[quote=Alexis Kennedy][color=#009900] our models are games where one mistake can ruin your day.[/color]
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Ah, Mr Eaten, I presume?
I was wondering if this is from playing the silver tree or something akin to that., but I guess it’s just a glitch. Additionally, for me this option doesn’t seem to go away when I play it, it can be played repeatedly for 75 gold each time and no consequences… Seems like a pretty big exploit
edited by KatarinaNavane on 6/18/2014
I played the game for the first time last night, and I’d like to echo what others are saying regarding terror and baddy difficulty. It’s definitely frustrating, and it doesn’t feel like there’s anything clever I could be doing to make life easier. Difficulty can be a lot of fun when it feels like you’re making progress (either by grinding up some quality or learning the skills needed to survive), and not much fun at all when it feels like you’re just hitting your head against a wall / keyboard.
I’d really like to see more story context at the very beginning of the game. I think what works in Fallen London doesn’t work here. In FL, there was barely any context to start out ("You’re in prison. Escape!"), but that was ok because the entire joy of the early part of the game was discovering the setting through the slow accumulation of storylets. Also, you didn’t really need any context because you started with nothing and very little was accessible (again, you were in prison). In Sunless Sea, your character is already established enough to own a ship and you’re plunked down in Wolfstack Docks with the entire Zee to explore, yet the actual player has almost no idea what anything is. And, since the immediate goal here is to survive (and figure out the game mechanics), the amount of story that I get through storylets seems much less substantial and more disjoint. The world is very big, and the storylets are very small. A few paragraphs of text at the very beginning to describe the setting, the relevant political factions, the known ports, and dangers of the Zee would be lovely and go a long way toward motivating my character’s seemingly foolish decision to quit writing poetry and jump in a boat. This is doubly important for players who haven’t played Fallen London before, who I imagine are a lot more lost than I was.
On a very different note, please bring back windowed mode! I can’t figure out a way to hide the game while I’m playing it (on a Mac; cmd-tab doesn’t switch to other applications and cmd-H doesn’t hide it), so I have to quit the game whenever I want to do something else. Importantly for you guys, this includes sending bug reports. I’m not likely to send in any reports if I have to quit and restart the game each time.
Guy - at least for me, cmd-tab gets me to other applications on my Mac running Gold. I would find it intensely irritating if that weren’t the case, for sure. Not sure what to tell you, though - I didn’t do anything to achieve this, and it’s playing as a full-screen game rather than windowed.
I started playing the EA last night, really enjoying it so far! Had a pretty nice first run where I accidentally wandered too far North, went “What am I thinking about do not go North run away run away”, and aaaaaaalmost made it back to London before the last of my fuel went out and my crew went insane.
Most of my feedback has already been well-expressed in this thread, but there are two minor interface-ish things that might be worth raising:
- The Tab key doesn’t work on the Login screen to switch between Email and Password fields.
- I wasn’t able to paste my Access Code in from my clipboard. Particularly with Windows Mode missing, it was a bit tedious to manually jot it down on a scrap of paper, switch back to the game in full-screen mode, and then type it back in.
Loving what I’m seeing so far, and can’t wait to have another go!
One small difficulty note: be very aware that there are (at least) two kinds of angler crabs; DO NOT try to fight the Elder one! Much much harder than Mt Nomad, for example.
The thing that makes combat against some foes SO deadly right now is that their attacks are faster than my responses. So they can get a lucky Illuminate roll, and then get an attack through (sometimes two!) before I can evade/hide; that is rapidly fatal. It IS possible to overcome… but really ludicrously hard sometimes.
Huh. Maybe because I’m running on an old OS version (10.6.8). I’ll file a bug report.
I just did some random keyboard mashing to try to switch applications, and I did find that cmd-F gets me to windowed mode. So that’s nifty! Hopefully it’ll work for other people too.
[quote=Guy Scrum]
I just did some random keyboard mashing to try to switch applications, and I did find that cmd-F gets me to windowed mode. So that’s nifty! Hopefully it’ll work for other people too.[/quote]
Oh, neat. I’m on PC, but maybe a key combo of some sort will work for me there too. Thanks!
As far as terror goes, I like the suggestion some have made that being close to the coast/in direct, non-your-own-lamp light, actually lowers your terror instead of just slowing its rise.
Sure, you can crawl along the coast, but this is an exploration game. And if I want to spend most of my time exploring the spookier parts, that should be possible. It should be a difficult balance between light and dark for which I would have high terror the whole time, but terror shouldn’t just be a clock counting down to your inevitable loss.
There should be more interesting and effective ways to drop terror. Maybe staying in light drops terror. Maybe shore leave drops it a lot more or even entirely (really? your whole crew partying and getting wasted only fixes a little more terror than you, alone, sleeping in a bed?). Maybe you can burn 2-3 rations at once to have a lavish meal that relaxes everybody? Maybe you can burn a fuel to launch a flare (out of combat) to sit above the boat, reducing terror significantly over time but bathing your ship in bright light so nasties can see you from far off? There are tons of possibilities.
