[GameSpot] - 5 Ways Disney Dreamlight Valley Could Get Even Better

[343iBot]

Disney Dreamlight Valley is almost everything a Disney fan could hope for in a life sim, blending together some of the company's most beloved characters with the type of "cozy" gameplay experience that has become so popular over the past few years. However, the game is currently in an early access period, meaning developer Gameloft is still working on balancing and improving the game before its full launch sometime in 2023.

With well over 100 hours already invested in the game, I feel that I've got a pretty good understanding of what Dreamlight Valley is getting right and wrong during its early access period. I'd argue that, in many ways, it actually manages to improve on the fundamentals of the games that very clearly inspired it--such as Animal Crossing and Stardew Valley--but it also has some frustrating issues that I feel need to be addressed before the full game releases. Here are the five biggest changes I'd like to see come to Dreamlight Valley.

Proper inventory management

Dreamlight Valley's lack of real inventory management is genuinely infuriating. The inability to move items around in your inventory means that sorting through things is a major hassle that requires time-consuming workarounds. The frequency in which I've had to drop nearly my entire inventory on the ground and then pick things up in a specific order to sort it all out is staggering, leading to a lot of wasted time that could've been better spent actually playing the game. Of course, it doesn't get any better when dealing with storage, either, as you still have to move items in and out of your inventory to sort them where you want them to go in the chest.

Even as an early access game, this one feels inexcusable. I'm really hoping a day comes when Gameloft provides us the ability to click on an item and move it to any slot we'd like--though at this rate, I'd even take a generic sorting option. Anything beats littering my valley with fish and berries to sort through while my villagers stare on with their judging eyes. Garsh, I'm doing my hyuckin' best, Goofy.

The ability to move bodies of water

One of my favorite things about Dreamlight Valley is how convenient it is to place or move furniture, homes, and items. Sure, the camera can be a little weird to control, but there's just a lot more freedom and efficiency to the entire thing compared to, say, Animal Crossing, which requires you to go through quite a lot of steps--and sometimes even pay money--to make simple alterations to the layout of your village.

That being said, one advantage to Animal Crossing is the ability to terraform, allowing you to move (or delete) entire sections of water to free up more space for your homes and personal creations. Dreamlight Valley, on the other hand, forces you to work around giant bodies of water--mostly used for fishing--which are often in spots that make it difficult to build around them. I definitely understand not letting us move certain rivers that connect to larger bodies of water outside of the playing space, but there's really no reason I shouldn't be able to move that massive pond in the center of the Peaceful Meadow. You're really messing with my feng shui, Gameloft.

More rewarding digging

I'm not going to sugarcoat this one: Digging in Dreamlight Valley sucks. It's bad enough that the process leaves big, ugly holes that take days to disappear unless you manually close them all up, but it's extra-insulting that it can sometimes take hundreds of holes to accrue enough resources to craft something. I sometimes dig up to 10 holes in a row without a single item, and more often than not, when something pops out, it's just a single coin. Of course, if I have Donald with me--my only digging companion--he'll reward me with one extra coin. Thanks, bud. I promise not to spend it all in one place.

I earned a total of four (4) pebbles while digging all of that.

In a game designed to keep you playing long-term, there needs to be a proper balance between time and reward, and that's been largely achieved with other tasks like mining and fishing. But digging feels wildly out of whack, asking you to spend an hour digging up nearly an entire biome just to get enough pebbles together to make a simple item. This could be fixed by either increasing how frequently resources drop while digging or by simply increasing how much of said resource is dropped when it finally does drop. As of right now, though, I'd rather suffer through Maui saying, "Why did I have to make mornings so early?" for the thousandth time than spend one more minute digging.

Consistent pricing in Scrooge's shop

Look, I get that Scrooge is named such for a reason, but the pricing in this guy's shop is absolutely bonkers. On any given day, you can be almost guaranteed to find a massive furniture item for around 650 coins and a simple shirt that costs something like 16,000. What kind of twisted nonsense is this duck up to? I originally considered that pricing may be randomized in some manner, but in fact, the same items show up regularly with the same ridiculous price tags throughout each week. As someone who does a lot of grinding and is usually sitting on upwards of 500,000 coins, I'm not terribly inconvenienced by Scrooge's shenanigans, but it still chaps my ass a bit each time I buy a jacket that costs more than a new car.

More balanced quest requirements

One of the most common things I see people complain about is the often absurd quest requirements. Many of your villagers' friendship quests ask you to obtain a selection of items, such as gems or wood, and the amount needed of each item is generally reasonable enough to knock out during a single sitting. But then you have outrageous requests, such as Minnie's level-10 quest, which tasks you with gathering 200 clay, 100 stone, 100 hardwood, and 30 iron ingots to make a clock tower. As mentioned above, digging up the clay alone is easily an afternoon worth of work, and it's just aggressively unfun to do so.

Minne's clocktower quest is so obnoxious that it has quickly become something of a meme on r/DreamlightValley, with players banding together in their shared hatred--many swearing not to even attempt to complete it out of sheer defiance. There needs to be something to keep us busy in the valley over the course of many months and years, but there has to be a better way than bogging us down with request this exhausting. Go dig up your own clay, mouse.

View the full article