The new life-sim video game Disney Dreamlight Valley launched its early access phase last Tuesday, and, so far, it has been quite the adventure. But what makes this game special - especially in comparison to other popular titles in the same genre? And is it worth dropping money now on a game that will eventually be free to play?
I'm not going to waste much time trying to explain to you what the game is. I'm sure there are plenty of articles and blogs out there that can go into extensive detail about the plot without me having to type it all up here. But I will briefly summarize it for you this way: if Animal Crossing and Stardew Valley had a kid and it lived in Kingdom Hearts, that's pretty much what you're looking at, just without any violence, romance or ridiculous loans to pay off. That do anything for you?
I heard about Dreamlight Valley a while back and was immediately interested in it - especially when I heard that it was going to be free to play, which I thought was totally shocking and un-Disney-like. I somewhat kept tabs on the game over the past few months, thanks to sponsored ads and posts on social media. I knew the game was launching on September 6, and I couldn't wait to download it to my Playstation. However, I woke up last Tuesday morning to quite a shock - the game wasn't free, after all. I had to buy it for $30.
I must preface my next sentence with two statements:
- I am a big Disney fan - and I miss Disney Infinity dearly.
- Thirty dollars is not expensive, for a video game.
After some momentary contemplation, I happily forked over the money and bought the game, without even fully understanding why I was doing it.
What is the Founders Pack, and why does it cost money?
I learned a lot about Dreamlight Valley on the morning of September 6. I Googled several variations of "Why isn't Dreamlight Valley free like they said it was going to be?" Here's what I found out:
- The version of the game that is available to play right now is considered "early access." They called it the "Founders Pack." That's a fancy way of saying that it's a beta version of the game that is not 100% finished. It's a hands-on method of letting the developers know how the game is running and whether there are any problems that need to be tinkered with before the full, free-to-play launch. Essentially, the $30 I paid granted me early access to play before most other people.
- The early access period is planned to last at least six months, meaning that the free version of the game will go live in early 2023.
- The money I paid also rewarded me with exclusive cosmetic items that won't be available to gamers who begin playing when the game launches for free. This included some cool Mickey-themed furniture for my house in the game, as well as some unique clothing items (most notably, a "Mickey ears" headband made of donuts) and an animal companion named the "Choco Crocodile," which is a little gator that looks like an ice cream sundae. As far as I am aware, it literally does nothing, other than follow my character around at all times, sparkling and looking adorable.
- Early-access users will be able to earn special in-game rewards that will not be available later on. For instance, the game is currently celebrating Pixar Fest. Players can focus on certain goals to earn limited-time Pixar items, like Miguel's guitar from "Coco" or Carl Fredricksen's fireplace from "Up." Pixar Fest is running in Dreamlight Valley for about a month. Once that timer hits zero, all that Pixar stuff will be locked, making it unavailable to people who wait to play the game for free.
- There are two tiers of paid content above what I paid; I think they're $60 and $99, if you're really hardcore. Those higher levels provide even more exclusive stuff, like a Buzz Lightyear-inspired tuxedo-looking thing. Looks sweet, but I'm not paying twice as much so I can have it. Thirty bucks was fine with me.
After one week, do I feel like getting the Founders Pack was worth it? So far, I'd say yes. I'm going to milk that $30 for all it's worth, and I'm having a great time.
Ten reasons to love Dreamlight Valley
1. The characters
The immediate draw for Dreamlight Valley is the Disney IP. If you showed somebody a picture of characters on Animal Crossing and a picture of characters on Dreamlight Valley, then asked them which game they want to play, I'm guessing that nine times out of 10, they'd pick Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck over Tom Nook and Isabelle. Dreamlight Valley is great because you meet Merlin, Goofy and Scrooge McDuck right off the bat, and can welcome new, recognizable neighbors to your village within 30 minutes. After one week, I've added characters from "Moana," "Frozen," "The Little Mermaid," "Ratatouille" and several other Disney and Pixar movies. They all live together (I can even pick where most of their houses go) and they naturally interact with one another, as if it's totally normal to have an ice queen living just up the road from a Samoan demigod.
Unlike Animal Crossing, where you've really got to luck out to get cool neighbors, or Stardew Valley, where you're plopped into a city of townsfolk that you've never met, I'm excited every time that somebody from a beloved film expresses interest in joining my ragtag bunch of villagers. Dreamlight Valley just announced the next few steps in their content roadmap - specifically that Scar from "The Lion King" and the toys from "Toy Story" will be joining the game in Fall 2022 and Late Fall 2022, respectively.
