Sunless Skies: Sovereign Edition now has a release date!
We’re glad to announce that Sunless Skies: Sovereign Edition will be released very soon, on Wednesday 19th May. This will be the first version of Sunless Skies we release on consoles, and will also be a free major update for everyone here on Steam!
This is a greatly enhanced edition of Sunless Skies, containing all additions and improvements we’ve made to the game since launch as well as many more completely new ones. Here's a link to the trailer!
For the Sovereign Edition, we’ve reworked and extended the starvation mechanics. Captains will now find a range of increasingly dubious gastronomic options available to them as desperation grows.
We’ve improved character progression, with a new interface, a greater range of facets to define your past, and even a way for experienced captains to continue improving their capabilities after reaching the level cap.
There are also new trading opportunities to exploit, an exotic engine for your locomotive, better performance, greatly improved gamepad support, and literally hundreds of fixes and small improvements. If you’d like to know more, we’ve included a more detailed list below.
This ultimately took longer than we’d hoped, partly due to the considerable scope and partly because it turned out to be pretty difficult to achieve the level of performance optimisations we wanted. But all is now well, and we’re very glad to be able to share it with you.
We think this will be by far the best version of the game for new players, and we hope the new features and many quality of life improvements will make it exciting for the veteran captains among you, too.
Announcing Our Next Game: Mask of the Rose
For a while now, we’ve been working on a couple of new projects. Today we’re very excited to announce the first of them!
Mask of the Rose is a romantic visual novel and prequel to all our other games set in the Fallen London universe.
Here’s the trailer: https://youtu.be/QujJ4oVaFKI
Mask of the Rose takes place in 1862, mere months after London was stolen by bats. Londoners are still adjusting to life underground. The old street signs are being erased. New ministries and new festivals are being established. The mysterious Masters of the Bazaar seem to be in charge.
You share your boarding house with a few other lodgers: Archie, a medical student discovering firsthand that Death works differently here. Griselda, a close aide of the new Masters. Horatia, the landlady with a soft spot for the Neath's native inhabitants. Harjit, the local constable looking for a missing person of his own.
As you make a new life below, you may find yourself visiting the underwater ruins of Parliament; intervening in a murder trial where the victim is a witness; or steering a hooded, vocabularious Master through the subtleties of a London courtship. However you choose to live in the Neath, you have your own friendships – and your own heart – to look after.
The art of Mask of the Rose draws on Film Noir, Victorian photography and Blitz-era Britain, and is an evolution of the Fallen London universe’s painterly style, keeping the atmosphere of the original but with more detail and depth.
If you’re a fan of the Fallen London universe, Mask of the Rose offers a glimpse of events we’ve never shown before, as part of a more personal story. You will get to explore the origins of beloved characters and institutions, as well as encounter brand new mysteries. Mask of the Rose is also an excellent introduction for players just getting started with the Fallen London universe.
We’ll be running a Kickstarter campaign for Mask of the Rose in February 2021 - sign up on our Kickstarter page to be notified when the campaign goes live, and join our Discord or forums to discuss the announcement!
What about Sunless Skies Sovereign Edition?
With our porting partner, we’ve submitted builds for certification on all three console platforms. This is the process in which Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft sign off on them as ready for release. We don’t know exactly how long it will take, and it’s common for certification to throw up a few issues, but this puts us in striking distance of a release!
Much of the work on the console editions is being done by an external team who’re much more experienced with porting games than we are. We're looking forward to being able to share the fixes and performance improvements they've made with you!
New projects, plural?
That’s right! We’re working on two new projects. We can’t tell you much about the other yet, but we can say that its game mechanics are very different from our past work, and that it takes place in a new setting.
Sign up via Kickstarter to be informed as soon as the Kickstarter campaign for Mask of the Rose goes live.
#LoveIndies Review Hour
#LoveIndies celebrates indie games and the teams behind them. We started this event in 2018 by rating, reviewing and recommending our favourite indie games, and inviting our community to do the same.
This year's event takes place from the 1st to the 12th of June, with the Review Hour in the middle, on the 6th of June.
#LoveIndies Review Hour is simple: spend just an hour going through your Steam library and leaving a quick review for any indie games which you've played, but not yet reviewed or recommended! Even a couple of words is great; every review helps us so much.
