Hello everyone! (TL;DR section on bottom)
In my opinion {
I love indie games, I’m struggling to develop my own indie, and Sunless Sea is an unquestionable charm, having a unique gameplay based on Fallen London, where I see a great potential for modders, and also enhancing it with great visuals of the zee. This is not everything; the terror attribute is interesting, and so it’s binary mechanic, so contrast to modern designs of small percentage values. Even the fighting system, often criticized on this forum for me seems to have potential, as I enjoyed blocking enemy’s attacks with the rightly times evasions, making him lose time on "warming". With only a few additions and changes the fighting mechanic could become really interesting.
However, the devs don’t successfully leverage the game’s strengths. A lot of people here on forum either criticize game’s slow progress and repetitiveness, ask how to start the game (and from what I’ve seen, the community fail to help here, as it’s not an easy task) or advice some paths to grind - over and over again. Even people defending the game, often admit to use the "save" and "load" spells, and if in iron mode, they take a "quit to menu" exploit as a normal game routine. This happens probably either because the game is too hard, or it’s pace is too slow.
I understand the game is under development. I understand that more options coming in future will make the game easier (unless devs decide to increase costs or decrease rewards, because it got too easy), and more diversified. However if in future there will be more quests and so more echoes per trip, I don’t see why devs wouldn’t decrease the cost of services and equipment in early access, and linearly increase it as the economy gets richer. I think, and that’s only an assumption, the rewards will stay low, the costs will stay high, and in the end a player will only find a profitable trade route easier, but he will still need to grind up, maybe with an option to change his path when he is really bored. This makes me sad, as it wastes the game’s great potential, and I’d like to humbly propose some changes, together with a justification.
Browser game vs immersion
To be honest, I didn’t like the Fallen London. I tried playing it thanks to the amazing story and interesting mechanics of "qualities", but in it’s core it was still a browser game. I couldn’t describe what I mean better, then by asking you to try 10 random Steam games, and then 10 random browser games - there is a difference in the immersion, and it’s not an accident; a browser game in it’s nature is designed for people who have a few spare moments during the day (often at work), and so they don’t want to get immersed too much. Downloadable games are designed for people who want to isolate themselves from the world for a longer moment (or sometimes a whole day if someone’s lucky enough to have so much time).
While repetitiveness of the Fallen London is OK for people playing it 30 minutes a day, it may become boring for a person playing Sunless Sea for hours a day. What I suggest is increasing the rewards/penalties per quests by a factor of 10 or more, so the game experience is more condensed. It will get significantly shorter, but I think the iron mode is supposed to regularly kill players in order to start over. In the current shape of the game a player can spend tens of hours of wearing grind into the game, and I doubt a lot of people would like to repeat it after their death.
The hybrid game
Sunless Sea are basically two games in a price of one. We get the Fallen London with interesting story, and we get a charming zee exploration game, competing with the best pirate games. However, the point of putting two games together should be a synergy between them, while in Sunless Sea these two parts seem to fight each other.
Imagine that you have two bosses. One asks you to paint a wall, and the second wants you drill holes in the ceiling. So you take a brush, dip it in the tin, shake it a little for the excess of paint to fall back and make a first stroke on the wall, but before the brush gets dry, your other boss comes and tells you to get to drilling immediately. So you clean your brush with water, position a ladder, take a drill, put safety glasses on, climb up the ladder, position yourself firmly, drill the first hole and the first boss comes yelling you should paint!
This is what I think happens inside of my brain when I keep changing my activities too often. I have no time to dive fully into one task, and once I become productive in it, I have to switch. Because travels are so short and repetitive in the game, I decided to buy the fastest engine and just rush through the zee. I’d rather like a travel to be an adventure that I do once, then maybe another time, trying to make use of my experience, and maybe even once or twice more, being rewarded for an optimal route and pushed to other parts of the zee by the story, before the path becomes boring. Once I get to a port, I’d like to stay there longer, doing more quests at once.
As for numbers, I would increase the distances between ports by a factor of 2-5, and decrease the speed of ships and monsters by 2-5. I’d love to have more time to decide if I want to switch my lamp off, and I think one of the best things at the sea is that chasing and fleeing can take so much longer there than on the land.
Summary (TL;DR)
- Make the game shorter by putting more quests at once in ports, and ten times higher rewards per quest.
- Make the travels much longer, to let players feel the dread of the zee.
- Since advancement will be much faster thanks to p. 1., increase the risk of death to make players repeat games and try new, safer paths and come up with witty strategies.
Of course this is only a tip of the lifeberg. A larger map would make room for creating multiply paths between two ports, giving a player a choice if he wants to maneuver between lights and gathering there monsters, or take the dark and dreadful route, or maybe move along shores and waste some fuel, much depending on circumstances and which resources are common or easy to obtain at the moment.
} :)
edited by Etherlord on 8/5/2014