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

[oscar]

Also people will be more reluctant to buy sequels in the RPG genre if they haven't played the first game since there's storyline continuity.

 

[orcinator]

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.

"but everything is subjective" is another fallback of those with no standards.

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.

RPG Codex Review: Desert Bus (1995) by thesheep
"It set out to be shit and that's what it did. 10/10"

Not to mention you can see Sunless Skies failed at many things it supposedly set out to do just by reading the steam description.

 

[thesheeep]

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.

"but everything is subjective" is another fallback of those with no standards.

I agree.
Thankfully, I never said that.
The stuff you complain about is for the most part subjective, however.
You have brought not a single argument that doesn't boil down to "I don't like this". Which, again, is fine. Assuming opinion (and personal standards are 100% opinion) as fact is less fine, it is instead rather childish. Reminds me of people not eating a specific thing because "it tastes bad".

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.

Not to mention you can see Sunless Skies failed at many things it supposedly set out to do just by reading the steam description.

Ignoring for a moment that that is just marketing blurb and should be taken with a grain of salt anyway, I actually read it again and - nope, you are just spouting lies here. There isn't a single part of its Steam description that is false.
The only thing I found funny is that this is now seemingly a feature to list:

• Key remapping and full controller support

Obviously, that's not a given any more?

 

[thesheeep]

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).

I don't really think that effect can really be attributed to him, though. As in, he's not the one that discovered it.
I always considered it a universal rule that finds its confirmation in the very rare exceptions.

For Sunless Sea/Skies... the series is just an extremely unique thing. Absolutely niche. For most, playing one game that is like it is probably enough and doesn't really leave the desire to play more like it.
And Sunless Skies is exactly like it (just improved in many areas) - I can see how people who liked the first game, but didn't really feel the "need" for more wouldn't want to try out the second game.

People like me, who played the first and found it SO good (or rather so promising) that they couldn't wait for more, are probably an exception.

 

[orcinator]

You have brought not a single argument that doesn't boil down to "I don't like this".

Is it so hard to understand that having the majority of your time spent waiting for your train to reach the next port is not good gameplay?

Ignoring for a moment that that is just marketing blurb and should be taken with a grain of salt anyway, I actually read it again and - nope, you are just spouting lies here. There isn't a single part of its Steam description that is false.

Literally the first sentence:
"Sunless Skies is a Gothic Horror roleplay game with a focus on exploration and exquisite storytelling."
How does something have a focus on exploration and storytelling when most of your time is spent playing delivery man?
(assuming someone who can read at a rate of more than 1 paragraph per minute is playing the game)

 

[thesheeep]

You have brought not a single argument that doesn't boil down to "I don't like this".

Is it so hard to understand that having the majority of your time spent waiting for your train to reach the next port is not good gameplay?

I fully understand that that is gameplay someone wouldn't like. I fully understand why you don't like it.
What you should understand is that this form of slower gameplay is exactly what some might like about the game. Or at the least doesn't bother them as much as it seems to bother you. When I travel in the game, I'm not annoyed, I'm not just "waiting for it to be over". I just take in the music, the effects, the art, the descriptions that pop up. As I said already, I find it relaxing. It wouldn't suit every game, obviously, but it suits this one and it was done on purpose.
And that experience is sometimes broken up with combat - that combat is indeed a part they failed to deliver. I'm certain they didn't intend the enemy AI to pose no threat at all (if that was the case, they would/should have removed combat entirely).

Ignoring for a moment that that is just marketing blurb and should be taken with a grain of salt anyway, I actually read it again and - nope, you are just spouting lies here. There isn't a single part of its Steam description that is false.

Literally the first sentence:
"Sunless Skies is a Gothic Horror roleplay game with a focus on exploration and exquisite storytelling."
How does something have a focus on exploration and storytelling when most of your time is spent playing delivery man?

Whenever I leave a port for an expedition, I explore new areas.
Sure, you also have a side target of "visit this port along the way to deliver/fetch X", but almost every game that has an exploration focus lets you treat on known paths too as part of the resource management. That doesn't mean that the game doesn't have an exploration focus, though.
The statement that most quests are of the fetch/deliver kind is not wrong. But that exact fetch/deliver system then leads to more "exquisite storytelling", as it often either leads you to new places or new content in known places.

