First thoughts!

Sunless Sea
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Finally finished work and got to playing. Been reading all of the comments here though, looks like some great feedback. I agree with a lot of what’s been said already so I don’t want to be redundant.
Babelfishwars posted a lot of what struck me, in particular about hull damage needing a hover-over description majig.

I Definately use the different engine speeds, even reverse is handy on occasion (got stuck on a reef near Port Cecil just now, awesome!). I also agree with the comment about wanting even more speed options and having them tied to fuel usage. It would make me feel still more like a Captain.
On a similar note, I do use the zoom function quite a bit and would like one more 'zoom out level. I read an article (maybe on Rock Paper Shotgun) about players liking the element of control in a zoom function, so perhaps even if the default were one ‘zoom level’ closer in, just so we had the feeling of being able to zoom out one more level, it would help.

Been using manual saves a lot, I’m a sucker for them.
As for Alexis mentioning the button (top left) to burn fuel/increase speed, I just used this and it saved my crew from all playing Lemmings. I had high terror and needed to head back to FL from Demeaux(sp?) with very few supplies/crew left. The increased speed meant it was worth burning through the barrels and gave a sense of excitement.

My main criticism so far is the lack of Zee-life out there but I understand that’s been noted and critters will migrate.
Really enjoying the art, UI, animations (bow waves and funnel smoke look great), writing (always excellent, especially the little notes whilst travelling, feels like sailing in Fabled Lands, more than I’d hoped) and the occasional swirls of fog. I’d personally like to see the odd bit of movement in the depths, especially when I’m far from ports. Maybe the odd glimpse of some unknown horror just begin to surface and then disappear but I don’t know how complex such things are to implement and sometimes that stillness really adds to the great atmosphere of the whole thing.

Has anyone ventured SE yet? I might head there next. Escape the feelings of guilt tied to that crate of human souls I parted with.
Sorry if this is hard to read (I’m on a mobile device at the minute)
Congratulations Failbetter, the game feels Exceptional.

Oh, one more thing. I’m also enjoying the slowly spinning light-house lights. I haven’t noticed that they stop your terror increasing whilst you’re (briefly) in them or not. I think that would be pretty cool - trying to time the boat with the light as I pass them to save on precious terror points.
edited by Notjimsmith on 5/1/2014

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Most of my comments have already been noted, so I’ll try to be concise!

So far I’ve died probably 8+ times, have played for ~10 hours, and have explored the entire &quotfinished&quot area of the map.
[li]

a. Game is beautiful. Art, music, story, all incredible. Well done, Failbetter, well done.

b. Hunger/Terror. I agree with everyone else that it’s a little too punishing in some ways. I could easily avoid my terror level getting too high or my crew starving, but only by staying very close to London. It really punishes exploration and that made me sad. Doing that run up to Vanderbight and back for a few Echoes is a nice option, but it isn’t nice that it feels like something you have to do for multiple hours (!!) before you can really strike out and explore. It wouldn’t be so bad except that when you die, you have to do it all over again. It gets boring. Maybe this will be fixed when there is more out there?

Terror is almost impossible to decrease; so expensive to remove even a single point! Every time but two that I lost, it was from my crew all jumping overboard. A couple of times when I was practically home to London. (Love the idea of menace dampening effects around London – makes a lot of sense).

Part of what causes those issues is that long voyages often end up with you coming home destitute – you used up your supplies and fuel to get there and back but didn’t necessarily get much of anything. Sometimes you can’t even get a port report if you did other options first so you don’t even get your pittance from the Admiralty (which doesn’t begin to cover the supplies and fuel you needed to get there and back, anyway). It feels like it punishes exploration. And exploration is what I’m all about.

c. If you run out of fuel, you just sit there until you starve to death. It’s boring as all hell. I ran out of fuel because of the docking bug at Vanderbight. I had no Echoes and nothing to sell, but I had a few crates of Supplies, so I had to sit there for ages while my crew ate the rest of the supplies and then we all ate each other. I feel like running out of fuel should either automatically end the game, or there should be a chance of rescue, or you should drift toward port, or something, so it’s not an inevitable death that just takes way too long.

