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KickStarter Sunless Sea - an undersea trading and exploration game

Grimwulf

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The problem is that everything is really fucking expensive, and you lose most of your stuff on death.

Make heirlooms. You can amass up to 16 heirlooms that your captains will pass along the lineage. Each heirloom is worth roughly 1000 echoes. New captain can sell some/all of those heirlooms to get a head-start, and then slowly but surely create new heirlooms for his own heirs.
 

orcinator

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"You don't grind in the game but to do endgame you have to play however long it takes to get a decent amount of bonuses for your descendant then start over"

It's a roguelike-ish game. You are not supposed to see everything in a single playthrough. Why do you think they constantly add new stories? Why make several branches to most of the quests? Hidden ambitions? The game is designed that way, so that it will always have dark corners you never explored.

Playing it munchkin-grind style is bad taste. There are other games of the genre that reward grind - try Space Rangers or Vangers.

But it's awful as a roguelike since it takes extremely long to get up and running and also because nothing actually changes between each playthrough (unless they finally made it so monsters don't always spawn in the same place)

Why should I pass money to a descendant when I can spend it on myself?
 

Grimwulf

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But it's awful as a roguelike since it takes extremely long to get up

Not as long as classic roguelikes, especially if you play your second, third, etc. captains.

and also because nothing actually changes between each playthrough

The layout of islands changes. You can explore other quest branches. Go for another ambition. Focus on another stat(s). Some quests have random endings, which are not even dependent on your stats or actions. Other events are so rare and random, you are very unlikely to see them during 1st playthrough.

Nobody forces you to read the same walls of texts over and over again - just skip them if you're feeling impatient. Better yet, give it a break. If my captain dies, I often drop the game for another month or two, and then come back to it eventually, downloading fresh stories and content.

Why should I pass money to a descendant when I can spend it on myself?

If you are in dire need of money, you can always sell the heirlooms you've made. The strange thing is, the longer you play - the stronger your wish to retire as current captain and start anew. Maybe your successor won't make the same mistakes...
 

orcinator

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The layout of islands changes. You can explore other quest branches. Go for another ambition. Focus on another stat(s). Some quests have random endings, which are not even dependent on your stats or actions.

There is barely any change though since a lot of them pretty much have set locations and the rest are always found in the same row (or general area). The quests have different endings, but not a lot of different everything else, given how the stories often involve going from port to port to do some fetch quest or require you to leave and come back once you made a certain amount of progress, that a lot of repetition. The ship being slow and the zee being devoid of anything interesting once you've been through it once doesn't help.

If you are in dire need of money, you can always sell the heirlooms you've made. The strange thing is, the longer you play - the stronger your wish to retire as current captain and start anew. Maybe your successor won't make the same mistakes...

But again, a new play-through is almost completely identical, once you're past the point where you're in financial trouble there's nothing* preventing you from just finishing all the ambitions up to the point of no return and backing up the save. I mean you'll miss on a few paragraphs that describe the alternate endings to certain quests but you'll also miss out on hours of grind so that's a worthy trade-off.


*well aside from the realization that the writing is nowhere near good enough to justify dealing with the boring gameplay, sure I can cheat to avoid some of the grind but there is nothing to the game besides shallow combat and fetch quests
 

Grimwulf

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There is barely any change though since a lot of them pretty much have set locations and the rest are always found in the same row (or general area)

There is a certain pattern, but it's far from definitions of "row" or "area". You get a feel for it with time.

The quests have different endings, but not a lot of different everything else

Actually, a whole bunch of quests are defined by how you start them. Pigmote Island, the Anarchists, patrons of Isle of Cats, and a whole lot more - no need for spoilers.

but not a lot of different everything else, given how the stories often involve going from port to port to do some fetch quest or require you to leave and come back once you made a certain amount of progress, that a lot of repetition.

Well, duh. The game is all about text quests. Most of them happen in ports/locations, and only some of the events occur randomly at the zee. If going from port to port is too repetetive for you, how come you even tried to play a game like this? Didn't you read the descriprtion?

