Another year older and a little less wise, we look once again backwards towards the irretrievable past and forwards towards an uncertain future. We’re sending out our State of the Game post a little earlier, this time around, alongside today’s new update to Firmament – I am now going to hand you over to Bruno for more details on that, and our plans for the year ahead.
Looking back at our goals for 2024
I am incandescent with accountability. Let’s have a look at the goals we set for this year, back in January.
Introduce (and land) a major new storyline
Firmament has occupied a huge proportion of our time and attention here at Failbetter. As far as managing to launch a new major storyline, we did it; we also pushed forward on (most) of the very ambitious schedule we set for ourselves.
But at the same time it’s been something of a rough ride; while lots of players have loved Firmament, we’ve also seen plenty of negative feedback, and we are working to course correct and adjust our approach. Part of this means slowing down our work as we rethink what we’re doing – so, to tide you over, we have a small update going out today, adding a slew of Roof goodies; details at the end of this post.
Reinvent Estival, Again
I think this was ultimately a success – though of course, every year we get a lot of feedback about Estival. We found our way to an event that was exciting and felt like it had stakes, without needing to point the death laser at London.
Continuing to rethink and reinvent Estival is now part of the yearly routine of Fallen London – I look forward to sharing the vision for 2025’s Estival with you all.
Continue improving the early game
We made further tweaks earlier in this year, but at this point we feel pretty confident about the early game experience (barring some small tweaks we are currently looking at). At this point, our focus is shifting more towards broader changes to player experience, that I’ll talk about in my goal setting section.
Refocus the street level
This took some time to come into fruition, but it finally did with the launch of Candlefinder Society a couple weeks ago. We’re very happy with the response to Candlefinder so far, and look forward to sharing more stories. We’re definitely noting that players appreciate the specific goal this was created to meet – adding a venue for more grounded, London-centric stories.
Expand the game’s mechanical space further
2024 saw the introduction of additive quality checks and four new item slots to the game. I’m happy about these additions, but I think the real sea change has been in how we are now approaching creating new stories and expanding the game. We’ve become much more willing to rethink the mechanical underpinnings of Fallen London if that’s necessary for a story, and I think this is going to be invaluable to retaining Fallen London’s sense of surprise and delight as we go into our 15th year.
In fact, the update going live today makes clever use of a subtle new feature that was added to support some other, future content that won’t be in the game for a few months still.
Looking forward to 2025: Projects
I’m going to split the goal-setting into two sections. The first one, projects, is about things we want to get done.
Continue rebalancing the early-to-mid game
Specifically, we want to finally give the London deck a comprehensive scrubbing. It’s an unruly creature, built from the decade-long accretion of cards and ideas that don’t necessarily cohere into one singular thing. We want the London deck to keep being really important to players – mechanically and narratively – because it’s invaluable to us to have a “universal bottleneck” that we know nearly all players run through periodically.
But we want it to feel more sensible, and we want to give players more agency in how they deal with it. We want the London deck to feel like your London deck, a reflection of your (unwise) choices and (unconscionable) priorities.
This has been in the works for a long time now; I’ve talked about it before. It is slow-going work that is difficult to prioritise over all the other demands on our time. But I do want to point towards it here.
Successfully steer Firmament to its midpoint (and beyond)
I don’t anticipate we’ll conclude Firmament before 2026, but we want the chapters we release in the coming year to reflect everything we’ve learned from player feedback. I’m very excited for you all to see the places and story beats we have planned ahead for you.
Launch [redacted] and [redacted]
[Redacted] is a response to the game’s long term issues with [redacted]. This is a major new [redacted], which will [redacted] how you [redacted] Fallen London. It’s meant to express the [redacted] of your character from a [redacted] to a [redacted], fulfilling the player fantasy of [redacted] that has always been present in the game in some ways (for example, with the [redacted] and [redacted]). But it’s also meant to change [redacted] in radical new ways, and we expect it to be a significant [redacted] of new stories. I expect this to be ready to show to players in more detail around [redacted].
