I love the pace of travel, as the best way to play this game is streaming over Discord with a friend so you can idly chat during quiet moments. Making the decisions together is also fun.
So one of the patches that dropped previously did offer a bit of a universal speed-up to travel. Not a lot of speed…but a bit.
And then another patch offered super high-end engines that could really move fast, and allowed you a new speed setting if you wanted to go there, “Full Steam”. At full steam you move really quickly, but they recommend that you not use it for exploration or travel in difficult steering areas – it’s for getting around from place to place in open areas where you know the area very well. Oh, and it also burns a metric crap-ton of fuel to go “full steam”.
And that’s a really nice solution for some travel issues that folks have.
But (and full caveat, this comes from someone who also likes the more languid travel times because of the way they build pace and add tension), I really hope they never take travel time completely out of the mix. I love that sense of exploration and the great unknown.
For me, this game is the 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea/Captain Nemo simulator that I sort of always wanted without realizing. And what helps make it so is the sense of scale and distance.
In my awesome rambling essay on Sunless Sea I mentioned that problem and a potential solution that applies to Sunless Skies as well:
The shortcut option is slightly hidden and a bit annoying to set up but it really helps with the poor gameplay pacing of the Sunless games.
I think that’s a terrible idea, by the way.
Really terrible.
This game isn’t for everyone. That’s absolutely a given.
But the game design wants you to spend lots of time feeling very alone, in a very vast open darkness, worried about whether you’ve got enough fuel and supplies to make it to another port. It wants you to feel isolated. It wants you to feel like an explorer on a ship, pushing his crew and vessel into the wine-dark unknown.
Therlun’s advice is about the worst thing I can imagine someone doing to this gem of a game, and the notion that it’s a representation that the developers didn’t play it is facile and completely misses that this is the pacing they’re trying to do – and succeeding at. It’s a fundamental misapprehension of what the game’s design goal is.
And honestly, it isn’t going to be a miss for some folks. That’s fair. This isn’t gonna be everyone’s cup of darjeeling, for sure. But man. There’s a reason you don’t fast travel in the first chapter of Red Dead 2, and why mods that allow you to do that miss the point of that game too.
I think the problem with that argument is that you are eventually driven to milk runs where literally none of that ever happens. It’s fantastically paced for exploration into the unknown but there’s significant downtime between ‘expeditions’ where you end up spending a lot of time shuttling stuff around in order to fund the next one. Unfortunately the environments are nowhere near dynamic enough to make repeat runs anything other than tedious. I know exactly what enemies are gonna spawn, and where. I probably also know how much fuel and food I need to get to the port that buys my junk (or whatever). Where, then, is the risk, the wonder?
That’s when you use the engines you’ve upgraded from having spent so much time exploring to make those milk runs go quickly.
And I would push back against the notion of knowing when, where and what exactly will spawn/respawn in an area. From everything I can tell, those are events that may be scripted to happen once, or are designed to happen at intervals that have a randomization applied to them. Respawns don’t happen always or even sometimes often. Which can be a problem if you’re counting on hunting some Cantankeri for supplies or something similar.
I’d always recommend people play the game as close to designed as they know they will be able to stomach to start with (so I’d still, e.g., install UI mods for Bethesda games and bug fixes, plus some things to obviate certain things I actively know I hate about their games, like lockpicking minigames). Because it’s good to know what the game is intended to feel like. But I strongly disagree with the idea that you shouldn’t change things that are actively interfering with your enjoyment of a game when you can trivially do so. Regardless of the designer’s intent. I would much rather people who like the writing but find the extended travel times tedious (or the food mechanics, or whatever) experience that writing than simply abandon the game because it’s “not for them”. If you don’t like the writing, then, yeah. It’s not for you.
I think an enemy not spawning at a location I expected it to is significantly different problem than an enemy spawning in a location I didn’t. From what I remember Sunless Sea/Skies didn’t really do any of the latter.
Engine upgrades help, sure, but I’m still salty they nerfed the ability to just boost-strafe around everywhere quicker.
I guess in the end, I’d say: “Play the game the way you want to.” You bought it. Do your thing.
But at least give it a try, playing it as designed. Pretty please. :)
Maybe that won’t work out for you. Fair enough.
But man. Don’t default to that right out of the gate. It’s like suggesting the best way to listen to “Hey Jude” is to fade out after the first round of “Na-na-na’s”.
I think it’s awesome that video games are a medium that allows us to tweak our own experience of them, and that the perception of the game that results doesn’t have to be the same for every person, or even what the designers intended.