The ship being slow and the zee being devoid of anything interesting once you've been through it once doesn't help.

Then drop it. I am dead serious.

But again, a new play-through is almost completely identical, once you're past the point where you're in financial trouble there's nothing* preventing you from just finishing all the ambitions up to the point of no return and backing up the save.

"Backing up the save"?:lol: You do realize that the game gives you the option to play with saves, right? Actually, if you played it save-scumming, it explains a lot. Except for one thing - why did you play it in the first place?

I mean you'll miss on a few paragraphs that describe the alternate endings to certain quests but you'll also miss out on hours of grind so that's a worthy tradeoff.
*well aside from the realization that even with cheats the writing is nowhere near good enough to justify dealing with all the fetch quests

You need a certain mindset to play this game. It's slow and requires patience. And if you don't appreciate the writing, then you'd better stop wasting your time playing and discussing this game.
 
Joined
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I've been curious about this for a while and picked it up for the free weekend. So far I'm enjoying it. I can definitely see how it might get pretty repetitive, but so far exploration is fun, and I'm a sucker for decent text adventure games. I'll probably give it a buy next time it's on sale and get a decent 10 hours or so out of it. Better than your average AAA release.
 

Fug

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Yeah, I'm not saying the game is bad at all, but the devs needed to make the combat better, since it's such a common occurrence in the game.
 

orcinator

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I dropped a long time ago.
You do realize that the game gives you the option to play with saves, right? Actually, if you played it save-scumming, it explains a lot. Except for one thing - why did you play it in the first place?

I actually forgot there was a mode with saving, and I never save scummed, but I should have.

It looked like a cool atmospheric boat game, and it was cool and atmospheric for the first few hours, then I explored most of the map and the atmosphere evaporated and all was left was the realization that the writing isn't the only thing that's similar to the p2w browser game it shares a setting with.

And if you don't appreciate the writing, then you'd better stop wasting your time playing and discussing this game.

I'm sorry I don't like there to be tons of tedious travel between each paragraph of a visual novel.
 

Fug

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The writing is pretty good, they did a good job with the Lovecraft aesthetic, the gameplay just needed to be much better. I would have even preferred turn based combat on a grid, or if you were allowed to command a fleet instead of a single boat. It would have added some depth to the game.
 

anus_pounder

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The devs need to stop teasing us and just release an expansion where we can start off with the farrrrrrrrrrrrrr more interesting Khanate than this new london nonsense.
 

hello friend

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I'm on an actual spaceship. No joke.
What they need to do is add more ships, more weapons, more engines etc and give you a reason to buy them instead of saving up from day 1 for merchant ship, best engine, best weapon, clay ppl, and all that. Increase all movement speeds by 50%.

The problem is most things aren't worth the money except things that cost a lot of it. So you're pretty much forced to grind to get top items with no moneysinks to occupy you along the way. And the world is not procedural enough to keep that interesting, once you know how to make those stacks every game looks exactly the same. You can tell that their development efforts go into the artwork and the dialogue - not surprising considering these are the Fallen London people - but a game that forces you to grind so much doesn't combine well with a heavy dialogue focus. Doesn't take long before you've seen most lines more than a few times, and pretty soon you're just clicking past it all.

Would help if a port/multiple ports had warehouses you could store wares in against payment, so your inheritors could skip some of the grind. The problem then becomes that there is not much else to do, so if you skip it you've skipped the game.

Tl;dr Game has potential, but needs A LOT more content to even begin to move in that direction.
 

Damned Registrations

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I get the feeling that the people hating on this game never really tried all the stuff it has to offer. Too repetitive? There's hours of different shit to do without ever repeating shit. Inheritors do get money you stash away. And you don't need some fucking doom ship. The game has like 8 different endings. The biggest problem it has imo is that it's too easy to almost see each ending before you actually finish one; which makes the replay value tank because then you will be repeating stuff if you try to see another ending. But between all those different ending routes and all the extra side areas besides, there was a ton of shit to do in that game, pretty much all of it profitable as long as you didn't completely gimp your build.
 
