However we commence proceedings with a brief thought or two on the Australian cruise event which was in progress at the time of my last news post. As I anticipated, the decorations which could be obtained from navigating the various days of the event were of fine quality - Joey Roo and the Koala Climber are both immensely cute while the Watering Hole is a slightly more sinister version of the Oasis.
And the final prize was the permanent guest appearances of Crocodile Jack.
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| Unlocking of Crocodile Jack |
His Crocodile Skewers recipe was another gem producer, bringing us up to eight on the Jubilee Oven. Understandably this had me daydreaming of the possibility of additional Jubilee Ovens finally being released for gems, particularly with Black Friday just around the corner. Would my prayers be answered?
Before we address that question there was the small matter of two more of Lani's special goals to gain stamps. We're all very familiar with the concept of these tasks by now, with this being the eighth and ninth editions of Lani's increasingly stale and tiring quests.
I think the desire (or total lack thereof) for these goals is demonstrated starkly by the threads over on the Storm8 Forum. Admittedly the level of activity over there relating to this game is relatively low anyway these days, but for each of the threads fo these Lani quests there was one response. Just one. Nobody's really interested anymore, and that's because it is repetitive and dull.
Keen to get the stamp recipes mastered, I still had a go at the challenges in each of these Lani batches, and completed five out of the six strands. The exception was the goal rewarding three silver stamps in the seventh collection.
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| Three silver stamp goal from seventh set of Lani's goals |
Be it 60 Veggie Juices, 25 French Dips or 38 Lobster Bisques (get real!) Lani does tend to be pretty demanding, and this particular goal was no different. On this occasion 66 Orange Juices was the hefty demand - being a 10 minute drink meant this one wasn't quite so bad, but with a 4 hour refresh time on Oranges there was certainly still an element of difficulty about this task.
I went in headfirst though, and looked set to pick up my hard-earned silver stamps in the final hour or two before the Thursday night deadline. Except I had a concentration lapse and forgot to serve up my last Orange Juice before the timer ticked down to zero. Falling one short of 66 Orange Juices was rather frustrating, but at least it's not like a cruise where you don't even get the income from serving the dish.
Coming off that annoyance was another cruise event, albeit with a difference. The Thanksgiving cruise event appeared at a glance to be your bog standard cruise with the opportunity to earn exclusive decor and another gem making recipe.
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| Notification for Thanksgiving cruise event |
Let me get this straight - there's nothing wrong with the game's developers re-releasing content. In fact this is something which newer players regularly clamour for, as it gives them a shot at procuring items which would otherwise be tantalisingly out of reach. But I'm not happy with how Storm8 have gone about this. They've presented this cruise like any other, and I'm sure many players are none the wiser that they've been duped into thinking they were gathering completely new stuff.
Maybe I'm nurturing a storm in a teacup here, but don't forget that real money does exchange hands in the game. It's perfectly reasonable to suggest that some players may have spent real money to ensure their passage through the cruise in order to earn a new recipe. After all the notification shown above does advertise a 'NEW recipe'. And yet for anyone who completed the challenge in 2015, the Mini Pumpkin Pies are already available for consumption.
There were only really two positives in all of this. Firstly there were stamps up for grabs this time on two of the days (whereas the stamps had not yet debuted 12 months ago). And secondly for those completing the cruise for a second time, Timmy the Turkey now pops by twice in that initial wave of customers, meaning that you stand to earn twice as many Pumpkins for preparing the Mini Pumpkin Pies. This does not however make up for my dissatisfaction.
Hopes of this being a happy round-up now rest with Black Friday. Would expansions and other upgrades be slashed in price and, most pertinently, would the Jubilee Oven have it's gem counterpart introduced? As with the original game we had to wait well into the day to find out, and sadly any optimism was quickly extinguished.
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| Black Friday 2016 teaser |
The offerings in the sale were threefold - a decent number of mostly past cruise prizes were made available in the market, all appliances for gems were half price, and selected construction parts were discounted, all for four days.
On the face of it the sale sounds good, but in reality I was left totally underwhelmed. Having completed every cruise, the past prizes were of little use to me. Having bought extras of all the gem appliances I really wanted in the past, the cooker sale was of little use to me. And with Hammers and Shovels (the rarer part drops for me) not included, the parts discount was of little use to me. In short, Black Friday's specials were of little use to me.
Having not really invested any gems for months and months, I'd accrued over 3,000 coming into Black Friday, and so went ahead and spent around 1,000 of them on a variety of the cruise content, even if I already own them all. I guess you never know when spares may come in handy.
I also paid up 125 gems to bag a second Celebration Stove. If I'm being honest this is something I'd been looking for, and will be useful. Cooking purely gem producing dishes on my existing Celebration Stove had meant leaving the normal recipes on there untouched - now I'll take the opportunity to harvest those mastery stars.
But all in all it was a real let-down of a sale. Not only were the contents lacklustre, but so was the presentation. The market has a featured tab which is a perfect fit for showcasing the reduced stuff, and yet Storm8 opted to just hide everything away in the floor decorations tab. Scrolling through to find those items on offer was not exactly enjoyable and further tarnished the Black Friday experience.
From that debacle we move on to the event currently on the go. That's the Christmas goals which like the Thanksgiving cruise had me checking the date in case it was Groundhog Day.
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| Notifications for Christmas goal (2015 above; 2016 below) |
This is the first 'standard' event in Restaurant Story 2 since the Wild West themed quest at the end of June, so I was understandably galvanished, especially since Lani was nowhere to be seen.
But the buzz soon faded when I saw that the related decor is identifical to 2015's festive event. And to add insult to injury the goals themselves are almost exactly the same. It's a pretty shocking situation, and is summed up by the notification windows for the two years, which mirror one another almost perfectly, with just the recipes depicted altering.
As with the Thanksgiving cruise, re-releasing a goal set is not a problem for me, if it is well advertised that this is what is being done. I still expect at least one festive cruise event which provides brand new content since we are still early in the season, but that doesn't make what Storm8 have done here any more acceptable.
RS2 News
05/11/16 November 2016
08/10/16 October 2016
03/09/16 September 2016
06/08/16 August 2016
09/07/16 July 2016
08/10/16 October 2016
03/09/16 September 2016
06/08/16 August 2016
09/07/16 July 2016
The amount of effort being put into producing this game has gone through the floor. The gamemakers are doing just enough to keep it going but not enough to make it the fun and challenging experience that it was this time last year. I still haven't redecorated since doing my Olympics theme, and am not sure how I'm going to go about doing a Christmas revamp given that the content we have to pick from is the same as it was a year ago.
It's fair to say these are not happy times. I can only apologise for the increasingly negative and deflated tone I'm adapting in these review posts, but unfortunately it's how I feel. The player base for the original Restaurant Story may have shrunk somewhat over the last couple of years, but the sizeable pool of players still checking in daily and investing time and money into the game is fiercely loyal. It appears that Storm8 have struggled to reproduce that in the sequel title and may now be gradually abandoning ship in favour of other projects.
I'm off for a stiff drink, feel free to join me readers!
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