Some of us don’t feel we have the time to spend 80% of the game doing nothing but watching a ship slowly trawl across the screen
Which makes the case we’ve probably already beaten to death, this isn’t a game for everyone.
With the speedhack I was able to play and enjoy the game elements though.
Then win win declare victory and march off the field!!
I think I agree with this, even if I’m wondering if we were playing the same game if you’re spending 80% of your time doing nothing. ;) But hey, different strokes!
Tom spelled it out kind of beautifully though.
Sunless Skies isn’t just the gameplay realization of Fallen London’s dizzying kaleidoscope of lore and metaphysics, sins and souls, nightmares and inevitable terrors. It is mortality, writ large. In a poem called Calmly We Walk Through This April’s Day, New York poet and Chelsea Hotel casualty Delmore Schwartz wrote:
Each minute bursts in the burning room,
The great globe reels in the solar fire,
Spinning the trivial and unique away…
Time is the school in which we learn,
Time is the fire in which we burn.
We spend time when we play these games. We pay with our most precious resource to see new worlds, explore new systems, observe and learn stange new patterns. Did you spend your time watching another animation of a dying demon or adding another point of dexterity? Did you spend your time taking delight from these chuntering hunters, unionised rats, and doomed skyfarers? As Failbetter has been teaching us for as long as they’ve been making games, there are no wrong answers; there are only our decisions.
My suggestion to those of you feeling impatient or bored or like you’re slowly going insane from the long and lonely space travel is to up your background music game! I’ve never met a game and/or setting that was quite this much fun to choose music to soundtrack my play sessions.
For me, this game’s pace is like the American/Euro truck sims. You either like long stretches of driving and watching the road go by or you don’t.
And Elite: Dangerous! You’re cool with flying long distances between locations or you’re not.
It’s a great “bad horror movie on in the background” game.
Yes! I love the Sunless Skies soundtrack so much. I also play with the soundtrack to Below:
And if I want to focus on the horror angle, I play to Colin Stetson’s amazing Color Out of Space soundtrack:
With the right music, there’s no such thing as…
And sometimes without any music. With just the lonely gurgle and puff of the steam engine. Maybe it’s just me, but if the game world is good enough, if the systems are tuned well, then traversal is part of the ebb and flow. Consider, for instance, horse rides in Red Dead Redemption 2. I’m sure those bothered some people, but to those of us buying into what Rockstar had created, they were a fundamental part of the game. I mean, I get the complaint about longboat river trips in Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla, driving somewhere in Cyberpunk 2077, and your motorcycle in Days Gone. Those games all had some built-in confusion about how and whether traversal was important. But a good game knows that traversal is part of the gameplay and pacing. Sunless Skies might be a step back from the expanse of the sea in Sunless Sea, but it’s still about crossing vast open spaces. If you’re not into that, I don’t know why you’d bother playing. Cranking up the travel speed with a mod is like watching a movie at 1.5x speed; if you don’t have the patience for the intended experience, there are other experiences you would probably enjoy more.
Anyway, I’m so psyched to get back into this on May 19th.
-Tom
Sunless Sea and Skies include crossing vast open spaces. They also include reams of terrific writing and worldbuilding, unlike the Truck Simulators (or from what I hear, Elite). I don’t know why it’s so hard to see why someone might like the former and not want to have to deal with the latter in between. (And yeah, I mean, there’s Fallen London, but it has its own mechanical barriers between player and writing, and also it’s a different set of great writing and worldbuilding.)
My favorite thing/weirdest thing/might eventually be telling a therapist thing in Sunless Skies on some long, lonely traversal is in the later stages of the game, feeling the empathy of my ship captain alter ego’s encroaching madness. I get to “Y’know, I kinda get where Captain Nemo was coming from, for sure.”
Having to, uhm, let’s say… ‘enhance’ the traversal aspect with your own custom soundtrack in order to make it more engaging is, to me, an indistinguishable position from using a custom mod to speed things up in order to make it more engaging.
The methods may differ but we’re still saying the vanilla experience isn’t quite everything it could be. Though I appreciate that you still enjoyed it regardless of soundtrack.