The biggest problem in Sunless Sea was that once you had discovered everything in a certain area, you'd still have to grind known content endlessly (do the same fetch/deliver quests endlessly) in order to amass enough riches/equipment to get to the next area.
In Sunless Skies, by the time you have discovered everything in The Reach (as in, you explored the map, not necessarily did everything in all ports), you are ready to move on to Albion or the Blue Kingdom.

 

[thesheeep]

Btw... sorry for another double post, but I find splitting this makes sense.
I think the two biggest problems of the weak combat AI are:
1) It doesn't seem to predict, or predicts VERY badly. Everything aims for where you are at, not where you will be. Which is just completely absurd behavior in any kind of combat involving slow projectiles and moving targets.
2) The "getting stuck around walls" problem.

At least the first problem should be easy to solve, programming wise, it's really just "where will X be in Y seconds" and then aim for that.
The second one is IMO harder to tackle, obstacle avoidance isn't that easy of a thing to code. But it shouldn't be that hard to improve upon the current state, either... Currently, I think the AI doesn't even realize it got stuck and thus won't try to get "unstuck", just continuing its normal routine.

 

[user]

Is it so hard to understand that having the majority of your time spent waiting for your train to reach the next port is not good gameplay?

This is what kills it for me as well. Maybe if the trips were not so uneventful...

 

[Life of the Party]

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.

February 2018:

On the topic of the game, I can only echo the sentiment that Sunless Seas didn't really leave anybody lusting for more.
Kinda like the Banner Saga, they mistook the success of the game as demand for more of it.

 

[Agame]

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.

February 2018:

On the topic of the game, I can only echo the sentiment that Sunless Seas didn't really leave anybody lusting for more.
Kinda like the Banner Saga, they mistook the success of the game as demand for more of it.

The curse of the sequel...

 

[ItsChon]

I enjoy laying back in my chair, eyes half closed with some nice music playing, only sitting up to read interesting writing. It's good for what it is.

 

[Vault Dweller]

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.

Back in July:

https://www.kickstarter.com/project...skies-the-sequel-to-sunless-sea/posts/2108401

After the remarkable high of the Kickstarter, the response to Sunless Skies in Early Access hasn’t met the level of Sunless Sea in terms of sales. It sold about 15% as many copies as Sunless Sea in the comparable time period.

We think there are a few reasons for this. In hindsight, we went into Early Access too early. The game wasn’t immediately ready for media attention, we lost a key promotional moment; people aren’t talking about the game as much as we’d hope.

The marketplace is also hugely different to the last time we launched an Early Access game (in 2014), and Sunless Skies just isn’t as visible as Sunless Sea was. The success of our Kickstarter probably also led to fewer people buying it at EA launch, which will have made it less visible on storefronts; thousands of people had already picked up their copy.

 

[MRY]

I think their design suffers a bit from having grown up on a F2P/pay-to-advance model. Nurtured a mindset of wasting players’ time.

[edited to fix typo]

 

[<3sRichardSimmons]

I don't know how a dip in sales for the sequel is shocking to anyone, least of all the devs. I had Sunless Seas on my radar for a long time, and I hemmed and hawed about purchasing it for a long time. Art direction and execution and music both looked excellent to me from all that I'd seen, and I have no problem with text heavy-games; what prevented me from pulling the trigger on it for a long time was multiple people (on the Codex and in person) telling me that it was lacking in substantive gameplay. Eventually I did buy the game ( I want to say it was after the first price-drop. I think I paid ~$20US for it?), played it for a few hours, and quickly found that to indeed be the case. While I don't resent the devs or the game in any way (what was on the tin was included, and I recognized my hopes for what the game might be to be a gamble on my part), there is no way I will buy Sunless Skies for more than ~$2.50. It's just not worth it in any way.

On the other hand, if the devs had taken the Sunless Seas criticism to heart and iterated on making real gameplay systems and challenges reliant on player skill and understanding instead of playtime, this would likely have been an instabuy for me, but from everything that I've read that's not what happened. If the vast majority of reviews for Game 1 (omitting some absurd outliers like that Eurogamer piece) say something like "Game 1 has some things that are absolutely amazing, but it also has some stuff that really fucking sucks", and then you make Game 2 without focusing a substantial amount of development resources on the common criticism of Game 1... yeah, you're going to lose sales. No shit.

