There are no ingame announcements and saw this only over Reddit. So let’s have it here too so we can discuss anything we may enjoy or not.
Key notes:
Menace items will now increase or decrease the amount you gain or lose. They will not lower your menace level. So long wearing multiple nightmare items during Hallowmas!
New Heart’s Game season will be live on the 20th July. Make sure to get a win! This includes me.
The 100th ES will come with new items and a chance to win 1 year of sub!
The new event: The London Horticultural Show will begin on the 31st of July and will come with 5 new items.
Uhuuuu, Railway mini expansion with 3 more small stations and some new activities will come live late August.
Reworked Fruits of the Zee planned for mid-September
TLU City and enhanced Exceptional Friendship are planned for late 2023.
Now, in the announcement it is mentioned that the new season of HG will come on the 20th of July, but where the other events are announced, FBG mentions the new season will come mid-August.
This is, ultimately, a buff to those items – gaining fewer menace change points translates to extra actions over time, especially in situations where you’re gaining a lot of a given menace in a short span of time.
It seems like these items only useful proactively instead of retroactively. And proactively, these items are going to compete with items that reduce your menace gain by increasing the chance of success (stat-boosting items).
We’ll see, I guess. I definitely see the point about the intuitiveness of the mechanic, but I wouldn’t be too happy if these menace-modifying items went from situationally useful to things I collect only for the sake of collecting one of everything.
This is the exact same thing that I thought yesterday! I’m still trying to find a good use of such items, but I only found another minus: it will no longer be possible to have two Nightmare items, get help from an alt and farm Sudden Insights.
I understand that grinding levels shouldn’t be done this way, but grinding 3 more levels while increasing watchful caps is a bit of a burden.
That menace reduction item change is also going to make getting the tomb lion harder. If a menace increasing item just means you get more points of increase but doesn’t reduce points of decrease then you’ll not be able to linger in the Tomb Colonies until the card actually bothers to show up any more.
But this also means that you can’t enter the Tomb-Colonies at five scandal to get the lion and save a bunch of actions, but I suppose that that sort of thing is what they want to remove.
That said, I don’t think this change will make the game any less fun, just some things will be harder now. I do think it opens up some new design space; with more menace-reducing items.
And they could make new stories where those items are extra useful - for example, ones where you advance on success or failure, but failure gives more menaces (in which case, the new menace-reducing items may well be better than stat-boosting ones!)
I feel like there’s also room here for a neat trade off: Items that boost your stats more but make you take more menaces. At the moment a lot of these trade off items are that impactful because bizarre, respectable and dreaded (the most often nerfed stats) don’t really do much and the four main stats are so massive that a couple of points off them doesn’t matter to much. But an item that gave you 2 points of an advanced stat, but made you take significantly more nightmares could be really characterful and an interesting worry (do I take the extra 10% if I know failing will kill me now?)
4 new cards in new Seasons sounds weird. Does it mean +2 new assassins? Or some of existing will have 3 cards? Mystery!
If I am reading this right, menace reduction items will have hard limit lower than 20% (10% + 5% + 2.5% + … <= lim 20%). Not super useful even in the situations where you expect to gain menaces and have 100% check. Looks more like the attempt to sell us yet another outfit slot…
This year Estival sounds not as interesting as two before (which were pretty awesome). But I am open for surprises.
Do I remember correctly that there is no story, especially no story on the wiki, that involves using menace reducing/increasing items with the current mechanics as a prerequisite for advancing it?
If this somehow goes against forum rules or Failbetter recommendations I will try to reword it, but I wanted to raise the issue so it can be planned for by devs.
There is no story where it would be a damnable inconvenience, but it’s not strictly necessary. You will not have to spend actions to raise or lower your Menaces to specific values, rather than being able to swing two or three levels for free.
This also affects Hallowmas, probably for the better by removing the need for a weird special case.
I remembered that at two inexistent particular points within this absent story it was rather necessary to change your level +1 and -1 in a manner that counted entirely on using menace items in the way they are implemented now. Those points also not being the most brain teasing parts of that nonexistent story. That’s what I was not talking about.
Do I misremember how that didn’t work?
You do need to get your nightmares to 8, but you have a way to gain actual CP, and you’re within a storylet, so you have time to do the thing before going off your rocker.
It sure is more convenient to be able to adjust from +2 to -2 at that point, though.
So, before the change to Menace Items is implemented next Thursday, what should we be doing one last time to really milk them for all their worth? Stuff we won’t be able to do again with the new system?
One thing I’ll really miss is equipping all your Scandal items to attend a Bohemian party and Make Waves, only to unequip it again directly afterwards and get away with only a modest increase in Scandal. That card will be really worthless now unless they adjust the mechanics somewhat.
Quite an effort to get wounds to 8, but this is a good options. I usually try to get Becalmed - Fallen London Wiki card for a nice color box.
Indeed! Especially with the 4 nightmare reducing items we have. Hallowmas will become more challenging I guess and it will require much more attention!
Until now I can’t say I am excited about these changes, but we’ll just see how well it will go and how FBG will adjust over the course of the next days/weeks.
I think my primary reservation about the change to Menace Reduction is that the new system sounds like a bit too much game for Fallen London. A little too crunchy. You’re adding a whole system so that in addition to adding qualities, gear can also affect the results of an action and how they modify qualities, in a probabilistic fashion.
For all its sins, the previous Menace-reducing system were inside the standard system of Fallen London: you have qualities, gear can modify those qualities. An interesting but absurd use of system mechanics. The new one is something wholly unlike what exists in Fallen London.
…on the other hand, I’m struggling to articulate why it feels different than other second-order effects like Research Preparation and Poison Tolerance. Some combination of the fact that they are quality-driven, and deterministic, and contingent on the action rather than strictly tied to the Menace being gained. I dunno, maybe it just feels more OK for the action to be special that it allows modification of its output than for the quality to be special and allow itself to be modified in any action. I feel like there is a difference, somehow.
Whether it’s a buff or nerf to the items (I agree probably nerf), I think the change is For The Better. Now you wear Menace-Reducing items when you receive the Menace rather than after-the fact. Maybe that could have been addressed with narrative changes (replace Tracklayer Helmet with active life-support system), but the new system is more sensible. However the game as a whole won’t actually be the better for it unless/until there’s some updates to itemization and/or Menace-gaining actions.
Besides all the changes that are bound, I’m still waiting for someone to confirm if Heat’s Game new season will be live in two weeks or later.
This
Hearts’ Game: the Season of Dares
The next update to Hearts’ Game comes out in mid-July. It comes with four new cards and adjustments to existing cards and mechanics. This update is planned for July 20th.
Or this
August and September
Here’s what you can expect after Estival:
The third expansion to Hearts’ Game: another season with four new cards. Expected in mid-August.
