Sunless Sea Catch All

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So I saw a mention awhile back about Sunless Sea. I was a Kickstarter backer and have been playing the beta for a while and, since it just cleared Greenlight today and is scheduled to hit Early Access sometime next month so I figured I'd start a catch-all and post what I have.

Sunless Sea is a semi-roguelike game of exploration set on the Underzee from Fallen London. If you haven't played Fallen London then what are you wasting time reading this for? Go play it! Now! Now! I'll wait.

Fallen London

Back? Good. If you for some reason didn't check the link, Fallen London is a story-based game set in a world where the city of London was stolen by bats around the year 1862 and carried into a gigantic cavern beneath the Earth known as the Neath. It's still the capital of the British Empire except now it's just down the river from Hell. Don't worry, the devils are civilized; they even have an embassy in London now. They still want souls, of course, but they're quite happy to pay good money for them.

The reason for the theft of London (Did I say "theft"? Sorry, I didn't mean that. There was no theft. Everything is the way it should be) is that it is now the home of the Echo Bazaar. It is the fifth city to host the Bazaar.

IMAGE(http://cloud-4.steampowered.com/ugc/3317209670747013920/9EFD1E7908729865C677DCA4F965D7F20BA40A61/)

I won't go into any more details except to say that Fallen London features some absolutely amazing and evocative writing. There are hundreds of thousands of words of text and the game still has secrets that I haven't discovered.

Part of the setting is the Underzee; a vast subterranean ocean that fills most of the Neath. There are other cities and even empires out across the Underzee; the Tomb Colonies, the Khanate, the Iron Republic and others. Some of these you can visit in Fallen London while others are just mentioned.

In Sunless Sea you are a ship captain out to make your fame and fortune on the Underzee.

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If you've spent any time at Zee in Fallen London then you'll recognize a lot of places. You start at the Wolfstack docks and your first few visits will be to places that are familiar; Mutton Island, Hunter's Keep, the Tomb Colonies and the like. There are new places as well. For example, I've been out to Mount Palmerston where a group of devils and devilesses who were cast out of Hell after a failed rebellion have settled. They're looking for souls, of course.

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You start off with a small freighter and a very limited amount of Echoes (the currency of Fallen London). You have to hire crew and officers and buy upgrades for your ship (or even larger, more capable vessels) but initially you will have trouble getting enough Echoes to cover fuel and provisions for your crew.

It definitely feels like Fallen London. When you first start out your best way to gain Echoes is to ferry Tomb-Colonists up to Venderbight. You can make a little more money if you buy Prisoner's Honey in London and sell it in Venderbight. You can buy Spider Silk for the return trip. You can also sell news from London in other ports and bring "Port Reports" back to the Admiralty in London for cash.

And there are stories attached to everything. Get to Venderbight and you get the option to explore. You may find a Temple. Do you pray, make a donation or simply leave? Or, you might come across a crewmember wanting to join your crew. They want to set up an idol to a god of the Neath. Do you let them? All of the stories have various effects. You can also find stories by talking to your officers or by having them occur randomly as you explore.

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There are dangers on the sea. You can run into creatures, pirates or even warships from other nations but the main dangers are shortages of supplies and "terror". You have to buy fuel and provisions for your ship. If you run out of provisions your crew starts starving and surprisingly rapidly turns to cannibalism.

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Terror results from events (like one where I found a Snuffler among my crew) or from simply being out in the darkness away from port. When your terror gets too high bad things start happening (like having your crew start throwing themselves overboard). You can reduce Terror by carousing and the like, but that costs Echoes. (You can avoid Terror early on by hugging the shoreline and thus staying in the light but you don't make a lot of Echoes that way.)

Darkness also affects combat. You have to illuminate or otherwise find your opponent before you can attack them. They're trying to do the same to you.

IMAGE(http://cloud-4.steampowered.com/ugc/3318337133366275170/C293BAB87931E2D1ED3D6F26798FC4A989EBFDAA/)

It is a roguelike so when you die you start over. They do have a mechanic that allows you to pass on a "legacy" from one character to the next. The portions of the map beyond the immediate vicinity of London will eventually be randomized but at the moment it is fixed (to make it easier to test).

At the moment it is still very obviously a beta. It works for the most part but a lot of it is just placeholders at the moment. Also only a few of the storylets are in place. But there's enough here to make me look forward to the full game. Check it out when it hits Early Access if you want.

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And feel free to friend me up in Fallen London. I'm PaleoGamer over there.

Official Site

I backed the Kickstarter!

Also, Emily Short is guest-writing an island in the game.

Yes, I've been to Station III. It's interesting but I haven't unlocked the whole story there yet...

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I had seen this and then lost track of it. Just purchased it! Thanks for reminding me about it.

tanstaafl, you're posting about Sunless Sea but the only link you provided in the OP was for Fallen London.

Anyway, I liked Fallen London, so I'm eagerly awaiting the proper release of this.

I'm waiting on the full release too. I'm mostly there for the story bits, so I want all of those to be in and all finalized and stuff before I play it.

garion333 wrote:

tanstaafl, you're posting about Sunless Sea but the only link you provided in the OP was for Fallen London.

Anyway, I liked Fallen London, so I'm eagerly awaiting the proper release of this.

I hadn't thought to link to anything because the game isn't even on early access yet. They've just said the Humble store version is going up on June 17 but they're still doing the "digital paperwork" with Valve for the Steam release.

I probably should have linked to their site though...

http://sunlessseagame.com/

Boy, you really know how to sell a game. I'm really interested in this now and I just signed up for Fallen London.
Thank you!

Fallen London is great. Feel free to send your card through to davet010, a 'magnificent and perilous' gentleman.