If you want to participate in the rest of the celebration, which takes place on social media, here's the complete guide to #LoveIndies 2020. Feel free to share this with your friends and other indie devs who you follow. The more the merrier!
On behalf of indie developers everywhere, thank you for your support. By taking part in #LoveIndies you're really helping us to reach new players and keep making more games for you to enjoy!
LudoNarraCon 2020 is coming on 24 April!
We're very pleased to be part of LudoNarraCon for the second year running!
This is a virtual event hosted within Steam: a celebration of narrative games starring many of our own favourites, featuring developer streams and interviews, and a lovingly-curated Steam sale.
It starts at 1800 BST on Friday the 24th of April. We hope you'll be there!
Sunless Sea: Zubmariner Edition and Sunless Skies: Sovereign Edition release update
Surprise! Sunless Sea: Zubmariner Edition is coming out for Switch on 23rd April and XBox One on the 24th!
You may have heard that we’ve been working on console ports for Sunless Sea, and Sunless Skies: Sovereign Edition.
Initially we’d expected Sunless Skies: Sovereign Edition to release for PC/Switch/PS4/Xbox One first, with Sunless Sea: Zubmariner Edition following. Schedules on both projects have moved around a bit, meaning the release dates are now as follows:
Sunless Sea comes to Switch on 23rd April
Sunless Sea comes to Xbox on the 24th
Sunless Skies: Sovereign Edition comes to PC, Switch, PS4 and Xbox in August/September
We'll have more to share about the Sovereign Edition for Sunless Skies as work continues, but we hope that for now, the opportunity to return to or discover Sunless Sea is an enticing one.
See you in the dark,
Your friends,
Failbetter Games
Note: Sunless Sea: Zubmariner Edition is already available on PS4 and Sunless Sea is available for iPad.
A Year in the Life of Sunless Skies
Releasing a game is a fiddly business. There’s no giant red button you can press to launch your baby into the world. In fact, there are so many buttons that when we released Sunless Skies on January 31st last year, everybody in the office got to click at least one of them. It took about half an hour. We stood around sipping champagne out of plastic flutes, taking turns with the mouse.
That little ceremony marked the end of an arduous 17 months in Early Access, but we had no intention of stopping development. Since then we’ve released four major updates to the game, added new characters and stories, new enemies, new mechanics and innumerable smaller improvements. We’ve changed offices, changed bosses, said goodbye to old friends and welcomed new ones.
Today, a year to the day since launch, Sunless Skies has grown a great deal, and we’re not done yet. We still have a major update to release before we move onto new (and secret) things, but now feels like a good time to look back at some of the key changes in the last year...
January-March
The Undeparted now depart on death, instead of clinging tenuously to existence.
We marked launch week with a charity streaming event that raised £10,000 for the gaming charity Special Effect. Meanwhile, the first reviews for Skies - the best reviews we’ve ever had - began to arrive. We watched streamers, scoured forums for feedback and squashed many bugs.
April
Officers who'd managed to go on secondment while also staying aboard your engine will abandon their secondments and cease to infringe the laws of physics and narrative plausibility.
The first major update, Wayfarer, was focused on giving players more to see and do on their long voyages through the dark. We completely reworked the geography of Albion, the second of the game’s four regions. The Gods of the Sky made their presence felt, you could visit cosmic spectacles like the still ticking corpse of Big Ben, and leave your Officers at port to make money or cause havoc.
June
Tackety scouts have had their brandy rations rationed and should now be less of a menace to passing traffic.
The Vagabond update added a hirsute new officer of no fixed abode with his own quest, and three new enemies joined the fray; the fire-belching Tackety Liberator, the snipe-happy Ministry Monitor and the repulsive Colonised Cantankeri. Worlebury Juxta-Mere gained a new spectacle, St Anthony’s Lighthouse, and we added new stories to the existing wonders and
horrors of the sky.
Meanwhile, the conceptual entity that is Failbetter Towers shifted location - for the second time in as many years - to a swanky new office in London Bridge, where the elevators move at right angles to reality and the snack jars refill with KitKats overnight.
July
The Empyrean Outrider's projectiles no longer shed hair.
A small update granted a long-requested player feature: horns for locomotives. We’ve had more entertaining mail about this entirely useless item than anything else. Players sent us a chocolate train, a Powerpoint presentation on the importance of tooting and an actual whistle made out of wood.
