#project me

The first thing is the direction of the art style. It's almost too far from the style of Portia and Sandrock. I know a lot of people complained about that with the previous games. If I had a dollar for every time I saw someone complain about the MC looking like a child or harping on the character proportions...I'd be pretty rich by now. That being said, the the cartoony style was part of the charm and uniqueness of the other games. My Time at Portia is distinct, you really can't mistake it for any other game (like how when you see Code Lyoko, you know it's Code Lyoko and not possibly another show). Even the slightly less cartoonish style of Sandrock still retains that charm. Project ME kept up the Sandrock style so I was hoping if they brought it to PC it wouldn't change much but clearly that isn't the case. With the more realistic style it's lost it's uniqueness. Several people have already pointed out that this new direction makes it look too much like other games (I see a lot of comparisons to Palia and Dreamlight Valley in the YouTube comments) and I can't help but see MiHoYo's signature anime-esque style myself. I'm not saying it looks bad. It looks amazing! It just doesn't look like My Time.

Another thing for me is that it's more of a city builder than a building/farming life sim. Those elements are still there obviously but...trying to build up the settlement takes a lot of time and planning (again, I played Project ME so I already have a feel for this feature) and you're left with little time for the core elements of the game. Hell, I struggled to keep up with commissions while working on the settlement and keeping up relationships and collecting materials AND exploring. I constantly felt like I wasn't making any actual progress. It became stressful and if there is one thing these type of games shouldn't be, it's stressful. Hopefully they'll balance it out better here than in ME.

Lastly, and I know this one is something a lot of people will disagree with me on, but I already have a fear of them focusing too much on multiplayer/co-op. I know there is a (very) vocal group of people who constantly demand multiplayer to be shoved into every. single. game. And when developers kowtow to that demand, singleplayer always suffers. Always. I'm not saying that it shouldn't be implemented for those who want it or if the developers themselves want it but...some of us just want to be left alone to enjoy the story. Especially in a game/genre that is, at it's core, supposed to be a singleplayer experience. Sometimes though, developers focus so much on pleasing multiplayer gamers that they completely neglect the singleplayer campaign. Hell, that almost seemed happen with Sandrock (thankfully, it didn't but it got precarious for a hot minute during early access). This is somewhat two-pronged, too. Usually, you can ignore multiplayer stuff in a game if it also has singleplayer but it's become more common to force the multiplayer/co-op feature onto players recently. Such as locking features of the game or putting up a roadblock in story progression unless you play with other people. I dropped Magic Awakened after only playing for a few weeks because of this. When you can't enjoy a singleplayer storymode without having to do co-op tasks or something it ceases to be singleplayer (and fun...for people like me). I know Pathea wanted to expand on the multiplayer feature for their next game, I just hope they don't expand so much that it destroys the main, singleplayer experience.