First of all, I'd like to say thank you LDW!
I am a fan of the VV series and I am proud to support a small, independent company like LDW. I also like that the LDW games are centered around building, creating, and learning rather than destroying, overpowering, and killing like a lot of games these days are.
With that said, this latest installment of VV4 left me feeling both relieved and disappointed. I was relieved to see that many of the things that I liked about the previous VV games were still there but disappointed that very few things were truly new and some aspects of the game were even scaled back.
Yes, VV4 uses a new map and many of the villager's faces and clothes are different, so it is clear that a substantial amount of effort went into remaking the graphics and recoding the map. However, I am not convinced that focusing a large portion of the energy into this aspect of the game made this installment of VV significantly better than previous editions; VV4 fits in just fine with rest of the series, but it is not particularly innovative.
To be clear, I do not think that you should substantially change the gameplay of the game, because I think it is great as is. However, it would have been nice to see more buildings, activities, and behaviors added to the game.
There are a few additions to VV4 that I do like:
I like that the stream is there for builders to keep improving their abilities even after the huts have all been built.
The wind flutes look and sound amazing.
I like that the villagers can meditate.
I like that kids can actually learn in nursery school, although I am not sure that they can become jacks of all trades before age 14 as they could in VV3, which is something I really liked.
I like the firepit.
I like that kids race and have jumping contests.
There are a a few things that left me scratching my head:
A couple of the puzzles had illogical solutions or were not entirely intuitive. For instance, the moss covered rocks. Logically, I let the river dry up (because moss needs moisture to grow) and tried to have one of the villagers bring a sharp cutting tool over to uncover them. Nothing. The real solution involved using live crabs to remove the moss (?!?!?). The crabs magically disappear after they've been used to scrape off the moss. Where did they go? Are they dead now? Also, why are they suddenly so hard to catch in VV4? Villagers in VV3 used to scoop them up effortlessly from the ocean and now two kids are needed to distract them. This seems like a cop out to me... The feast puzzle pictograph also shows a crab, but no [censored] is required to complete it. The feast is also on a platter, so I assumed the fire pit would be used, but instead it involved a stew, which seemed misleading to me, and a mere rehashing of previous VV games. Also, the soap doesn't use ash at all, which could have easily been acquired in the game (real soap used to be made from animal fat and lye, which was acquired from ashes). The flowers used to make the lei also didn't look any different when they were in full bloom than when they were not. This puzzle didn't make logical sense to me. I was also hoping that when these flowers eventually were in full bloom that they could be used for stews and I was disappointed when they couldn't be. On a lighter note, I found it funny that ultimately the tree "just needed to get lei-ed" (pun intended).
In VV4 I was also disappointed that some of the things that I liked in VV3 were scaled back:
In VV4, the villagers need to make cloth before they can use it. In all previous versions this was magically taken care of, so this feels like a step back to me rather than an addition. There are now only three herbs, so the number of possible stews that can be made is smaller. There is also nothing particularly new or interesting about the science lab or hospital.
As things stand, I think the VV games are great.
I have personally experienced the painful process of coding and debugging (on a smaller scale), so I fully empathize with that process. I also understand that sometimes
life gets in the way of work and those kinds of experiences are truly blessings - so, congratulations on your new baby boy.
I do disagree with rockmower that one hour is enough to know whether you will like the game or not. It is enough time to know whether you like the
gameplay of the game or not, but to appreciate the buildings in the game and functions the villagers can perform, one needs to complete the puzzles which takes far longer than one hour. For the record, I purchased the game directly from LDW, and I have no regrets about that...
The purpose of this post isn't to put down the creators of the game. I completely understand the tremendous effort that went into making VV4. Rather, please treat this as a request to make VV5 EVEN better than the current games already are and to keep incorporating new things. I AM complaining - not for the sake of complaining - but to help LDW understand where they can make improvements to the games so that they can be truly extraordinary. If I didn't care about the VV series, I wouldn't post anything at all.
When VV3 came out, the graphics improvement over VV2 really impressed me and a liked a lot of additions like rain, rain dances, the sun room, the look of bath, the fruit tree, and behavior of the villagers. So for VV5, take more time if you need to, but add more new things that make players think, "WOW, that is so cool!"
In the next installment, please, please, please keep the VV3 and VV4 maps, but link them together and instead spend energy on adding activities, buildings, and capabilities to the two maps, rather then reinventing the wheel. I'll add detailed suggestions for VV5 in that particular thread.
Again, thank you so much for the effort you put into VV4, and know that some people appreciate VV4 for what it is, but also have high hopes for VV5 can become.
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