You may remember Pathea Games' My Time at Sandrock, a life sim game released late last November that we weren’t massively enthused with. We awarded it a 5/10 in our review, saying that the launch version's "bland presentation and technical hiccups" affected this sequel to My Time at Portia. The Switch version sits with a Metascore of 62 from 11 critic reviews at the time of writing, although the PC version stands at 81.
Despite our reservations, this cozy game held a lot of potential and in the months since, the development team at Pathea has been hard at work to correct flaws and bring in new content to keep players engaged. Arguably its biggest update on Switch — version 1.1.4 — is due out imminently, and to get a better sense of what it contains and what’s on the horizon, we recently sat down for a lengthy conversation with some key staff on the Sandrock team to discuss its past and, crucially, its future.
Joining us for this discussion were Jingyang Xu (CTO at Pathea), Aaron Deng (Vice President), and Xu Zhi (Director of My Time at Portia and My Time at Sandrock).
Jingyang Xu: Before we get started, I just want to say a couple of things. First of all, I'm the executive producer for My Time at Sandrock. For this, for our discussion here, I'll probably be answering most of your questions. I've read all your reviews about us. I know your concerns. I also saw the interaction you had with the commenters on your review and everything like that. So, I wanted to have this conversation with you for a long time as well. To try to explain some of the things that happened, you know, why it happened that way. We're not looking for excuses, but we just want to have a good conversation about that and also give you a little bit of insight into how we think about things in our development process and what we're preparing for the players, most importantly. And then also to listen to your comments and feedback on how we can make this game better and continuously improve going forward. So, I'm really looking forward to this conversation.
Nintendo Life: Based on what you read in the review and comments and so on for My Time at Sandrock, what are some things that you felt like you need to say?
JX: Yeah, I think, to be honest, our first emotion was kind of… we felt it was a bit unfair to us. That was the first reaction. And it wasn't that it was unfair on your part. The whole situation just felt unfair to us. What happened was we sent out the review version, right? The review version that we sent out to all the reviewers was actually a month and a half old, because we have to get it lot checked by Nintendo before we can send it out. We had this build that absolutely addressed a lot of the issues that the reviewers had already talked about. And those issues, to a certain extent, prevented the reviewers from seeing the really, really good parts of the game, which was how amazing the story was, all the romance-able characters, etc., that made this game really different. So, your review said, “Oh, this is nothing new. This is just a run-of-the-mill life sim.” But I think a lot of that came from issues like how you couldn't see the descriptions on the items. It was very frustrating to play through parts of the game because there were bugs in the game that were from a build that was a month and a half old.
Our original intention was to take the full version of the game and have that ready before the launch date. And we could send that to the reviewers and say, “Hey look, we promised we're gonna fix all these bugs before the launch. And here's the version to prove that.” But unfortunately, we were still experiencing some of the echoing effects of COVID—all of these Nintendo games were backed up at the time we were trying to release it. Nintendo took a bit longer than usual to go and approve our game, and we ended up having to release that final version at the launch date. Now, I'm not blaming anybody. I mean, it is what it is, and we could have prepared a lot better. But, what then happened was, we didn't get that final version into your hands to prove we were gonna fix all these things before the launch. Since you didn't see the fact that we fixed a lot of these things, especially the game-breaking bugs, then the review came out the way it did.
What we want to tell the players and tell you as well is there's a lot more to this game than meets the eye. If you look at just the overall scores of Metacritic and everything like that, especially on the PC version, people are saying that in the life-sim genre, they've never seen so much content. For example, look at what people are saying about the story. If you look at the Reddit forums where people are talking about how they play Stardew Valley, but when they play Sandrock, they get so much more out of the drama and all the twist and turns. We see so many posts about romancing different characters. There are so many memes out there on the internet. That's all come out of Sandrock. What I'm trying to say here is that I think unfortunately we gave out a review version that was crippled that really had a result of not allowing the really good parts of our game to shine. That's really what we want to try to correct, if you agree with that.
It sounds to me like you're very dialed in to what players like and don't like about the game and about the things that you're including in future content updates. So, what are the features that are coming in this update that's coming out? What are all the big changes and additions?
We read [feedback] every day and we may not respond to all of it, but we go back and we think about how to make those game design choices or put the content in the game that makes our players happy.
JX: Yeah, there are actually a lot of things that are new and improved. The bug list and the feature list is hundreds of items long, but I just want to highlight a couple of key things. The major thing is, of course, when we released the PC version and the console version, all of the main storylines [had] 80-100 hours of just story content that was already there. But, in the console version, there were a couple of side quests, marriages, and extra things you could do within the game that were still missing. So, the most important part about this update is we brought the content in the console version up to date to where the PC version is. We're always putting out updates on both versions, so what we're trying to do going forward as we're getting better at this is to make sure that the console versions are only, at most, a month behind the PC version. For Xbox, for PlayStation, it's gonna be a little bit quicker, maybe a week or two weeks behind, but because of all the processes with the Switch, we're gonna try really hard to keep the Switch content at most a month behind. So, whenever PC updates, then console updates. Boom, boom, boom.