 

[MRY]

Can I ask a dumb question -- which perhaps is just a symptom of my affluence? If a game is tedious and not worth playing for long, why should the price point matter at all? "I wouldn't waste 20 hours of my life on this if I had to pay $10 for it, but I'll happily do so if I only have to pay $2.50" seems off to me. (By contrast, being a cheap sonuvabitch myself, I totally agree on principle with refusing to pay anything more than scrape-the-bottom prices if you don't have to. But I just don't understand how a game that's a boring grind at $10 becomes anything better at a lower price.)

 

[Urthor]

So we reveal Early Access's true purpose. If you release a game to early access that is *actually* unfinished, it doesn't sell and you're screwed. Really it's just a way of releasing bad games that are complete but unfun to play, avoiding a terrible metacritic score because it's early access, and then using the money from your sales to "finish" the game, aka actually finish making it fun.

 

[Nutria]

if the devs had taken the Sunless Seas criticism to heart

I went as far as going on their damn forum and trying to argue with them, but the response was always that if you don't like the 20+ hours of grinding that makes up the mid-game, then it's your fault because you're not cultured and sophisticated enough to understand it. And then I was dumb enough to buy Cultist Simulator and it's the same goddamn shit.

There's a huge problem in gaming in recent years that I think got obscured by Gamergate. It's the growing gap between customers who expect a good product and developers who think they're smarter than us and expect us to swallow whatever shit they serve up for us. So anyway, I'm not gonna buy this until I hear multiple reliable sources telling me that they've completed the game and it fixed the problems of the last one.

 

[<3sRichardSimmons]

Can I ask a dumb question -- which perhaps is just a symptom of my affluence? If a game is tedious and not worth playing for long, why should the price point matter at all? "I wouldn't waste 20 hours of my life on this if I had to pay $10 for it, but I'll happily do so if I only have to pay $2.50" seems off to me. (By contrast, being a cheap sonuvabitch myself, I totally agree on principle with refusing to pay anything more than scrape-the-bottom prices if you don't have to. But I just don't understand how a game that's a boring grind at $10 becomes anything better at a lower price.)

Well, in a word, aesthetics. That was what I enjoyed- and expected to enjoy- about Sunless Seas. What I disliked was the grinding tedium and lack of meaningful system interaction or player choice, indeed, these qualities lowered the value of the game as a whole to me. It's also what I expect I would enjoy and value in Sunless Skies.
I suppose the implication here is that the value I place on aesthetics in computer games is ~$2.50, and that seems about right. Maybe that makes me a basic bitch but *shrug*. Valuation judgments on art/aesthetics are always a bit weird/untethered.

 

[Cromwell]

I went as far as going on their damn forum and trying to argue with them, but the response was always that if you don't like the 20+ hours of grinding that makes up the mid-game, then it's your fault because you're not cultured and sophisticated enough to understand it. And then I was dumb enough to buy Cultist Simulator and it's the same goddamn shit.

There's a huge problem in gaming in recent years that I think got obscured by Gamergate. It's the growing gap between customers who expect a good product and developers who think they're smarter than us and expect us to swallow whatever shit they serve up for us. So anyway, I'm not gonna buy this until I hear multiple reliable sources telling me that they've completed the game and it fixed the problems of the last one.

they should have just made a standalone version of fallen london, cut out a lot of the grinding (get 90 pens to write 2 pages of paper) and instead expand the stories and paths you can take, sell that for 20 and be done with it. What these dumbfucks did instead was creating a game that has about as much rginding as fallen london (which of course has a lot to get you paying for resources) and stuffed tedious moving around in there so it became even more tedious than fallen london was. There is nothing good about playing fallen london and having every 5 clicks you do there expaned by 30 minutes staring at your boat/submarine/plane moving around instead of instantly going to the next story snippet.

 

[orcinator]

I managed to finish the Truth ambition. Easy to see why the achievements list 0% to 0.1% completion rate for all the ambitions.
Because holy fuck the game gets real bad as it goes on, even if you have speedhacks and infinite money. I might be misremembering but endgame quests were even more tedious than in Sunless Seas since you have to constantly travel between the 3 hubs and the enemies are harder to avoid, even if only the blue kingdom has anything that's actually threatening.

