Quick Look: My Time At Portia

Antoine is a handsome devil to be sure.

I haven't played this in like 2 years but it's looking way better now. May have to check it out again thqnks.

Curious if Dan will check this out. A Next-Gen Stardew Valley.

Oh, it's that game.

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2019/01/24/my-time-at-portia-devs-apologise-claim-voice-actors-will-soon-be-paid/

Im about 35 hours into this game and im still LOVING it. Can't stop building! I havent really dug into the relationship stuff but i probably will eventually.

Maybe it's just the way Abby is showing it off here, but I really don't get the comparisons to Stardew Valley. It feels more heavy handed towards crafting stuff than tending a farm... The 'crafting' in Stardew was only there tangentially, not as a full on mechanic.

There are more involved dungeons latter on that have combat and exploration. More resources are also present in latter ruins and you can get resources from the quarry latter in the game so you have to worry less about mining.

By the way Abby, in Stardew Valley there are multiple ways to enhance your stamina bar. Also eating or drinking something after farming gives you stamina so you can do a bunch of stuff after you are done farming.

@synthesis_landale: Yeah, the only thing crops are for is for one festival and for growing mining resources in your yard so you don't actually have to go to the mine.

So this is like Stardew Valley, but in three dimensions! I'm definitely interested.

I’m disappointed by this Quick Look because it doesn’t represent the game very well. The bridge mission Abby is on is one of the first. Once you complete the bridge mission the map opens up more. Several of the missions open more map and new activities. There are also holidays and special events like Stardew! There is a dungeon and combat! Right now I’m (spoiler alert) connecting Portia to another city! I’m just not sure why you would record a Quick Look in the first few hours of the game? It doesn’t represent the game well. Like Stardew, a lot of the content is gated by the calendar and story.

I guess there's really nothing hinting at that unless you look up things ahead. They gotta draw a line somewhere for when to start recording a quick look. Hopefully Abby will continue playing and mention more of her progress in a future Beastcast.

Oh man, this looks cool but reminds me I need to finish DQ Builders.

The complaints about the map are incredibly odd, it seems on par with most games? Does anyone know if you can play at your own pace/endgame like Stardew?

I'd have to agree. A lot of the time the duders do absolutely no research on the games they're playing, and they tend to not realize what makes a good and informative Quick Look. I've always wanted to think of QLs as "hey let me see if this game would be worth my money and time" and they could be more fleshed out with as much information as possible. 99% of the time they don't even know how much the game costs or what platforms they are on.

@synthesis_landale: You're not terribly far off. They call you a builder and Portia's missions definitely push you towards building/crafting. That said for me Stardew was the most fun when I was working towards building things. The community center being the most obvious but the rest of the buildings too. I didn't spend a great deal of time farming until post community center.

Got this on the 1.0 launch and it's very much like a number of games others have already played but if I were to compare it to any other game it's far more like the Atelier games than Stardew. More often than not the games is mostly about building things and putting built or found items together per jobs or request. It's a bit rough in spots and there are instances where there should be sounds effects during enemy encounters. So far it's been a solid crafting game.

I'm about 9 hours in and find this game to be a very middle-of-the-road Stardew-like (and yes, it very much is even if farming isn't the focus. You inherit a place, you ingratiate yourself with the town, the days have a timer. It's the same, get over it.). I like the crafting loop, and the storage bin quality of life should be heavily mimicked by other games, but it's kind of a shoddy production, especially when it comes to the audio, which is straight abysmal.

@juggaloacidman said:

That's what Quick Looks used to be most of the time, just putting in a game for the first time and finding out what it is. It's what made a lot of the classics so classic.

Why are people calling this my time at porsche?

@phourniner: They need a checklist! Lol. To be fair though after watching the Quick Look again I think it might be the games fault a little. If you do commissions instead of the main story it moves really slowly. For her the story line probably hasn't moved much.

The faces kind of remind me of the puppets from Crank Yankers.

The description I heard on Waypoint makes this game sound bonkers... on top of all the voice actor stuff

I think you guys might be misunderstanding what the quick look is. The quick look is literally a look at the first couple of hours of a game, giving viewers a glimpse at what the game will be when they first pick it up. The quick look was designed so that Giant Bomb's small team could cover more games without having to devote a lot of resources to each game. If you want more in-depth coverage, the podcasts are usually the place to look.

Oof. Bad situation. By the sounds of the article, it wasn't that the company didn't want to pay its VAs, but that it didn't have the structure in place to keep in touch with and follow through with them. They even asked some of the VAs to get in touch with them if they haven't been paid, which is a messed-up thing.

@the_nubster: Yeah, at some point it's more like they kinda need to get on top of knowing how to run a business right, and if they are lucky, get away from this mess as a learning experience where everyone's dues are paid with fairness.

Reasonably speaking, this lesson also applies to any business liability, not just voice actors or creative assets that center the game's development, of course.

@jeffgoldblum

It might've started out like that, but we're in 2019 now and the quicklooks where they go in completely blind are almost non-existant nowadays. Pretty much every Vinny quicklook has him switching between multiple savegames to show how the game progresses (Exapunks & Factorio come to mind.) And you have quicklooks of Assassins Creed Odyssey & Spiderman on the site after the quicklooker went through the entire game. I don't think that when people point out that when a quicklook doesn't give a great idea of what the game offers, it's fair to act like the quicklook format is too rigid to allow for that information to be there.

And sure, back in the day when they were throwing out 4-6 quicklooks a week, trying to play enough of these games to get a complete overview is a fools errand. But again, it's 2019 and we now have a larger crew & quick looks are not the focus anymore. For instance, the last quicklook with Abby at the helm was Parkitect (21 dec , 2018). Dan, the most prolific quicklooker, seems to do +-2 a week lately. With this decreased focus on quicklooks, i don't think it's too much to ask the quicklooks that do show up to give a decent amount of information to the viewer. Not to see lategame switch ups as in Brutal Legend, but to poke around a bit in the story & sidequests to get a good grasp of the breadth of content.

In this case, i think Abby did a pretty good job, given that it's not super obvious that the bridge would open up a bunch of activities, but the idea that a quicklook strictly has to stick to the first hours is something that's simply not true anymore.

So nobody else has compared this to Yonder? Yonder is like the "no combat" version of this - but it looks very similar. I like the non-violent game bent in Yonder; (someone on a Quick Look not long ago said they couldn't think of a good non-violent game; i was like Sports games, Uniracers, Simcity, Tetris, Sims, Animal Crossing, Gran Turismo, Harvest Moon, (Mario Kart really)... The list is very long and contains some of the best selling games of all time!).

But from this quicklook, if you do have combat, I would think DQ Builders, or even Portal Knights would be better? Little Dragons Cafe would be good for fans of this too (non-violent again), but I got a little bored about half way through that...

The art style in this game is eehhh. Why is the main character's face so creepy? It seems slightly too realistic for her body proportions and the style of the world Maybe they should have gone full-on Wind Waker.