Looking forward to 2025: Direction
I have a bi-weekly conversation with Chris Gardiner, our Narrative Director. He’s entirely focused on our unannounced game, and I’m entirely focused on Fallen London; we sit down to give each other advice and perspective on our respective projects. I keep coming back to something he said to me a few months ago: “we’re supposed to give them what they don’t know they want yet.”
Be less predictable
A thing I’ve noticed over the past year or so has been that players (on our Discord, for example) are increasingly a little surprised when Thursday comes and goes without an update. I think we’ve really built up expectations – around our release schedule, around our plans, around what’s coming next and when.
I don’t think this is ideal. I think that when we update the game, it should send a frisson of horror and panic through the community. It shouldn’t feel like the mail arriving. We already have a lot of ‘fixed points’ on our schedule – the holiday events and the monthly ES. Those are staying as they are, of course. But we want to keep you guessing about what’s going on around those pillars.
I expect that in 2025 we will put about as much work into Fallen London as we did in 2024. But I expect it to come out more irregularly, sometimes with longer gaps between updates. We want the game to feel lively, but we don’t think that needs us to try and fill every single week with something – ’fallow periods’ are allowed and desirable.
This is important not only to keep working at a sustainable pace, but to give us more breathing room to iterate on what we’re doing, rethinking and adjusting as necessary. A phenomenon we’ve seen lately has been the ‘high cost of slippage’ – we struggle to delay things by a few days because they will inevitably bump into another planned release, creating a cascade that forces them to be delayed even more so they can wait for an available ‘slot.’ We want to regain some flexibility so that we can think more carefully about each thing we put out.
Be more mysterious
Right now, we have a handful of ‘boxes’ that nearly every new Fallen London thing fits into. Exceptional Story, holiday event, living world event, major story chapter, and so on. We want to break out of those boxes more. We want to do more things that are one-off, or that don’t fit into established moulds. An example – and these are just examples, don’t assume we’re doing them – might be a serialized story that has only three chapters; or a one-off update that’s substantial in size; or a story that has a singular release date but is broken up by real-time gates to play out over the course of weeks.
There’s always a push and pull between things being digestible and things being surprising; I think at the moment we are risking making everything so digestible that one can forget to chew. We want players to approach things more as the things in themselves and less as comparable items within a category.
This is a long-term commitment – Firmament and Candlefinder, of course, have established formats and will continue on within those formats. But what comes next will probably not be shaped the same.
React less, act more
I’ve talked a lot in the first half of this post about reacting to player feedback and course-correcting. Major things that came out this year were responses to player feedback – the Horticulture wheel and Candlefinder Society as a whole are examples of this.
This is overall positive; listening to the players is important. But it’s hard, creatively, to be in a place where you feel like all you’re doing is chasing expectations. And we never want to get to a point where players don’t feel surprised by what they’re seeing.
I genuinely believe that Fallen London is special; and it is special because it is ultimately guided by the fixations, fascinations, and inclinations of the people who make it.
I want to give you all things that will make you rethink what it is that you want.
The Firmament Recap Update
Finally, a bit of news: this is out today! It includes:
- ‘A Moment’s Pause’ – a new storylet found at all unlocked Roof locales, which gives you a chance to chat to your officers and recap what has taken place. We hope that this will help clarify events in the plot, as well as give players a useful refresher before starting the next chapter.
- ‘A Woman, a Plan, an Airship’ – F.F. Gebrandt has come to Hallow’s Throat with a new business venture. This is a small flavourful addition meant to show how London is reacting to the new reality of regular contact with the Roof.
- ‘The Gate of Misers’ – A new activity; a puzzle. Join a herd of Moon-Misers on a circuit of the Roof, starting from Zenith.
Recaps become available after completing Chapter 1, and continue to update as you progress through Firmament. The other material in this update is available if you’re caught up – that is, if you’ve completed the chapter in Zenith.
More details to come…
Expect a roadmap post in January, with more information on upcoming events, new stories, and other changes coming to Fallen London.
It was just too indirect or maybe obscure or complex. Or maybe it referenced events (the Starved War) that I missed in ways that only participants could understand.