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KickStarter Sunless Skies: Sovereign Edition - new Fallen London game from Sunless Sea devs

orcinator

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It's getting out of early access in 6 hours, let's see how long I can play it without reaching for the cheats.


Edit: Steam says 13 hours (16 but I played the alpha for 3) but I left the game running while doing other stuff so who knows how long it really took but I'll say 10 hours is a good estimate I guess. Good thing too, just after bumping all my stats and raising my money to 999999 I had all my stats reduced by 1 thanks to a choice whose alternative would have probably just made me lose some crew.
Now I just need to figure out how to edit ship speed.
 
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Urthor

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Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire
The economy balancing of the first, let's just say it lent itself to sadism.

Perfect time of year to release it though, need a new game immediately
 
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Sunless Skies review - a rather more accessible literary space monstrosity

Victoria's secrets.

All the verbal artistry of Sunless Sea scattered across a gorgeous steampunk cosmos that's a little easier to navigate and thrive in.

After 45 hours in Sunless Skies, it's tempting to offer your own spin on Roy Batty's "I've seen things you wouldn't believe" speech from Blade Runner. The problem is that it's hard to know where to start, and even harder to know where to stop. A hybrid, like 2015's Sunless Sea, of top-down steampunk naval sim and choose-your-own-adventure storytelling, Skies takes you everywhere from an asteroid circus to the howling corona of a clockwork star. Blending the juicier nightmares of Victorian astronomers, bureaucrats and sailors with some rather less antiquated-feeling characters and concepts, it's a tour of the heavens in which every port is an oddity, twinkling or at least glistening in the firmament.

Pick random moments from my playthrough and you'll find my captain doing something very different each time, all of it brought to life with Failbetter's trademark mix of dread and whimsy. Here I am having sex with a demon signaller, for example. And then there was that time I visited a laughing orchard to resolve an academic dispute about the exact occupant of a celestial tomb. Here I am trading shots with a ghost of wood and parchment as I skim the lip of a black hole - oh, and of course, here I am devouring my own crew after running out of fuel on the way back from hell. The great joy of Failbetter's latest is once again the ghoulish inventiveness of the writing and setting, though it's helped along in Skies by more accessible world design, relatively generous earning mechanics and some truly decadent background art.

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A direct narrative sequel to Sunless Sea, the game's premise is that Queen Victoria has conquered the solar system, ensuring that Britain is, indeed, the empire on which the sun never sets by murdering the sun and replacing it with a mechanical one. She's also achieved immortality by somehow mining the raw stuff of temporality itself and selling it by the barrel - a wonderfully silly and brutal co-opting of the theory of relativity. In this universe, royal stipends are measured in hours, not coins, and time passes a lot slower inside factories than in palaces, the better to exact maximum blood and sweat from each labourer. Out in the solar system's recesses, meanwhile, upstart "Tackety" colonists battle London's representative the Windward Company while demons, the dead and other, even stranger entities go about their business.

The sight of the old star's bloody ember rolling beneath you is one of many grotesqueries you'll process as you trundle, once again, around a 2D plane in your trusty steamship, buying coal and food at ports while pursuing hundreds of branching stories and doing your best to keep your crew both alive and sane. Your captain has the same four core skills as in Sunless Sea - they correspond to perceptiveness, stealth, strength and charisma, though one of the game's beauties is that what each skill actually does is a little ambiguous - and most quests test one or more of those skills with a roll of the die. You might have to gamble with your Hearts skill to woo the servants at an aristocratic masque, for instance, or test your Mirrors to find the contraband in a bandit's hold.

The return of a successful formula aside, the broad similarities with Sunless Sea reflect how outer space has long been a literary cousin of the ocean, as scientists, engineers and sci-fi writers seek to express its immensities via the more familiar language of nautical miles, (solar) winds and constellations. In this case, outer space is also breathable, suffused with vegetation and thoroughly British, made up of references to particularly eccentric or blighted aspects of British culture, geography and history. The environment art rises to the challenge with aplomb. As with Sea, much of the thrill comes from the sight of your tiny vessel hurrying across a delicately layered vastness of painted backdrops, but the backdrops are far more detailed and animate, to the point that they almost upstage the writing. Almost.

