Carl and I have been busy playing Medieval for about 5 straight hours. It's a fantastic new game. We were at Meijer before the sun came up this morning and the clerk had not even put the game on the shelves yet, so a manager needed to be called to unlock where the games were in storage.
Wow...where to begin? Well, there's a ton of overlap with Sims 3, so all of you should feel right at home. But, it is a true RPG with concepts like Experience at the core. Every morning at 9 AM your hero receives 2 main aspirations for the day and you have varying amounts of time to complete those. You also have Quests to complete and each main quest is made up of many small accomplishments — go talk to X and discuss Y, go to the boat and do Z, go to the Village and do Q, etc. All of these things eat up lots of time because you have no option but to walk everywhere.
My biggest tips at this point is to do a little exploring in a forest at the outset in hopes you find some gems you can sell. You can then go into Buy mode and purchase a better bed because all heroes, even the Monarch starts off with truly abysmal beds and it takes forever for them to be fully rested. Cooking decent meals is another thing you want to address early — your only option without going to the village for ingredients is gruel, so going to the village for something like boar meat will provide meals that yield nice buffs — moodlets are called buffs in Medieval. And the Mood Meter is called Focus.
More to come soon.
