Are you sure you are playing it right?
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KickStarter Sunless Skies: Sovereign Edition - new Fallen London game from Sunless Sea devs
- Thread starter Rahdulan
- Start date
Are you sure you are playing it right?
Cromwell
Arcane
- Joined
- Feb 16, 2013
- Messages
- 5,443
given the paymentmodel in fallen london thats to be expected, the mistake they made was to forget that for sunless everything the players actually already paid for it and you dont have to bind them in this way.
I don't really understand why to play in FL when you have the Sunless series with the actual gameplay going on.
To read delicious stories.
FL is a browser game, you are not supposed to sit for an hour straight or more playing it. Check it in the morning, during lunch, and before going to sleep. That's more than enough.
It is sad that devs have discarded the mobile version of FL. I've somehow managed to make browser version work on my Android, but I can't leave location this way and need to change it via browser on PC. Tiresome.
orcinator
Liturgist
Good meme, but once you get past the early game you end up experiencing one new paragraph of writing every couple days.
Lithium Flower
Arcane
- Joined
- Nov 29, 2016
- Messages
- 1,832
oh boy here i go sperging again
I felt like making a preliminary post about this game's writing as it compares to Sunless Sea, because it appears that the general consensus is that there are no differences to speak of, which put me off from playing this game for a very long time. Fortunately for me as someone who could barely stand SSea's plotnarrativelore, I find the writing in the two games to be night and day.
Many express that they have suffered through SSea's gameplay loop our of their enjoyment of its stories. Others have found problems with the writing, purple prose and "pretentiousness" being commonly cited. My problem with it, however, was the way it presented information - or to be more accurate, how it didn't. And I say this as someone whose tolerance for ambiguity in storytelling is quite high, as evidenced by my enjoyment of Dark Souls and Second Apocalypses and Gene Wolfes and what have you.
My problems with SSea's writing can be found in the very first piece of information the game gives us about its background: "Three decades ago, in the reign of Victoria, London was stolen by bats." A new player might find this to be a curious if whimsical implication. A veteran player may be frustrated that this plot hook is never expanded on in game. But someone who happens to have knowledge of Fallen London's dank lore will know that this statement is a fucking lie. Sure technically bats stole London but that doesn't actually tell you any useful information - in reality this deed was arranged by the Masters of the Bazaar, the strange and powerful beings that now pull the strings in London (I am not a Fallen London player but I am pretty sure this isn't even uncommon information for a Londoner to have considering that the Echo Bazaar is an established fact of life). By writing about bats the game's writers aren't being vague or clever, they are deliberately misdirecting the players who might very well be set up to think there might be an important faction of demonic bats somewhere and are more or less lead to disappointment and confusion as nothing like that materializes.
Petty to nitpick the very first sentence of the game, right? Except in my experience it feels like the vast majority of the game is written this way. It is as if the writers are deliberately writing around the subject at every turn, almost as if they are afraid to ever give the player any concrete information. Implications are all fine and good but in my mind they should have some sort of solid context to be made sense of. The fact that nearly the entire game is this vague arrangement of half-truths and could-be's I found to be extremely tiring and disappointing - especially when you finally grind your way to some big revelation and it is treated in the exact same way.
There were ports that stood out to me as being more coherent, but this created another issue - ironically enough, the presence of said ports made the experience as a whole incoherent. The ports are written by very different writers employing very different styles and the result is a very eclectic experience, as if if the primary writer's method of storytelling by grapeshot wasn't scattered enough already.
So I have only played a few hours of SSkies to get a taste before the Sovereign Edition's release but I found its writing to be far, far more to my liking. Much like SSea the game does not give you a lot of information, but what information it gives is clear, concrete, and serves as a great foundation to contextualize future revelations. You learn that the Blue Kingdom is a hostile region ruled by the dead that your captain barely escaped from after stealing a mysterious box which she tasks you with delivering to London, and you learn that you have escaped to London's frontier region called the Reach which is experiencing a logical conflict between its independent settlers and London-backed company men. This information suggests both long and short term goals and opportunities (deliver the box vs stay in the reach and meddle in the faction war) while generating intrigue by prompting questions like: what did the Captain steal from the Blue Kingdom? WHAT'S IN THE BAWKS? What are London's plans for the Reach? Should I do as I am told and stay out of trouble or should I poke my nose in these matters?