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In the Reach, the game's starting region, you'll find golden Spenserian forests where pirate vessels dart about like pike, and warrens of fungus that seem to clench around your ship. In the aether over London, Dickensian "workworlds" open furnace maws in the sooty distance, while half-glassed wrecks bake in the hellish radiance of the Clockwork Sun. There are ports modelled on cosy Somerset villages, complete with cricket lawns and bunting, and a leafy hothouse patch that suggests the artists have spent many an idle hour in London's Kew Gardens. Each port and region has its collection of orchestral themes - mournful, upbeat, oppressive, reassuring - but the game's audio is often more powerful in the silent stretches, when the chug of your engine is your only comfort against encroaching shadows. The least welcoming of the game's regions is Eleutheria, a breathless midnight realm which combines Christian devilry with pagan ritual and a knowing touch of the Orient in the form of Victoria's great rival, the Khanate, basking in the glare of an electric moon.

Much of this you can glean from screenshots alone. What's less apparent is the change in underlying structure. Divided into four regions whose contents are shuffled around a bit each time you start over (there's the option, once again, of reloading your last save on death or beginning afresh with a new captain) Sunless Skies is much bigger than Sunless Sea, but it's also more digestible. Each region has a central port, which is the only place where you can buy new ships and - save for the odd bit of plating pilfered from a defeated captain - patch the holes in your hull. It's also where you'll sell off most of the stranger commodities from outlying ports, and take on Prospects: simple trading missions that give you more cash per keg of human souls or bolt of spectral fabric, with a commission on top to boot.

The Prospects obviously make it easier to enrich yourself, but more importantly, they also come with rough compass headings and thus, guide your hand as you peel back the fog of war. It's part of a broad clarification of the Sunless style. Skies is still a game that will happily destroy you if you're reckless - moreover, it's a game that is often more fun when you do screw up, and must deal with the effects of starvation or crew hysteria. But it's not as painful to master as Sea, and a trifle harder to get lost in. Commodities and the places where you can sell or make use of them are more conspicuously grouped, easier to memorise. There's also more opportunity to resupply en-route, each region being strewn with randomly generated lootable artefacts, from sad little clouds of locomotive wreckage to ancient libraries ripped from their moorings.

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The difficulty curve is steepest when entering a region for the first time, with safe havens easily missed as your scouts (including one-eyed owls and a guinea pig riding a bat) point you towards things you'd really rather steer clear of. But it levels out quite soon enough, as you fill in your skychart and identify the best routes - a course that takes you past a monument to The Unknown Rat, raising crew morale, or a slight detour in hopes of depriving some marauders of their latest catch. Managing your ship's hold is still the key challenge on longer trawls - fail to prepare for the worst (or best), and you might have to cast priceless finds like panes of stained glass out the hatch to create space for ship's biscuits. But there's now storage available from the get-go at each central port, with stored items retrievable at any other region hub.

The combat is cleaner this time round, too, closer in tempo to an arcade shooter. You no longer have to click enemies to target them, or wait for a firing solution. You can also now strafe, sliding around cannonfire on a jet of steam, providing you don't overheat your locomotive by firing too often. I wouldn't buy the game for its steamship duels, nonetheless, but where in Sunless Sea combat was at best a source of tension and at worst annoying, here it's actually enjoyable. The enemy AI is fond of bouncing off the scenery but will often test your mettle, and there's the odd exciting three-way when ravening skybeasts chase you into the arms of an enemy faction.

