What would it be and why?
Personally, I would add a social option for Watch owners to aid their friends in regaining their souls. I have a friend recently who lost his, and I would be more then happy to help him regain it.
Well, Paramount Presence if it isn’t present. Who knows on that one.
I could go for a new expedition or a new weekly area like the nadir. Maybe some more crazy color related content.
Agreed, a new massive quest leading to a new weekly area. Cave of the Nadir has always been my favorite content, and I’d love an even more difficult line with higher requirements and a greater reward. Especially if it’s how they continue the Dilmun Club storyline.
For me, actually, there is that one thing which is above and beyond all other preferences:
A personal encyclopedia/much more powerful logging.
For a game whose main modus operandi is piecing vast number of tiny jigsaw puzzles together, it’s remarkably hard to keep track of all the jigsaw puzzles. A wiki is very unsatisfactory, not only because it breaks immersion but also because I generally lose the sense of whether I’ve "discovered" some piece of worldbuilding or simply got spoiled on the wiki.
What I would like is something like the Bazaar tab where you have categories for NPCs, locations, factions, items etc and as you explore new entries open up and existing entries are expanded. Ideally of course this would be semi-automated but I realise that’s a tall order.
Similarly, the journal would be much better organised. It would be searchable, it would be taggable, it would include the action text and not only the root and conclusion text (always seems like a strange exception/omission) and it could be organised by story branches (so that if you are pursuing several stories you can actually understand where you are in relation to each).
edited by genesis on 6/19/2015
Ooh, that’s a wonderful notion. In theory there would be no harm in tying it to quality progress.
However, a lot of mysteries in Fallen London are put together by aggregating clues all over the place, and there’s really no way of knowing /when/ a player has figured it all out.
What might be better is if, with the big journal update coming up, it became possible to tag journal entries by topic. I think that would make it much easier to piece together what you know, and how they all tie together.
It’d be nice if Bats with Attitude had some sort of stat or use aside from selling/hoarding. I’d love to have a Shadowy or Dangerous bat companion.
Got 2 that I can’t choose between.
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The ability to attach a message when you accept or reject a social action. This would make them much more conversational.
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The ability to display more than 1 item and 1 quality on your profile. Ideally this would come in the form of something like a "trophy room" tab where you can choose what you want displayed and sort them into categories. This would let you give people a much better sense of what you’ve been up to and what your character is about. The echoed journal entry things are cool but they don’t mean much outside of the context they appear in and reading through the list of echoes on a player profile isn’t especially helpful.
I’d really appreciate the ability to “lock” options, so that you can never accidentally choose them.
I’ll second "An Individual" for his suggestion (1). If someone invites me to coffee and starts a conversation, I’d love to have some way to reply without either inviting them to stick around for a second cup, or suggesting we start up a game of chess.
I have mentioned this elsewhere, but I would appreciate some decent women’s footware and some nice silk pajamas or night gown/kimono. I’d even accept some scandal for the pleasure of lounging in my jarmies.
(Hello Mr. Vitamancy, fancy meeting you here!)
^ This, please. I always get super-hesitant whenever I draw a connection card. I’m so worried that I’ll mis-click (or worse, accidentally press the wrong thing when using my phone browser) and sell the Location of the Cave of Nadir to someone.
For my suggestion: I’d like a way to toggle off unwanted / useless opportunity cards. Or some way to go "yes, I’m definitely done with this story for now".
Edit: Trimmed my example(s), to make the thread easier to read.
[spoiler] I have Touched By The Fingerwork 64, Walking the Fallen Cities 50, etc. and I doubt they’ll be useful anytime soon - or if they are I have no idea how to conclude those stories so that those cards will stop diluting my deck.
Whenever City Vices: an Entanglement with an Old Friend comes up, I just want to throw like 40; no, 400; no, 4000 jade at the Struggling Artist and tell the stalker to just leave me alone already. It’s over, dude. Move on and find someone else.
Similarly, the Sardonic Music Hall Singer asking me for help is all well and good - but not if the card shows up when Acquaintance: Sardonic Music-Hall Singer is already at 9 and the options shown cannot increase it any further.