2. It actually has a story
I love Animal Crossing - I even named it one of the five things that saved me during quarantine! But after playing that game every single day (literally) for over a year, it became a chore. I knew I had to log on to check into that little ATM machine and get my Nook Miles, and while I was at it, I might as well do some fishing, chip away at my mountain of debt and check in on my little sweater-wearing buddy Marshall, but that eventually just stopped being fun. It became tedious and repetitive and I lost my will to keep doing it.
Stardew Valley is great - different, but great - but racing against the in-game clock to tend to all my crops and making sure I pet every single chicken and cow, along with maintaining relationships with everyone in town - all before I pass out from exhaustion (yes, that's a real thing), gets tiresome, too. I have to play Stardew in spurts so I don't get burned out.
Dreamlight Valley actually has a plot. You don't have to do anything, necessarily. If you don't want to garden, you really don't have to that often, other than when it's required for quest progression. I was mentioning to my wife that I hardly garden at all anymore. If you prefer to just go fishing, you can just go fishing. If you feel like picking some apples or cooking at Chez Remy, go ahead and do it.
But if you want to focus on the main storyline in Dreamlight Valley, you're really in for some fun. It continues to surprise me how detailed and interesting the story has been, for a game that is ultimately going to be free for everyone. I've paid more money for worse storylines, quite frankly. My journey to discover what happened to the valley and why all the residents started disappearing has been a fascinating one, with a few exciting twists and turns along the way. That's something I couldn't say about Animal Crossing or Stardew Valley.
3. Unbreakable tools
It stinks when stuff breaks. If you've played Animal Crossing or Zelda: Breath of the Wild, you know what I mean. In fact, I traded Breath of the Wild back in to Gamestop because of the breakable weapons. (I sometimes regret that decision, but I truly felt like if I got a really strong sword, I couldn't use it because after a certain number of hits, it would break. So dumb.) In Dreamlight Valley, you get all your tools fairly quickly into the game. They're yours to keep, and they're only going to get stronger. You never even have to refill your magical watering can. It's so glorious.
4. Cooking and crafting, made easy
One thing that I really love about Dreamlight Valley is that you don't have to have everything on your person, if you're trying to cook or craft something. For instance, if you want to make a meal for Merlin that requires a fish, some lettuce and a lemon, those things can be stored in a treasure chest back home and you can still access them, no matter where you are. If you've got it - anywhere - you can use it. Needless to say, I've got six chests in various rooms of my character's house, just to hold all my crap so I don't have to lug it around with me everywhere I go.
5. Wildly different biomes and realms
In Animal Crossing, you're on an island. The seasons vary from real-life month to real-life month, but you're always on an island. In Stardew Valley, you've got pretty drastic changes in weather, from in-game month to in-game month and even from day to day, but you're always in Stardew Valley.
In Dreamlight Valley, there is a central geographical hub called the Plaza, which is pretty standard. But down the hill, you've got a meadow with several little fishing ponds. Further south, there's a tropical beach where bananas and coconuts grow. In the northwest portion of the map is a forest with big trees and a small stream. There's also a dark, swampy glade, a desert plateau and several regions that I haven't even unlocked yet - one of which I know is covered in snow and ice. In other words, you can access extremely varied climates just by running 30 seconds in any direction, at any time of the day. Each region, or biome, has unique plants, vegetation and minerals, so you'll likely want to visit all of them, any given time you boot up the game.
In addition, players can travel to different realms, based on areas from Disney and Pixar movies, which is where new characters typically hang out before you can recruit them to come live with you. Up to where I'm at in the game, there have been four realms, but the developers have stated that they'll introduce many more down the line, in some cases lining up with future movie releases. Who knows which characters and which worlds they'll introduce in the future?
6. Sarcastic responses
As you progress through the game, the characters will ask you to run errands for them or help them accomplish certain things. These missions are driven by text dialogue (augmented by occasional, generic lines of audio). Almost always, the game will allow the player to select one of several possible responses to guide the conversation along. For instance, if Anna from "Frozen" asked you to help her pick some berries, the player might say, "Sure! I'd love to help you!" Perhaps they might say, "What do you need berries for?" And, from time to time, they'll even give the player something really snarky to say. Here are the best three thing I've said so far:
- In response to Scrooge asking me what I thought Merlin might have bought from the store. I said, "Something old... like him." Scrooge then chided me and told me to stop making his customers the butt of my jokes.
