Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Egan_BW]

I like the sounds of most of those things.

Romance!

[nenjin]

I'll be interested to see what his price points are. Unless there's more effort going in to these legacies than we've seen so far.....not a lot of room for what you pay vs. what you get. But it's nice to see all the improvements to core gameplay elements. Clearly there was a lot they wanted to do but that didn't fit the launch window.

[thegoatgod_pan]

I am surprised more ambitions isn’t listed. Starts are neat, but ultimately they don’t matter much—aspirant or bright young thing, you are still going to earn money via lawfirm or more likely painting—I was expecting new victory paths based on lore other than Chalice, Lantern and Forge.

E.g. Winter calls for a different path, an apocalyptic suicide cult, etc. while Edge cults are described in lore as pursuing ascension by kidnapping and eating Longs—both seem readymade for a victory path/ambition.

Then again, the “Long Hunt” victory sounds literally like the Edge ambition I am describing, so maybe the devs are way ahead of me there

[nenjin]

Dancer DLC releases October 16th.

Dev blog about it: http://weatherfactory.biz/september-3-tennyson/

Alexis finished off romance and is finishing rivals today. Romance is dastardly with a surprisingly sugary finish (I wrote a v smol amount of the content! Alexis says my writing is ‘noticeably more feminine’ and then returns to his study to idk hew some rocks with a raw steak 💪). The design he’s settled on is elegant, especially when romancing your Followers comes with a natural minefield:

    how do you ensure your cultists have consent, when the system’s set up to let the player pull the levers?
    how do you write convincingly apophenic romance scenes, when you never specify your gender or preferences? cf all of Alexis’s previous work.
    how do you mechanically fit trysts, lover’s tiffs and (this is CS, after all) romantic tragedies into the overall schema and balance of the game? We had to cannibalise the Season of Serenities for the Season of Ardours, for example.

Well, Alexis bloody went and did it cos he’s dreamy. I’m a big fan of the final design, and I hope you will be, too.

Rivals are… well, YOU BRING THEM ON YOURSELVES, shall we say. It introduces a new way to lose, because there weren’t enough of those in Cultist already. More significantly, it also introduces some new problems to manage as you scrabble not only to achieve your own desires but to do so quickly enough that your traitorous underling doesn’t achieve their ascension earlier.

Or you could just send a Hint after them, I guess.

Finally, some consequences to horrible staff management.

The Dancer DLC will come with a bunch of new achievements – some for Dancer-only ascensions, then a whole nother 21 cheevos for each of your romanceable Followers. Good luck with that.

Phew! All that’s missing now is that new, shiny art to replace all those placeholder images. Lemme just go find our artist and throttle her for leaving it so late.

Also Moth and Heart Ascensions are part of the package.

TBH, I don't like the sound of rivals. You know what Cultist Simulator didn't need? Another Doom Clock. Minions are not inexhaustible, there's a finite supply. So having to race to finish, assuming you know how to do that, and being forced to dispose of a finite resource so it doesn't end your game sounds....unfun to me. If it's just one minion that becomes a rival and that's that, it's fine. If you get a new rival every time you dispose of the previous one, then it's going to get on my nerves.

Romances and yadda yadda I honestly am not interested in, but at least it's fleshing out your activity list a little bit. I got the Perpetual Edition, so, I'll get it regardless.

[MCreeper]

NECROOO!
Did this become more playable with patches?

[ndkid]

NECROOO!
Did this become more playable with patches?

Eh. Even in the early days, I don't think I ever had the experience of it being unplayable. The question of whether it's _fun_ is tougher for me to answer. I feel like the additional content they've added has helped a little... cultists get wounded rather than dying immediately when the RNG hates you. But, fundamentally, most of the gameplay still feels to me like trying a thing and seeing whether the RNG hates you or not. ("Oh, you want to combine those lores, and have both some erudition and glimmering saved up? I'm going to ask you for reason first, and only ask you for erudition after its expired. Hope you can generate more without using study!")

[nenjin]

Short answer is: it's still pretty much the same game.

Finally did get my first win after about 80 hours with the game. Mostly because I was more interested in seeing everything (especially the expeditions) than just going straight for a win.

Rivals only happen if you raise one of your cultists up to the highest level. So you can go most of the game without running in to them. (You can actually finish the game without ever recruiting anyone.)

Love interests are a thing now. Nothing too deep.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Heart folks want to bang heart folks, lantern folks want to bang lantern folks. Within that you need to find an activity that the specific cultist would enjoy, which also generally follows their chosen aspect. Once that's done, you can smash for some contentment during the season of romance, and you may get like a fleeting memory or something out of the experience as well.

He's also added the beta stage of "New Cult+".

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

It's a legacy where you pick up where your cult leader left off after their ascension. Now you play a (hitherto unknown) acolyte of the previous character. Your previous leader is now a card you can do stuff with, and you start in the old cult right off the bat. A couple of your cultists from your previous play through show up at random, too. The gist of this playthrough is the old cult leader ascended, but not all the way. Now there are other Adepts or Knows or Whatever Alexi Calls Them who are dead set on NOT letting your cult leader ascend all the way up. So your cult leader gives you a set of cryptic instructions to help them with their final ascension, meanwhile these other adepts are hatching plots and schemes to prevent that from happening. I didn't get anywhere with a new playthrough and it's still in beta testing, but if one playthrough wasn't enough for you, there's a second available with new wrinkles.

Other than that there's the Dancer DLC. Which provides a slightly different path to ascension than the normal professions.

He's also currently working on making researching lores less of a pain in the ass than it is now. (The exact situation described above.) Not sure when that will come out.

