Highlights
- A Mastery System can keep players invested even after completing the main story content by offering optional rewards for late-game players.
- With a darker story and focus on combat, Haunted Chocolatier may benefit from emulating Stardew Valley’s Mastery System for continued player interest.
Despite the anticipation players might have for ConcernedApe’s upcoming Haunted Chocolatier, it might be wise for the developer first to look back and borrow one of Stardew Valley‘s new features introduced during its 1.6 update. While it might have been initially unusual for a game like Stardew Valley to receive a major update after so many years since its release, it seems that ConcernedApe’s focus had been on improving Stardew Valley‘s quality of life and longevity. More specifically, it’s possible that ConcernedApe wanted to ensure Stardew Valley could stand on its own two feet so that development could resume on Haunted Chocolatier.
But among these improvements was the introduction of Stardew Valley‘s new Mastery System, which added a range of new features and content suited to players who had already seen and experienced everything the game had to offer. While the sim genre faces a unique hurdle with replay value unlike other games, this Mastery System expanded Stardew Valley‘s potential by giving players optional rewards to aim for, even during late-game stages. With this in mind, Haunted Chocolatier should learn from Stardew Valley by including its own Mastery System at launch so that players have more than enough reasons to stick with the game for years to come.
2024 Might Still Be a Big Year for Haunted Chocolatier
Even though it may not launch this year, 2024 may still be a big year for Haunted Chocolatier, so long as ConcernedApe remains committed to it.
The Significance of Stardew Valley’s Mastery System
The biggest challenge a farm-life sim like Stardew Valley needed to overcome was ensuring players wouldn’t eventually lose interest in the game once they had, for example, seen every in-game event or maxed out their levels. With this in mind, various new features introduced in Stardew Valley‘s 1.6 update specifically target this after it added things like new festivals, new farm types, and especially an extension to the player’s skill tree.
Moreover, by making these new high-value rewards available for purchase through surplus experience earned after hitting the level caps,
Stardew Valley
incentivizes players to keep playing even if their skills can’t progress any further.
Why Haunted Chocolatier Needs Stardew Valley’s Mastery System
While a case could be made that Stardew Valley, as a solo indie developer’s first game, deserved to listen and learn from player experiences in real-time, Haunted Chocolatier will need to do the same with hindsight. Knowing that fans of Stardew Valley are prepared to invest time and energy provided that there’s always something for them to engage with, ConcernedApe should ensure that Haunted Chocolatier incorporates its own Mastery System from launch. Beyond being a preemptive safeguard for Haunted Chocolatier‘s longevity and replay value, it may even help further refine and evolve ConcernedApe’s approach to developing late-game content for other potential future sims it works on.
For instance, ConcernedApe has already stated that Haunted Chocolatier will focus more on combat than Stardew Valley, and this will likely mean players will collect a significant amount of experience points from defeating enemies and bosses. But depending on how Haunted Chocolatier balances this with other areas of the game, players may find themselves quickly maxing out any combat skills with leftover experience going to waste.
The perfect solution would be to adopt Stardew Valley‘s Mastery System, offering players an assortment of items, perks, and more as a reward for continuing to take on Haunted Chocolatier‘s foes. In addition to this, ConcernedApe has claimed that Haunted Chocolatier‘s story will be darker than Stardew Valley‘s, which might suggest it will have a potentially more definitive “ending” in line with this mature narrative.
A Mastery System may therefore be essential for Haunted Chocolatier, ensuring that players are incentivized to keep playing even after they have completed the game’s main story. Provided that the Mastery System has substantial rewards for players to work towards, Haunted Chocolatier could even take advantage of this and allow players to seamlessly transition from the story’s ending into its late-game content.
