I totally see the criticism about abstractness. My favourite moments so far have been in failing terribly or narrowly succeeding in very unlikely one-off card events. I know that tactically if I want to get nicer lodgings and (I presume) be able to hold more cards at any given time, then I should grind cat catching or the poetry storylets, but I’m more interested in the one-off events.
Tactics never (much) enter into it … After a while, once you get your sea-legs (if you stick around; it takes a few turns) you may find that you begin picking goals of your own (rather than the goals provided) and at that point, goal-seeking begins to produce some (small) satisfaction, but never very much, IMO.
For me at least, the sense of character definition became a genuine thing maybe five days in, but the real draw is the sketch-by-sketch worldbuilding. As a sandbox game, though (and it really is very sandboxy) I think everyone will find something a bit different in it (or nothing at all, as the case may be).
Fallen London is about grinding, but it does have story.
Hello all. Ta for the feedback.
Abstractness: that drops off later. There are a lot of long, highly-specific, non-repeatable stories. It never completely goes away, because we wanted some stories to be repeatable, and because the inspiration for the very early game was the tradition of Facebook grind RPGs: and that’s still in the bones of the beast.
The grinding. Guilty. At its best it works as a mechanism for drip-feeding and preventing burnout. At its worst it’s left over from the original grindy inspirations, and it does help us keep the servers on. It was very hard to judge pacing when we were still learning how all this works. I know it drives some people crazy. We’re toning it down for subsequent games, but FL (all 750K words of it) is much too big to retool.
Night Circus. The nature of the brief was that it was supposed to a a meandering, directionless sort of experience - but that, we realised eventually, was a problem in itself. And we’ve realised since that a purely random card draw, without any pinned / static cards, is just zero-choice design. There’s some stuff we’re proud of in there, though (not least the art direction).
You know we’re opening up the platform for this, basically now? http://signup.storynexus.com/ It doesn’t really allow rich interaction between cards, so I don’t know how much of an Ascension-y game you could put together. But we’d be delighted to see something like that.
(edit: typo)
But we tell stories like this all the time. When a king offers a brave little tailor half his kingdom, we don’t generally object that the particular kingdom is not specified, and nor is the precise acreage entailed by the contract. While Grimm contains few artists’ models, it has plenty of love-objects that are just as abstract. The parable of the workers in the vineyard does not name any of its characters, or show us anything of the flesh and blood of labour negotiations; and when we read The Trial we are not meant to understand that Josef K is contending with a real legal system that could be quite clearly understood, had he only access to a better lawyer. In many kinds of stories, specifics are a red herring: when we’re told that Samson killed a thousand Philistines with the jawbone of an ass, we’re misreading if we ask who counted the bodies, or how the jawbone failed to shatter over so many blunt impacts. This doesn’t make any of them bad stories, or non-stories; it makes them stories of a different kind.
(Specific characters do, in fact, crop up in Echo Bazaar, although they’re almost never given names.)
To my mind, the point is that the modrons understand human story-telling techniques all too well, structurally speaking, but aren’t very good at the veneer. (There’s an advert in the background of a Buck Godot comic, where aliens are trying to sell human-style food to humans: “Fat! Salt! Sugars! Alcohol! We know what you like!” The joke isn’t that humans don’t like fat, salt, or alcohol; it’s that we prefer them delivered a little more artfully than that. Sometimes that means more specific flavours! But equally, it can mean something that’s just fats and sugar, beautifully made.)
Now, admittedly, one side-effect is that this makes Echo Bazaar, like many videogame narratives, a story about someone who, at best, is emotionally distant and doesn’t really have friends, and at worst a sociopath. (Reading Against Nature is a pretty good preamble to Echo Bazaar-ing.) But it’s very hard to accomplish anything else in a CRPG-like setup! Anybody who can show me a CRPG NPC who functions primarily as a friend gets approximately a million points. (Like Planescape:Torment, Echo Bazaar is pretty good at making a virtue out of a constraint.)
Finally, an entire chapter from one of my very favourite books:
Echo Bazaar isn’t a very good story in the sense of an histoire, a relation of particular people and specific incidents. It’s a perfectly good carousel of fantasies, though.
1 Like
Precisely this. And I really should finish Torment someday … I keep re-buying it with intent …
My friend Tim once sat staring at a potato chip: “A slice of potato isn’t really interesting. But turn it into a delivery mechanism for salt and fat? Bam.”
Sure, the unstated assumption of my argument was that if Fallen London is going for any kind of storytelling, it is going for what we may perhaps call psychological storytelling. That is not the only kind, and not necessarily the best kind. But I didn’t see any traces of parable, or myth, or what-have-you in the narration, so the assumption seemed warranted.
Though it may not, in fact, be true.
(Note that Calvino is very different from Fallen London: he doesn’t follow the structures of story at all when he is painting his cityscapes.)