We want to keep up this stream of updates—major updates seasonally, and then we have maintenance patches every single month. As people are feeding back to us, they're finding bugs, we're fixing all of those bugs in maintenance patches. Our team is on this, this game is not going away, and we're just giving the players the tip of the iceberg here. And there's a lot more content, there's a lot more gameplay, there's a lot more things to do with each other within the game and also with your friends in the future that are coming.
How would you say community feedback has affected the plans you have for updates and fixes and so on?
JX: The really simple answer is that that's it's the energy that powers us. It's a source of why we want to keep doing this until 'forever'. When we see all those posts on the community, on Reddit, saying how much they love this game, when players say, “Hey, I'm going through a terrible breakup, and Sandrock is the game that helped me through that.” We read that every day, we read all those stories and we go back and make the game better. But also, all the players that tell us, “I'm stuck here in this part of the game” or “I wish I could date this character.” We read that every day and we may not respond to all of it, but we go back and we think about how to make those game design choices or put the content in the game that makes our players happy.
This gets me thinking, what's been your impression of the community feedback since this game had its official launch? Would you say it was mostly positive, negative, mixed? Any recurring themes you notice? What do you see?
JX: Yeah, that's a very good question. We're on Steam, we're about 88% positive there. On Metacritic, we're at, I think overall across all the different consoles, I think we're at 82. [Note. At the time of publication, the PC version has a Metascore of 81 and the PS5 80. The Xbox version lacks the requisite critic reviews to display a score, although the three available reviews average to 80. As noted in the introduction, the Switch version stands at 62.] And then, in terms of the actual players, their feedback. We're seeing all this content, people memeing and talking about their dream characters, talking about how good the story is. So I would say that the positives are definitely there, and they're overwhelmingly there.
Now, I do want to talk a little bit about the negatives. We did see a lot of complaints or concerns from the community saying, “Hey, I've heard that the console content is not the same as the PCs. So, should I hold off buying this game until that content is complete?” And we also see other players in the community saying “Hey, there's already 100 hours in there and it's not gonna affect your main gameplay experience. You should go buy it.” But then there's still concerns from people, right? That's why we worked really hard to remove that concern as quickly as possible. And that's what you're seeing with this next version.
Additionally, people are saying that the pop-in is really affecting their immersion, because they're really noticing that, boom, something appears and then it disappears. And we don't want that immersion-breaking experience, especially in a game like this, where players are putting themselves as the main character into this world that they want to imagine they're living in. That's where we're also fixing our next version—things are gonna smoothly fade in and fade out. You probably noticed in the comparison video (see above) things are smoothly fading in and fading out instead of boom, boom, boom. We had to work through some technical hurdles in the game as big as ours to address those issues, but we made sure to fix that in this version.
We're hearing from players, especially Switch players, who say, “Hey, we know the Switch is not a current-gen console. We know we're not gonna get PC-level graphics, the frame rate's gonna be lower, but when the game stutters, that's gonna cause a bad experience." And we had a lot of stuttering in the version that we released. So, we also work to really — I think we reduced something like 70% to 80% of all the stuttering in the version we're about to release.
What's it been like porting this to the Switch? What were some of the challenges that you faced trying to squeeze it onto this seven-year-old hardware now?
JX: I'm really glad you asked that question! We wish we had just been working on the Switch version five years ago when we started working on this game. It would have been a lot smoother, but we did start working on Switch about three years into the game. And I think the first one was… well, first of all, this game is four times as big as Portia. In terms of the map, in terms of the stories, in terms of the graphics, in terms of just general size, it's four times as big as Portia. I'm not kidding, you can play just the main storyline for 100 hours. If you went through all the side quests, this is easily a 200-hour game.
And when we started porting to the Switch, this game was using eight gigabytes of RAM of memory on the PCs. And the Switch has a quarter that much. So, we had all of this stuff in memory, and we had to figure out, “How do we take all of this stuff, still keep all of it, but fit it into a memory footprint that’s a quarter as much?” And that, to a certain extent, was probably the biggest challenge that we faced. It was all about making trade-offs in the art. We made very minimal trade-offs in the gameplay. But it was about how we both reduce that memory footprint, but also keep that full experience that the players wanted. And I'm not saying that we got all that right, but it was a fun journey trying to get there. And we're still trying to get there as well.
