As far as simulation games go, Disney Dreamlight Valley has done a pretty good job so far in delivering mostly what fans were expecting, while not just making a carbon copy of The Sims with licensed characters that people know and love.
The game is far from perfect in its current state, however. Aside from being a bit light on content (at least in terms of variation), there are elements in general performance and stability that need to be addressed before it fully goes live and can stand independently on its own two feet. Credit where credit is due, the developers are being very communicative through their Twitter page about their updates and what updates fix/address. It is also worthy to hold a degree of sympathy for developers launching a game that is heavily reliant on cloud information to basically every major gaming platform around right now. There are still some fairly large kinks that need to be ironed out though.
5 General Stability
While Disney Dreamlight Valley operates generally well most of the time, freezes, crashes, and the odd time of the game just closing down after it hits a virtual wall are still too common. This seems to be experienced by most when entering or exiting houses or talking to characters “too quickly”.
Losing progress on a game is always a frustrating experience. Having to retread old ground, acquire resources, sit through unskippable cutscenes, it’s all a lumpy, irritating cocktail of nuisance. This is exacerbated manyfold when it turns out the last save you made was prior to doing one of the many tasks that require time to pass, crops to be harvested, etc. If there’s one way to provoke ire in your fans, this is most certainly it.
4 Goofy’s Store Options
Goofy offers a helping hand to players by selling you useful items, but even when you sink some sizeable star coins into his stalls, his inventory isn’t exactly what you’d call “expansive”.
Admittedly, you can invest in his set-up to increase the range of items that he has on offer, but it’s not a huge increase. It would be nice to see him have a sale on certain items, have limited windows for special offers on certain days, or just have a wider range of things to buy beyond what he currently has. Goofy could even have a special or secret store that appears on set days where players have to find him, much like how Bungie did with Xur in Destiny.
3 Areas/Realms & Characters
While there is sure to be more content added to the game as it progresses, right now there are paradoxical feelings of claustrophobia and sparseness in the main hub world, even if you have all the characters unlocked. As far as content roadmaps go, Gameloft, Dreamlight’s developers, have only mapped out until the end of 2022. So far players have received Scar in a decent-sized update, and are due the Toy Story update in “late fall”.
With the amount of Disney characters available to them, it’s a little disappointing to see the number of characters and magical Disney worlds to explore be slightly anaemic, but it is still early days. Seeing that characters like Belle, Stitch, and Buzz Lightyear all feature on the game’s main promotional artwork though, it is strange that none of them were in the initial batch of introductory content. Judging by one of the achievements/trophies requiring players to build thirty houses for friends (which isn’t even physically possible at the time of writing), we should be due at least a few more residents in the not-too-distant future.
2 Radiant Quests
Although Preston Garvey from Fallout 4 did as much as he could to make radiant quests a mild irritation, Disney Dreamlight Valley could potentially benefit from having them included in the game. The quests the characters offer, both from the main “story” and for improving their friendships, are generally lengthy and involved. There’s certainly enough for the player to get their teeth into to keep them busy.
However, there are often times when, unless you’ve reached the correct level with a character, you can find yourself without a quest to undertake. This reduces you to the somewhat gruelling task of having a character follow you around while you plant crops or mine minerals just to raise their friendship level. Having general radiant quests available from characters could paper over this potential design crack.
1 Character NPC Interactions
Arguably the most annoying aspect that persists in Disney Dreamlight Valley is when characters have to interact with each other or meet up with one another to progress a quest. Later quests sometimes require NPCs to interact with each other or require the player to witness a conversation take place between two parties in order to progress to the next stage.
However, the usual result is that characters’ pathfinding gets messed up, or certain characters never initiate trying to look for the particular quest character at all. This is even more troublesome when characters are asleep when taking the quest, or looking for Ariel or Ursula as they teleport between different bodies of water.