d. Sort of tied in with c. – If you run out of money, you’re just screwed, and you either have to manually restart or sit in port while you starve to death and/or eat each other. It seems like if you’re out of money/things to sell and fuel/supplies but you’re at a port, you should be able to, I don’t know, indenture yourself or something? It’s frustrating to be sitting in London and able to do absolutely nothing, knowing you’ll never make it to Vanderbight or anywhere else. Maybe if you’re completely out of everything a rich uncle could give you enough fuel/supplies to start up the Vanderbight milk run again.

e. The death/loss options really need to change when there’s only one crew member left (me). It feels more than a little absurd (and not in a good way) when the bosun tells me I just committed suicide via kettle, or when I eat myself. There should be a similar option that only triggers when you only have one crew member left talking about how you go mad wandering the empty ship, or gnaw your own hand off in hunger and bleed to death, or something.

So… that turned out to not be very concise at all! Hope some of my observations help, though.

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Oh – one more thing – I too have been playing since Fallen London was Echo Bazaar and log in with my twitter account. I hope that when the final build is out we will be able to link our twitter-based Fallen London accounts to Sunless Sea!

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UPDATE: PEBCAK. That is: going into System Prefs and assigning ‘bottom right corner’ to mean ‘secondary-click’ fixes this &quotproblem&quot of no right-clicking. Why that works when other methods don’t, I don’t know, but I am happier.

[quote=Ewan C.]So:

  1. Echoing others (just to add to the ‘bulk’ for FBG feedback: hunger is (1) really really fast and (2) then insta-fatal; the auto-fire responses happen without break. Possibly intended? If so, yikes.

  2. Can’t ‘right-click’ on officers at all; Mac build, so no actual right-clicking, but neither command-click nor control-click does anything.

  3. Much fun! Somewhere out there is ‘my’ land feature…[li]

  4. If the intent is that new captains need to spend a long time doing something like milk-runs to/from Venderbight, maybe say so explicitly? Otherwise as others have said, not clear how I actually make money here…
    edited by Ewan C. on 4/30/2014[/quote]

[/li][li]

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I played for a while now and have to say I like the game already very much. It captures the spirit of the FL game wonderfully. The graphics are just as I always imagined this world and the music fits the mood. The stories so far made me wish for more.[li]

A few notes/answers to the initial questions:

  • Half speed/reverse is a useful feature for docking and such.
  • Zoom in: Never found a use for it. If any, I’d like a zoom out-feature
  • I use manual saves often
  • brightness works fine for me

The thing with crew jumping overboard in rapid succession has been mentioned often enough, that’s just unbalanced from my perspective.

What I’d wish for/suggestions:

  • Keyboard commando for docking/launching. Since the ship is stirred with keys, it makes sense to me to dock with a keystroke as well.
  • Maybe the storylets in the bottom right corner could be activated with keyboard too (perhaps numbers 1-…). I’m not using a mouse but my laptop’s touchpad and finding the mouse arrow is sometimes a delay.
  • Log book a bit larger window (perhaps scaleable). There are some useful and/or funny remarks in there which get easily overlooked. The scroll button there is difficult to operate.
  • the active register in the Gazetteer (Story/Hold/Journal…) should be highlighted.
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Is there a bit of new geography in the latest update? I don’t remember Low Barnet from yesterday.

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[quote=Tanaquil]
e. The death/loss options really need to change when there’s only one crew member left (me). It feels more than a little absurd (and not in a good way) when the bosun tells me I just committed suicide via kettle, or when I eat myself. There should be a similar option that only triggers when you only have one crew member left talking about how you go mad wandering the empty ship, or gnaw your own hand off in hunger and bleed to death, or something.[/quote]
I concur. It’s a little bit immersion-breaking as is, and I like this suggestion for how to fix it.