In the same span of time, SSea threw about twice as many concepts at you but gave you about half the information on each of them. You were told that London is underground for some reason, that there is a place called the Tomb Colonies where the undead immigrate to for some reason, that there is a some place somewhere called the Khanate that is maybe hostile to London for some reason, there was like a war in hell but it is not relevant really and there is no information about it but there might plausibly be some implied tension between hell and the london authorities and the echo bazaar people but you are not really given any indication as to why or how and oh christ what the fuck is even the point
And just to confirm that I wasn't crazy or simply misremembering SSea's writing style, I checked the listed writers of both games. Ssea was written by 7 people, while SSkies was written by 4 (hopefully the latter translates into a more coherent stories from port to port!) and the two games have a single writer in common. Ssea's lead writer, the infamous Alexis Kennedy, is notably absent from Sskies. Another likely reason for a change in writing is the transition to a different setting - since SSea overlapped with Fallen London perhaps the authors felt like they didn't need to do as much worldbuilding since much of it was covered by FL, but SSkies' High Wilderness is largely new territory that demanded the player to be better informed.
In conclusion, while I want to eventually make another post after playing more of SSkies, so far I have found its writing to be far more enjoyable and intriguing compared to SSea's writing which I largely found to be obtuse and frustrating - and as a result I am very surprised that more people didn't note the difference in writing style between the two games, so as to reassure those who, like I, wanted to like Ssea's writing but found it impossible to do so.
Yes I'm well aware that no one cares.
I felt like making a preliminary post about this game's writing as it compares to Sunless Sea, because it appears that the general consensus is that there are no differences to speak of, which put me off from playing this game for a very long time. Fortunately for me as someone who could barely stand SSea's plotnarrativelore, I find the writing in the two games to be night and day.
Many express that they have suffered through SSea's gameplay loop our of their enjoyment of its stories. Others have found problems with the writing, purple prose and "pretentiousness" being commonly cited. My problem with it, however, was the way it presented information - or to be more accurate, how it didn't. And I say this as someone whose tolerance for ambiguity in storytelling is quite high, as evidenced by my enjoyment of Dark Souls and Second Apocalypses and Gene Wolfes and what have you.
My problems with SSea's writing can be found in the very first piece of information the game gives us about its background: "Three decades ago, in the reign of Victoria, London was stolen by bats." A new player might find this to be a curious if whimsical implication. A veteran player may be frustrated that this plot hook is never expanded on in game. But someone who happens to have knowledge of Fallen London's dank lore will know that this statement is a fucking lie. Sure technically bats stole London but that doesn't actually tell you any useful information - in reality this deed was arranged by the Masters of the Bazaar, the strange and powerful beings that now pull the strings in London (I am not a Fallen London player but I am pretty sure this isn't even uncommon information for a Londoner to have considering that the Echo Bazaar is an established fact of life). By writing about bats the game's writers aren't being vague or clever, they are deliberately misdirecting the players who might very well be set up to think there might be an important faction of demonic bats somewhere and are more or less lead to disappointment and confusion as nothing like that materializes.
Petty to nitpick the very first sentence of the game, right? Except in my experience it feels like the vast majority of the game is written this way. It is as if the writers are deliberately writing around the subject at every turn, almost as if they are afraid to ever give the player any concrete information. Implications are all fine and good but in my mind they should have some sort of solid context to be made sense of. The fact that nearly the entire game is this vague arrangement of half-truths and could-be's I found to be extremely tiring and disappointing - especially when you finally grind your way to some big revelation and it is treated in the exact same way.
There were ports that stood out to me as being more coherent, but this created another issue - ironically enough, the presence of said ports made the experience as a whole incoherent. The ports are written by very different writers employing very different styles and the result is a very eclectic experience, as if if the primary writer's method of storytelling by grapeshot wasn't scattered enough already.
