Thoughts and feedback (sorry, looooooong)

[Johnny X]

Hello all

I’ve spent a few hours with your game and in the spirit, I hope, of constructive feedback, I thought I might offer some observations.

Note: I’m probably not a typical user (or maybe I am), I’m in my 50s, a quite senior professional in my field, a dad and I’ll be honest, have a sufficient disposable income that price points are less of an issue for me, so do bear that in mind.

I like your game. I’m on the verge of loving your game, but at the moment, I like it, I like it enough to have spent the bulk of my free time since release playing it and I don’t, for a second, regret pre-ordering.

What I like

The setting and production are first rate. I’m normally a gameplay fiend, actually, but you’ve created a setting that is compelling to me, and followed it through. Atmosphere, soundtrack, dialogue, plot all hit the right spots for me and speak of people who love the genre and are respectful but playful with conventions. I can see how this setting might not be to everyone’s taste, though – 30s pulp is perhaps not exactly precision-tooled to hit the tastes of younger gamers, more, arguably, to that of their dad (did I mention I’m a gamer dad?)

The characters are great. I like them, I want to know their stories, I care about them (even though they are scoundrels). Their voice acting is on point, and I love the way they reflect genre archetypes but in a sometimes playful way. Ingrid is the femme fatale par excellence, you just know sometime in her past there is a downtrodden private eye (the one archetype you unaccountably missed) whose encounter with her starts ‘this dame walks into my office and I knew she was trouble’. Maybe that trouble is why he isn’t here now. Not encountered everyone yet, but particularly liking our jolly hockey-sticks Parmina, whose expressions of delight when she gets one of the Undrawn Hand means I am now compelled to use her to pick everything up.

In short, this is quality pulp, with larger than life figures battling an ancient threat. I like them, I want to know what happens next.

It isn’t very buggy, the only gameplay bug I’ve come across is the one time I found a lowerable ladder nobody could lower it. They’re rare enough that it makes me think that they may have supposed to have been cut as it didn’t go anywhere I couldn’t access otherwise, but thought I’d flag that up.

I have a decent rig, but there’s the odd graphical glitch and at one point the sound distorted – I actually noticed that more as I think the soundtrack and voices are really good.

You’ll notice I haven’t mentioned gameplay yet – it’s….pretty good? The stealth bits do their job, but can feel a bit sluggish; it feels as if movement rates are a bit slow, especially when a map has been cleared and you’re scavenging for goodies. I’m liking the combat and I especially like that the characters are all palpably different – switching from my speedy pal Lateef to Parnima as my sneak was very a real change, as was swapping Eddie’s excellent offence for Ana Maria’s quality support, and that means different play styles. I am not sure that there are any step changes in innovation here but it’s solid and fun. Character skills trees work so far for me, Ingrid feels palpably different and more effective with a few points in her skills, for example.

Where the setting + design is a very good 9/10, I’d give the gameplay a solid 7.


What I don’t like

Some of this is speculative, bear in mind, and some of it may change as I proceed through the game.

I like the idea of the Undrawn Hand, but it doesn’t quite work for me in practise. The issue is that the cards are a mix of dull (oh look, I can get an admittedly-regenerating grenade to put on my characters which I won’t use because I’ve spent XP on cool skills I’ll use instead), clearly-designed-for-specific-characters ‘so I can turn Ana Maria into a vampire revolutionary nun with a machine gun? Sign. Me. Up’ and rank bad choices (no, I am not going to take a card that takes my health if I use my full move, and nor is anyone else). And then you make the draw completely random, but it’s save-scummable. All you have to do is save just before you exit a mission, reload and poof, the Undrawn Hand is Undrawn and you can get a reroll. Want to get Ingrid that neat ranged attack (you probably do)? Or Ana Maria the ‘regain health if you hit a bleeding character and by the way you can cause bleeding already' (yes, you absolutely do)? Ride the reload button a bit.

