Sunless Skies: Victorian spaceships included

Yes, because your original point – that Sunless Skies is somehow a lesser game because I sometimes opt to play different music – is absurd, as I’m pretty sure you know! I had to stop playing Fallout: New Vegas because my game kept locking up at a certain point. I had to turn off ray-tracing in Cyberpunk 2077 to get an acceptable framerate. I had to wait several minutes for the AI turn to process in Total War: Warhammer. I had to quit out of a bugged scenario in Planetfall to keep playing empire mode.

I have never had to change the music in a game. Instead, sometimes a game is working so well for me that it’s even better when I play different music. And most times, I turn off game soundtracks anyway because they’re awful. Which is not the case with Sunless Skies.

In fact, I routinely listen to the Sunless Skies soundtrack while playing boardgames. Does that mean those boardgames are somehow compromised? :)

Four characters played to their untimely deaths, a fifth well into a career cross-crossing Albion, but currently on hiatus waiting for the update. And champing at the bit to resume on the 19th!

-Tom

I think his original point was that playing Sunless Skies at the original 1.0X is no more necessary to enjoy the game than playing Sunless Skies while listening to the original soundtrack.

If you would enjoy a game more after modifying some part of it, then it makes perfect sense to modify that part. It would arguably no longer be the same game, but (to you at least) it would be an even better game. Just as shortening or deleting a few scenes can make a bad movie into a good one.

I have to admit I do feel Tom is locking on to some pointless distinction in semantics as some sort of linguistic ‘gotcha’. I misspoke. Or not. It’s frankly irrelevant.

Obviously no music in any game ever is going to be so bad that it will literally stop you playing in the way that bugs or crashes will. Unless it’s some special audio frequency that causes your brain to shut down, I guess. So the comparison to these types of blocker is, as you say, absurd. Enough so that I didn’t think it’d warrant discussion.

What’s interesting here is that you still chose to mute it. Whatever your level of compulsion in doing so, you still made the decision on the basis that your time playing would be more enjoyable with amendments to the experience that are external to the game as designed. You’re yet to put forth an argument that effectively distinguishes e.g. enhancement via speed mod vs enhancement via alternative soundtrack that doesn’t essentially boil down to ‘I enjoy doing this, ergo it is good; however I wouldn’t enjoy doing that ergo it is bad’.

I don’t blame you, but I can’t square away your comment here with what you said earlier;

Am I misunderstanding you or were you misunderstanding rrmorton? All I can see here is that you’re recommending jpinard listen to something else while playing Sunless Skies… After saying that’s exactly what you do (albeit only sometimes). That being the case, I really don’t know how to read this as anything other than QED ‘Sunless Skies does not always have the right music’. Though of course, what is right here - and what isn’t - is never going to amount to anything other than subjective opinion.

We’re not recommending players listen to something else. Good grief! The game has a great soundtrack. That said…

The rich setting and the long, lonely stretches in Sunless Skies are an opportunity to match the gameplay with music I love. I’m all about nailing the mood and this game has a great mood to nail using all kinds of different music. You can approach it like a movie soundtrack or like a road trip mix or anything really. This is taking my music love and layering it on top of my PC gaming love. I’m not in any way fixing something that isn’t already working for me.

Do you want my blessing to use the time speed-up mod? You got it! But personally I wouldn’t use it because it seems to miss the point about what makes this game special/unique/work. If a gamer prioritizes other parts of the experience, the mod makes sense. Better to enjoy it how you want than not at all.

I honestly don’t remember the soundtrack at all. It’s possible that I muted it. ;)

Well, okay, but then aren’t we talking about whether something is “fun”? Or, as @fox.ferro put it, “engaging”? That’s not really worth arguing, is it? I think Sunless Skies is fun and engaging. Fox.Ferro thinks Sunless Skies isn’t fun and engaging. There’s not much more to be said on the matter, which is why we’re now discussing whether playing a different soundtrack is the equivalent of modding.

But if you want to mod Sunless Skies to make it “fun” or “engaging”, have at it. I don’t think anyone in this thread would mind!

Honestly, I don’t think it’s the least bit interesting that sometimes people listen to their own music when they play a game. No offense, but that might literally be one of the least interesting observations you could make about how people play games.

I will gladly expound on this if you’re serious, but I’m having a hard time believing you’re serious. You really don’t see a distinction between someone putting on different music during a game and someone modding the speed at which a game plays? You don’t see a distinction between an aesthetic choice (music) and a design choice (the speed of traversal, the usage of resources, the tuning of an economy)? You’re being serious?