 

[Gerrard]

Give me a proper RPG in this setting without all the time wasting grind.

I think their design suffers a bit from having grown up on a F2P/pay-to-advance model. Nurtured a mindset of wasting players’ time.

[edited to fix typo]

Yes, this is exactly what I though when I learned that they started out with some browser/mobile thing.

 

[Multi-headed Cow]

Finally got off my ass and installed Cheat Engine so I could speed cheat and reduce travel time and it seems pretty beneficial. Can crank it down when I'm somewhere new that requires navigating and/or get into combat, but otherwise it just cuts down on "Staring at my train" time. In fact it's making me strongly consider firing up Sunless Sea again at some point so I can crank the speed up, especially since I never played it after they added Zubmariner despite owning it because of the early sucker bonus. It's more of a grind and more of a pain in the ass than Skies but all the same, being able to reduce the wasted time might turn me around on the game some.

Also haven't posted in a while but I got the trading train, around 5k in the bank, and then made the trip to Albion. Albion's been an interesting experience. Much more wide-open than the Reach, some harder enemies (Though maybe less of them) but terror's a more pressing concern since it feels like every goddamn port is parked right on top of a horror. Been hemorrhaging money ever since I made the trip (Down to around 3.5k now, although some of that was stocking up on stuff like tea and crockery since you can't get it in the Reach regularly) but I'm advancing quests and it's interesting to explore. Game didn't really end up what I hoped/dreamed for from Sea/Skies but I'm reasonably happy I chipped in on the Kickstarter for it since I'm still enjoying poking at it.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Can I ask a dumb question -- which perhaps is just a symptom of my affluence? If a game is tedious and not worth playing for long, why should the price point matter at all? "I wouldn't waste 20 hours of my life on this if I had to pay $10 for it, but I'll happily do so if I only have to pay $2.50" seems off to me. (By contrast, being a cheap sonuvabitch myself, I totally agree on principle with refusing to pay anything more than scrape-the-bottom prices if you don't have to. But I just don't understand how a game that's a boring grind at $10 becomes anything better at a lower price.)

Some games are worth playing primarily for the novelty even if you don't intend to finish them. I mostly pay for games these days based on what I think the devs deserve- if it's already a huge success I'll probably wait for a sale, but if it's a hidden gem I'm more willing to pay full price, and also more willing to pay more for things in genres that are mostly dead.

Having sunk dozens of hours into each of Sunless Seas, Skies, and Cultist Simulator, I have to say Cultist Simulator does it's thing the best. The writing is a lot better, and while it's also super light on the gameplay, I find it at least does a good job of occupying my brain with plans for the next ten minutes and things I want to try as opposed to trips between ports where I've got nothing to think about because I've got the next 20 minutes already planned out due to my cargo and missions.

 

[Nutria]

Finally got off my ass and installed Cheat Engine so I could speed cheat and reduce travel time and it seems pretty beneficial.

That settles it for me. Pace is a fundamental part of making a game like this enjoyable. This is their second game now where players can decide that better than the developers. Fuck that. I'm not gonna pay for a game that was poorly-tuned just because the developers don't believe in creating a good experience for players.

 

[Multi-headed Cow]

Finally got off my ass and installed Cheat Engine so I could speed cheat and reduce travel time and it seems pretty beneficial.

That settles it for me. Pace is a fundamental part of making a game like this enjoyable. This is their second game now where players can decide that better than the developers. Fuck that. I'm not gonna pay for a game that was poorly-tuned just because the developers don't believe in creating a good experience for players.

You're not wrong. I can sorta understand why they'd do it a bit (Makes the "Weird/big reveal" parts supposedly have more weight since you've been spending 10 hours with your thumb up your ass staring at the travel screen, also makes you more inclined to savor the writing rather than clicking through since it took for fucking ever to get there, etc) but they do it so much it just ends up pissing me off. Skies was less guilty of it than Sea but I finally cracked regardless. Just doing a small 1.3 speed right now, may set a 1.5 or 2 for quicker cranking on paths I've already been, 1.3's been good for sailing into the unknown since it still speeds up downtime and isn't fast enough to prevent you from bopping back to normal if needed.

Also agreed with Damned Registrations and Cultist Simulator doing the best job of all 3, in large part because it also wastes your time far less when you know what you're doing.