I understand that it’s meant to be a game where "one mistake can kill you," I’ve played and enjoyed many games of that nature. But the way in which you get killed should at least be as interesting as possible. Right now all terror does is make you choose between playing in a boring way, or slowly losing.
edited by conductorbosh on 6/18/2014
edited by conductorbosh on 6/18/2014
Spoilery update on beasties: Just defeated Mt Nomad again, and that was no harder than before (went down doing only 50 hull damage, all from the uber-speedy lesser attacks). The Elder Angler is MUCH more dangerous right now.
One thing that works well but is risky is ‘luring’ enemies to start difficult attacks, then having an evade reduce your illumination below the needed level. This not only cancels their attack (i.e. wasting their effort) but also often causes a delay that looks like confusion in their taking any further action.
Some thoughts from a first time player:[li]
- The same terror and combat complaints as everyone else.[/li][li]I’d really like a name generator. Given that each character is significantly less permanent than my FL character, trying to think up a name with each new character is annoying.[/li][li]The zee-bat is totally useless. I can be right next to an unexplored island and it will tell me to go somewhere far offscreen, or immediately after exploring an island it will tell me to go back to it.[/li][li]Following on that, it would be great if there were a little more direction to be had, especially once the map gets randomized. Even adding an additional point of reference when being told to go somewhere ("[Island] is in this direction, as part of this region", or "[Island] is in this direction, to the west of [Another island you already know]") would be incredibly helpful, as would locals on more populated island being able to point you in the right direction. In my last game I died after zailing in circles for ages because I just could not find Polythreme.[/li][li]At least twice I told myself that clearly this build was too hard and I should wait for the next one. Then I started a new game after half an hour. So clearly FBG is doing something right!
I’m a-gonna play a bit of devil’s advocate on the terror mechanic. I sortof like it the way it is currently.
Right now, a lot of the "tactics" of the game involves plotting your best sea-route to get to a given point while staying in brightly-lit areas for as much of the time as you can, so your terror doesn’t spike. It’s perfectly possible to make it to Khan’s Heart with a very small gain in Terror, if you maneuver carefully the whole route and make no mistakes. Of course if you have to dodge something nasty en route and get pushed out of the lit zones, or if you judge a turn wrong, or if you have a slow engine . . . yeah, it gets nasty fast.
Overall I actually really enjoy the crawl-and-dash kind of maneuvering it takes to cross big areas with minimal terror gain. I do wish buoys were marked on the map, though, if only because knowing precisely where they are is really, really important.
I also have the Serpentine engine, which may be slanting my analysis a bit. The faster you move, the less time you spend in unlit areas, the more manageable terror becomes.
I guess I just feel like sticking very close to shore should be something you can do to be much safer, not something you must do to survive. Once you get out into random generation territory you’re gonna miss lots of cool stuff if you just stick to the shore. Shouldn’t all these pirates be killing themselves and mutinying 100% of the time if it’s so terrifying to get more than a few inches away from the shoreline?
I just feel it should be possible for me to spend very little time crawling along the shore, if I’m willing to spend more resources to do so. There’s simply no acceptable/balanced way to mitigate terror at this point. Even if the terror mechanic is not changed (which I’m praying it will be, to allow some sort of ambient terror reduction from lights or something), just adding more efficient ways to reduce terror will help. Those who stay close to the shore will have more resources. Those who long to explore the wider seas will be able to, but they’ll need to spend more stuff to keep terror manageable.
edited by conductorbosh on 6/18/2014
I feel that making it easier to remove/reduce terror when you’re at home would help immensely. At this point in the early game, even when you’re in london unless you don’t need to spend any echoes on anything else (and you will need supplies and fuel) you can’t afford to remove more than a couple points of terror at most.
a possibility on the zee-bat issue: perhaps a compass rose that would point directly toward whatever the bat finds? because their directions are so vague and inexact right now that you can easily pass whatever it is trying to point you toward.
[quote=cheshster]Some thoughts from a first time player:[li]
- The same terror and combat complaints as everyone else.[/li][li]I’d really like a name generator. Given that each character is significantly less permanent than my FL character, trying to think up a name with each new character is annoying.[/li][li]The zee-bat is totally useless. I can be right next to an unexplored island and it will tell me to go somewhere far offscreen, or immediately after exploring an island it will tell me to go back to it.[/li][li]Following on that, it would be great if there were a little more direction to be had, especially once the map gets randomized. Even adding an additional point of reference when being told to go somewhere ("[Island] is in this direction, as part of this region", or "[Island] is in this direction, to the west of [Another island you already know]") would be incredibly helpful, as would locals on more populated island being able to point you in the right direction. In my last game I died after zailing in circles for ages because I just could not find Polythreme.[/li][li]At least twice I told myself that clearly this build was too hard and I should wait for the next one. Then I started a new game after half an hour. So clearly FBG is doing something right!