September
It is now possible to leave the Now-Triumphant Priest's cottage without eating pie.
The Chiropterous Hoarder, a winged horror of profound cunning and unreliable manners, joined your crew in search of immortality. Meanwhile, the new Albion-Eleutheria Transit Relay completed the connection loop between the regions, provided you had the resources to build it.
The Hoarder update introduced brand new travel mechanics, offering the means to upgrade your engine and engage “Full Steam Mode” for jolts of expensive, dangerous speed. This particular feature was a tricky bit of coding and an even trickier bit of naming. For a while it was “Advanced Cruise Control”, until our Narrative Director drily noted that the name “does not suggest giddying speed and excitement”. We flirted with excitable words like Ultra, Nitro, Injector and even Clockwork before settling on Full Steam. The argument that streamers would *really* enjoy yelling it during moments of crisis was what tipped the scales.
November
Activating Full Steam Mode will no longer cause the Dendrified Vagabond to play a jig on his harmonica.
Finally, as the year was coming to an end, The Sky Worn Urchin joined the crew. We created this new mascot character in honour of War Child’s Armistice 2019 fundraiser.
In total, Sunless Skies has raised £17000 for charities this year.
December
Only spider-sweepers may sweep the well.
As is traditional, the Failbetter gang sacked off to visit an educational tourist attraction before our annual Christmas party. This year, we chose the rather spooky Old Operating Theatre Museum. Here we are in a room whose very walls are marinated in screams:
The Future
A captain who successfully escapes the Eaters of the Dead will no longer be endlessly haunted by the sound of their jaws.
We are currently working on features for what will most likely be the game’s final major update: the Sovereign Edition.
The Sovereign Edition will launch on Switch, PS4, Xbox One and PC. Featuring massive overhauls to controller support and character progression, new stories, enhanced trading prospects, a radial menu, tragic new options to mitigate starvation, an extremely dangerous exotic engine, and much more, it will be the definitive version of Sunless Skies.
And after that? Something new! Possibly more than one something! We can't say more just yet, but we think you’ll like what we have in store...
10 Years of Fallen London!
If you've played Sunless Sea or Sunless Skies, you might be familiar with Fallen London!
Fallen London is a text-based browser game set in a subterranean city inhabited by Victorian Londoners, talking rats, and people with the faces of squids. In the last decade, it’s grown from a handful of stories to a 2.5-million word epic with tens of thousands of monthly players.
We’d like to think that it’s remained popular for the kinds of stories we offer. Not just the weird, inventively horrifying world, but the fact that you get to act on fantastically bad ideas, from publishing horrendous poetry to feeding your soul to a cat.
To hear more about the celebrations we have in store for Fallen London's 10th birthday, follow us on Twitter or join our Discord.
Storridge's Definitely Umarked Playing Cards
In honour of our 10th birthday, we've produced some gorgeous, special edition merchandise with Gametee: Storridge's Definitely Unmarked Playing Cards! Perfect for long zee or High Wilderness voyages.
Sovereign
We're also busy working on the Sovereign update to Sunless Skies, which will be launched across PC and console.
Sovereign will feature new starvation content, trading opportunities and facets, along with a redesign of the character progression interface. It will introduce a new exotic engine, the ability to continue to raise stats after reaching the level cap and an equipment stat rebalance.
Along with fixes for outstanding bugs, performance improvements and a number of quality of life updates, it will feature a redesigned control scheme and interfaces optimised for controller support, plus a fancy radial to make UI navigation more intuitive.
Sunless Skies Patch Notes
The correct category can now always be selected when submitting bug reports.
High Wilderness inhabitants and other locomotives will now keep more distance from ports and relays.
Curators, Logoi and Eaters of the Dead are less unrelenting in their pursuit.
Various small adjustments have been made to ambient messages.
The bug report interface now includes a link to the troubleshooting guide.
Sunless Games in the Winter Sale
The longest nights of the year are upon us: the perfect time to lose yourself in the dark of Sunless Sea and Sunless Skies!
(With apologies to the southern hemisphere; they do play equally well in summer.)
Sunless Skies has a recent review score of 95% positive, and has been named a game of the year by The Washington Post, The Guardian, New Yorker, Kotaku AU, Paste and Slant. It's 50% off in the sale!
Sunless Sea is also 95% positive, with 66% off in the sale, and its expansion Zubmariner is also reduced, by 60% - it really completes the experience, so we hope you'll give it a go.