[ndkid]

He's also currently working on making researching lores less of a pain in the ass than it is now. (The exact situation described below.) Not sure when that will come out.

I think this is the part that's always surprised me the most, because the system seems like it would allow way more interesting mechanics than they've implemented. Almost no books provide multiple lores, and reading books never makes you crazier. I feel like books that give lots of one lore, and a little of other lores, and/or books that give you lore *and* dread/fascination when you read them would be way more thematic. Similarly, rather than having the RNG bone you on research and making it just make the game longer, do something more interesting with it... make the results of research less consistent, let other cultists help you research (voluntarily or not), have the ability to do something notorious to increase research/lore, have negative mental states come from research...

[forsaken1111]

There are several books that give you dread/fascination when you read them now, I ran into one that gives dread and it nearly ended my playthrough as it just so happened I was already at 2 dread and attempting to pay that down before losing

[nenjin]

Yeah, some books do include that stuff. And some do give multiple lores.

The thing he's envisioning is that breaking down lores or combining lower level ones will be almost instantaneous, no futzing about with glimmering or whatever.

The higher level ones will require something special. Perhaps you need a cultist to help, or an occult artifact, or some other weird influence.

[Chiefwaffles]

So, multiple things of note, both from this article:

1.) A successor has been announced, Book of Hours. You play as a librarian in possession of occult books, taking delivery of and organizing these books, talking with visitors and giving them what they need. It's meant to be much more "chill" than Cultist Simulator; with a co-founder of Weather Factory describing it as "spooky hygge" and Kennedy stating:

We want you to feel that you're in a familiar room with the rain rattling on the roof and the firelight playing on the old leather spines of the books, but also that there's a storm getting up outside and the sea's smashing on the rocks and if you open the wrong book you might see something you really regret.

Weather Factory has apparently expanded to a full team since Cultist Simulator and is described as a "fully-fledged game" set in the same setting of Cultist Simulator. A setting they're now calling the "Secret Histories". Looks like it's planned to use the same base card mechanics of Cultist Simulator, but with a lot of changes and additions.



2.) Cultist Simulator Anthology Edition. Releasing "now" though on steam it says May 30th. It brings with it two DLCs: The Priest and The Ghoul. Both have some interesting content, but you should just look at the steam pages linked rather than me giving a  blurb here.

[nenjin]

I'm sold.

[Chiefwaffles]

Apparently it has a steam page already, cool.

Its blurb:

BOOK OF HOURS is an elegant, melancholy, combat-free RPG set in an occult library, from the makers of BAFTA-nominated Cultist Simulator and the creator of Fallen London and Sunless Sea.

Shutter the windows against the sea. Bank the fire against the cold. Listen to the rain rattle on the roof, while you slide books one by one into their ancient nests. For five centuries, the library of Hush House was a fortress of knowledge... until the fire. The collection is ruined, and the Librarian is dead. Your unique talents make you fit to rebuild the collection.

ACQUIRE occult books, by purchase or more underhand means, and STUDY them to solve the setting's mysteries. RESTORE books to address the ravages of time, or PURIFY them to remove their curses and shadowy taints. Enjoy the sweet peace of indexing and cataloguing books to the order you desire, building a library to be proud of, while you defend it against storm, fire, theft and the occasional theoplasmic assault.

And GUIDE the visitors who come seeking your assistance, to choose their paths and stories. Give one uncanny seeker the knowledge they need to rob a tomb; sabotage another's intrigues; or convince a third to stay home with a nice book of poetry. The Librarian's influence extends far beyond the walls of Hush House... and it's up to you to determine how history is written.

BOOK OF HOURS is a rich, non-linear story about the terror and majesty of books, and about alphabetical order.

Some more images. Additional stuff on the steam page, as well.

(Above image looks to be more of a UI design/mockup, as closer look shows that the cards are all from Cultist Simulator. While they'll probably share stuff like Reason and whatnot, I fully doubt that the cards will be this similar)

[Biowraith]

Wait, the librarian thing is actually going to be a real game?  I thought that was just them joking about on social media or something.

[Cruxador]

So, multiple things of note, both from this article:
1.) A successor has been announced, Book of Hours. You play as a librarian in possession of occult books, taking delivery of and organizing these books, talking with visitors and giving them what they need. It's meant to be much more "chill" than Cultist Simulator; with a co-founder of Weather Factory describing it as "spooky hygge" and Kennedy stating:

We want you to feel that you're in a familiar room with the rain rattling on the roof and the firelight playing on the old leather spines of the books, but also that there's a storm getting up outside and the sea's smashing on the rocks and if you open the wrong book you might see something you really regret.

Weather Factory has apparently expanded to a full team since Cultist Simulator and is described as a "fully-fledged game" set in the same setting of Cultist Simulator. A setting they're now calling the "Secret Histories". Looks like it's planned to use the same base card mechanics of Cultist Simulator, but with a lot of changes and additions.

Well, this concept definitely suits the system better than the initial one. As for the screenshot (or mockup or whatever) I appreciate that they've got items which aren't cards, that was something I thought was a big bit of missed potential in the first game. Instead of cards with books and items on them setting on your table, just have the items, you know? But then in addition to the books on the table there's a card with a book on it, so who knows what's going on there. Hopefully the full team allows them to do things thoroughly, but we'll see.

Well, I think the main missed potential was narrative anyway. Having generic secrets instead of properly drafting out the cults and writing a fuller system just didn't work well in my opinion. Similarly, it would be nice if the mentioned interviews are more of a Papers Please thing and not just "stick the person's dossier in the interview box". But either way, give me some text to read. I know Alexis Kennedy can write text. It's like, his thing. So come on.