True, but every character after that seems to get the ship and stuff from it. Or maybe it’s a new ship, hell if I know since I’ll never get a new ship. :)
Anyone here made some videos of their plays(sp?)?
Explore the west coast.
Go meet the sisters.
if you can find the salt lions and they are close, a decent early game strategy is to exhaust the lions and the sisters quickly. That should give you enough cash to do the townhouse/will thing with a few upgrades and enough cash to fund a couple of other plot lines.
Do a few large exploration circles. Push your boat/crew to the limit but live.
At that point take on the gadfly’s purchases and the blind bruiser’s “quests.”
That’s pretty much what I’ve got
After that…I don’t know what to tell you. I can survive (and the above seems to be the easiest path) but actually making headway into the main quests is just beyond me. How anyone can complete the zong of the zee …I don’t get it.
I think one problem here is that, at least for me, my approach is to dip my toes in the proverbial water. The game punishes you for being conservative, by giving you virtually no reward for hitting a single port and coming home. So my first captain is gone. I shall have to be a bit more aggressive next time.
While I suspect that this game will undergo serious changes in the next half year or so, I now feel that they’ve missed the boat(see what I… nwm) on several of their actual game implementations.
Even if it is entirely possible to stay alive and make enough echoes(the game currency) to keep the wheels turning, the way you have to do it is tedious at best. I’ve read up on its development and it seems they went through multiple iterations, before settling on the current echo balance and boy did they settle in a stupid place.
It IS going to take you ages to upgrade your ship and weaponry, long past when the most interesting stories have been told. When you finally do get some of those upgrades, it barely makes a difference at all. Your ship will hardly move faster, your larger crew will eat more than ever and your new engine will burn through that fuel at ludicrous speed. The most interesting stories in the world are not going to make people sit through hours upon hours of patrolling the same 10-15 ports for a net gain of 100-300 echoes each half hour cycle.
People might be willing to grind for that first weapon and engine upgrade but by that point the “beginner exploits” have been exhausted and players will become wise to this. There’s simply no longer a quick way to make a buck. You’re gonna have to actually sail to all those ports on repeat and I’m sure that most people won’t enjoy doing that at all. A grind to unlock more text? That’s not how you do a proper PC game guys.
As I see it now the game suffers from a multitude of problems.
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There’s not enough game in there. There’s not enough pirating, trading or most else you associate with captaining a ship in a video game. Even the combat is lackluster. There are not enough upgrades, not enough interesting loot, not enough customization, no interesting enemies and the few early and middle upgrades don’t even matter. PT is one of my all time favorite games, I’m not adverse to reading in a video game so no, it’s not that. (and this game’s writing still has nothing on PT)
These guys can write stories, they sure as hell can realize an atmosphere through graphics and (somewhat) through sound but they fail when it comes to gameplay. -
It’s using an esoteric quest system from another game that is not in any way helpful to newcomers. The system itself is DUMB. I can hover over a quest icon in a port and get a list of all the possible variations of that quest? Nice spoilerish system you got there.
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It’s heavily imbalanced and the in-game documentation is almost non existent. When you take on a quest, the game will sometimes let you know that you’re going to need X amount of fuel or some other items for this particular ordeal. When you’re in the middle of the quest you’ll discover that you need tons more echoes, fuel and supplies to complete it. If you don’t have that? Oh well, back to grinding WITH LESS CARGO SPACE because FUCK YOU PLAYER, MUHAHAHAHA! You might be hoping to make a little echo for upgrades or just to feel safer but you’ll mostly get fucked in the ass by devs who threw up their hands long ago when attempting to balance their game.
Seriously, this game hates the player to a point where even the most masochistic adventurer will be screaming out his safe word in vain.
It feels as if these guys had a solid plan for the world building but only a vague idea about the nitty gritty game elements and only a passing interest in fixing this. I suspect that all the very positive reviews are written by people who barely played it and are going on its initial impression of great wonder and possibility. Possibilities you’ll discover to be fully unrealized once you’re several hours in.
My final verdict is; do not recommend. Maybe the ground work they’ve done here can be built into something wonderful but they’re a long way off and I don’t think they deserve to be rewarded for making half a game.
It does feel a bit like they realized that the free-to-play aspects of Fallen London were a turn-off to the audience that is likely to enjoy their text-driven mechanics and quirky world, so they went looking for another way to pace out their fiction without energy and other free-to-play mechanics so they could charge a premium price. Not a bad plan, and sailing around seems like a reasonably good way to do it. But that change has consequences and requires some further scaffolding to make it work, and maybe that scaffolding is underdeveloped. I think I like the game so far, and I’m happy to explore it without trying to min-max or even necessarily caring too much about advancement. I just don’t know yet how long I’m going to be willing to do so.