I liked Fallen London, but the energy mechanic kind of pushed me away. I'd do stuff for a while, then get to a point where I really needed to raise stats to move to the next batch of stuff, so I'd spend all my energy grinding the same storylets. Then I'd forget to go back in the next day to grind some more, and I fell off the wagon. I love the writing and the world, but wish it wasn't an energy-based thing. Maybe it's improved in the two years since I played though.

The look of this game is intriguing- really curious to read some first hand feedback about the game.

Both games look good, so I've joined Fallen London for now. Feel free to leave your calling card for Tamron, at the widow's guest room.

I hit the content cap in Fallen London a while back (when it was much lower) so I'm a bit lost getting back into it now. So I don't know how active I'll be. But if you look up Inevitable Gremlin, you'll find me.

Sunless Sea is now available on steam. Steam keys have appeared on the humble bundle page, as well.

Also, I am "Toddland" in Fallen London

davet010 in Fallen London. And I'm a Watcher - always been a sucker for the Great Game.

RPS talks about the Steam release

They seem to like it

It is, as I’d hoped and expected, beautifully written and intelligently constructed, although the transition (from) browser-based (mostly) text adventure to top-down trading, fighting, exploration game hasn’t been quite as smooth as the glassy lakes of Titan. The leaks in the hull are easily corked though and the ship is a magnificent thing despite its flaws.

It caught my interest when I saw it pop up on Steam today, so I took the dive. I won't have time to jump in until this weekend or Monday night next week. Considering doing a twitch stream too if anyone's interested in seeing what it might be like.

This has been a bit disappointing. I've only played a bit of Fallen London but surprisingly, there's way more to do in it. There are barely any interactions on islands in this and those are fairly shallow compared to Fallen London. I've heard people mention trading as an option in this game but I've never seen anything but fuel and supplies for sale anywhere outside London and I've seen what Im pretty sure is most of the available content.

There are lots of cool boats and parts of boats but I cant scrounge enough echoes doing admiralty missions and die to every pirate I run into, so Im stuck with all starter equipment.

A fair complaint, though Fallen London is the result of years of gradually layered content and Sunless Sea is still in Early Access.

According to the road map, the fiction portion is only 38% complete. There's a ways to go.

Yeah, that's understood. I just expected a little more fun for some reason. The raw mechanics of Fallen London's storytelling hold more promise than that of Sunless Sea, I think, and I guess that's what has me concerned my money might not have been well spent. I did spend some for a month of subscribing to Fallen London though, and am enjoying that in the meantime.

Fallen London is really keen. What I've found in Sunless Sea so far is that in order to progress story, I'm having to ferry a lot of things back and forth. I wish there was more to it, but once I got a rhythm down with exploring, I found it was pretty easy to unlock progress in stories, and even found a few hidden things. So here's how some of the story mechanics seem to work: when you discover enough secrets, you get a notification that something awaits you in port. The next place you dock should have an extra storylet to explore, which in turn unlocks other things. Some places seem to need the state you get from reading your newspaper in your lodgings. Try going back to the three sisters after reading the paper. If you visit them a few times, other things happen, progressing their story. A lot of the mechanics are obfuscated by the opaque way story is handled.

My next goal in game is to earn enough echoes to upgrade my lodgings in order to be able to write a will, which I expect will allow me to continue after death with everything I had. This will allow me to progress further in each story. I'm about 200 echoes away from this.

I'm not sold on the combat, yet, either. Because the rest of the exploration is action based, it was jarring to be thrust into a turn based combat scenario where you goal is to illuminate your opponent enough so that you could destroy them. It's not very ituitive. It sticks to the fiction, but it took me a while to wrap my head around what they were trying to achieve. I'm curious to see whether it changes at all.

I like the core of it so far, but I think I'll hold off on playing more until it's more developed.

Here's some interesting updates, addressing some of the standing issues:

- We're still on target for the Emerald release next week. The headline feature on this is map-shuffling - you'll also see new islands, new sound effects, and a great many bug fixes and chunks of implemented feedback.

- Combat is the least successful part of the game right now - we know that. Some people are fine with it; some people think it needs tweaking; some people hate it. We always knew it needed work, but we think, now, we're going to spend a big chunk of August focusing specially on combat experience, balance, and beastie pathfinding. This will be a separate release - so it will delay subsequent releases, and push the final release date of the game out by 3-4 weeks. This isn't ideal for us, but we want to do this right, and we want you to know we are listening carefully to feedback.

I'm really glad to see that. This game has so much potential, but the combat system is currently really rickety. Workable, but kind of lame.

So, okay, we said, let’s go one more time round the reasons we don’t do ship combat in real time on the map, bearing in mind that it is of course impossible and we shouldn’t do it.

Two hours later, we’d decided that it wasn’t impossible, and we should probably do it.

Two days later, we’d run the numbers, done a bit of prototyping, and we’re going to do it!

Combat in SUNLESS SEA will still be gently paced not frantic, still be pausable, still involve light and darkness. But it’s going to occur right on the main map, with the primary game systems plugged into it, not in a turn-based secondary card game.

And there is the first inkling of the new combat system. A step in the right direction for this product, I daresay.

They would do fine to copy the best parts of games like Pirates! and that Sony Pirate MMO game I cant remember the name of. "Sony Pirate MMORPG" I think it was called.

Even Assassin's Creed pirate combat is basically the same, and would work top down.

polypusher wrote:

"Sony Pirate MMORPG" I think it was called.

Or possibly it was called Pirates of the Burning Sea. You were close.

Cannot participate in thread [size=8]la la la not listening[/size] because of crap old computer, but denizens of Fallen London are encouraged to "hit me up," as the kids say, to exchange names for social actions.

What's your name in Fallen London? I play during work, so I'm on most days.
My name is Taharka.

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