Cosmetics first game design

One week into promising to write a weekly newsletter I’m already realising I should have built in a system whereby I do not write the newsletter at the last minute, because at 8:30pm on this particular Sunday I am tired enough that focusing my eyes enough to proofread is tricky. But we persist! I do apologise in advance for any grammar or spelling oopsies.

I was going to do a little summary of the different farming simulators I played last year, but instead I think I’m just going to talk about one thing I noticed in two of them.

Fields of Mistria and Lightyear Frontier are both games released in early access in 2024, and as a farm-sim lover I jumped on both of them. I played Lightyear Frontier on Xbox through gamepass in the front half of the year, and Mistria I bought through Steam more recently. They have very little in common besides the concept of farming. Where Lightyear Frontier provides a fantasy of fleeing earth for greener pastures and finding a perfectly serene and habitable world with cute critters and edible crops, all while stomping around it alone in a war machine modified for extra-solar colonisation (and we can talk later about that part), Fields of Mistria sees the player character offered a job fixing up a farm in a fantasy village damaged by earthquakes, and otherwise follows a more “classic” farm sim experience, with romancable neighbours and crops and animals more familiar to an earthbound human.

However, what they have in common is a focus in the gameplay that adds very little to the game itself. Craftable and purchasable cosmetics.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I love cosmetics in a video game. I believe I’ve publicly spoken about being willing to purchase cosmetics with real money in a free-to-play game as a way of supporting devs. However. In these games, I felt like as the game progressed I was being rewarded for progress with nothing but visual trinkets, and that whole mechanical systems of the game revolved around those trinkets, rather than contributing meaningfully to gameplay. There is almost nothing you can spend the money you get from selling crops and doing quests in Lightyear Frontier that isn’t completely cosmetic, for example.

Where I assumed this came from in Lightyear Frontier was multiplayer. I could be wrong, but I believe Lightyear Frontier was designed specifically for multiplayer, and a player going through the world solo was sort of an optional extra. Who likes playing alone, after all (me. I do.). And in a multiplayer setting, decorating your farm is definitely something you’ll spend time on. In single player however, who am I decorating for? Fields of Mistria also has no multiplayer aspect as of yet, but a key part of the game, the Saturday Market, sells only completely cosmetic items (aside from food and drinks). In particular, the clothing salesman seems to sell anachronistic styles of clothing, which for me felt completely out of place. Things like rainbow striped bucket hats aren’t common in most fantasy worlds that I’ve played in.

While cosmetics are great - collecting hats in Stardew Valley is a lot of fun for example - focusing so much gameplay around them feels like a waste of resources, when other aspects of the game could have been polished instead. Perhaps this is a complaint only I have, but if there were half as many hairstyles or clothing types in Mistria I don’t think I’d miss them. Much less the completely non-functional scarecrows in both games.

Maybe I’m judging early. Maybe in the full release of both games I’ll feel fulfilled by the cosmetic economy. But right now they feel like style over substance, and I’m just not compelled.

That’s all from me this week - see you next Sunday!