[/li]
What Alexis has said is that the problem they found with ambient terror reduction is that people then just sit off-shore in their ships all day long to reduce terror, which is a weird mechanic and counter-intuitive and doesn’t actually make the game more fun.
My suggestion is to make the glim-lamps give additional terror mitigation when they’re equipped (possibly with corresponding increases in fuel consumption?) That doesn’t really help newbies though due to the cost issues.
edited by Dr. Hieronymous Alloy on 6/18/2014
[quote=Dr. Hieronymous Alloy]What Alexis has said is that the problem they found with ambient terror reduction is that people then just sit off-shore in their ships all day long to reduce terror, which is a weird mechanic and counter-intuitive and doesn’t actually make the game more fun.
My suggestion is to make the glim-lamps give additional terror mitigation when they’re equipped (possibly with corresponding increases in fuel consumption?) That doesn’t really help newbies though due to the cost issues.
edited by Dr. Hieronymous Alloy on 6/18/2014[/quote]
Sure, more things you can do with fuel/supplies to reduce terror (like my afore-mentioned ideas of ships or out-of-combat flares. Or have terror dropped by a few whenever you do ANYTHING at a port; after all, you’re off the boat even if you aren’t paying for shore leave. At the very least the amount of terror you lose doing shore leave has to be massively increased, at least tripled. Shore leave could even 100% empty the terror bar, given how much it costs and how far you have to travel back to London… my concern is that the way it currently works makes it very difficult for the earlier player to go and explore randomly generated areas, which means they’ll be playing the same, static part of the game over and over.
edited by conductorbosh on 6/18/2014
EDIT: This is in response to the discussion on terror management, and why ambient terror reduction near shores is dangerous to game play.
Its the same problem they had with trade routes. If you incentivise, on purpose or not, boring things, the players will both become dependent on them and resent you for them simultaneously. I think that they should plumb the mechanics of well established roguelikes for a solution.
If the devs read this post, I would suggest looking at the game Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup. Its one of the oldest and most widely respected of the true-roguelike genre.
Dungeon crawl has a pretty awesome mechanic to incentivize players to continue to move deeper into the dungeon: Out Of Depth Spawns.
The difficulty of the spawned monsters normally increases with the player’s current depth of the dungeon, so as you progress further, you fight stronger monsters. However if you’re sitting on the same floor for too long, grinding the enemies that slowly repopulate a floor, the game will start throwing you enemies from significantly deeper in the dungeon. They essentially chase you off the floor. You CAN stay on the floor, attempt to kill them, and almost definitely die. Or you can keep moving forward. This is such a brilliant mechanic because it is not necessarily a punishment. Its a massive risk, and one that the player would be hard-pressed to stumble into accidentally.
But what if players who played it too safe, or players who terror-scummed on shorelines had an increased chance of dangerous random events? Their crew grows restless in the safewaters and abandons the captain. They’re attacked by raiding parties from the shores of London who steal their goods. They Hit rocks in the shallow waters and lose hull points.
These choices would manifest not as punishments, but as a risk the player would have to weigh against the benefit of terror reduction. It would be an immersive, gameplay based equivalent of the choices FBG already gives us (ie potential gains, potential loss, risks for us to weigh).
edited by Eggix on 6/18/2014
edited by Eggix on 6/18/2014
[quote=conductorbosh]
Sure, more things you can do with fuel/supplies to reduce terror (like my afore-mentioned ideas of ships or out-of-combat flares. Or have terror dropped by a few whenever you do ANYTHING at a port; after all, you’re off the boat even if you aren’t paying for shore leave.[/quote]
That’s a decent idea actually. A point of terror reduction for each action in London makes a certain amount of sense, even if it’s just going to drydock or recruiting someone new or whatever.
[color=#009900]The particular problem with it is that is that actions ashore are repeatable to various degrees, from one a visit to being repeatable at a cost to being infinitely repeatable. Because terror reduction is one of the primary economy drains, tying it to every other action in port would have a bunch of distorting effects.[/color][color=#009900]
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[color=#009900]The approach we are, tentatively, taking, is the one Eggix suggests: escalation. You may notice the ‘Time, the Healer’ quality you gain, since the Amethyst patch, when you return to London: this tracks the number of visits to London and, later, other major ports, and in concert with log dates will ultimately determine some narrative pressures to go out further from home. Similarly, we’ll be introducing an, uh, inverse escalation effect, where you get some cheap terror reduction early on. This’ll make the early difficulty curve a bit less savage, without making terror something you can ever safely ignore. We’ll also likely tie terror reduction to some of the NPC rewards in FL.[/color][color=#009900]
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[color=#009900]ConductorBosh: welcome to the community. Over the past couple of months, Terror’s been much too tough, much too easy and it’s currently on the tough side in the early game. What goes around comes around.[/color]
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[color=#009900][edit: trailing para 2 sentence][/color]
edited by Alexis on 6/18/2014