So I have only played a few hours of SSkies to get a taste before the Sovereign Edition's release but I found its writing to be far, far more to my liking. Much like SSea the game does not give you a lot of information, but what information it gives is clear, concrete, and serves as a great foundation to contextualize future revelations. You learn that the Blue Kingdom is a hostile region ruled by the dead that your captain barely escaped from after stealing a mysterious box which she tasks you with delivering to London, and you learn that you have escaped to London's frontier region called the Reach which is experiencing a logical conflict between its independent settlers and London-backed company men. This information suggests both long and short term goals and opportunities (deliver the box vs stay in the reach and meddle in the faction war) while generating intrigue by prompting questions like: what did the Captain steal from the Blue Kingdom? WHAT'S IN THE BAWKS? What are London's plans for the Reach? Should I do as I am told and stay out of trouble or should I poke my nose in these matters?
In the same span of time, SSea threw about twice as many concepts at you but gave you about half the information on each of them. You were told that London is underground for some reason, that there is a place called the Tomb Colonies where the undead immigrate to for some reason, that there is a some place somewhere called the Khanate that is maybe hostile to London for some reason, there was like a war in hell but it is not relevant really and there is no information about it but there might plausibly be some implied tension between hell and the london authorities and the echo bazaar people but you are not really given any indication as to why or how and oh christ what the fuck is even the point
And just to confirm that I wasn't crazy or simply misremembering SSea's writing style, I checked the listed writers of both games. Ssea was written by 7 people, while SSkies was written by 4 (hopefully the latter translates into a more coherent stories from port to port!) and the two games have a single writer in common. Ssea's lead writer, the infamous Alexis Kennedy, is notably absent from Sskies. Another likely reason for a change in writing is the transition to a different setting - since SSea overlapped with Fallen London perhaps the authors felt like they didn't need to do as much worldbuilding since much of it was covered by FL, but SSkies' High Wilderness is largely new territory that demanded the player to be better informed.
In conclusion, while I want to eventually make another post after playing more of SSkies, so far I have found its writing to be far more enjoyable and intriguing compared to SSea's writing which I largely found to be obtuse and frustrating - and as a result I am very surprised that more people didn't note the difference in writing style between the two games, so as to reassure those who, like I, wanted to like Ssea's writing but found it impossible to do so.
Yes I'm well aware that no one cares.
Tl;dr he doesn't like autentical High writing of setting creator, but the imitators from Failbetter are okay to his American taste.
Longes
Augur
- Joined
- Jan 13, 2013
- Messages
- 395
Masters of the Bazaar are giant space bats. You can meet and shoot some of their kind in Sunless Skies. The ones who didn't make a deal with the Bazaar are decidedly unimpressive.
Longes
Augur
- Joined
- Jan 13, 2013
- Messages
- 395
I'd say technically two, via
Lithium Flower
Arcane
- Joined
- Nov 29, 2016
- Messages
- 1,832
Yes and if someone shoots you in the head, they didn't kill you nor their gun. You were killed by the laws of physics.
Lithium Flower
Arcane
- Joined
- Nov 29, 2016
- Messages
- 1,832
Okay, let me elaborate.
The Masters of the Bazaar being bats does not make the game's setup any less misleading because that is quite probably the least important thing about them and might prompt the reader to think of real world bats (or indeed the bats of the underzee that also have esoteric attributes associated with them) when they should be thinking eldritch Powers That Be. In fact, I am not even sure if their semblance of bats is even common knowledge to Londoners, seeing as how they are cloaked, but the Echo Bazaar's influence should be obvious and apparent! (Feel free to correct me if I am wrong here).
Again, if this was the only instance of this happening that would be fine, but to my mind most of the game is spent talking in vague details about the implications of something and rarely if ever getting concrete information. I wish I could provide more specific examples of this happening but the fact that I cannot aids my point as I have played this narrative-driven game for 49 hours not too many years ago and barely remember any of it. A few stories stand out as having engaged me - for example, speaking to the God-like creature in Port Cecil only to find out that all a being of such power wants is to degenerate and deciding whether or not to aid or interfere with its efforts to do so - now that's fantastical, unexpected, and bearing interesting philosophical implications. It is also for the most part clearly stated and self-contained to that location. The game does eventually give you other revelations and answers enough questions to answer some others, like the Traveling East ambition that nicely frames and concludes the game (that I wiki'd, because fuck actually doing all that shit lul). The problem is that getting even the hint of substantive information (which is usually the bats-stealing-London type of vague and dubious) requires advancing the storylines of individual islands with far more substantive time investment. The result is that you are encouraged by the game design to explore the world as widely and as shallowly as possible (because advancing a storyline in a single island costs resources while visiting as many islands as possible is one of the most accessible ways to get resources via port reports etc), therefore being hosed down with orphaned implication, and, in my case, that meant I could never actually internalize any of the say-what and whats-that I was drenched with.