For a non-CityVices example, on one hand I kinda want to get rid of the Albino Rat so that the Rat Melancholy card stops appearing all the time, but on the other hand I don’t know how to reacquire her so I dare not try to sell her in case she’s helpful further down the track. [/spoiler]
edited by Kittenpox on 6/22/2015
What I’d like to add… some way to manipulate luck-checks. Special, super-rare equipment that can improve your odds. Rare consumables that can give you ‘second chances’ on luck-checks. I know that’s not how luck is supposed to work, but… this is a world of mystery and magic! Ancient deities lurk behind the mirrors, devils walk amongst us… surely, there are ways to move the Fates.
Devilbone Dice already exist, are really rare, and sell for next to nothing. They’d be perfect as ‘second chances’ for luck-checks.
Luck-boosting gear, meanwhile, would be the kind of thing you went on an epic quest for. The end-reward of a lengthy, and expensive story. Luck-checks would still be a matter of luck, of course - but just being able to move the odds a tick or two in your favor would make me feel much better about them. Y’know, just having DONE something, instead of being left with nothing to do by pray to the Random Number God…
The one thing that I’d like to see the most is them adding the Locked and Go buttons to plans that I put on the plans tab. Lets say I need Bazaar Permits and I just get the last Romantic Notion. Why do I need to leave where I am, go to the bazaar side streets, open up Baseborn and Fowlingpiece, make a Bazaar Permit, then go back to where I need to use it. Would be so much easier if I could do all that stuff on the Plan tab.
Not sure if this is the kind of thing Failbetter or the community at large would want, but I think it would be interesting to see a variant of the available clubs in which players can co-create and operate one of there own (IE X number of players would have to work together to create the club, after which they could improve the club and raise its quality along with their own, unlocking secondary opportunity cards and eventually upgrading the stats on the equipment page)
[quote=Kylestien]
Personally, I would add a social option for Watch owners to aid their friends in regaining their souls. I have a friend recently who lost his, and I would be more then happy to help him regain it.[/quote]
Agreed, however, as one who chose the spirifer’s road, I would love the opportunity to steal the souls of my acquaintances. Perhaps through a long series of disguised social actions, culminating in a final disguised social action that only allows the theft if X menace is so high (wounds? nightmares?).
Or the ability to sell your soul to your spirifer friends for a range of prices.
Each soul would be unique (with a tag specific to the player it came from), and would require either the now souless victim to steal it back (again through a long resource intensive quest, and normal soul retrieval quest-lines would not work). Watch owners could aid/complete portions to help.
It would be interesting to see an actual player interaction with the soul trade and it’s impact, rather than the theft of souls from nameless npcs and buying and selling legions of anonymous souls. It would make the whole matter more personal and altogether more disturbing and fun.
[quote=Hypersomnus]
Agreed, however, as one who chose the spirifer’s road, I would love the opportunity to steal the souls of my acquaintances. Perhaps through a long series of disguised social actions, culminating in a final disguised social action that only allows the theft if X menace is so high (wounds? nightmares?)[/quote]
Yeah no, that sounds like a disaster in the making, because it turn the Soul Trade story into "pay real money to gain the exclusive ability to screw other players over with long lasting consequences for profit" while placing other players under the mercy of Shepherds (other paying players).
I think it would make sense for both Shepards and Spirifers to be able to help other characters to recover lost souls (either via the C.V.R. or via connections in the spirifer community).
[quote=Estelle Knoht]
Yeah no, that sounds like a disaster in the making, because it turn the Soul Trade story into "pay real money to gain the exclusive ability to screw other players over with long lasting consequences for profit" while placing other players under the mercy of Shepherds (other paying players).[/quote]
Yeah, upon further examination, my idea was unequivocally a really bad idea. It would ruin social actions altogether, also you are spot on in your acknowledgement that in order to keep non-paying players, you can’t make Fate locked content central or detrimental to non-paying player’s experience.
I think I’ll amend my wish to: More social actions as a (non-mandatory) part of the game. The most fun I’ve had in FL has involved either tricking or helping my acquaintances. Most memorably, being commissioned to complete a particular theft to aid an acquaintance in the earlier stages of her ambition. Also, I would love to be able to aid a fellow player in writing a short story, performing a heist, pursuing a case, or preparing for a hunt.
edited by Hypersomnus on 6/21/2015
The ability to change one’s POSI specialisation.
Profession social actions via Free Evenings!
As a Murderer, optimize your friend’s deck by killing (Struggling Artist / Artist’s Model / Jewel Thief), thus leaving said menace incapacitated for a week!
I always wanted to order a hit on fictional people…