Above all, though, you'll still be playing Sunless Skies for its writing, which oscillates between fairytale, gothic horror and comedy of manners. The script is never short of a grisly implication or contemporary parallel: as with Terry Pratchett's novels, it excels at holding up a carnival mirror to various social or historical quagmires without giving you a lecture. But it's never short on absurdity, either. It revels in both the cruel grandiosity of empire and the little intimacies and stupidities that keep such an enormous machine in motion. Consider its obsession with tea - stewed, nectar-infused, fungal, hallucinogenic, diabolical, with milk or without, even vaguely sentient. Characters range from circus clowns to princesses, and there are many different gender identities and sexual orientations, but one thing everybody seems to share is the love of a good brew. The script is leggier than in previous games, closer to a collection of short stories than a mass of fragments, as Failbetter gravitates away from the sparer prose of 2009's Fallen London. In particular, the officers you can recruit to boost your stats - each embarked on a little odyssey of their own - are much more involved as characters. It's always a pleasure to sift through, as rich and sickly as a rotten tapestry, though I did occasionally miss the terseness of the developer's other titles.

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If that wit and imagination is why we play Sunless Skies, the game's gentler design is what makes it a worthwhile advance on Sunless Sea. It is at once a more florid artwork and a more considerately built one, with a few more toeholds for the wayward captain. There's still much to deter a newcomer, all the same. If you found Sea frustratingly oblique and demanding, and you struggle with the idea that every great story includes a few cataclysmic setbacks, the new game's nips and tucks may strike you as too little, too late. But if you adored Failbetter's previous work, you're drawn to tales of gruesome misadventure or you have a taste for outlandish portraits of imperial hubris, well - your cuppa runneth over.

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2019-01-29-sunless-skies-review
 

orcinator

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Eurogamer gave the first game a totally unbiased 10/10 so it's not surprising to see them fellate the sequel without offering any real criticisms.

"The enemy AI is fond of bouncing off the scenery but will often test your mettle, and there's the odd exciting three-way when ravening skybeasts chase you into the arms of an enemy faction."
Understatement of the century, every sky captain and sky beast is a horrible drunk, and while they can pose a threat, often they'll just decide to get stuck on a wall and let you pelt them with shells.
 
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Zakhad

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Forgot to add, on making money: port reports are now actually useful for this. And they get you favour that can earn you various other useful things (especially ministry-stamped documents or whatever they're called, I'm always running out of them). Do a cycle that touches four ports, get 400 gold, easily enough to pay for your fuel and repairs with some left over. I usually go with the Imperial side because :obviously:, but you can choose different sides to report to and it changes the balance of power.

Multi-headed Cow It's worth picking up all officers you meet since there's no cost once you have them and each allows you access to new stories. 100 gold is small potatoes after a while. And yeah, you really want more space... remember you can buy expansions to your cargo space that fit in the bridge slot or the speciality slots on your engine. lowest tier is pretty cheap.

Also I've come round a bit to the k-pop dude after a while, and the Driver's story was a bit better than I remembered. Any story where I get to threaten a fungus is alright by me.

Just shifted to the Agravain-class juggernaut. each ship seems to have separate hidden values in addition to weight/fuel efficiency, e.g. the juggernaut shifts sideways much further/faster than the freighter but this seems unrelated to weight, and the value isn't listed anywhere. Makes avoiding enemy shots much easier, but also means I sometimes crash by accident since I'm used to a much less responsive engine.
 
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I'm around 10 hours played now and I'm still in my newbie train (Though 2,500 groschen and it's 3,500 groschen for the trading-train, which I'm assuming I'll want) and still glacially slowly dicking around and I'm still enjoying it more than Sea for some reason. Having a hard time putting my finger on why exactly, since I theoretically enjoy Sea's theme more and after playing a good chunk of Skies it still seems fairly grindy, but for whatever reason I'm not getting as pissed at it. Maybe I'm just in the mood for something ridiculously slow like this at the moment. Don't know.

