A Township Tale is an intriguing MMO-like VR game that’s been in early access on PC since 2018 and is heading to Oculus Quest next month. We got an exclusive tour around the Quest version of the game by developer Alta.
Beyond perhaps any VR game I’ve seen to date, A Township Tale has built itself up around an intuitive and interactive crafting system. Rather than simply collecting ingredients and pressing a button to create something, A Township Tale takes a very hands-on approach that lets players experiment and cooperate as they learn and perfect their crafts.
To get a sense for how things work, A Township Tale game director, Boramy Unn, gave Road to VR an exclusive tour of some of the crafting mechanics inside a beta build of the Quest version.
What we saw in the tour is only a portion of the crafting systems in the game. From the walkthrough it’s clear to see that there are processes to be learned and mastered, enough so that you might even want to become an apprentice to another player to learn the ropes.
Luckily, A Township Tale’s multiplayer underpinning makes that possible. In the Quest version, up to eight players can play simultaneously in a persistent world. And nearly every object in the game is interactive and networked between players. That means that if a master blacksmith is walking you through the process of running the furnace, you can literally hand them resources as they ask for them, or hold a blade on the anvil while your friend forges it with their hammer.
But of course crafting needs resources and they aren’t all just laying around. A Township Tale isn’t just a job simulator, there’s a whole world surrounding the town with monsters to fight, camps to scavenge, and dark mines explore.
Exploration is really the name of the game in A Township Tale, both of the world and mechanically. Very little is handed to you outright, and players will need to work together to discover how it all works as they go. As you explore, you’ll learn how to improve your crafting, learn new abilities, and even upgrade the town for everyone.
We’ll be digging deeper into A Township Tale as the game’s July 15th Quest release date draws closer. If you can’t wait to jump in—and have access to a PC VR system—you can already check out the free-to-play game today on PC.