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Yeah the game's main problem was that sailing is dull as dirt and takes fucking forever. Everything else is actually pretty well done.

Honestly, now that I'm thinking about it the game would have been an amazing KoDP-lite/Academagia clone, but it ruined itself with its awful sailing.
 

WhiteGuts

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I understand the sailing was supposed to convey certain feelings and be part of the actual storytelling, but it's boring as fuck.
 

hello friend

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I'm on an actual spaceship. No joke.
The problem is that there aren't enough things happening during sailing. There is this atmosphere of mystery and foreboding, 'don't stray too far off the map, here be dragons' type of feel at first. But it never, ever delivers. Combat is boring, mostly unnecessary (at least pre-nomad farm), and with only a handful of enemy types. There are a few story events that can happen at sea, but there aren't many of them, and they aren't all that exciting. I was hoping to come across horrors out at sea, lovecraftian cosmic horror and gothic pulp horror, weird lights and mists and fish with ancient engraved clay balls in them and crew members seeing doppelgangers of themselves on the other side of the deck sabotaging the rigging for just a fraction of a second, monsters coming out of the depths, and strange keening songs in the dead of night, and the cook's hand is bandaged and what's this in the soup?

Ports are not what made me buy the game, but they are where the most dev attention went. What ports could use is some quality of life ui improvements.
 

Damned Registrations

Furry Weeaboo Nazi Nihilist
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The game actually had a fair number of those sorts of events, the problem is you'll never see them unless you're a total moron and sail around with your lights off for too long until everyone goes crazy. I'll agree the sailing was too uneventful, though I disagree that uncharted waters 2 was any better about it; those trading trips got real dull real fast. Finding new ports and discoveries was by far the best part, I'd love another game like that, except set in a fictional world so I didn't know the geography. Sunless Sea did that part pretty well, but the game lacked any major systems to revolve around like trading or fame or anything of the sort. Was basically just a bunch of isolated items and quests that didn't relate enough. The rewards for finishing sidequest lines were often underwhelming as well.
 

Lucky

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Apr 28, 2015
Messages
672
I backed this on kickstarter, so earlier I got the main game and now also the expansion, which I'm trying out now. It still feels like a game that does too much well to be bad, and too much badly to be good. The crux of it I think is that the fuel/supplies system limits exploration without creating interesting situations. Right now too much of the game revolves around getting enough funds to be able to safely ignore the hassle that is fuel management so that you can actually explore. It should probably have been scrapped as a necessary part of exploration and instead have been incorporated into a more in depth terror system. Have it and other items affect your terror gain and your options in terror challenges in various ways, rather than what makes it how far your ship can go, making exploration about first finding routes that you can safely manage with the resources available to you, while leaving open the option to go of course without it being immediately lethal if you find nothing of note and also provide interesting events as your crew is pushed beyond their normal terror limits.
This was their first game with this kind of gameplay though, so there's no reason yet to not think that they will improve on this with their next game.
 

Jasede

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Insert Title Here RPG Wokedex Codex Year of the Donut I'm very into cock and ball torture
I may give the expansion a shot, I did like the atmosphere quite a bit.

But unless they fixed the integral problems with the actual trading I am gonna regret it.
 

Lucky

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I may give the expansion a shot, I did like the atmosphere quite a bit.

But unless they fixed the integral problems with the actual trading I am gonna regret it.

Here's what I did: start a new game and manual save it, then exit the game to edit it and give yourself a fat 'inheritance', enough to buy a good boat and engine with a fortune to spare. Don't use it to immediately buy the best stuff you can, but instead take your time to explore a bit without the pressure of needing to earn enough money. Once you're comfortable get the merchant vessel (save the dreadnaught for later) and a fast engine, then start the zubmarine quest (it's fairly easy to complete and fun to play with). You should still have more than enough money now to sustain you as you explore and find profitable deals at your own pace.

I've played the main game legitimately as a roguelike and there's a certain satisfaction to be had to obtaining all that money yourselves, but it's just not worth it here to get to the parts of the game that are its actual strengths.
 

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