As with most, I am thoroughly enjoying the parabolan base camp and the laboratory. The Bone Zone I’m not quite as keen on since I don’t see why my character would care about it, but I’m sure it’ll grow on me. However, one thing that bothers me about this new content is how disconnected it feels from everything prior. I feel like there are places earlier in the game where the new content could be integrated to make it feel less disconnected from the whole of London. Here are a couple suggestions:
-The Renown 40 items tend to be super cool and I feel like some of them really fit the new qualities. Particularly, The Location of an Underground Organ feels like it should give Shapeling Arts, the Great Game and The One Who Pulls the Strings feels like they should give A Player of Chess. The Oneiric Key and What Might Be A Thudnerbolt feel like they should give Glasswork, the Infernal Vinification Aparatus feels like it should give Artisan of the Red Science, The Beatific Stone and the Oneiric Key feels like they should give Mithridacy.
-Flute Street maybe should be updated to give cp of Shapeling Arts on some end-of-carousel choices, particularly examining the devices that the Rubbery Men use for the arts.
-The Garden Embassy Exceptional Story really feels like some rewards should be changed to Preserved Surface Blooms somewhere.
-That place where they imprison possessed people in the Labyrinth of Tigers feels like it should somehow connect to Fingerking Favors.
-The Unearthly Fossil should really be possible to investigate in the lab and someone in the Bone Zone should be interested in buying it.
Obviously, some of your suggestions sound like great ideas, and some of them might eventually be implanted, but I’m not a big fan of the use of "it should do this" or "They should do that." I think we have to be careful when we talk about design, because there might reason not to do those things. For instance, in that place in the Labyrinth of Tigers, part of the player (which included myself) didn’t know that the captive where…well I’m too lazy to put a spoiler tag, but I think giving Fingerking Favors might ruined the mystery and revelation. Also, some of the quality you mention are later game content, and putting them in early game content might spoil some story beats and ruined some mechanical challenge. I just wanted to be the devil’s advocate to suggest some caution about prescriptive statement aimed at designer. edited by Quidam on 5/22/2020
[quote=Quidam]Obviously, some of your suggestions sound like great ideas, and some of them might eventually be implanted, but I’m not a big fan of the use of "it should do this" or "They should do that." I think we have to be careful when we talk about design, because there might reason not to do those things. For instance, in that place in the Labyrinth of Tigers, part of the player (which included myself) didn’t know that the captive where…well I’m too lazy to put a spoiler tag, but I think giving Fingerking Favors might ruined the mystery and revelation. Also, some of the quality you mention are later game content, and putting them in early game content might spoil some story beats and ruined some mechanical challenge. I just wanted to be the devil’s advocate to suggest some caution about prescriptive statement aimed at designer. edited by Quidam on 5/22/2020[/quote]
Point taken, I tried to qualify most of my statements with a "feels like" to avoid precisely this. The "should"s are more meant in a "this should be possible given the logic of the world" rather than "this should be a thing in the game".
Off the top of my head, it seems like they might need to be consistent with whether the tier 3 Renown items grant one of these traits or not. I think having the tier 3 Profession ones do so was a good, intelligent move. I think you could make a case depending on how common you wanted it to be for it, but that if one does they all probably should.
There has been teasers that seem to imply increasing the stat caps. Personally, I’m expecting Tier 4 Renown items.
Revisiting old content is difficult because there’s a lot of it. And it’s deeply entangled with its mechanical and narrative context. It gets difficult to merge new systems into old content without upsetting something for either new or old players.
Personally I’m OK with there being a division where here is the end-game content, and here are the stats that support it. BDR is basically both irrelevant and difficult to obtain before you’re a POSI. While there might be opportunities for both stats and checks before you become a POSI, it’s probably for the best that there’s a content barrier where it suddenly becomes relevant. The biggest issue with the new content is that there isn’t a single big barrier saying “this is the next step” the way there was for being a POSI. This plays into the sentiment I’ve heard from people of “this is fun, by why am I doing it?” but it also dovetails with there not being a signpost saying “here there be dragons, and by dragons I mean new stats.”
I’m still optimistic that this will tie all together with the next batch of content. The Paramount Presence changes, in particular, suggest that there will be a “next step” type of content.
I kinda disagree with the premise here, since one of the big draws of Whitsun was the new companions, with the fate-locked ones being the very first companions that increase four of the the new stats (Parabolan Panther/Kitten aside). Next year they’ll likely stop being fate-locked for those who saved up Ha’pennies. Not to mention that there are items from the cave of the nadir that increase Glasswork, and companions from the Feast of the Rose that increase Kataleptic Toxicology and A Player of Chess.
The distinction between "items that raise the new stats" and "items that don’t" is not "the former are in endgame content" but "the former are in content that happened to come out later".
One more thing about the Tier 3 renown items. When renown first came out, these items were invariable best-in-slot except for maybe profession items. Since then, we’ve seen them surpassed by ambition and event items, and now many of them only hold value as collector’s items. Giving them some of the new stats would make them attractive again for new players to try to attain. A player starting the game now would probably be unlocking the parabolan base camp and the lab at around the same time as the grind to renown 40 gets in view. They are both endgame content, it just doesn’t seem that way to old players because we’ve already seen it.