It's only cosmetics. It's just getting to beta but they have a decent start to the store for clothing items for purchase. Doesn't seem to be a terrible way at all. Aside from the tutorial mission about it, you could simply never interact with the storefront ever again.
"it's just cosmetics" it doesn't really matter anymore. They're charging for any sort of meaningful customization, and that's pretty important, especially in a role playing game.
True, I know that you can buy items like copper bar from the shop etc. But it's still grindy. One thing I like to add is some items it take IRL time to make materials. For example I need five copper bars so I need 25 copper ore. One copper bar takes five minute to make, so I need to wait around 25 minutes to get five copper bar. The worst part where the heck am I gonna find a copper ore?
I've been describing this as if Animal Crossing had an MMO. It's cute, cartoony, and cozy/relaxing. It has all of the typical MMO activities but a very heavy focus on house building and customization. The fishing mini game is decent to not get too boring and the cooking skills are a fun mix of different mini games. Overall it's a nice balance of freshness and QoL improvements for a nice chill gaming session. I'm excited to see where jt goes after launch!
It works on Wine if you install mono, dxvk, and (winetricks) vcrun2022, before launching the game installer. Tested with GloriousEggroll release 8-10, but I expect others would work as well. You could probably play it with Proton by adding it as a non-Steam game. It's built with Unreal Engine.
Next day edit: Looks like Lutris has an install script for it now.
I’ve been playing in private beta with the Lutris script just fine. Particle effects are a little visually glitchy but everything is running great, I’ve even streamed it on twitch some.