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Acquaintance Actions Missing?
bjorntfh
Posts: 216
6/27/2013
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Anyone else notice that you can no longer visit your acquaintances? Does this mean they're going to be cards now (dear god no, please no)? Seriously, my deck has enough filler in it as it is, although I wouldn't mind seeing their stories continue.
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Fhoenix
Posts: 602
6/30/2013
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Sara Hysaro wrote:
I was just referring to Pinned cards in that post. Honestly, I'm looking forward to the SN Deck Mechanics being applied to FL since it'd be easier to stay focused on what I want to do. I know not everybody would be happy with it, but that's just my opinion on the matter.
For me it's the opposite. With storylets, if I want to do something (say get a quality to some level, or get some amount of resource), I go to a location and do that storylet. With cards you basically draw whatever and hope that you'v drawn something usefull. I never finished The Silver Tree because in that game even though I had goals, I could not do anything meaningful to advance them. The cards and resources that I got were totally random, so you just played everything until you got enough of what you needed.
Same here, if you need a Mark, instead of visiting your friends in a certain location and doing something about it, you must wait for days until you get the card you want. Then wait for days again. And again. In the end I just stop caring about the thing that I wanted to do and play something else.
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My Character
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Tesuji
Posts: 161
6/29/2013
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Little The wrote:
That's why I'm a little worried. If FL moves to the SN card model, it will radically change an element of the game that the rest of the game has been developed around for years.
It's not just the mechanics. The SN mechanics lend themselves to a completely different kind of game than Fallen London, where the meat of the actual game itself is found in the opportunity cards rather than the always-available storylets.
I've been getting the sense that the Fallen London we know and love is more a historical accident than anything else, that it isn't necessarily the game FBG wanted, but rather one they lived with because of the mechanical limitations they were faced with at the time. (That's not to rule out FL-on-SN as being a good game or even a better game, but I'm beginning to think it's going to be a very different game.)
Take the current trend toward opaqueness and randomness. Most of the new storylines are using obfuscated qualities, where you don't get to see a progress bar and have to go to your inventory page (or maybe even use your scrapbook/mantelpiece) just to see the value. This is being used in situations where it's not really needed (e.g., Archaeologist) and even in situations where it's actually nonsensical to hide the quality's value (e.g., Proud Parade of Victories).
Likewise, we're seeing more hiding of checks. In the old FL, for example, using Whispered Secrets to gain Expedition Supplies would have been labelled as a luck check. Now, it's effectively still a luck check, but coding it as a rare success means that players don't get to see the odds.
We're also seeing less in the way of warning labels. An obvious example would be the removal of the "Learn some tricks" opportunity cards quite a few months back, which were replaced with the connection cards which do the same thing, but don't actually warn you that you're trading in connections for stats.
You could even add in the switch to the Broad difficulty system, which makes it easier to have storylets with unavoidable random failure, and the change to Second Chances, which removed their use as insurance against random failure.
This isn't to say that change is bad or that the end result won't still be a fun game, but yes, there are some indications that there's been a pretty substantial shift in the game's underlying philosophy, and the current thinking seems to be that adding more luck, randomness and surprise makes for a better game.
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Tesuji.
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