In game, the Undrawn Hand is supposed to respond to the characters actions, but I don’t see that it does (maybe it does, but not much). It would work better if there was a way to influence what comes up and if the dull options were more interesting. Use Lateef a lot? Get mobility-related cards. Use grenades a lot – yeah, sure, get Manticore and Salamander. Buff a lot – get Herald (this one is one of the good cards). Appreciate this is probably difficult in game design terms at this point though. In addition, the costs for upgrading are too high compared to the rewards for trashing the cards, and there is, alas, no way to save a good card that would be ideal for a companion you haven’t got yet, which seems an oversight. I can see that you want an element of randomness here but actually, the Hand is fun and this is actively making it less fun.

The way the Clock and missions are structured means that actually it may not make sense to get any more companions once you have 4, since you can only run one main mission and one intel mission a week. Yes, you might get one wounded, but you can reload, and yes, I think you’ve put in penalties for reloading a mission and we will certainly get onto that. I can understand in game reasons why only one mission - there is only one Captain Nicky (by the way, I love the sneaky blighter with his cynicism and his spiv's moustache).

The companions are a major strength of the game and there should be clear, obvious in-game bonuses to setting aside that clock-busting mission to fetch a big Russian bruiser who won’t be as good at stuff as the characters I’ve spent time developing and kitting out. I do like that there’s a choice, but the way this game is, is that it gives you a choice between a good bit of the game or a less good and then penalises you for doing the bits you as developers should be particularly proud of.

A better way to do this would have been, in my view, to make the bonuses for getting characters better (even if it’s just setting one of the clocks back further) but then for them all to have their own missions with their own rewards that have to be balanced against the main event. Maybe you do this already, but if you don’t, then imagine I decide I want to bring in Fedir, and the game doesn’t hammer me for it, but now I’ve got him missions will pop up that maybe modify his Undrawn Hand or give him extra skills or good kit but which are also less good for the whole preventing Doomsday thing. This plays into the idea of the Lamplighters being a colourful but slightly amoral and self-serving bunch with their own agendas and gives you a chance to reward players for engaging with the gang – even if those rewards are double edged, but it also steers you back into the characters themselves.

So, this cuts to the other issue I have. You’ve developed engaging, interesting characters. And you want us to treat them as essentially disposable. Lots of mechanics around reviving wounded characters, or dead characters, or special cards for characters who have stress breaks. Many of us aren’t going to encounter them because we’re going to reload. A lot. And unless I am mistaken, you’ve put penalties in for reloading. I’ve noticed rewards that were Aether in first pass become Lore after a reload. Either that’s a bug, in which case please fix it, or it isn’t, in which case please fix it.

The penalty for reloading a level is that you have to reload the level. That’s all the penalty there is and all the penalty there should be. That goes double if you’re restricting the supply of a crucial, hard-to-find material. Yes, you have developed exciting mechanics for when a mission goes south, but you shouldn’t be trying to force players into those mechanics, particularly not when they’ve grown attached to those characters, as you have intended us to. It is the nature of this kind of game that people save and reload; they’re interesting, intricate puzzles that at least feel ultimately soluble, and the more saving and reloading they’re doing the longer they are spending on your game. And when you have developed likeable characters, don't restrict players who respond to them as you have designed them to do.

Sorry, this is v long, but hopefully it's readable + useful. I have really enjoyed the time I’ve spent in your world and hope to enjoy it more. Thanks, and well done.

(edited because although an ostensibly-functioning adult I seem unable to use the right vocabulary in some portions of the text)

 

[Johnny X]

Yes, obviously my next rescue mission was for Madame Mei, and it turns out professional game designers might know more about game design than old Internet men. Who knew? This shakes my entire faith in the opinions of unqualified strangers.

However, I do still think you are likely to spend a lot of time being frustrated with the Hand until you learn you can have some measure of influence over it, and that presents a barrier to enjoying the game.

 

[Johnny X]

Right, so I've played quite a bit more, here are some observations and, also, spoilers.

First up, and most importantly, I've stopped having fun. The difficulty is not pitched right for me. I appreciate the genre is such that you're facing mad odds and you have to choose your battles but the problem is that the missions just keep ramping up the bad guys to the point where it isn't a challenge any more, it's just a slog. There's a sweet spot for me between being too easy and too more of a chore where a victory on a map feels good. Unfortunately the levels err too much on the chore side of things.