So, that's probably it. And then the other player feedback — what we're hearing is that players can accept a certain level of graphics degradation on the Switch, but they don't want to break immersion. They don't want things that are jarring to them in the experience. And we're still trying to keep [at] that. Every day, we're trying to listen to the feedback and trying to keep [going] and get that right.
If you build a game on the first day for the Switch, it's a lot easier, especially if you don't have to consider all these other platforms. But then if we did that, at the same time, I think players wouldn't be saying this is the best-looking live sim, right? So, then we maybe lose on the other side. Or maybe we win. But our next game is still going to come out for the Switch, and we're going to build it for the Switch from day one, right? So hopefully we'll take everything we've learned from Sandrock and we'll make that even better as well.
Thinking about the future of Sandrock, what are some other changes or additions that you'd like to make in some content updates and patches and so on in the near future?
we'd like to take that PC version...and bring as much of that to the 'Switch 2' when it becomes available
JX: We're going to keep making this game better. There are players that have put in 600-1000 hours into this game. Because we've made this open world, because there's so much activity to do, we want to bring that to a bigger and bigger audience. And what that means for us is, one, seasonal content updates. And then secondly, we feel like on the console, having a multiplayer life simulation, that's actually not something that's really been explored. About a third of our daily active users on Steam are in multiplayer today. We know that multiplayer experience is actually a pretty compelling experience. And so we think that when we launch multiplayer support, and it's going to be cross-platform multiplayer support in June, we’re going to be bringing a sort of never-before-seen experience to our existing Sandrock players.
So, you've got a Switch version already. You've got someone in the family who's on a PC, or maybe another Switch, or even a version on some of the other consoles. You can sit down and jam a session of Sandrock multiplayer across all those devices in your living room. If not in your living room, that could be across multiple locations. We think that our next major update this year, is going to bring that kind of experience to life for existing and new Sandrock fans.
Then, of course there's a 'Switch 2' — we have high hopes about that. If possible, we'd like to take that PC version, what people are saying is the best-looking live sim experience, and bring as much of that to the 'Switch 2' when it becomes available.
What's that process like for coordinating cross-play across platforms like that, and with such different hardware in mind? Especially with the Switch being so far behind, is that really challenging?
JX: Actually, it’s not as challenging as the memory issue. For the networking hardware, there's not so much of a difference between something that's six years old and something that's not. Whereas with graphics and the amount of memory that's available to us, that's going up every year and there's a big difference there.
What would you say are some key lessons that you learned from my time at Portia that Sandrock benefited from?
JX: I was actually not with the company when we when we did Portia, right? But Zhi and Aaron were, so maybe I'll let them chime in a little bit here.
Xu Zhi: We learn a lot from the players on what kind of content, especially for the romance-able content, the players want. So, in Sandrock, we designed everything for players who really love that kind of content. Earlier Jingyang said it's over one million, one and a half million words in Sandrock. But with Portia, it was only, I believe, 100,000 words? We really pushed the team to write a lot of stories for the main story and for the NPCs.
Another important thing was that a lot of people want the multiplayer, more than one way to play the game with their friends, so we want to make that in Sandrock. That's why Jingyang mentioned we'll have a very big update hopefully this June. Especially on console, we really want it to be good because a lot of players want it. If we can make it happen, we can let the players feel comfortable, feel satisfied, and then we can sell more.
As much as you guys are willing to share, what were some ideas that you had early on development that never made it into the game that you wish would have if resources and timelines were different?
JX: A good example is we wanted to make the players able to adjust their height. A lot of stuff made it into the game, first of all, that's why we have 100 hours, just on the main story quest if you wanna go through all of it. Yet I constantly have to say, “Here, no, let's not put that in there. We need to actually release this version out there.” But we do see from the player feedback that sometimes they want to have a slightly taller character or a slightly shorter character. That's part of the immersion, that's part of the characterization, right? But we ended up making a design decision not allowing the player to do that.
It's just like, for example, the Witcher. You can't really change Geralt’s height. Not because we didn't want to allow that level of customization for the players, but because it would have made it a lot more difficult to make all the cinematics and all the gameplay elements adjust to a height-adjustable player. Because we would have had to make sure all the camera angles were correct and all of the collision were correct. And I guess at the time, the game engine just wasn't built for doing that. For our next version, if that's something that is really important to players, we could rework the engine to accommodate a lot of those things. But that is one thing that we know a lot of players [were] asking for, and we weren't able to deliver on that. The other thing a lot of players were asking for was more options for beards. That was like a huge, huge request. So, if you look at the updates, every update, we add more beards.