Besides, my point is less about that, per se. The pacing is fine when you’re heading off into the unknown. It’s just when you’re doing (yet another) loop through the known that it all becomes a bit wearisome. I’ll grant that it was improved over Sunless Seas, and that I probably played through it before some of the improvements @triggercut mentions were in place. I’m willing to give it another shot.
Heh. I’m the weirdo who’ll take it at face value, just the quiet chug of the locomotive engine, listening for faint sky beast calls or the distant whine of some other faction’s engine in the sky. And I’m Richard Harris’s character at the end of Orca or Dr. Frankenstein at the end of that TV movie from the 1970s, my hands clutching the helm ready to sail off the edge of the world if necessary.
FWIW, I am quite certain that Failbetter knew the sort of specific experience they were aiming for and have worked on it enough that these games are probably as close as was possible to achieve. There are ways in which I appreciate that. I’m fine with taking my time travelling around, more or less (though I need to be in the right mood). The supplies/fear management stuff was much much more disruptive to my enjoyment. I’m just saying, I don’t agree with the idea that that intended experience not 100% landing for someone means they shouldn’t bother at all, especially when there are such easy ways to customize it to land better that affect literally no one else’s experience of it.
A) “Having to”? What’s this “having to” nonsense?
B) So let me get this straight. If I’m listening to music that isn’t part of a game’s soundtrack, or even if I’ve turned down the soundtrack and I’m listening to a podcast, or even if I’ve just turned off the music, that means the game itself “isn’t quite everything it could be”? In other words, listening to music from La La Land while killing zombies in State of Decay makes State of Decay less of a game?
Hoo boy. I’ll take Bad Analogies for $1000, Alex!
Also, “engaging” is the new “fun”. You tell me Sunless Skies isn’t “engaging” unless you change the pacing, I tell you Sunless Skies is one of the most “engaging” games I’ve ever played with the pacing as is. And here we are. Now let’s talk about whether it’s fun! :)
-Tom
My self-quote above about the speed option goes along this line. I mention that the initial exploration is fine-ish. In those “first time here” cases the slow, careful crawling works as an experience and mechanic. (The -ish is directed at certain other mechanical issues I have with the Sunless games.)
Like mentioned by several other people afterwards (and many times before) it’s that that the game extends that crawling to all other aspects of the game as well though, having the exact opposite effect and severely diminishing the experience for those large parts of the game in my opinion.
Sure, I guess from a philosophical standpoint we could argue whether sapient beings truly ever have to do anything other than obey the laws of physics. Does replacing ‘having to’ with ‘choosing to’ materially change my original point? Though perhaps ‘feeling compelled to’ fits more what I think I meant, but that’s a synonym for ‘having to’ anyway and we’re back to where we started.
It means you’re not playing the experience as intended/designed by the designers. So if the argument is that ‘speeding things up with a mod’ goes against the design intent/vision, then equally so does a custom soundtrack.
Beyond that, we’re down to your own subjective motivations in doing so. Does it make things ‘less of a game’ if you act in this manner? I mean, I’ve never chosen to turn off the Doom Eternal soundtrack and put something else on because it’s well composed and, more importantly, near perfect accompaniment to the gameplay experience. If that’s the case, I don’t see the logic in rejecting as absurd statements to the effect of “games that don’t achieve that are lesser, at least in that single regard”.
Like you wouldn’t have 6-starred State of Decay if it shipped with a soundtrack as good as La La Land. Zombleton!
I’m happy that Sunless Skies was paced well for you throughout, though I’m keen to know how much of it you played and experienced. I had a great time overall but by the point I was ‘done’ with the clockwork sun zone (the second zone I think?) I bailed. Fortunately that coincided with my captain having completed their personal quest thingy, so I could at least call it a win. I’m just cognizant of the fact there were more zones out there that I didn’t get to experience in doing that, but I couldn’t really find the motivation in slogging through more of the exact same at that point in order to do so.
If sunless skies is anything like Sunless Sea, you can use a speedhack to increase speed by 50%, and even then there will be plenty stretches of doing nothing and going slowly through vast expanses.
