I just started playing. Today I signed up to be an exceptional friend of the bazaar. There are about 79 story lines you can get with Fate about 3500 to 4000 Fate worth of story … 280 Fate for $50 yea so roughly a $700 game? Am I missing something here?
Those stories are optional and represent only a fraction of the game’s total content. The vast majority is free.
But don’t you think that is a little extreme to charge that much money for a game if people want to do as much as they can eventually?
Well, it is ten years of stories. You’re not intended to buy them all at once. There are several threads reviewing Fate-locked stories to help you decide which ones you might enjoy.
Dude, I would have griped the same thing years ago.
But I got by without forking out Fate for the Exceptional Stories, and now have several high-end characters.
You might want to avoid taking options that concern the Exceptional Stories though; you will be seeing those, and you might not find them pleasing.
P.S. If you got in now, then I would say that you got in at a good time. There are a lot of things that addressed problems that I had been peeved at (and you would be peeved about, if you were around back then).
edited by Rostygold on 7/3/2020
They didn’t always have this many, but they were having financial difficulties for a while, and changed to the ES model in an attempt to get people to subscribe, since people come here for stories and a story a month is a very nice pace. And it worked, they are in a much better financial position now. The number of fate locked stories may be excessive now, but it is better than the path they were going down before.
Awesome ! Thank you everyone for the replies. I love Sunless Sea and Sunless Sky and am enjoying Fallen London so far ! I just wanted to see what was going on with the pricing.
A tip for you: you can purchase Fate by selecting the currency that you want. If you are aware of certain advantageous exchange rates, cheese them.
A tip for you: you can purchase Fate by selecting the currency that you want. If you are aware of certain advantageous exchange rates, cheese them.[/quote]
Very interesting ! :D
As free-to-play games go, Fallen London’s business model is pretty fair. The vast majority of content is available for free, and though you can spend Fate for actions, the design doesn’t push you to do so. Similarly you can spend Fate for special equipment items, but most are at best tied with free items, while the best Fate ones tend to be only marginally better.
As for the five-plus years of Exceptional Stories, most are pretty stand-alone. Few tie in with free stories or give unique rewards. In my opinion, only a handful are worth buying without a particular interest in that story’s subject–with so many options, it’s worth being discerning!
Two things I hate in games are microtransactions and mechanics that make you log in within a specific timeframe to play optimally. There must be something really special about this game, because it has both of those things, and I’ve still played long enough to get 37 "Memories of a Tale".
edited by PJ on 7/3/2020
You were supposed to subscribe and play them as you went along. I took a few years off and missed loads. Hopefully they’ll discount the old ones at some point. If not, we can always cherry-pick the most popular ones as and when moneys allow.
There is a list to help.
edited by imeja on 7/3/2020
They don’t discount older ones. It’s always supposed to be cheaper to get new stories by subscribing ($7/month, I think?) than by buying them afterwards.
Considering it’s stories, it’s more like a series of monthly published comics or something with multiple year’s worth of issues.
Yes: Even without purchasing any of the premium content, it is still a viable game. That’s what distinguishes it from all the rat-trap "freemium" games out there.
edited by Mizadil on 7/3/2020
wow ! What a very interesting way of looking at it. Makes sense !
Actually, a selection of older stories is sometimes discounted during festivals. When I first joined three or so years ago, I played the occasional older EF; I think I have three or four of those left. Now, it’s all I can manage to keep up with living the Neathy life and doing one new story a month.
Also, how about getting into maintaining the wiki, hmmm? Especially if you have the skills for code writing. You won’t be missing the stuff that you are missing much if you are doing the proverbial jigsaw puzzle that is the wiki for the game.
Fallen London is a constant hobby for me, but it’s a hobby like any other and it’s worth factoring whether being an Exceptional Friend is good for my budget at any given time. There may easily come a time when I need to cancel my subscription for fiscal reasons, which was already a solid concern before the pandemic. As for Fate, I don’t buy a lot of it. Sometimes I want to catch up on a beloved Exceptional Story or access content like Flute Street, and I figure that the Failbetter team are having money problems as much as anybody right now. I say play for a bit and see if you enjoy the writing, since at the end of the day stories are your main reward for playing and completing quests.
In my humble opinion, only the extra-long yearlies are ‘must haves’ and all the others are vanity projects. Delightful vanity projects, but rarely make a difference in gameplay. The one that opened Sinning Jenny’s Finishing School has had the largest overall impact because she has become such a presence in the rest of the main lore.