As you get into higher levels in Fallen London, there’s a definite sense (at least, I got it) that your character is not so much an actual, literal person as a walking legend, about as concrete as Sweeney Todd (a little less abstract than Spring-heeled Jack, but of the same water.) And the detachment from tokens (individual instances of a storylet) heightens the sense of types. For me, at least. But I agree that this sense doesn’t kick in for a while.
To put it another way: it’s not so much a story about a blackguard who seduces an artist’s model, as it is a reminder that Fallen London is the sort of city in which artist’s models are seduced by blackguards.
1 Like
I’m interested to know what people think of the gameplay UI. When I tried it out the flow felt poorly organized, which turned me off to the game in general.
Am I just spoiled by text interpreters 
.
it’s been a while, but I remember feeling that the UI was pretty frustrating. The main issue I recall is with the tabs: I remember clicking on a tab to try to find something interesting to do, and then returning to the tab I was just in, I’d find that the content that had been there before was changed. Perhaps you get used to this, but I felt as though the affordances for interaction thoroughly unpredictable.
I just recently started playing this again, since I’m teaching it in a class; if anyone wants to be my delicious friend, my associated Twitter name is @ObservantRumin.
Ok, it’s been a few days, and I’ve come to some reflections. Actually, this might read somewhat as a reiteration of what others have already said, but nevertheless:
Oh Glob! The Grinding
At the start, I was content to dabble in storylets in a undirected fashion. But after a while that wasn’t enough and I set myself some longer term goals. I decided that I’d like to go to university, and for that I needed higher watchfulness. It was then that I discovered that ventures require you to repeat the same storylets, sometimes upwards of a dozen times. This is not a good game design decision at all. If I have to reread the same content, I’ll skim read. If I skim read once then I’ll skim read again, and soon the whole reading experience is undermined.
Drip Feeding
At first I didn’t mind the limited action points. But then I became invested in what I was doing. Now it’s got to the point where I’ll switch over to the Fallen London tab, play the action that I wanted to play 10 minutes earlier, and most of the time it won’t be an action I’m actually interested in as it’s only a means to some future end. This has the unfortunate consequence that most of my interactions with the game are marked by ambivalence and impatience.
Oh the Stuff!
I love all the dozens of different qualities and kinds of qualities the character can have, and the variety and varying intensity of these qualities helps flesh out the idea of the character. I have the most fun tinkering with inventory items, and selling things at the bazaar to buy other things so that I can unlock inventory-related actions. This is fun because it takes some thought, requires taking calculated risks (am I going to need these diamonds later? What about all this rostygold?), and there’s a nice sense of pay-off when you get a fortunate result after juggling a whole load of resources, even if you just end up with a shed load of memories of distant shores that you can’t do anything with yet.
Varying Contact Contacts
There are loads of different contacts that you can have, which is a great feature for making the game feel richer and larger. The downside is that, as poor luck would have it, I rarely have the right kinds of contacts for any given contacts-requiring storylet. Like, I’ve got Connected: the Duchess coming out of my ears, but I’ve yet to see a storylet that needs it. Also, the way in which I’m connected is very abstract. Like, I’ve clearly never actually met the Duchess, yet I’ve met loads of Bohemians, and both of these are very high connections for me. It really seems to be tracking reputations among certain groups and individuals rather than any interpersonal connection.
Gold In Them There Hills
Despite the frustrations, Fallen London is a compelling world, the writing is a constant draw and I really do want to uncover some of the many mysteries of the setting. More than that, when it becomes available, I’m seriously tempted in having a go at making a game with the Story Nexus toolset. Like the Varytale stories, I think there’s a lot of mileage in this Quality-Based Narrative approach, and I’m looking forward to seeing what else comes out of it.
My wife told me about a somebody who was listening to some crime novel audio book, who was really surprised and confused about all the flashbacks and parts told out of sequence. Eventually she realized she accidentally had the audio player on random.
I don’t know, I just thought that was pretty cute. Fallen London is not really like that, but it is a funky platform. What’s most fascinating is that it feels like they’re not really using the platform to its full advantage. The storytelling could be better (like, maybe some actual characters you’d care about?), and the gameplay could also be better… But even so, I’m still playing it.
Yeah, I think they’re on to something. Or is it just the crazy world building that’s good? I’m not sure.
Reviving the thread - I’ve just begun a character there (name of Teaspoon, funnily enough.) and enjoying myself so much I’ve already bought a subscription.
Anyone else here currently playing this?
There are a lot of awesome community games on Storynexus if you want to check them out.
storynexus.com/s
I’m playing it! It’s my favourite way to waste time during boring office hours - the game is wonky and grindy and full of problems, I know, but I love the setting and the community is full of nice people.
My character is Daniel. Send him chess invitations, he likes to play.
Admittedly I’m only dipping into it now to see what they’ve done with Seeking Mr Eaten’s Name. Otherwise… so much grinding, and it was hard for me to keep track of storylines. (Though I liked the Jack of Smiles story.) (I found Sunless Sea more compact and with stronger storylines, tbh)
I’m, surprisingly enough, Verity Virtue on there.