I’m not sure who’s misunderstanding whom, but my point was there’s more going on than “watching a ship trawl slowly across the screen”. Writing off the gameplay in Sunless Skies as “doing nothing but watching a ship slowly trawl across the screen” is like writing off Lawrence of Arabia as “watching nothing but dudes walking across the desert”. It’s reductionist nonsense.

My comment about the music was just me making an off-the-cuff remark about how much I enjoy the traversal in the game. It’s evocative, moody, atmospheric, simultaneously tense and relaxing, immersive, and all sorts of other words, and it lends itself to some of my favorite music for how well it fits with the tone and pacing of Sunless Skies.

I hope you limbered up before attempting that semantic jujitsu. A fella could pull something with a move like that!

-Tom

In case you want to mod this thread, press play:

Just that first minute of High Wilderness, the first cut, stands out for me. One of the all-time great soundtracks.

-Tom

Yeah for me this one musically ranks right up there with Shogun 2 and Rimworld.

Any time I like music in a game enough to play it outside of the game while doing other things it’s clearly made an impression above and beyond the usual quality I’ve encountered.

I’m completely serious. The aesthetic is part of the designed experience. I’d even go so far here as to say in this case the aesthetic is the experience. Consider if I were to mod all the graphics in the game to be cute kittens and swapped out the text to be funny jokes at the expense of dogs. Nothing mechanical would change (the speed of traversal, the usage of resources, the tuning of an economy), but I think you’d agree my experience would be at least somewhat different to yours.

Ergo it’s obviously important. More so in Sunless Skies than in other games as the feeling you get playing it is so informed by its aesthetic I’m surprised you appear to be on the other side of this argument, or indeed that there’s an argument to be had with you on this subject at all.

Putting on a podcast or listening to something else while playing Sunless Skies is, to me, as discordant to the designed experience as any speed mod is likely to be.

That said, and what is completely lost to me at this stage, is whether or not you were actually recommending people do that, or indeed whether or not you do that yourself for Sunless Skies specifically.

Well… It’s certainly an extremely interesting observation about how you play video games, being a critic and all. Did State of Decay 2 get 5 stars because it was actually awesome in its own right, or because you were listening to La La Land?

Oh dear. I listen to music sometimes when I read a book. I recommended The Alienist to some friends, but was that just the Mahler coming through?

And… can I even evaluate Mahler? The Alienist totally skews that too.

I don’t think that’s a good analogy as books don’t come with soundtracks, or indeed, any aesthetic qualities at all, really. The closest we could come is an argument about fonts, the quality of the paper, or something, but I don’t think it’s pertinent to the underlying text in the way the graphics, audio or music is pertinent to a videogame.

I’ll reiterate my core point here is just that I think it is hypocritical to suggest that ‘modding the travel speed is bad; it undermines the intended aesthetic’ yet also say ‘modding the soundtrack is awesome’. Whether you subjectively enjoy one type of modification over the other doesn’t change that they both are modifications.

I don’t care a whit as to whether people actually play custom soundtracks or whatever. Though in my own play I’m apparently more of a purist here than others, I rarely ever change the soundtrack. Or, for that matter, use mods. The first time through, at least.

IIRC, the speed hack does not change the underlying game mechanics because it affects everything in the game equally (e.g. opponents, economy). In other words, if choices X, Y, and Z lead to game state A without the mod, the same choices will be available and lead to the same state with the mod. It’s like the difference between playing chess by mail and chess in person.

So I think the slow speed ultimately belongs to the same category as background music: an aesthetic decision (affecting player emotions), not a gameplay decision (affecting player strategy).

Now, it’s true that some aesthetic choices are made with the expectation that emotions will interfere with strategy, e.g. making loot chests look like little girls in Bioshock. And perhaps in this game, impatience is supposed to interfere with strategy. But I think they are nevertheless aesthetic choices. An emotionless player would not even notice those design decisions.

My friend Josh doesn’t know how to savor anything. Hand him the finest, decadent confection from a world-renowned chocolatier and he’ll put the entire thing in his mouth, chew it once or twice, then swallow.

Ah, I think here’s part of where we’ve been talking past each other:

I didn’t realize you guys were talking about something that ran the game at a faster “tick rate”. I assumed a “speed hack” boosted your speed without a commensurate increase in creature speed, fuel usage, time passing, etc. So it is just like watching a movie at 1.5x. Which wreaks a fair amount of violence on the intended experience, if you care about that sort of thing. But I think I understand better what @fox.ferro was getting at, especially now that I see he’s not talking about a more direct gameplay hack.

