establish that they are unreliable storytellers, but that there might be a kernel of truth in their folklore.

Flipping the situation around and putting oneself in the trader's shoes for a moment--it's easy enough to say the NPCs should provide an in-depth exposition about the history of the world up to that point of meeting. However, there's a lot that's likely passed into myth and been twisted over the years, if not forgotten entirely. I think it's also worth noting that it's quite difficult to explain things that are taken for granted, especially if you're unfamiliar with the world outside your personal bubble. From the trader perspective, they probably just assume that everyone knows the legends and basic survival tactics(like living behind fortifications), and in the event someone doesn't...assume they're a little addled in the head(if not lying) and set some safe boundaries.