If you are considering to buy this game, please give this a quick read. These are the things they don't advertise.
I'm normally hesitant to leave negative reviews. I feel bad reducing a game's chance of success because it wasn't my type of game. However, this game is on another level of disappointment- even though I bought it on sale.
When you first spawn, you need to gather wood and stone to craft a hatchet, chop trees and build the first crafting station. All while gathering wild vegetables and fruits to maintaining your hunger stat.
...is what I wish I could say. Instead, when you spawn, you gather wild berries to sell to a [i] vending machine[/i] . Use your money to buy a fishing rod, and sell your catch to... a vending machine. Use even more money (over 2.000 'mk' (a regular fish sells for about 60 mk)) to buy a workbench, as well as a research tent for 700 mk, at another vending machine.
(I also saw a player on a mount give a random player 100.000 mk, which is an obvious red flag)
You then spend the next hour or so to find a spot where you can place your tent, among all the other tents of other players. There is very little room for all players, so you can't exactly be picky. Also, your enerhy bar is your health bar, so keep it full if you plan to walk a long way (at a low walking speed).
Your tent will decay in 24 hours, unless you upgrade it to a cabin. I get that, it's actually an okay way to prevent the server getting flooded with abandoned tents by new players. To upgrade your tent, simply place your workbench in your tent and collect 150 wood and 50 juniper wood. A normal tree drops about 8 wood, and a small tree about 8 juniper wood. That's 25 trees to cut down. Normal trees fall after about 50 chops, and smaller ones after about 25.
I gave the game muliple chances at this time, and almost quit entirely. Today, I decided to give it one last shot. Maybe I was playing it wrong? Maybe the game is more about the social aspect.
I gathered the wood with a few random players passing by, no interaction. Just chopping wood and dying next to my tent repeatedly because of energy loss. I upgraded my tent to cabin and found out that you have to MAINTAIN your cabin using resources, lest it would decay. You cannot take a break from this game for longer than 180 hours (7.5 days), or fail to deposit enough wood, without losing everything. That did it for me.
Something I haven't mentioned yet: you can customize your character, but it will cost you an enormous amount of Vintercoins (?) which you can earn by playing daily, OR simply buying them! Yes kids, you can use your parents' creditcard to buy a hat and a kitty mount! We already payed for this game, right? Thank you, devs, for bringing that horrible mechanic to PC gaming.
The concept of the game seemed really fun of me; a competitive farming sim, I hadn't seen that before. I have not engaged in any PvP activity in 3 hours, though, neither have I seen other players fight or farm together. This really could have been a great game.
If you still want a game like this, check out Don't Starve Together. It has dedicated servers, PvP as well as coop, and it's a non-pay-to-win survival game. It's just really harsh to new players, but you can host your own server and tweak the settings as much as you want. Don't know why I just played that in the first place...
Longvinter? I'm long gone.
