New details on Birthdays the Beginning, the upcoming sandbox game from Harvest Moon creator Yasuhiro Wada, are out this week, courtesy of a Eurogamer interview with the iconic developer. If you’ve been keeping tabs on the game it’s a must read, in no small part because it sounds like some folks aren’t going to enjoy Birthdays the Beginning nearly as much as they expected.
According to Wada, gameplay in Birthdays the Beginning will be even simpler than the basic Collect → Craft → Build → Repeat loop we’ve come to expect from the sandbox genre. The TOYBOX Inc. founder says player interactions will be mostly limited to raising and lowering small sections of land. Wada says there will be items for the player to use, which we have few details on at this time, but input will be pretty heavily constrained. The only other control the player will have is the ability to swap between Creation Mode, which freezes time and lets you terraform the world, and Macro Mode, which unpauses the game clock and lets players jump tens of thousands of years down the timeline.
Players’ primary goal will apparently be to catalog all of the plants and animals available in Birthdays, including rare spawns that only appear in certain circumstances, and there will be a basic quest system to give players a sense of progression. Penalties are pretty sparse. Players will have an HP meter, which forces them back to Macro Mode when depleted, but the only time we’ll see a “Game Over” screen is if your planet is around for 999 billion years.
For more on Birthdays the Beginning, check out the writeup of Eurogamer’s discussion with Yasuhiro Wada and/or revisit the trailer published during the 2016 Tokyo Game Show. Then head down to the comments section and let us know if you’re thinking about buying Birthdays the Beginning when the game heads west next year.
Birthdays the Beginning is in development for PlayStation 4 and PC. The game is expected to hit North America sometime in early 2017.
Be sure to check back with iDigitalTimes.com and follow Scott on Twitter for more Birthdays the Beginning news throughout 2016 and however long Arc System Works continues to support Birthdays the Beginning after launch.
