Disney Dreamlight Valley: Time will tell…
Boy, a lot has happened since the last time I wrote about Disney Dreamlight Valley, which wasn’t even all that long ago. They announced the first major paid expansion for the game, A Rift in Time, which brings with it a whole set of new biomes, characters, and more, but more on that later.
When I last wrote about Disney Dreamlight Valley, I was still wondering when the game would go free-to-play, as that was the plan developer Gameloft had since the launch, a period of early access where people could buy in and then eventually the game would just be free-to-play as virtually every Gameloft game is. Then surprisingly, Gameloft announced that Disney Dreamlight Valley would just be a full-priced product and would continue to receive free updates but also occasional big paid expansions like A Rift in Time as well. That’s quite a big change. I’m not sure what Gameloft’s numbers were that indicated the game would be better off as a full product you buy, but here we are.
I guess the question this raises is how viable is the long-term future of Disney Dreamlight Valley? Obviously, this depends ongoing sales of the base game as well as the expansions. But anytime you add expansions that add content that the base game will not have, you are already dividing the player base. It’s just a question of if enough of the player base sees the value to buy enough expansion passes to justify Gameloft making more. We will just have to see how this drastic new direction works out for them. For the record, I think Disney Dreamlight Valley offers a wealth of content for the base package, especially if you have only recently gotten into it. Well worth the price of admission.
Now, people who only have the base game aren’t completely bereft of new content. You get a new villager, Jack Skellington, with his own questline, a very streamlined map and content list that’s way easier to navigate, and in what I think is a kind of odd decision, the ability to “deactivate” villagers. Their dwellings won’t disappear, and if you need them for a specific quest they’ll pop up, but if a particular villager is throwing off your groove, you can simply deactivate them and otherwise they won’t be around. Honestly, I feel this is kinda odd as a lot of the fun of Disney Dreamlight Valley is seeing all these characters running around and interacting, even if it’s often in limited ways. Certainly, I don’t find any of them annoying or bothersome to the point where I’d take a step to remove them from the game as much as possible. To each their own I suppose. Also, still waiting on fixing that storage, Gameloft. It really should be easy to stack and sort my resources by now.
Also, I haven’t checked it out and don’t really intend to, but multi-player is now a thing in Disney Dreamlight Valley. Maybe it’ll be expanded upon later, but the limited interaction you can have (visit, exchange a gift or two, and not much more than that) but as of now it doesn’t seem particularly interesting. Maybe they can add some contests or something to spice it up down the road…
As for the expansion itself, A Rift in Time offers a wealth of new content. Several new villagers, new biomes, and a whole new main storyline to tackle. You get a new tool, a wand that can manipulate time in a limited fashion, mostly this can move rocks, fix bridges, and uncover some fun hidden stuff here and there. Underneath all that though, it’s still mostly what you’ve been doing this whole time in the game so if you are looking for some drastically different things to do, this won’t fix that.
The biggest additions are a whole new currency that’s equivalent to Dreamlight you can only get either by finding it using your new wand or completing quests in the new area, and a new game, Scramblecoin. Scramblecoin is a board game you can play that’s honestly a little hard to describe but easy enough to understand once you get introduced to it. You can play it with any villager once you beat Mickey, but honestly, Mickey is pretty tough for an initial opponent it took me several tries to beat him.
Then there’s the new currency. “mist”. This is more heavily used in Eternity Isle than “Dreamlight” is in The Valley. You need it (and lots of it) to unlock the biomes, craft lots of new things, and upgrade various items including your new time wand. It’s not that hard to find, but if you’ve regularly been playing Disney Dreamlight Valley, odds are you have more Dreamlight than you know what to do with. With “mist” it’s like you are starting over at square one in that aspect. This is fine for now but I could see it getting incredibly tedious if we get some new version with each major expansion and have to do it all over again.
That’s it for today. Basically if you like Dinsey Dreamlight Valley, I highly recommend the A Rift in Time expansion, it’s more story, more characters, more biomes, and all that fun stuff. If you’ve been getting a little bored with the loop of the game, however, this won’t change your mind. Does Disney Dreamlight Valley have what it takes to go the distance as a full-service paid product with the occasional paid expansion? Only time will tell. I might squeeze one more entry in before the end of the year, but if I don’t, there probably won’t be another blog entry until at least Mid-January, possibly late February depending on a few things. So… maybe see ya real soon?