Aaron Deng: Another big thing we didn't do is that we didn't make the game open world enough. When I say that, I’m talking about the main story. During the main story, you have a lot of choices to [make]. We used to want to have multiple endings, where your different choices will lead to a different ending. But because we don't have enough money, and we don't have enough human resources, we don't have enough writers, we couldn’t make that happen. Even right now we have 1.5 million words. If we make that, yeah, that will be another Baldur’s Gate. In the future, if we can have more resources, we want different endings.
That's interesting hearing about how things that appear so simple on the face are such multivariate problems, like the player character's height. It reminds me of a post a few years ago from a game developer about “The Door Problem”. It’s the problem about how just the presence of a door in a scene introduces dozens of these questions about physics and interaction and so on that no one would ever think about, but if you don't have an answer for every single one of those then you can't put the door in.
JX: Yeah, I saw that exact article. It's actually weird, the door problem is very real. You go in Sandrock, look at what happens when you just open the door, right? I'm not even talking about whether your hand needs to actually touch the door and stuff like that. Just look at what happens when you open it. That comes with its own set of problems as well.
Open question I have for anyone here, more generally, what are some key innovations that you would like to see in the farm sim genre going forward? Either from something you guys work on or from other developers. Farm sims have just exploded in the last few years in popularity and it’s exciting seeing all these new takes on it coming out. So, what are some things that you guys want to see?
JX: To us, we’re not in the specific farm simulator genre. To us, it’s more about expanding the life simulator elements. It’s a life in a different world that you can immerse yourself in and you should be able to do things you imagine that you would want to do in that world. Once you think about it that way, it opens up a lot of possibilities. What do you want to do in your life? You want to meet friends, have a romance, have meaningful work, have a goal. You want to be part of something that’s bigger than yourself. Those are all the things where it’s maybe not that simple in real life, but we want to give our players the opportunity to experience that in our world.
When you think about it that way, there are so many ways to innovate. There's so many ways to bring things that we feel like we've experienced in real life, but put that in the world of the game, make it make sense in the world of the game, and create a completely different, but similar experience for the player. The one area that we try to innovate with in Sandrock is recognizing that you're living your life in Sandrock, but what if that life had a bigger meaning? What if that life had, you really accomplished something that you were proud of? So, that's why the story we built into Sandrock, it's not your run-of-the-mill story. It's got intrigue, it's got conflict, it's got a completely believable reason for why each of the characters were reacting to you the way you were doing. I think for players who spent the last few years simply just putting out props or crafting and going through that cycle, we're bringing meaning to why they’re doing that. We're helping them live through a really meaningful story. And that's what we think we're innovating in this area, and it's something that we hope more games do, as well.
Sure, I think that's a great take. That's a really salient observation of not considering it as a farm sim, but more broadly as a life sim. You make a good point there that the genre is kind of evolving past just the farm now. That's a great idea that a more focused and involved story is one of the many ways where you can evolve beyond what the genre started as.
JX: And sometimes it's risky as well, right? One of the first characters you meet in Sandrock, is the head of the guild, like your boss. That's the first person the players meet in the first 10 minutes. And a lot of our players hate that character. “I'm so annoyed at this guy!” Usually you go into a farm simulator and everyone's nice to you and you don't have such a visceral, emotional reaction to one of the characters. But we built them that way just so we can pay it off later in the story. But if you just play the first ten minutes, you're like, “Oh, I don't like this guy. I'm going to return this game.” You're going to miss out on a lot of the good stuff. But we took that risk to say, well, if this isn't explained well to the player base, maybe we're gonna lose a bunch of the players. But at the same time, we think at the end of the day, we built a completely different and satisfying experience for the players that do stick with us. And we're gonna give them something, some memories that will last for a really long time.
That's a great approach to take just in terms of game design: Build for the players that are really invested in this product, not just to the lowest common dominator kind of person that'll pick it up for an hour or two and then wash out and do something else. Thinking about some of my favorite ongoing games, a very common thread that I see between them is that, [especially] when new updates come out, or just the way the game is designed, it's clearly made for this specific player who's going to keep coming back and is really engaged. So yeah, I mean, great job with making that choice. I can definitely see the risk in that, but I think that's the right choice to make.
AD: That is also a joke when Jingyang mentioned that character. He's a bad guy in the game, right? And after some story happens, he leaves and then his brother comes. His brother is a good guy. His brother named Wei — there is a producer in our team named Yan Wei. It's that guy. He's a real person. Because, you know, producers always rush people to do something. “Hey, finish that on time!” that sort of thing. It's a joke.
This interview has been edited for brevity.
Our thanks to the team at Pathea for talking to us, and to Andy at Renaissance for setting this up. Let us know below how you've found your time at Sandrock on Switch, and if you're looking forward to the updates ahead.