EDIT: After reading Tyron's follow up to the original post and his replies in this thread, my concerns are addressed. I'm confident that the vision and gameplay mechanics for VS will not change from what I love about them. While I'm not personally interested in what I think this Adventure mode will entail, I think it will be an overall positive for the game and the community.
This is where I see the issue. That statement has a positive spin, but I read it as Hytale mechanics rapidly bleeding into Vintage Story and altering the gameplay. I have no doubt there will be internal struggles about these decisions that will also bog down development and slow the release cycle.
I'd never heard of Hytale until I read about it on these forums with the last news announcement about the game's failure. I then watched some trailers and some youtube videos detailing the history of Hytale's development and the mistakes along the way. It looks like it endeavoured to be the kind of community-driven, monetized content market that Roblox is (which I don't think aligns with VS's philosophies). Maybe I'm wrong, but that's not really my point in this post. I don't like the game, and I don't like the mechanics I saw.
Tyron specifically mentioned combat and enemy AI in what I quoted. And I'm sure that's just the tip of the iceberg. I feel this will too drastically alter too many mechanics in VS. I also agree with others that have said that VS's story and lore development will suffer as it is blurred into whatever vision Hytale has. Maybe even stopping further development of VS story/lore and putting it in this "adventure mode" while making the existing modes simple sandbox survival.
The progression in VS and the discovery of the lore and unfolding of the story is already the "adventure" to me. It does not need a seperate mode.
I think the solution to this is to make Hytale an independent project from the beginning. A separate codebase. A fork that VS will not pull changes from, but the Hytale developers can sync and merge engine changes down, as they see fit, from upstream VS.
But the wording in this announcement seems to want this adventure mode to be deeply integrated into VS from the beginning, and then possibly release it in the future as a stand-alone game. How does that work? What happens to this adventure mode in VS after that? Does it just stop getting updates, get deprecated, and replaced with a splash screen directing users to buy the new adventure mode standalone game? I doubt that would happen. So there again, there is reason for me to assume that a large number of Hytale-inspired changes to game mechanics, lore, etc. will be merged into the core experience of VS and remain there.
They should be totally separate projects from the start, with collaboration. This will minimize Hytale design philosophies creeping into VS and alienating existing players. I'm not happy about this announcement as it is written. I'm new to VS, but have about 215 hours playtime according to my AMD control panel (which tracks playtime independent of platforms like Steam).
I like the game as it is. And I like the direction it's going. I've seen the Hytale trailers and various footage as I learned about it recently, and I don't like it at all. I'll never buy it, and I don't want it in my VS.
It's a good investment for Anego Studios, as a seperate game with a totally different release cycle and forked codebase. The part that rubs me the wrong way (which I feel is embodied in what I quoted from Tyron) is this idea of integrating all these changes as a new mode in the Vintage Story base game.