I don’t necessarily disagree with most of the factual points phero.1 makes, but I think they’re talking at cross-purposes with the developer and the audience that likes the game. Yes, it’s going to take AGES to upgrade your ship, but that’s not the point of the game. The point of the game is to experience the stories - to sail to those ports on repeat, as you put it. The rest is just scaffolding to get you there. The problem with Fallen London was that, at least without paying, you ended up having to grind out the same story bits over and over. So far I haven’t encountered that in Sunless Sea - there’s always been something new to do on my next expedition, even if the upgrade path is grindy in the sense of making relatively little progress on each expedition. If the story itself gets grindy later on that’s a legitimate flaw.
I’m also not sure I understand point 2 at all.
It’s a weirdly compelling little game. It’s the kind of game I shouldn’t like. There’s a great deal of busywork - the actual driving of the ship is exactly the kind of thing that drove me nuts in the Mass Effect games. The systems are obscure and the interface doesn’t always let you easily get where you need to go, or give you access to the information you need. But it’s an easy game to play in bite-sized chunks, and I find myself thinking about it when I’m not playing, and playing when I get the chance. I just lost my third or fourth captain, went insane and the crew mutinied, but it was right after I picked up that quest where you have an extra 1000 echoes to carry around, and when I restarted, I picked the option that let me keep half that. So, finally, for the first time I was able to pick up a better gun and take some of the more money-heavy storylets. I love the exploration, but it’s frustrating when you have to go somewhere and don’t have a clue what direction it’s in.
Yeah, I can understand people finding the traversal (sailing) boring in this game, but for me that traversal (and the stories you read after it) is what I love about the game. If the game was faster it would lose me, I think.
But yes, this is bound to be divisive. For me , it’s the most interesting game that I’ve played in the last several months.
The problem I am having in the early going is simply making enough money to continue. The one thing I did that was significantly profitable was take a tomb colonist north, but now I don’t have that option again. So, I ended up in a position where I had enough money to buy a little fuel, but my hull is rather low after 3-4 expeditions and I am unlivable to survive another.
Maybe with my legacy I will keep the engineer I picked up.
I kinda wish this was a tablet game. I really dig the atmosphere, but the languorous pace at sea would be perfect w/ headphones while eased back in bed, on the couch, or during my morning commute.
The problem I am having in the early going is simply making enough money to continue. The one thing I did that was significantly profitable was take a tomb colonist north, but now I don’t have that option again. So, I ended up in a position where I had enough money to buy a little fuel, but my hull is rather low after 3-4 expeditions and I am unlivable to survive another.
It’s easy to get in a hole if you treat it like a trading game (or if you attempt too much combat early on). Don’t. Do the Admiral’s missions, get port reports from everywhere on the way, and you’ll be swimming in cash, relatively speaking. You’ll also likely pick up a few things that you can turn in at the university for more cash later on. Exploring and discovering the storylets is much more profitable than trading in this game. Pirate hunting is fairly profitable as well, if you’re careful.
Turning in port reports also keeps your favor with the admiral up, which in turn makes cheap repairs possible.
I just unlocked the cheap repair, but it was either that or no fuel. And I haven’t done any trading whatsoever. How do you get the tomb colonist delivery to come back? And I have no idea where the first delivery for the Admiral even is. Now, I’m sure I could look up the general location or you guys could tell me, but that isn’t the point. The point is that getting on your feet where you can even keep the game going is not a simple matter at first.
How do you get the tomb colonist delivery to come back?
Post-release, I don’t think you can. It used to be a repeatable mission, but now I think it’s a one-off. Unless there’s some trigger I haven’t stumbled upon yet.
And I have no idea where the first delivery for the Admiral even is. Now, I’m sure I could look up the general location or you guys could tell me, but that isn’t the point.
But it tells you. The mission text is always something like “Obtain strategic information from Polythreme somewhere to the south east of London”.
Sometimes it says that it’s in the general vicinity of London, but doesn’t give you a direction. I haven’t found that one to be too difficult, but there was a blind bouncer mission that I had no idea where to go, and eventually went insane and died. Had plenty of fuel though.
Sure, not all missions do, but the strategic info missions always give a direction/location, or at least they always have the dozens of times I’ve done them.
Nope. It says “somewhere not far from home waters”. It’s probably East, if I had to guess.
Well if it’s not far, then what’s the problem? Even the locations that have been described as far have been about 3 fuel distance for me.
What’s the location? It might be one of the fixed locations and we could tell you were to find it.