Psst! I don’t think these suggestions are unnecessary extras. Repeating storylets and long travels represent early drudgery the player has to push through to get to the slowly unraveling stories. That doesn’t jive with the roguelike inclinations. The current game sells itself short by not enveloping players in the setting every time they return to a port. Sometimes a player travels to Corsair’s Forest only to find there is nothing new there. That’s disappointing.
Meanwhile a lot of this is less difficult to implement than it first seems. Combat events can be one or two sentences long with simple stats effects. The functionality for changing the prose used during a stroll through Venderbight is already demonstrated by the two different possible paragraphs when the player reads the newspapers in London. Just having a London pub where there are three or four characters than can always be talked to, and who the player can ask different things of, and who discuss the latest Unterzee news, would make a HUGE difference.
Meanwhile, the sheer beauty of the art, and the willingness to work for a month on Steel in response to feedback, demonstrate that this is FB’s baby. I don’t think they’re nearly done with it, December release date or not.
The Southern Archipelago and other seas near London is the current bottleneck in this game. It forms a much larger share of playtime, and making sure that players don’t read about birds nesting in hair every time they click to have lunch with a certain sister and get her tale of terror is more important to this game’s general impression than this detail is in Frostfound, fascinating though the latter may be.
If Alex can write 20 mini-storylets a day (or 30 london storylets adapted from FL) then he can take each island of the So. Archipelago one a day and greatly smooth out this problem in a week.
Meanwhile hopefully sailing events will continue to be added to on an ongoing basis. You could even crowdsource a lot of those!