- I asked Mother Gothel how old she is.
- When Ariel told me she believed superglue to be something that humans put in their hair, I responded, "You should try it sometime."
7. All will be revealed... from the very beginning
One of the biggest pains I experienced with Animal Crossing was the misery of picking up those bottles on the shore that would give you a recipe to craft something. Like, you might open one and it would be instructions for how to make a wooden desk, then your player would be able to make one for their home. The problem was that it was a total crap-shoot every time you got one and, after you'd played for a while, the recipe in the bottle was almost always something you already knew, making it completely worthless. I remember hoping for the recipe for an ironwood dresser for months. I finally got it, which, sadly, felt like I had just won the jackpot.
In Dreamlight Valley, if you're curious about how to craft something, you can literally just look it up in the crafting menu. You don't have to hope and pray that you'll randomly stumble across the instructions. They're right there, from the very beginning. I have noticed that, as I have unlocked different areas of the map, picking up a new flower that I'm encountering for the first time may unlock a new crafting recipe, but it's not like I go to find out how to craft that item and it doesn't allow me to do it or won't tell me which resources I need. It tells me, clearly, what I need and how to do it.
Similarly, for cooking, if you randomly toss some stuff into a pot, you can make anything. Nothing is locked for new players. If you've got the right ingredients, you can make it, and the game will even save that recipe for you to use again in the future. I've been using a website like this one as a guide any time I come back to my house with a bag full of ingredients that I foraged as I walked through the glade, beach and meadow. If I have a new, rare or unique fish or vegetable, I just CTRL+F it on the list of recipes, throw the stuff in and make it. Boom. Pretty simple. Pretty convenient.
Another really nice thing is that if I need to mine an emerald and I can't remember where those are found or if I need to look for a specific type of flower but I can't remember where those grow, I can pull up the "Collections" page in the menu and it will tell me exactly where to go.
8. Cats and dogs living together! Mass hysteria!
I know I already talked about how great the cast of characters is in Dreamlight Valley, but one more aspect of the game that makes it a lot of fun is that it's not just the good guys who want to move in. There are a couple villains, too! The quest mechanics, as I mentioned earlier, give you some freedom to treat people in certain ways, so if you want to talk to Ursula like she's the most despicable creature on the planet, you can pretty much do that. On the other hand, if you want to sort of flirt with Mother Gothel and tell her that her dress is stunning, like I did at one point today, you can do that, too. You can run missions for heroes and villains without any sort of morality system; doing one thing for a villain isn't going to turn everyone else against you. Heck, I even agreed to spy on one of the villagers, which truly made me feel despicable, in retrospect, without any major ramifications, which is pretty nice, honestly. Deep down inside, it feels like the characters all want the valley to prosper, no matter how virtuously they choose to go about it.
9. Cross-platform functionality - eventually
One thing that I absolutely cannot wait for is cross-platform functionality, which is to say that, once the game goes free-to-play, if I am busting my butt on the Playstation and my wife wants to watch a TV show, I will be able to save my game to the cloud, then boot it right back up on the Nintendo Switch, using the exact same save file. You actually may be able to do that right now, but I assume you'd have to pay at least $30 to buy it on the other console. Once it's free for everybody, you could just make sure the game is downloaded on both systems and you'd be good to go. The version of the game that I bought was technically compatible with the Playstation 5 and the Playstation 4, and I've verified that the cross-functionality works by downloading the game to the PS4 and loading it up. It worked like a charm, so I could actually go play in the office on the PS4 while my wife plays in the living room on the PS5, but from my one-time experience starting the game on the PS4, the load time seemed to be dreadfully slow, so I think I'll just stick to the one platform for now.
10. It's a game I can play with the whole family
As I just mentioned, this is a game that my wife and I have both been playing over the past week. She's not as much of a video game junkie as I can tend to be sometimes, but every once in a while, I introduce her to a game that she really enjoys. We've both made some impressive progress on our villages, at this point, and it has been fun to talk about the game together and compare and contrast the decisions we've made along the way. I really hope (and I do expect) that Dreamlight Valley will eventually introduce a multiplayer aspect at some point down the line so that we can play the game together and visit each other's villages. That's one thing that we haven't really been able to do with Animal Crossing (we'd need two Switches in order to play together simultaneously) or Stardew Valley (we have it on Playstation and the Switch but the game doesn't have cross-platform functionality). Once DLV becomes free for everybody, if we could play together, either with each of us on a Playstation or with one of us on the PS5 and the other on the Switch, I think that would be a blast.
