It honestly wouldn’t surprise me if it’s actually set in a more anime-style world, and that the “real” looking one in the trailer is imaginery or something.
So you install a “f2p” game, get ten rounds(which takes a few minutes) and then you have to subscribe to play anymore, and the only option is $30 for a year? And it’s missing features that are on the website version.
This is a limitation of the (ancient) engine the game is on, as I understand it.
Old engine isn’t always bad. It is if you do like Todd and just slap more and more plugins and technology on top and call it a new engine, instead of fixing underlying issues or rewriting/updating old parts.
Which is why Starfield NPCs walk onto tables and become owls when the camera zooms into conversations, etc: It is the same code that is used in Skyrim and partly Oblivion. And Todd Howard doesn’t want devs doing silly things like fixing twenty year old code, he wants new and bigger.
I’m not saying there’s going to be another Stardew Valley update, I don’t even know at this point. Right now I am focused on my next game. So, we’ll see.
The decision making behind this is incredibly hard for me to understand. Just a very, very nonsensical way to run the project, on paper. I wonder about the circumstances.
The rights were aquired by Take-Two Interactive in 2017, and they wanted a sequel to be released in 2020.
The dev studio shut down in 2023 and current status is unkown.
You can stand on a leafy, forested river bank with deer grazing nearby in the reeds as the sun rises. It can be the dock of a large lake with boats driving by during the day. Or you can be by a tiny rocky mountain lake shore as the sun sets over the distant hills. It’s can be really relaxing(as long as you’ve cleared the are and aren’t attacked by a wild animal)