Story Of Seasons Pioneers Of Olive Town - firework festival

Congratulations, farmers! Your farm has just been updated to 1.0.4, and with that comes a few new patch notes! It's just like real agriculture. Story of Seasons: Pioneers of Olive Town launched late last month in the West with a bit of a lukewarm reception - many reviews (including ours!) noted its framerate issues, its tedious cooking/Maker interfaces, and its long loading times, as well as a few bugs and gripes here and there.

As a result, XSEED and Marvelous made a show of apologising and promising to fix it, and they're keeping to that promise with their latest patches. Version 1.0.4 - which is out in North America, but not Europe and Australia - has patch notes which include fixes for corrupted save data, an infinite item glitch, and generally just shortening the loading times. It's not a huge update, but it'll certainly fix a few of the most pressing issues.

Story Of Seasons Pioneers Of Olive Town - farming in the field
Hopefully, the issue of the framerate tanking when you're around a lot of objects will be improved

By the end of May, however, we'll be getting the mother of all patches: Version 1.0.5, which has the following patch notes:

Adjusts some of the residents’ existing dialogue and adds new dialogue
Changes the functionality of all makers
Improves visuals during eating scenes
Adds the ability to lock movement in a straight line
Adjusts cooking times
Removes the need to press the A Button when moving from indoors to outdoors

This patch will attempt to address some of the biggest issues in the game, and though the patch notes are a little vague, the XSEED blog goes into a little bit of further detail:

"The next update will go beyond optimization and bug fixes. It will include adjustments and additions to game systems and text. The two main purposes will be to adjust the functionality of makers and update dialogue text, two things that we have received a lot of feedback from players about.

Makers
In an effort to improve the functionality of makers, they will be changed so that each maker is able to create multiple items.

Dialogue
Our team is now working on writing new dialogue so that players can enjoy getting to know the residents of Olive Town even more than before."

What's more, a Story of Seasons player on Reddit has translated the Japanese blog post, which also has more information, including the fact that Marvelous has just hired a new scenario writer to work on the dialogue for the marriage candidates, and that the developers are "thinking about doing free content updates".

Story Of Seasons Pioneers Of Olive Town - eating a meal of fish, soup, salad, and bread
One common complaint is that, no matter what you order in the restaurant, you're always pictured eating the same meal

In case you were wondering why Pioneers of Olive Town missed the mark by such a wide margin, Story of Seasons fan blog and irreplaceable guide Fogu detailed the fact that the game was actually outsourced to a company called Three Rings Inc., a studio that has previously worked on One Piece games among others. Despite Pioneers' disappointing launch, Marvelous intends to keep working with Three Rings, according to a Japanese report from the company.

Are you relieved to see these patch notes, or is there something missing for you that would improve the game? Let us know in the comments below.

[source xseedgames.com, via fogu.com]