Greetings, delicious friends! We hope you had a wonderful end to last year. Now the lacre is drying off the streets and Mr Sacks has taken all that it was offered. If you can believe it, it’s 1899 once again! The time has come to talk about our plans for Fallen London in the new year.
There are things that it’s too early to discuss in detail; the year is long and full of plans. So don’t take this post as a comprehensive list. But here’s what we’re ready to announce now:
Fate and Subscription Price Change
We will be increasing the price of Fate and Exceptional Friendship this year. It’s never pleasant to hear that something you enjoy is going up in price, but we hope for your understanding.
Fate has been the same price in USD since the game launched 13 years ago (international currency conversions have fluctuated a little). It feels redundant to mention how much the game has changed in that time. It’s so much bigger, deeper, and richer, and the things you can do with your Fate are so much more varied and interesting. The benefits of having Fate have increased a lot while the price hasn’t changed.
Cumulative inflation in the US since 2009 is about 40% (and a little more in the UK), so we’re bringing in a 30% price increase to Fate - not keeping up with inflation, quite, but bringing us closer to current levels. We plan to make inflationary adjustments like this more often in future, so any further changes won’t be so major.
We’ll make this change on the 6th of March, based on the exchange rates at that time. 4 Fate will be $1.30, 10 Fate around $3.25, and 100 Fate around $26. The best value price for a single point of Fate will be around $0.23.
Prices in other currencies will reflect these increases, as determined by the current exchange rates, which we update regularly.
Exceptional Friendship will cost $9 USD a month (8.5 EUR/£7.50/$12 CAD/$13 AUD) from the 6th of March, to reflect inflation, but also recognising that we have grown what’s on offer for Exceptional Friends since the last price change in 2015. We’re also adding another outfit slot for Exceptional Friends at the same time.
An Expanded Exceptional Friendship
Details are still TBD, but we are cooking up an expansion to Exceptional Friendship that will feature a more economical way of playing the growing back-catalogue of Exceptional Stories, plus some more delicious perks.
Regular festivals and living world updates
Our regular schedule of free festivals continues throughout 2023:
- The Feast of the Exceptional Rose in February
- Whitsun in May
- Estival in July
- Fruits of the Zee, now in September
- Hallowmas in October
- Christmas in December
Expect also to see periodic returns to Living World events like crab hunts and a newly-rebalanced urchin war – as well as the appearance of a new Living World event or two.
Read on for more details on Estival and Fruits of the Zee.
Horatia’s Boarding House
Your efforts in reaching social goals for the Mask of the Rose Kickstarter campaign are still paying dividends: you’ll be rewarded with a new small activity in Fallen London, free for all players. Visit the main location of Mask of the Rose, 40 years on, and see how the proprietress (and boarders) are doing. Horatia’s Boarding House arrives in January.
Two more zee ports, and a conclusion to Evolution
Our next planned port of call is Gaider’s Mourn. Expect the port itself to be fairly small, but it will come alongside adjustments and expansion of the zailing experience – aimed both at adding more variety to the zailing deck, and some more challenge for experienced (or foolhardy) zee captains. We expect to launch this in spring.
The conclusion to Evolution, and our final zee port of this cycle, is Irem. We expect to launch it in summer.
The Estival
Like 2022’s Prelapsarian Exhibition, this is a summer festival with an all-new story and the return of past summer-event items. 2023’s Estival will take place in July as usual.
The Tracklayer’s City
New stories in the Upper River will arrive in the second half of 2023, to show the consequences of your choices during the Railway storyline. This will be a little bigger than we’d originally planned. The Railway is largely written by our creative director Em Short, who is leading the writing on Mask of the Rose; thank you for your patience while she works away to complete it!
Fruits of the Zee
We are making some changes to Fruits of the Zee. We plan on a redesign with some new added content; at present, Fruits is the festival least in line with our current design principles and the one with the least content. Don’t worry, items that were available in past Fruits will continue to be available.
We’re also moving Fruits of the Zee into early September, to space out festivals more evenly over the course of the year.
Improvements to the Onboarding Game
Throughout 2023 we’ll be working on improvements to the early parts of Fallen London to make the game more welcoming and engaging, especially for new and returning players. We’ll be focusing our efforts on what we call the Onboarding Game: the experience roughly up to the point you unlock second tier main highway stat areas (such as Wolfstack Docks).
This will include:
- clearer tutorialisation and a less overwhelming new player experience
- some improvements to role-playing in the earliest parts of the game
- revised progression and balance affecting very early players
Many of these changes will be invisible to the more experienced denizens of the Neath. For example, we’ll shortly be rolling out a clearer tutorial to introduce new players to Social Acts, but this won’t trigger for existing characters.
And Finally, Some Planned Maintenance
You may have noticed some outages in Fallen London before Christmas, which were down to a memory fault which, among other fixes, requires that we perform some scheduled maintenance. Expect Fallen London to be out of service for a half day on 17th of January!
Thank you for your continued patronage! We look forward to bringing you all of this plus the release of Mask of the Rose in April, and all of the various delights that a game launch brings (competitions! Events! Rats! etc).