Imagine a stranger comes up to you in the street and tells you "Wibbly bobbilly strobbily throbilly. Remember this." You will likely forget because you don't know who or what or where or why wibbly, bobbilly, strobbily, or indeed throbilly are. A few hours later you are approached by another stranger who tells you "Wibbly cares for throbilly's rabbits," (by which he means that throbilly rapes rabbits to death and wibbly prepares them for consumption afterwards but, you know, that's just the way the stranger chose to phrase himself.) You will be unlikely to relate the first sentence to the second when, without context or understanding, you are probably won't retain the information - 4 names that might as well be random words - from the first message. This is how much of the game feels to me - you travel far and wide, visit many places, and each contain cryptic, mostly disconnected mentions of Something or Other and require at times hours to learn additional information so that retaining anything is all but impossible. Perhaps I am mentally deficient due to my genes being excessively Slavic, but as a result my reaction to the majority of the stories in the game was a resounding "Huh. Ok I guess. I wonder if that will come up again" (the answer to which being not rarely "Nope" or rather "Play our fucking browser game, you stupid bitch.") And that's another reason why I'm excited that Sunless Skies is going with 4 smaller regions as opposed to 1 large one - I hope that will focus things somewhat so information is easier to retain.
None of this is the Truth of Truths, of course, simply my guess as to why this game failed to captivate me as someone who, again, enjoys dumb stuff like Pathologic and Blue Oyster Cult lyrics and long walks on the beach.
The Masters of the Bazaar being bats does not make the game's setup any less misleading because that is quite probably the least important thing about them and might prompt the reader to think of real world bats (or indeed the bats of the underzee that also have esoteric attributes associated with them) when they should be thinking eldritch Powers That Be. In fact, I am not even sure if their semblance of bats is even common knowledge to Londoners, seeing as how they are cloaked, but the Echo Bazaar's influence should be obvious and apparent! (Feel free to correct me if I am wrong here).
Again, if this was the only instance of this happening that would be fine, but to my mind most of the game is spent talking in vague details about the implications of something and rarely if ever getting concrete information. I wish I could provide more specific examples of this happening but the fact that I cannot aids my point as I have played this narrative-driven game for 49 hours not too many years ago and barely remember any of it. A few stories stand out as having engaged me - for example, speaking to the God-like creature in Port Cecil only to find out that all a being of such power wants is to degenerate and deciding whether or not to aid or interfere with its efforts to do so - now that's fantastical, unexpected, and bearing interesting philosophical implications. It is also for the most part clearly stated and self-contained to that location. The game does eventually give you other revelations and answers enough questions to answer some others, like the Traveling East ambition that nicely frames and concludes the game (that I wiki'd, because fuck actually doing all that shit lul). The problem is that getting even the hint of substantive information (which is usually the bats-stealing-London type of vague and dubious) requires advancing the storylines of individual islands with far more substantive time investment. The result is that you are encouraged by the game design to explore the world as widely and as shallowly as possible (because advancing a storyline in a single island costs resources while visiting as many islands as possible is one of the most accessible ways to get resources via port reports etc), therefore being hosed down with orphaned implication, and, in my case, that meant I could never actually internalize any of the say-what and whats-that I was drenched with.