It also seems sort of weird that you can be at 1 crew member – yourself – and still have your named officers present, but it would probably be too frustrating if they got eaten/committed suicide and you had to restart your officer collection from scratch.

Unrelated little nitpick: The flipped cursor has an unfortunate tendency to obscure the first two or three characters of text in tooltips. This is actually quite inconvenient with the fuel gauge because the percentage of fuel remaining is the first thing in the tooltip, and I have to bounce the cursor around so I can read it while the tooltip is catching up with the cursor.

I did this just to try it out on a run to Venderbight, then I couldn’t figure out how to shut it off and burned through 9 barrels of fuel and 35 hull points before it cooled down on its own. I almost ran out of fuel entirely but I managed to limp into port. That was exciting.
edited by CameoAppearance on 5/2/2014

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[li]

Yes it is new, I hit that little island on my first trip out of London after the update. Oops! should watch where I’m going:)

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[quote=CameoAppearance]I did this just to try it out on a run to Venderbight, then I couldn’t figure out how to shut it off and burned through 9 barrels of fuel and 35 hull points before it cooled down on its own. I almost ran out of fuel entirely but I managed to limp into port. That was exciting.
edited by CameoAppearance on 5/2/2014[/quote]

[li]
From my own experiments in steaming wildly over the horizon, it’s not a mode you turn on and off. You click the icon once, and that dumps one barrel of fuel in the engine, and your speed and temperature rises. This cools down, and slows down on it’s own, once the extra fuel is used up.

Clicking again just dumps further barrels of fuel in the engine, so it gets hotter and faster.

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regarding monster balance: a playthrough ago, I came across literally 5 different sea crabs just as I came out the mouth of London’s port. After dying on that run, I’ve started another - been playing for three hours now, and so far I haven’t seen a single beast or boat. Whatever algorithm that’s generating these encounters could use a tune up.

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[li]
The swarm of crabs then nothing issue has been noted, and is being addressed. Some of the issue seems to be related to said zee-monsters wandering off into parts of the map that are placeholders, and thus not being available to fight, but still counting towards the zee’s population. There also seems to be some hold-over to this state after dying and starting a legacy captain. If you start a new-new captain, the initial crab abundance seems to re-appear.

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The swarm of crabs then nothing issue has been noted, and is being addressed. Some of the issue seems to be related to said zee-monsters wandering off into parts of the map that are placeholders, and thus not being available to fight, but still counting towards the zee’s population. There also seems to be some hold-over to this state after dying and starting a legacy captain. If you start a new-new captain, the initial crab abundance seems to re-appear.[/quote]
I’ve noticed that sometimes if you save, fully exit the game, and then reload, some monsters and ships can reappear, but not a great many.

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Aphotic Quills be damned! First time I’ve died by other than my own incompetance. My first 12 hours were on my work laptop (ssshh), on a 13 inch screen. It was beautiful and fun. Now I just got home and played on a 25 inch screen and…wow. And I can see the sparks from the towers at Venderbight and the ripples from the wake of the ship are so clear. It’s a brand new game already.

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[quote=AlexWattsEsq][quote=CameoAppearance]I did this just to try it out on a run to Venderbight, then I couldn’t figure out how to shut it off and burned through 9 barrels of fuel and 35 hull points before it cooled down on its own. I almost ran out of fuel entirely but I managed to limp into port. That was exciting.
edited by CameoAppearance on 5/2/2014[/quote]

From my own experiments in steaming wildly over the horizon, it’s not a mode you turn on and off. You click the icon once, and that dumps one barrel of fuel in the engine, and your speed and temperature rises. This cools down, and slows down on it’s own, once the extra fuel is used up.

Clicking again just dumps further barrels of fuel in the engine, so it gets hotter and faster.[/quote]
That explains why I couldn’t turn it off! I thought you dragged the temperature up as high as you wanted it. I’ve used it for an emergency speed boost since then, and it used less drastic amounts of fuel and cooled itself off on its own.