When the balance of things changes in Sunless Skies and you’ve left The Reach, you’re going to have different beasts respawn. And also have different skycraft belonging to different factions show up where they didn’t before.
All survival games should come with unlimited supplies.
It’s perhaps an interesting point that they all do, technically. Sure, it all boils down to time investment on your part, but the supply ecosystem in every survival game is, in my experience, usually entirely static with infinitely harvestable sources.
Ultimately the only real resource being consumed is your time. Most of it, in these games, is consumed keeping various plates spinning. Every now and then you’ll have them all spinning fast enough that you can wander off for awhile and do something else that’s usually a lot more fun.
I guess my point here would be, Sunless Skies ultimately has you doing this too often, for too long, and the chinaware in question barely changes. The stuff away from that? It’s sublime. Don’t get me wrong here, either, I can certainly see the need for at least some plate spinning to help contrast the mundane against the exotic. But the balance between the two states of play in the Sunless games is just… off, for me.
I only ever completed Skies with one captain, and I’m aware there was so much more left undisturbed in that inky blackness outside of that solitary run. I mourn that I never got to experience it, but the ‘upkeep boredom’ was just too much.
That said, it’s been awhile and the new edition is well timed. Maybe I’ll mod it and see how better I fare.
I played a little bit of Sea with the original supply/fear mechanics in place. Never got far in the game at all until I installed a mod that turned them off entirely, and had a much, much better time after I did so. I’m told Skies changes that stuff to be less of a burden, so I’m hoping that I agree, but it’s entirely possible that combined with Skies having never implemented mod support will end up being a barrier to me getting on with the game. We’ll see, once the Sovereign Edition hits.
You can always argue about design balance, I get it. But I guess if the devs design was intentional on their part you sort of have to take it for what it is and either like it or not is the way I go with it.
I’m not a mod guy though, I take games almost always as designed. In fact it’s one of the reasons I have trouble with PDX, they seemingly never stop modifying their games.
Or while I’m venting, the incessant demands by MP’ers banging on about how ever single game must have MP bolted on to it even if not designed for it.
Ok, enough rambling and back to work for me!
Sure, if you have to take it or leave it, then that’s how it is, and I may leave it. But it’s PC gaming. You often can just change the thing you don’t like, and then you’ll have a good time with the game. IMO that’s a way more satisfying approach.
I actually completed the first area as intended and had a great time. By the time I got to the 2nd area though, the ‘grind’ became a little more obvious, and I lost any resolve to re-trudge the same lanes over and over again. A pity, because I loved all the rest.
I do agree that you have a point though. A fast travel option would greatly diminish the game’s atmosphere which is one of the best things going for it. I wouldn’t know how to solve this problem.
A couple of things that they’ve done is to generally add some speed to all locomotives. And then the addition of the later-game big engines that can run “full steam” is great. Especially for the more open spaces beyond The Reach.
But they also had been adding to the story beats and choices with crew along the way, even in previous patches, and I believe they plan to build that out a bit for the Sovereign edition as well.
I just need a YouTuber to record their full run, snip out all the boring flying around / not running out of gas shit I don’t have time for, and just let me mainline 10 hours of straight lore all in one go. It’s all I really want from games these days. Having to PLAY them? Ugh. Who has the time for that??
I’ve mentioned it a couple of times (so forgiveness is begged for repetition) and Tom mentions it in his review, Sunless Skies is not Sunless Seas in terms of exploration mechanics.
My problem with Sunless Seas was always what I’m guessing you guys experienced to some extent or another – just when it felt like things were getting really cool, you had to go back to the main port in London. And eventually the combination of the fear mechanic, supplies dwindling and fuel seemed to put me into a constant feedback loop, where I was spending 10% of my time at sea exploring and experiencing new story beats…and 90% of that time trying to find stuff I could trade for more food and supplies and ways to reduce my fear levels.
In Sunless Skies, especially for the first 10-15 hours, unless you’ve missed something completely in the tutorial or unless you’re deliberately trying to kill yourself, you’re going to figure out the trade mechanics and find that you’re able to do a ton of exploring and story stuff on the fuel and supplies you get. You don’t go through them nearly as fast. And there are also other ports and waypoints around the areas to refuel/resupply/trade. Plus there are places that offer ready ablation to fear.
What’s great about Sunless Skies is the overall pacing of things. It pulls you in with so many carrots that reward your successes as you absorb some story beats and build out your background, crew, and work towards your goals, that you almost don’t notice as the difficulty gradually ramps up…even while providing you with multiple ways to work around things like the fact that you’re Locomotive captain alter ego is obviously starting to go crazy.