Perhaps the most ringing endorsement of all is that my son, who turns two next month, absolutely loves Dreamlight Valley. The first few times I played it, he would legitimately scream when he saw Mickey moseying on down the path. One time, I had the game paused and my son saw a Mickey Mouse emblem on one of the menus. When I un-paused the game, he almost started crying because the Mickey icon disappeared. He has cheered for me when I've caught fish or successfully built a character a new house. He has brought me one of the Playstation controllers while I was working and asked, "Play Mickey?" And it's even a game where I feel like I can hand him the controller for a few minutes and let him mess around (he's not old enough to know what he's doing yet) without fear that he's going to get my character killed or do something that's really going to mess me up.
If you're looking for a game that everybody in the family will enjoy - and probably one that everyone in the family will be begging to play - Dreamlight Valley is it, even for a down payment of $30.
What bugs need to be worked out?
There are a few things that I've noticed so far that I hope the developers can iron out in the coming weeks, and I know that they're already working on a few of them, which is awesome. The first update patch should be released at some point this week.
The update will include:
— Disney Dreamlight Valley (@DisneyDLV) September 8, 2022
✅Fix for changing clothes
✅Improved Founder's Pack claiming
✅Fix for Error 7
✅Reduced Switch crashes
✅Improved Dream Shard frequency
✅Multiple fixes for quest progression tied to unreachable, missing, and unrecognized items
In my experience, the game has run mostly fine, but here are a few kinks I've noticed:
- Most egregiously, I'm stuck on an early quest for Donald Duck, where I have to collect a bunch of items in his boat - one of the items is stuck underneath a table that I can't move, thus making the item unobtainable. (Editor's note: This was fixed in the first major update patch.)
- The camera can be a bit janky, especially in the forest (tall trees occasionally obscure the view) and in small rooms (the Ratatouille realm).
- The game has completely frozen on us a couple times, requiring a hard reboot, which solves the problem - and we've never lost any unsaved progress - but is not ideal.
- I've seen some items randomly disappear, like all of the food on one of the shelves in the Ratatouille realm.
- The camera occasionally blasts from where the character is to the completely opposite side of the map, which is odd but corrects itself quickly.
- When I added two new rooms as expansions to my house, the addition of the east wing deleted the treasure chest I was keeping all of my food in; thankfully, I didn't lose any of the food - it's all still there when I go to cook something - but the chest was completely deleted. (Editor's note: This was fixed in the first major update patch. They even gave me back my chest with all the food still in it!)
- The skin tone on the marker for the player's character (most noticeably in my wife's game) does not match the skin tone of the actual character.
- Some characters randomly, rapidly glitch when standing close to the character (I've mostly noticed it when fishing or standing close to an edge.
None of those glitches were irredeemable, in my opinion. Nothing made me rage quit. On the contrary, anything that made me have to restart the game just made me sad that I had to stop playing for like two minutes while the game closed and rebooted. It looks like the DLV team is collecting feedback and actively working to resolve known issues, which I appreciate.
Verdict
When I first learned about Dreamlight Valley, I thought it looked awesome. I was stoked to see that it wasn't just a mobile game and that I could get it for my PS5. I was a tad concerned that being free-to-play would make it feel cheap or that it might be loaded with microtransactions (making you pay real-life money to access certain aspects of the game). After diving into the game for a week, I cannot understate how please I have been with it. I've honestly been pleasantly surprised. It amazes me to see how much content they've packed into this game so far. The map feels huge, the storyline is actually really interesting and it seems like there is plenty of room for growth and expansion. The $30 I paid for this game feels like nothing. It feels like a "thank you" to the team that created this incredible game that I've spent the past week enjoying with my little Disney-loving family. I can't wait to see what the developers have in store. Here's a little taste of what they have planned, as announced in this past weekend's D23 Expo:
Have you seen the buzz coming out of the D23 Live Stream? We're excited to announce some BIG news about some small friends coming the Valley. Experience a sneak peek of the Toy Story Realm - coming to Disney Dreamlight Valley in late Fall 2022!✨ pic.twitter.com/d93umsd3lR
— Disney Dreamlight Valley (@DisneyDLV) September 9, 2022
*****
Are you playing Disney Dreamlight Valley yet? If so, how are you liking it? What are you loving? What weird glitches have you encountered? If you haven't picked it up yet, what's holding you back? We'd love to hear what you think in the comments section, on Twitter (here and here) or on Facebook.
Happy adventuring! See ya real soon.
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