About downloading updates: I only seem to be able to do so by starting a new game. A dedicated ‘Update’ button would be great.

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I actually want to take back a lot of what I said earlier. I’ve now played for probably 25+ hours (oops…) and I think it’s actually not punishingly bad at all. The early game might need a little more balancing (some help so you don’t just founder immediately, because that’s frustrating and boring) but at later levels terror and hunger seem to be much more balanced.

One thing I noticed: when submitting port reports, I can always “continue” to submit another, unless I’m submitting one from Gaider’s Mourn. That always closes the Gazetteer, even if it is the first one I’m submitting.

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And also – this game is a ridiculous amount of fun. The only complaints I have will probably be cleared up when there’s more content. So bravo, once again.

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Just realised I never answered the original questions

So responses to the questions:

  1. Half speed? in tricky corners, docking etc but I go to full speed as much as possible
  2. zoom - I haven’t discovered how to do this yet … oops, help!!
  3. manual saves - definitely after I died several times on my way back to London I now have saves for a couple of the other ports (Mount Palmerstone and Gaiders Mourn) which I overwrite when I visit. I like my character and don’t want to lose any progress I make on any particular voyage
  4. light/dark - definitely better in a darker room.

Other things

I don’t see many monsters/other ships out there. Unless they are hanging around the various ports. My first encounter with the Lifeberg actually sitting in the entrance to Whither was a bit much. Have only seen it one more time and avoided it then as I didn’t think I was strong enough to beat it.

I’m not sure if I am just getting better at avoiding it but as I have boosted my stats; filled in more of the map and found the best routes I’m not finding Terror as much as a problem. The pop ups don’t seem as frequent either.

I now have enough echoes to buy supplies at every port, they might be more expensive but it is better than losing crew and dying

Still absolutely loving it. Very addictive and it is easy to spend more time than I thought playing.

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Just got setup, used medium graphics settings.

Immediate first thoughts:
Text fields feel unpolished. Autoclear upon click, cursor position, handling large amounts of characters - all expected but not present.

The buoy’s bell seems out of place. I didn’t watch it closely enough to be sure, but I’m guessing it’s animated independently of the buoy bobbing, when I expected it to be in sync.

The anchor at the bottom of the loading screen resembles a smiley face. At odds with the visual atmospherics of the launch screen and the music.

First screen in Wolfstack: I can mouseover many things, and some respond by changing borders/highlighting, but I can only interact with very few things. That response drew my eyes away from the interactive part when I was looking for my cursor and slowed my ability to absorb things in the right order. If it were turned off for times when your interactive choices are heavily constrained, it might help. If it’s possible to enable some tutorial mode that hid everything for this first view, and then turned things on as you needed them, even better. One of these things is the furnace, which is likely not supposed to react. From this screen there doesn’t appear to be any way to quit either. No Q, esc, ctrl-q. (Haven’t researched if any of these should actually work, just checking the things I would expect.)

Grammar: Decide who you were… No period. All the other text seems to be properly punctuated, save for a comma in &quotNow it lies…&quot

Who were you screen:
I’m glad to see different choices that have mechanical differences and they are cleanly spelled out.
The gray text immediately following the black text could use another line break for additional readability.

Once I got to click through the tabs of the gazeteer, I clicked on the letter in the corner, which put me into the storylet to choose my term of address. I finish this, pick my portrait and name, and then it launches the storylet again.

Screenshots with printscreen (full screen mode) do not work.
edited by Theus on 5/12/2014

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[quote=Theus]
Screenshots with printscreen (full screen mode) do not work.[/quote]

That’s odd. I can’t check from work, but I definitely sent screenshots to them in my first bug report (taken via printscreen), so they definitely used to work. At least for some people. :-S

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I’ve had no issue taking screen shots on my PC.