We're a bit vague about release dates for new content, because we're such a lean and frantic operation that it's often hard to know when we'll be done. Especially when we come over experimental. But we do have a big fat blurt in the pipeline, so I thought I'd post about it.
We went live with Mrs Plenty's Most Distracting Carnival. This is quite a departure from other areas: a smorgasbord of little fun snippets rather than the usual ladder to climb. As such it's an experiment. Props to @goatdance, who was creative lead on it and did most of the work, and to @emilystaubert, who is entirely to blame for Madame Shoshana. The early-access pass is also an experiment in revenue generation, so feedback on both the carnival and the pass are welcome. (We will possibly be dropping the price of the early access pass as we get closer to March - this depends on takeup, but we're as interested in data as in income on this really).
We have the first part of Book 2 nearly ready to go. This goes up to around 84, but again, we're experimenting with some different patterns for play on a couple of the paths, so the upper limit isn't as straightforward or obvious as it has been in some other cases... We'll probably run an early-access scheme on this too, but it should be open to the public well before the end of February.
If you've been following @huffam_esq, @mr_wines and so forth, you'll know that the Feast of the Exceptional Rose is just around the corner. This is Fallen London's take on Valentine's Day. I want to use it to road-test some enhancements to social actions that I've had bubbling away for a while. That should run, er, from Valentine's Day.
And the Ambitions are getting love. We need to go careful on these, because they tie so significantly into major background secrets and we try to make the prose a bump more sophisticated than the standard storylets, but you should soon be closer to satisfying your Heart's Desire and your need for revenge.
A more general point about upcoming content. We have arcs sketched out up until around 240 along each of the main tracks; we expect Ambitions to run up to about 150. All this is tentative and depends on player growth and enthusiasm. If we only manage a small hard-core of long-term players we'll end the arcs sooner; if we get a big long-term audience then we'll probably keep adding content until everyone's bored or dead. We do have some extreme ideas at the very top end that I think it's fair to say no-one has really ever done in a game, and I'm very, very keen for those to see the light of day.
One last point on that. You've probably noticed that the cost of increasing a Quality is the next level: 38 to go from 37 to 38, 39 to go up one more level, and so forth. The thought of a grind that required 100 or 200 change points to increase a stat has long made me a little ill. A couple of weeks ago we decided to take a stand on this, and capped the cost of increasing qualities at 50: that is, it will cost you 50 to go from 49 to 50, 50 to go from 50 to 51, 50 to go from 159 to 160, and so forth. I *hope* we will gain in player enthusiasm more than we lose in Fate sales at high levels - but more than that, the goal with Echo Bazaar was always to build a casual but compelling storytelling experience, not a straightforward grind game. We'll be looking at more ways to approach that ideal in the months to come.
-- Alexis