Got officers in all slots except quartermaster and I've got a few stories rolling. I need to get my ass to Albion to find a place called Perdurance since both the princess and the rats want to go there, but I've been dragging my heels since I'm not sure how big of a trek or how expensive that'll be. I got an invite to it already, I'll just need to go through the jump gate or whatever. Had a whole port up and vanish on me which was slightly alarming. I've also never once managed to take a settler to a location yet too, they all either die or get the heebie jeebies and want to sign on as crew. Still feel like I'm far off from my wealth victory condition but maybe things'll turn around massively when I get the trading train. Or reach Albion. In fact I wonder if I load up on hours before I go to Albion if I can make a fortune.
 

orcinator

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Got pretty far in the game now that I learned how easy it is to setup hotkeys for cheat engine.

Quick review: It's shit as a video game
Less quick review: It improves on a lot of stuff from Sunless Sea and is less grindy overall but the majority of your time will still be spent moving through empty space as you do yet another fetch quest and thus the game should not be played without cheats.
Shit you can't even get all your stats to an acceptable level this time since you need 75pts to equip the good ship parts and not fail tests all the time but with the level cap and officer bonuses you get less than 200pts total.
 
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Zakhad

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cheat engine.

447.jpg
Quick review: It's shit as a video game
Less quick review: It improves on a lot of stuff from Sunless Sea and is less grindy overall but the majority of your time will still be spent moving through empty space as you do yet another fetch quest and thus the game should not be played without cheats.

Well, I disagree, I like the pace and enjoy the game. But I guess it comes down to taste. However...

Shit you can't even get all your stats to an acceptable level this time since you need 75pts to equip the good ship parts and not fail tests all the time but with the level cap and officer bonuses you get less than 200pts total.

This is just wrong. Maximum possible stat pool is 257 without any bonuses from events or well-rites, just the 40 base stats, 22 from starting career, 8 from each facet (times 19), and 10 from each upgraded officer (and 3 from best mascot).

And loads of good stuff can be installed at 50 (or even 25 for some of the unique stuff).

But even if it were 200... is the codex really getting its panties in a twist because a game doesn't let you do everything possible in one playthrough? I'm confused. Wasn't this one of the things we all hated about Fallout 3/4, the fact that every character could do everything?
 
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Shadorwun: Hong Kong
Slow and tedious journeys do tend to impact one's interest of partaking in them again. Quelle surprise. There's no point in a character having specialties if 90% of their journey is doing the exact same thing as every other character. Sunless Sea was thematic, but had absolutely no concept for tying game-play and narrative together beyond, 'Journey to read this', 'Level to read this', 'Trade to read this'. Maybe they should have taken cues from FTL.

Once first impressions wore off, Sea really had nothing to offer but pretension. It may as well have been made by inXile, but I wouldn't insult Sunless Sea by saying it's anywhere near as bad as Tides. Which is praise enough for any ex-Bioware developers.

Skies looks like more of the same. Yay. Good for the 1 in 100 people that remembered anything about Sea.
 

thesheeep

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tl;dr:
Played it a couple hours so far.
As expected, I ate my crew.
9/10 (-1 because the crew tasted bad).


Seriously, though, Sunless Skies improves upon Sunless Sea in pretty much every aspect. Less grind, you can get much further with fewer fuel/resources.
The writing is as interesting as it was in Sunless Sea, really not much to improve here. I just notice myself constantly smiling at the oddness of it all, from the art to the descriptions.
I also have the impression (so far) that it is way more clear this time around where you need to get certain items from in order to proceed at place X.

The biggest downside is without a doubt the combat AI. Enemies are borderline braindead and basically become cannon fodder once they run into a wall.
Abusing that, you can easily kite & kill enemies clearly meant for later in the game for great profit. You'll have more fun if you resist the urge.
I only died once so far and that was when I ran into the marauder hive with 30% of my hull left. Wasn't able to get four engines at once stuck in a wall :lol:

Slow and tedious journeys do tend to impact one's interest of partaking in them again. Quelle surprise. There's no point in a character having specialties if 90% of their journey is doing the exact same thing as every other character. Sunless Sea was thematic, but had absolutely no concept for tying game-play and narrative together beyond, 'Journey to read this', 'Level to read this', 'Trade to read this'. Maybe they should have taken cues from FTL.