Imagine a stranger comes up to you in the street and tells you "Wibbly bobbilly strobbily throbilly. Remember this." You will likely forget because you don't know who or what or where or why wibbly, bobbilly, strobbily, or indeed throbilly are. A few hours later you are approached by another stranger who tells you "Wibbly cares for throbilly's rabbits," (by which he means that throbilly rapes rabbits to death and wibbly prepares them for consumption afterwards but, you know, that's just the way the stranger chose to phrase himself.) You will be unlikely to relate the first sentence to the second when, without context or understanding, you are probably won't retain the information - 4 names that might as well be random words - from the first message. This is how much of the game feels to me - you travel far and wide, visit many places, and each contain cryptic, mostly disconnected mentions of Something or Other and require at times hours to learn additional information so that retaining anything is all but impossible. Perhaps I am mentally deficient due to my genes being excessively Slavic, but as a result my reaction to the majority of the stories in the game was a resounding "Huh. Ok I guess. I wonder if that will come up again" (the answer to which being not rarely "Nope" or rather "Play our fucking browser game, you stupid bitch.") And that's another reason why I'm excited that Sunless Skies is going with 4 smaller regions as opposed to 1 large one - I hope that will focus things somewhat so information is easier to retain.
None of this is the Truth of Truths, of course, simply my guess as to why this game failed to captivate me as someone who, again, enjoys dumb stuff like Pathologic and Blue Oyster Cult lyrics and long walks on the beach.
I would say it is worth it at full price.
Have you ever heard of marketing? This shit needs simplification. Read the last several pages of Strangeland thread to see how painful it is.
Lithium Flower
Arcane
- Joined
- Nov 29, 2016
- Messages
- 1,832
My point isn't that I am expecting Sunless Sea to drop the entire dank lore of Fallen London in its first opening paragraph. My point is that, for me personally, fragmented misleading information is far, far worse than no information at all.
Let's rewrite the first sentence of the game based on what I assume its narrative goals are. I've intuited that the writers are trying to establish London's fall as a fact that is 1. poorly understood 2. well accepted 3. conveys the game's atmosphere of whimsical and grotesque and mysterious 4. restrained to a single sentence 5. not actually substantiated in Sunless Sea but rather in Fallen London therefore the player should just nod and move along.
So rather than "Three decades ago, in the reign of Victoria, London was stolen by bats," which is both inaccurate in every sense but the technical and prompts the player to ask questions that will never get answered - which, in a narrative-driven game, one might consider a flaw. In some sense, its some sort of anti-information that actually makes things less clear with its knowledge.
Consider instead "Three decades ago, in the reign of Victoria, London fell to the sunless Neath, and Her Majesty's subjects carried on" or something. You could add or remove or restructure this and write something much better than I have but that's one way you could convey all five of the above things without misleading your players.
OK, I get it. Stop posting please.
Lithium Flower
Arcane
- Joined
- Nov 29, 2016
- Messages
- 1,832
you are like that guy who hanged around my aunt's stalinka and would ask passerbys for a light and when they went for their lighter he'd pull out a switchblade and after he'd fumble it and cut his fingers by accident he'd go all like "aaaaah tovarisch it was just prank suka blyat"
Fascinating story.
It was always a mystery to me, why this game periodically demonstrates sudden FPS drops from 60 to 20 or so while moving through map, regardless of the system it is played on.
Bad layering probably? Too much invisible objects overlapped.
Bad layering probably? Too much invisible objects overlapped.
Lithium Flower
Arcane
- Joined
- Nov 29, 2016
- Messages
- 1,832
Sovereign edition got delayed btw
https://www.failbettergames.com/when-is-the-release-date-for-sovereign/
:^(((((((((((((((((((((
https://www.failbettergames.com/when-is-the-release-date-for-sovereign/
:^(((((((((((((((((((((
Wait, so it was a beta-test all along???
I guess I'm fucked
Ship Locomotive almost crushed by some script monster just upon arrival to Eleutheria from the Reach after completing the gate construction.
No food, high nightmares & terror, almost no fuel, no money to pay for the way back, autosave here and now
Goodbye captain Joshua, we spend nice 60 hours together!
No food, high nightmares & terror, almost no fuel, no money to pay for the way back, autosave here and now
Goodbye captain Joshua, we spend nice 60 hours together!
Infinitron
>New Fallen London Game
>from the creators of Sunless Sea
>romantic visual novel
>prequel
>no Alexis Kennedy
Lithium Flower
Arcane
- Joined
- Nov 29, 2016
- Messages
- 1,832
still no sunless skies sovereign edition btw
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