I didn’t see this thread until now and I’m surprised and disappointed that this story received such a negative reaction. I just wanted to chime in to say that I found it to be one of the highlights of my Fallen London experience thus far.
[spoiler]I told the Last Constable I loved her, in the hopes of being able to marry her, and received her rejection.
Then I rigged the “game” ensure the Cheery Man died and she lived, and she was furious with me and stormed off, never wanting to see me again.[/spoiler]
Contrary to finding fault with the RNG mechanics, I actually thought that was a great element because it compelled me to do what was necessary to save The Last Constable even though I knew (because the game warned me in advance) that this would upset her. It was an actually difficult and emotionally resonant choice precisely because I had to choose between a bad option and a potentially much worse one. It was one of the rare moments in Fallen London where I felt anything but heroic but still felt that I made the “right” decision and did what I had to do. It would have been so much more dull if I could have just chosen a guaranteed happy ending.
I loved this and I hope that writers don’t shy away from potentially upsetting resolutions as a result of the reaction here.
So I saw mentioned within this thread that the option to reset is under Write Letters in your Lodgings, for 20 Fate. I’m not seeing it there under the open beta site.
When the conclusion to the story was first released, there was an option to reset with Fate. After some writing and balance changes, FBG decided the option to reset was not in line with their vision of the story, and removed it.
I believe it was discussed somewhere in the backlog of thread pages, but essentially, the option was removed. The odds were far less favorable than they are now when engaging in an honest duel between the two or doubling the dosage of poison, much to everyone’s annoyance. If I recall correctly, you weren’t even guaranteed a success if you cheated. Many players felt that the odds were unfair and placed you automatically on the losing side regardless of your decisions, and Failbetter seemed to more or less agree with this sentiment. From what I understand, they didn’t want to make players feel that they were setting up players for financial abuse or to devalue the ending, so they made the cheating option a guaranteed success and the honest challenge a more evenly split chance of success or failure. Unfortunately, in an effort to further ensure no players were being taken advantage of, they removed the reset option altogether. The idea was that previous players who completed the story would receive a second chance to decide a course of action, and from this point, players could decide to either give your side the fair shot they wanted at risk of their life or guarantee their success at the cost of their disapproval, this time with understanding that choices would be permanent and any potential future content involving them wouldn’t be solely tainted by cheating tactics.
To be honest, it still wasn’t received well by many, and I agree. Like others have said, leaving it up to RNG wasn’t the best choice, and the fact that people couldn’t reset the story wasn’t taken well. I don’t like how Failbetter went about it, but I’ll give them this: if I’m gonna be upset with a company’s business practices, the best I can ask for is that it be done out of concern for the well being of their player base. Quality of content aside, I can only be so upset at a company wanting to make their purchase options as clear cut and fair as possible, especially when compared to other less reputable devs. But yeah, no reset option now. Sorry, friend.
“…you were placed automatically on the losing side…”
“…made… a guaranteed success”
While I don’t disagree with your point, I’m still salty enough to use this as an opportunity to rant more about how “success” is subjective. I only saw an option for guaranteed failure; in the end, the “”"“tragedy”""" story led to a happy ending (and even that wasn’t “happy” in the sense of warranting celebration or just being noteworthy in any way, more like “ok nothing too bad happened, cool, story’s over”).
Thank you! In between then and now, I’ve actually read through this entire thread from start to finish. I saw later on that they did indeed remove the option to restart. I don’t understand why the option to restart this story isolated from the litany of other stories we can restart, but that is FB’s prerogative.
I will say that this is one of the more divisive threads I’ve read. I understand that many were emotionally invested in one of these characters; I certainly was. But I do not understand the ardent complaints about the ending and mechanic. All FL stories come to an end, all have varying types of mechanics, and all have varied levels of investment and impact by the player. Each player may attribute their own subtext to the story, just like a good book. And Fallen London is certainly like a grand, voluminous, and rich piece of literature, packaged in a choose-your-own adventure framework.
[quote=Jason5237]I don’t understand why the option to restart this story isolated from the litany of other stories we can restart, but that is FB’s prerogative.
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IIRC it was because 1) it allowed players to collect "reward" items from all endings (which was an unintended and unwelcome sideeffect), including both feast-of-rose companions (which are intendended to be mutually exclusive) and 2) it encouraged certain kind of players to throw money at the RNG until they got the ending they wanted, which is not the intended purpose of replaying a story.
It actually wouldn’t let players collect the items from every ending–the conclusion only gives the unique items if the player had the relevant companion. The Feast companion options already require that the player doesn’t have the other companion, and it would be simple enough for it to lock it with the ghost versions.
While it makes sense to prevent the player from obtaining the memory version of their foe, I do hope Failbetter lets us obtain their weapon at next year’s Feast. There’s plenty of ways it could make sense narratively. For example, my character would love to have the Cheery Man’s cane as a trophy recognizing a worthy opponent.
FBG mentioned that the Last Constable opportunity deck card would be coming back, for those who keep her alive to the end. But I’m not seeing it, still.
Would love this! I sided with her and was able to assist her in felling her father in the end. Her opportunity card had many options on it and I believe it was only available for one advancement level earlier on.
Will they let us reset it again?[/quote]Probably not. They’ve said that the story will likely not be replayable, even for Fate, though anything’s possible, I suppose.
Well I can’t say I am happy with the outcome. After backing the last constable every step of the way (except for a brief moment When I wanted to see what would happen if I tried to get the cheery man’s story which did not go well and earned me 2 Turncoat) I raised the stakes and poisoned an additional tankard, only to have the dreaded RNG kill her on the first go. Definitely not the ending I was hoping for. Despondent and sad with the ending narrative and only hope that she is at peace.
I’ve heard arguments both for and against it. Avoiding cluttering up forums with repeat threads vs bringing up old conversations that most participants have moved on from.
The thing is, FailBetter presumably hopes for / encourages new players all the time, so there will always be new participants who haven’t "moved on". These are conversations, not on some random internet thread on floating subjects of the day, but about a game that remains reasonably stable and has players at all stages. So harking back to other people’s experiences and views seems entirely reasonable.
I have been known to use search on here to look for old threads about EF and read them; people playing the EF in those circumstances sometimes add comments late in the day. So conversely, there is a case to be made for not cluttering the barely functional search (no more than 5 results!) by adding more threads covering the same ground.