However, I still disagree with his claim that there’s no distinction between speeding up the game and playing different music in the background. The effect on the user experience is dramatically different. Soundtracks are a more inherently flexible element of the aesthetics than the pacing, especially in videogames, where soundtracks are often a looping accompaniment with no regard for what’s actually happening onscreen. Which is NOT the case in Sunless Skies, where sometimes the soundtrack doesn’t even play. It’s a rare game that knows when to shut up! But when I switch off the music, alt-tab out to cue up Colin Stetson’s Color Out of Space soundtrack, and alt-tab back to set off for a trip across Albion, I’m not doing anything inconsistent with the designer or storyteller’s attempt to create a mood or tone. Instead, I’m making it more personally enriching to me by connecting it to other meaningful experiences I’ve had. I’m not simply changing the aesthetics because I’m impatient; I’m enriching them because I appreciate the game.

Contrast this to speeding something up. In a movie, when you watch it at 1.5x speed, movements become jerky and sound becomes higher pitched. The characters move like old timey baseball players. They sound like chipmunks. What you’re seeing and hearing is less relatable to real life. Now it takes on an absurdity it didn’t previously have. Which might not be a big deal if you’re watching Ant-Man or Battle of Five Armies. But how would it affect the experience of, say, The Father or Minari, where the universality of human experience is an important element of the story being told? Different movies have different amounts of emphasis on relatability, right?

Now let’s apply this concept of speeding up something to games. If we concede that watching a movie at 1.5x has variable impact based on the movie, isn’t the same true of games? And don’t different games place different amounts of emphasis on pacing? So isn’t it especially true that speeding up a game with a strong focus on pacing would alter the game more dramatically? Consider this:

The pacing in Sunless Sea and Sunless Skies is very deliberate, based on the concept of negative space and downtime. There’s a beat in these games, a breathing rhythm, a systolic and diastolic cadence between text and traversal, active and passive participation, tension and release, settlements and wilderness. It’s crucial to the design, storytelling, and worldbuilding.

Sunless Sea is about space. Sunless Skies is about time. Compressing space and speeding up time fundamentally alter the experience away from what the designers intended and, in my opinion, diminish the efficacy of the design, storytelling, and worldbuilding. Which is certainly your prerogative! But claiming it’s the exact same thing as playing a different soundtrack implies to me that you don’t understand the role of space and time in those game’s design, storytelling, and worldbuilding.

(I don’t mean that to sound critical, as if everyone needs to fully comprehend games that aren’t for them. And I’m not trying to glibly dismiss you for not “getting” Sunless Skies. But I am trying to explain why there’s a distinction between playing different music and speeding up the game, and it basically comes down to the game’s pace being an integral part of the experience, even if it didn’t work for some people.)

-Tom

Oscar-winning actress Olympia Dukakis died yesterday at the grand old age of 89. And Sarah Polley, who co-starred with her in the movie “The Event” and then directed her in the movie “Away From Her”, had this nugget to share regarding the just-passed actress:

Indeed, Sunless Skies understands “What’s happening right here” really, really well.

Was thinking of going with the console version of this. Other than mods, any reason to get this for PC instead? Did they do a good job with controller support on the Sea version for consoles?

For what it’s worth I really loved both of these games and I’m eagerly looking forward to the update.

I love the atmosphere and fear invoked in sunless seas. I was less wild about the content added with the submersibles, while I did recognize the improvements made in the quest system.

In comparison, Skies shines in approach-ability and the questing interface is just worlds better than what they had available in sunless seas. Somehow I found less dread, fear and wonder in the skies than I found in the seas.

I don’t want Failbetter to spend time reinventing the wheel, but I would dearly love a version of sunless seas that had the user interface/quest support of sunless skies.

They do have a new story based game in the works. I really enjoy what these folks make.

If I were going to live to be 200 years old I would totally love the slow immersive, expansive nature of the game in its default state. But my mind… it’s not normal. During the downtime my mind drifts and I think about how much I want to experience or do and how little time there is for it.

Can I get a do-over and go back to age 20?

I’ve played quite a bit of Sea on the Switch, and the actual ship controls are fine (analog left/right tank steering, d-pad up/down throttle stops IIRC), but navigating the menus is a bit cumbersome. The shoulder buttons are frequently available to swap between “tabs” in the interface, but most navigation is done by using the d-pad to snap between available mouse click targets, so there 's constant tapping of the d-pad to navigate the text adventurey segments.

I imagine that a mouse is much nicer to have, unless the tradeoff of playing on the couch or portably is worth it (which for me, it was.)

Mixed media has always had its aesthetic core. @fox.ferro if you were to change music, costumes or ballet steps in the Nutcracker Suite, which do you think would make the most difference?

Perhaps the purist would say that they are all equal.