(SPOILERS) On a Lack of Variety of Replayability After Achieving an Ending

[NC31]

I must say that as a fan of Cultist Simulator front-to-back, I am a little disappointed that there's no NG+ cycle to the game. The Apostle routes in CS were the highest points of the game for me, second only to Exile. Seeing as the last few news posts have told us that Weather Factory has more or less put BoH on the shelf, I doubt substantial change to the game loops will be coming, and that's genuinely a good deal saddening. Sure I could loop through the same House House and the same books an unfortunate number of times to get each flavor of Librarian ending, but they're more like sprinkles rather than new scoops, to use a clunky allegory.
I can't be the only one who feels this way, right? I know BoH is fundamentally a gentler, different kind of Secret Histories experience, but it feels so teasing and disappointing for there to be a 13th Librarian slot and all it's for is transporting one item to a new game.

[ForestMagi]

A.K. has said that Book of Hours wasn't designed to be a game you play through multiple times to see all the endings, the way Cultist Simulator was; the thing you've spoilered there seems to have been meant as a neat little bonus to kick-start a second run if you wanted to do so, but he never intended for people to do dozens of runs as a matter of course.

Even with House of Light, I think the intent is to make an "ideal" Institute, and be satisfied with one or two endings.

[HeadsetRuler]

Yeah, I agree wholeheartedly

[Lukewarm]

Lesson Learned: Early Accesses and Early Feedbacks.

Many great ideas surfaced when the game was basically done. The next time we'll get our hands on their next game, we should do our best to speedrun the game and see what kinds of deficiencies it has on the macro level, and hurry with the feedback.

[AK]

We had a six-month beta! But as ForestMagi said, play-once was the intention from the start. I wanted people to be able to play once for 40+ hours, feel they were done, and be able to step away.

This is the exact opposite of CS, and so we get and will continue to get people who love BH and don't like CS, and people who love CS and don't like BH ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Or at least like you folks are disappointed by the lack of replayability. If you lean hard into an approach, you always disappoint someone.

We'll be talking more about Game Three soon, but I can say that it's designed to have some replayability, but not to the roguelite degree of CS. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis.

[NC31]

Messaggio originale di AK:

We had a six-month beta! But as ForestMagi said, play-once was the intention from the start. I wanted people to be able to play once for 40+ hours, feel they were done, and be able to step away.

Firstly, thank you for the direct reply, and for your work over the years. I've been enjoying your creations since the Fallen London days (though I missed the Seeker saga in real-time, at the very least I'll always have Paris). Secondly, I will say that you accomplished the completeness you were looking for in BoH. With every book in hand, every incident attended to, a frankly overwhelming number of varied salons, and every secret of Hush (eventually) weeded out, I felt a greater sense of holistic understanding at the ending than I did in Simulator's routes.

Messaggio originale di AK:

This is the exact opposite of CS, and so we get and will continue to get people who love BH and don't like CS, and people who love CS and don't like BH ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Or at least like you folks are disappointed by the lack of replayability. If you lean hard into an approach, you always disappoint someone.

I thoroughly enjoyed both games in their own rights. What I think it comes down to is a sort of informational whiplash coming from the underground figures of CS to the sanctioned Librarian of Hush House. Becoming Long, exalting an Apostle, or achieving a DLC's principle-themed ending left the player with a bevy of information, but heavily canted the information towards the shape of the ending, given their (largely) Mansus-unsanctioned paths.

Meanwhile, by nature of being exempt from Calyptra, the Librarian enjoys a much wider and all-encompassing, if largely impersonal, view of the Secret Histories. While the lore overall is much the same from game to game (with the exception of Nowhere, the Carapace Cross, and the Second Dawn being much expanded upon in BoH), the particular flavor of that information is different between the two. It is comparable to one being who reads most every book and scrap of information on surviving the wilderness, yet never sets foot outside a city, while another one is born into the woods and must learn by trial and the occasional oral scrap and treasured trinket of other wood-born survivors. I suppose I, and some others, enjoyed the latter flavor more than the former, though both are well-layered and developed.

Messaggio originale di AK:

We'll be talking more about Game Three soon, but I can say that it's designed to have some replayability, but not to the roguelite degree of CS. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis.

I wait with bated breath for Game Three. I know I'm jumping the gun here (frankly, gunpowder has, metaphorically, barely been invented at this point), but the pre-alpha screenshot much reminds me of Disco Elysium's formatting and dialogue system, another literary-based game that I adore greatly. I wonder if it will be an even more personal experience of the Secret Histories world than CS offered, more removed than BoH, or somewhere between. However it turns out, if it's to the same quality as CS, BoH, or your works before them, it will be fantastic to experience.

[AK]

Very much appreciated, @nc31, thank you! :)


>Meanwhile, by nature of being exempt from Calyptra, the Librarian enjoys a much wider and all-encompassing, if largely impersonal, view of the Secret Histories.

You're right of course. If I'd written BH and then CS, the CS experience would have been much less compelling (not that I could have done that anyway! because the setting expanded considerably n the five years since CS launched)

re: your original point on the 13th slot. Ths is one of those things (like the frankly insane number of endings) where I thought I was adding a nice bonus but ended up miscueing the player. It occurred to me that there should probably be a niche for the twelfth Librarian because people would want to roieplay. And then if there was a twelfth there should be a thirteenth, because it implies hopeful continuity and allows people to make a headcanon or RP statement about the library's future (the statement is usually 'cat' of course). And then I thought it would be a really sweet Easter egg to carry over the niche choice, and it took months for that to become public knowledge. But when it finally did, it came across as a tease! Well, it's all experience points.

re: your last comment. Two things: first of all, do keep an eye on our blog / newsletter, Lottie will have things to say that may interest you. Second, for context, below is an email I sent to the DE guys six months before launch.


===

Alexis Kennedy <--->
Tue, Mar 5, 2019, 3:46 PM
to beta

Hi all

I'm about ten hours in and this is the best-written RPG I've ever played. It gives me the same look'd-at-each-other-with-a-wild-surmise that I got from Planescape Torment all those years ago, but obviously we're twenty years on from Torment now, and this is better. The dialogue, the pacing, the flow, the inventiveness, the structural games, the lyricism - I have never seen better. M John Harrison vs Sam Esmail.

Honestly this 'burn down and re-invent the RPG' bit sounded overambitious, but if the rest of the game lives up to the first ten hours, I reckon you've done it.

Blinding work - thank you for inviting me to the beta, and I'd be delighted if you passed this on to the team.

I'll send a third mail with typos and interface nuisances when I've done. (I love the interface, too, though.)

[Tola]

Honestly, once my magnate found peace by, let's see, petitioning for a city that all Brancrug seemed to feel was the doom of mankind to become real in this history, I felt it was something to come back to some day, maybe. But it seemed a shame to poke at the advent calendar for a game that was already a closed shop (unless I wanted to rewrite the ending) so here I am pushing a twice-born through.