Once first impressions wore off, Sea really had nothing to offer but pretension. It may as well have been made by inXile, but I wouldn't insult Sunless Sea by saying it's anywhere near as bad as Tides. Which is praise enough for any ex-Bioware developers.

Skies looks like more of the same. Yay. Good for the 1 in 100 people that remembered anything about Sea.
You obviously didn't get the first game. That's fine, those games are clearly not for everyone.
But then you expected the second game to be different? Joke's on you.

Honestly, if you expect the game to be anything else than reading buttloads of text (in a style you either dig or not), basically playing a text adventure with some mild arcadey gameplay in-between, while looking at some great (and the rare not-so-great) art, don't play it.
If you are one of the people that just click through the text as quick as possible to "get to the gameplay", then you did not understand that the text is the gameplay and the game is not for you.
 
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orcinator

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Well, I disagree, I like the pace
You gotta get back to port because you're clearly insane if you like the pacing of a game that's 20% somewhat interesting but mechanically dull exploration and 80% traveling through empty skies as you do fetch quests(the only type of quest in this game, aside from the rng skill checks and like 3 quests where you go kill a certain monster then fetch a piece of it).

But even if it were 200... is the codex really getting its panties in a twist because a game doesn't let you do everything possible in one playthrough? I'm confused. Wasn't this one of the things we all hated about Fallout 3/4, the fact that every character could do everything?
Whoops forgot to add the starting stats. Anyways as someone already said, there's little value to supporting specialization if the game stays the same in each playthrough. This is doubly true in skies where you can and often must pass most checks with weaker stats, you just have to grind even more to replace the wasted items and remove the extra terror. Most max tier modules aren't anything special except a few relating to hearts and mirrors so there's no real choice when deciding which stats to focus on anyway.

basically playing a text adventure with some mild arcadey gameplay in-between, while looking at some great (and the rare not-so-great) art, don't play it.
If that was an accurate description the game would potentially be passable, but you seem to forget how most of your playtime involves staring at your vessel as it slowly moves from port to port.
 
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thesheeep

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basically playing a text adventure with some mild arcadey gameplay in-between, while looking at some great (and the rare not-so-great) art, don't play it.
If that was an accurate description the game would potentially be passable, but you seem to forget how most of your playtime involves staring at your vessel as it slowly moves from port to port.
I spend about 60-70% of my time in the text adventure zone.
Maybe you should actually take in the text and not just skip over it to "get to the rest of the game" as fast as possible.

I take my time with the texts - and with the rest of the game - and it works just fine like that. I'm not in a hurry.
Don't blame the game if you very clearly are not the target audience. And you ARE very clearly not the target audience if you just skip over the texts and have to use cheat engine or whatever to make the game bearable for you.
So many games out there, play something else.
 

orcinator

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I spend about 60-70% of my time in the text adventure zone.
Either you can't do math or you can't read. Or both.

Don't blame the game if you very clearly are not the target audience. And you ARE very clearly not the target audience if you just skip over the texts and have to use cheat engine or whatever to make the game bearable for you.
I like the writing and atmosphere but I don't like gameplay that's less interesting than watching paint dry.
 

thesheeep

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Don't blame the game if you very clearly are not the target audience. And you ARE very clearly not the target audience if you just skip over the texts and have to use cheat engine or whatever to make the game bearable for you.
I like the writing and atmosphere but I don't like gameplay that's less interesting than watching paint dry.
Q.E.D.

Don't get me wrong. It happens that you like parts of a game, but not other parts. If those other parts make up a large portion of the game, that just means it's not for you.
But if most other people like those other parts (and judging from the scores, they do), it makes little sense to blame the game or devs for anything.
Though the slowness of travel is certainly the most brought up complaint. Personally I don't mind it, I find it relaxing.
I do wonder a bit why they don't just let you adjust some kind of base locomotive speed before you start a new game. Apply it to all things moving through space, done.
Oh, well...