Celebrating 10 Years of Fallen London
The browser game that started it all! Fallen London, the internet's finest text-based Victorian alternative history roleplaying game is going to be ten years old on the 11th of January.
In celebration, there'll be a lot of events in-game, and competitions and other diversions for our community!
A true collector's item, these cards are equally at home in your parlour, at Zee or to pass the time in the Skies.
If you'd like to get more involved with our birthday plans, and future plans beyond that, you'd be most welcome in our official Discord.
Thank you for a phenomenal 2019. We'll see you in January!
The Skies are yours,
Failbetter Games
Urchin Update
We are proud to be taking part in War Child's annual gaming fundraiser, Armistice 2019, which encourages peaceful gameplay during the month of November to coincide with Armistice Day.
What's new in today's update
Recruit a new mascot: the Sky-Worn Urchin. Orphaned by the Winchester War, she now stows away on locomotives, intending to see every corner of the sky. If you give her a home, she’ll share what she’s learned of the heavens.
To recruit the Sky-Worn Urchin, first visit Lustrum. Then return to the sky, and watch for signs of a stowaway…
About War Child and Armistice 2019
War Child is striving for a world where children’s lives are no longer torn apart by war.
They protect, educate and stand up for the rights of children caught up in conflict. They aim to reach children as early as possible when conflict breaks out, and stay to support them through their recovery - helping to keep them safe, give them an education, and equip them with skills for the future.
The Armistice fundraiser is an annual event which includes a Steam sale. 30% off our profits from the sale (after taxes and fees) will be donated to War Child!
Some balance adjustments have been made to lateral thrust.
The highlighting and spacing on Storylet panels has been improved.
Changes to your qualities are now presented more clearly.
Storylet logging is now capped to the last few branches selected.
The left stick on gamepads now scrolls and highlights branches (you no longer have to use the left and right stick together together).
Storylet logging is now capped to the last few branches selected.
N.B. With regards to scrolling with gamepads, R3 is still used to move up to see logged branch choices and down to view long quality results. There are a few outstanding issues with R3 scrolling, in particular on non-hub bazaars. We will address these issues in a future update.
Bug fixes
Curators will no longer pursue you endlessly across the High Wilderness.
Focus can no longer be lost from the control menu when using a gamepad.
Activating Full Steam Mode will no longer cause the Dendrified Vagabond to play a jig on his harmonica.
You can no longer travel under terrain near Tiggelaar's Haunt.
Headlights will no longer pass through terrain near Prosper or New Winchester.
You will no longer collide with invisible obstacles near Braley Rock.
Sunless Skies: Sovereign Edition
Sunless Skies: Soveriegn Edition will be released for PS4, Nintendo Switch and Xbox One in the first half of 2020!
Sunless Skies: Sovereign Edition will include new content and various improvements, and will be released on PC at the same time as on console. Players who already own the game on PC will receive the Sovereign Edition for free.
It's been a great year for Sunless Skies, thanks to your support, and we're delighted to be able to celebrate it with this enhanced edition.
What's new in the Sovereign Edition?
Here's our Narrative Director, Chris Gardiner, with more detail:
“The Sovereign Edition will add new stories when your crew is starving. As their desperation grows, you’ll be able to try and eat a variety of unwise, unpleasant or tragic things. By that point, your mascot probably looks quite tasty.”
“We're overhauling the character progression user interface, and introducing a range of new Facets to define your captain's past. Perhaps you lost your soul (and found it again), or attended a seance. Perhaps you have a hobby, or are close to rats, Devils, spies or Rubbery Men. Experienced captains will be able to continue to raise their stats even after reaching the level cap, extending the late game experience.”
“We’ve made significant changes for the console versions to enable smooth and intuitive play using a controller. And there'll also be new opportunities for traders to exploit, and a new exotic engine to acquire, which skilled players in particular may find rewarding. It's a big, exciting update which we like to imagine will be the jewel in Sunless Skies' crown.”
Exciting news for Sunless Sea fans, too!
Sunless Sea: Zubmariner Edition is already available for PS4; later in 2020 it will join Sunless Skies: Sovereign Edition on Xbox One and Switch.
All of these ports are being developed in conjunction with Nephilim Game Studios, and will be published by Digerati.
We hope you're equally as excited about this news as we are!
