"This is a storyline where the pay off is 100% on you and your appreciation of the story. Do not pursue it if that's not the reason that's motivating you, or you will be mad/disappointed/sad.
Thats pretty much 100% of the reason to play the game, right?
Not completely? There is definitely an appeal in the mechanics when you're starting out. A real appeal. There's things to fail, interesting consequences for failing sometimes, mystery, exploration. Novelty. Things to acquire that are useful to you, and a constantly expanding and evolving web of story options.
When you've been playing FL for years however, the illusion slowly gets stripped away. The stat grind ends. You can no longer fail 99% of the game, and even if you do, you've built up so much cushion against penalties that they're meaningless. New gear? Meaningless at 200+ stats. All that remains are the resource grinds to achieve a story end. I ground for the entirety of the Presumptuous Opportunity Card, not knowing what the pay off was. Turns out, it was nothing for someone not doing that Ambition (that I know of.)
Put another way. Once you hit the high level in Fallen London, it's like re-reading the first 99% of a book for days, months, even years on end, just so you can read the last two paragraphs of the story. Whatever climatic finish or closure you're seeking is diminished by the grind that's required to experience it. In the beginning of FL, this isn't a problem. You move from story to story at a good clip, see new things constantly, are delighted and surprised regularly. Once you hit Person of Some Importance however, the activities change. What's asked of you changes. Grinds, story-esqe grinds like Archeology in the Forgotten Quarter, open-ended grinds like Polythreme, the Carnelian Coast, Burglary, Writing Short Stories....it all just works in the opposite direction of their story goals when they make you repeat it ad nauseam.
That and I dunno. After FL and Sunless Sea, I just appreciate Failbetter's narrative style less than when I started with these things. I've talked about it a bit here and in the SS thread but, familiarity breeds contempt I guess. Failbetter deals in broad strokes, evocative imagery that manages to imply a lot and say very little. Or how every character is conceptualized as "adjective" "profession." It starts making these story endings you're grinding to achieve seem almost trite. That's not to say they can't finish a story dramatically but the vast majority of them feel like the end up in a dismissive shrug. And that's also not to say that they don't build a large world out of many interesting details and mysteries; they do. Piecing together your own understanding of what the world is about is part of the fun.....but the pieces never actually come together. They're held together by supposition, ambiguity and sometimes deliberate contradiction for narrative effect. There's just so many "tricks" to their stories and style that the deeper I got into it, the less successful those tricks were at entertaining me.
I mean, it's good enough I played a web game for years. Religiously even. But the end-game is vastly less entertaining than the early and mid game. When nothing new under the roof can happen until you pay out for Fate, and know that these are very self-contained stories, it's just not much of a motivation to keep playing.
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Topic: Fallen London : Explore Neil Gaiman's Victorian London ... in your browser! (Read 143715 times)