If you like the writing and atmosphere so much, what about their browser game? Afaik, that consists only of the writing (and some art? Honestly don't know.).
 
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orcinator

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Don't get me wrong. It happens that you like parts of a game, but not other parts. If those other parts make up a large portion of the game, that just means it's not for you.
But if most other people like those other parts (and judging from the scores, they do), it makes little sense to blame the game or devs for anything.

Ah, the last fallback of people who like or tolerate garbage. The Desert Bus 3: Space Train gameplay is shit no matter how many people give the game high scores.

If you like the writing and atmosphere so much, what about their browser game? Afaik, that consists only of the writing (and some art? Honestly don't know.).
It perfectly explains the devs desire to waste the player's time since that "game" had you wait for days or even longer before you could read a new paragraph of writing.
 

thesheeep

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Don't get me wrong. It happens that you like parts of a game, but not other parts. If those other parts make up a large portion of the game, that just means it's not for you.
But if most other people like those other parts (and judging from the scores, they do), it makes little sense to blame the game or devs for anything.

Ah, the last fallback of people who like or tolerate garbage. The Desert Bus 3: Space Train gameplay is shit no matter how many people give the game high scores.
If you do not enjoy something, that doesn't make it bad. You bring no objective reasons here, only that it is too slow for you. That you would have preferred a different style of gameplay. That you feel your time is wasted. Just like you cannot tell people that they have a wrong favourite color if they like a different one than you do, you cannot say something is shit simply because of your personal preferences.
You are not some kind of gold standard.
It is very sad that you are not capable of seeing behind your own bias here and really seem to believe that your opinion is some kind of fact. And it brings your position down to that of some brat crying for more candy, you are not argumenting, you are just raging.

The truth here is rather simple:
giphy.gif


For the most part, Sunless Skies achieves what it sets out to do. That makes it an objectively good (but not perfect) game. A game that achieves what it sets out to do can generally be found out by looking at its ratings (NOT from major magazines, but from actual players).
It never set out to do what you would have preferred it to do, at least nothing I ever read suggested they were going for fast paced, action loaded, very challenging gameplay with little to no downtime. Sucks for you, obviously, but doesn't make the game bad.

If you like the writing and atmosphere so much, what about their browser game? Afaik, that consists only of the writing (and some art? Honestly don't know.).
It perfectly explains the devs desire to waste the player's time since that "game" had you wait for days or even longer before you could read a new paragraph of writing.
Ouch. I had no idea about that, just knew that it existed.
 
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MRY

Wormwood Studios
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Seriously, though, Sunless Skies improves upon Sunless Sea in pretty much every aspect.
So is it another piece of evidence of the Vault Dweller effect that, despite improving in every way, the sequel's Steamcharts peak number (2285) are <60% of the first game's (3869) during launch month? (I guess maybe the peak could get higher later in the month.) User ratings are a bit lower, too.
 

Zakhad

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Seriously, though, Sunless Skies improves upon Sunless Sea in pretty much every aspect.
So is it another piece of evidence of the Vault Dweller effect that, despite improving in every way, the sequel's Steamcharts peak number (2285) are <60% of the first game's (3869) during launch month? (I guess maybe the peak could get higher later in the month.) User ratings are a bit lower, too.

Sequels just tend to do worse than originals. People have much higher demands and are more easily disappointed... and you can now disappoint people in two ways, either by not being enough like the original or being too much like the original.

They already had problems during production, had to scale it back and let go of some staff due to pre-sales being much lower than SSea. I'm glad it's as high as 60% tbh.
 

MRY

Wormwood Studios
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Yeah, that's the VD effect I'm talking about -- it's a point he often made (one I hadn't appreciated till he pointed it out; I'm slower than the average bear).
 

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