Often we are asked what the game’s end goals are, and I guess they haven’t been explained very thoroughly. So here, we'll go into a deep dive into what drives you as a player in A Township Tale.

We design this game to accommodate various play-styles, so there are what we’ll call peaceful and adventure oriented goals.

Peaceful Experience

If you’re into the peaceful experience, it’s likely that you’ll spend most of your time in town. The town serves as a hub where all roles/professions take place at the core. The farmer’s mill is there, where you’ll process grain, make fertilizer, grow and manage a vegetable crop.

But the town is old and derelict. Not everything works, so you’ll need to collaborate with others to repair them. Some bridges may need to fixing to unlock an area, the infrastructure of the actual houses may require special items that can only be found out in the world. You may need to ask some of the adventuring players to look for those when they head out next.

If you’re a peaceful player in town, you are essentially playing the role of an NPC if they actually did their work. If I was the innkeeper, I could brew new drafts to give people buffs, and spend the rest of my time seeking out resources from others to repair the distillery so that I could unlock a new way to make more varied drinks. (Disclaimer: The inn-keeper’s brewery is a fair way away from starting development.) Perhaps I need to ask the woodcutter for some timber, and the blacksmith for some metals. Repairing takes a huge amount of resources, so maybe we decide to distribute some of the metal to make better tools for others rather than spend it all. Balancing and negotiating these is a part of the town’s communal objective. Everybody will want their things repaired, and so it will require community planning to see what’s the highest priority for that server’s playstyle.

We take a bit of inspiration from the town experience of other peaceful games, that are more centered around sharing, and improving the town’s facilities. When the weather, and the elements take a turn for the worst, your survival depends on how well you managed to prepare your township.

Adventure Experience

Exploration, battling bosses, and unveiling new mysteries is the bread and butter of this experience. Anybody looking for a thrill will band together with others to build up their resources. Whether that means collecting timber to create weapon handles, mining ores to smelt into better and better weapons. The game scales in difficulty, the further you go the harder things will be. As a result, you work with peaceful players to craft better gear so that you may seek out rare treasures. It may be the legendary drop of a specific boss, or the repair resource a peaceful town member asked you to look for. As you explore the game’s many resource cycles, you’ll come across dungeons and lairs in which you need to be diligent. You may fight a little to see where you stand against the new enemies, and choose to get better armor and weapons first. There could be new environmental effects you need to deal with. And so, you return to town to see if the tailor (another distant role) can make thicker clothing for an icy biome. Turns out he can’t, because the advanced sewing machine hasn’t been repaired. And now suddenly, your goals align.

As an adventure player, you’re going to seek the end regions of the world, looking for ways to trigger events so that you may collect specific gear and trigger bosses to fight alongside your friends.

But you can be all of it…

It’s easy for me to divide the game into these two experiences, but we know that people want to do multiple things. We crossover the mechanics we consider peaceful and the ones we consider more adventurous so that objectives can overlap and can solve problems however you want. The town acts as a hub where you may seek answers to your problems as an adventurer, and as a peaceful player you could make it your sole objective to have the answers to their problems.

As a VR game, a video game in general, and a fantasy-medieval game, there are aspects of A Township Tale that require a new mindset. Simply imagine you live in a town in this setting, and then we trigger a bunch of events, both good and bad to challenge your survival. We strive to do this in all aspects of the genre, and we want you to co-operate with others to do it.

I hope this sheds some more light on the objectives of the games, and soon much of this will become a lot more tangible.