I have a buffing engine in Ana Sofia with a level 4 Companions Cards and a Level 3 Herald card (why Herald, you ask, she already has the blessing power, well, it triggers cooldown reduction and it works on your comrades no matter where they are on the map). All battles are basically the same, find a chokepoint, mine it with poison, fire and/or electricity depending on enemy, sit Ingrid behind it with the talisman that boosts armour when she heals and the card that gives her a heal when someone misses her, pop some smoke, and evade. One hundred years later all the enemies are in a heap, all the summoned enemies you can't prevent from arriving are in a heap, all the other enemies the summoned enemies summon are in a heap, and Ana Sofia's buffing has cleared all the stress from the characters, but not from me, the player. Ingrid has full health and max armour and has taken out everyone herself. I use Lateef as the third character, all he does is move, blind people and overwatch. It is effective and it is boring. Sometimes someone throws a grenade, but I tank it as Ana Sofia will be along soon to heal everyone.

But all the clocks keep going no matter what you do and it's pointless to recruit because the clocks advance too quickly so I keep doing more and more missions and it doesn't feel like going anywhere. I feel as if the game is actively trying to deter me from seeing content.

This is a shame as the best bits are the character interactions. Ingrid flirts with everyone no matter how inappropriate. Lateef considers himself this age's foremost thief and is keen to inform everyone of the fact, only he might actually be. Eddie has a font of colourful gangster tales he pretends he doesn't want to tell, and Ana Sofia is a bit too keen to hear them for someone who is supposed have been a nun (but who also seems to have more than a few stories of her own). Purnima is just a hilarious mix of high-spirited mischievous posh girl and lethal assassin. The Alexandrite is cheerfully and amusingly amoral. I haven't recruited any of the other characters because the game becomes less fun, not more, if I do.

Also, the villains are great. Nicastro is scary, Strum is just awful but the pinnacle is Trace Marteau who is smarmy, exceptionally tiresome and entitled, and immense fun to hurt. I would quite happily play a campaign where the Lamplighters punch Marteau repeatedly in the face in a range of exotic locations whilst he whinges about it. I even almost like that one thing he does (you know that one thing), because that makes kicking his teeth in after he's done it all the sweeter.

Also, I have had a couple of crashing bugs that have kicked in when the screen gets a bit lively. Otherwise it seems to work fine.

I'm not so concerned with Undrawn Hand issues though, as the game progresses I feel as if I have enough control over the cards now, so that bit works better than I thought.

Things that would be useful:
- a tally of what you've found on the level so far to give you an idea if you've missed anything
- ability to unequip kit
- better balanced game experience. On levels, it's usually quite easy to find healing and there's usually 2 second winds per level, but that doesn't mitigate having to grind through 14 guys with knives around every objective. I'm not sure what to do about that.
On the main map, my proposal is that if you've had to spend Intel on a thing either it sets back one clock quite a long way (ie more than 1 tick) or it sets back all the clocks a bit. That makes Intel more useful and gives us more of an incentive to rummage around in content. Personally, I can afford the game's financial cost, but I'm usually quite time poor and I am not sure I feel that this game respects my time. The player should be free to choose if they want to take a long time to finish the campaign so that they can enjoy all the content rather than have the game basically tell them to hurry up like we're toddlers who are taking too long to get our shoes on to go to the shops.

 

[$ilent_$trider]

That has been my feelings so far
That I won’t be able to have the time to recruit everyone before I have to finish the game, which is a shame really. Threat rises too high too fast for the factions and there was one time that I had the chance to run a mission that said it would reset Nicastro’s threat to the previous threshold, which was great but I had to run a mission that it was now or never to get a Keystone. Then the next week that mission wasn’t available anymore…

 

[Rubidium]

Yeah, the fact that recruiting people beyond your starting core of 4 is generally counterproductive is kind of a problem. Even if you do recruit more, you realistically level up 3-4 and have the rest strictly stick to search missions without ever investing XP in them (safehouses give a decent in-flow of resources). Magdalite healing can take care of any folks that fall in mortal danger and get wounded, so you don't have much downtime even without save-scumming.

It would definitely be nice to have recruitment missions set back the clock more, since they don't have any associated threat with them, as it would encourage folks to recruit more agents even if they don't intend to use them (and thus get to experience the dialogue, if nothing else). I feel kind of bad for poor Lateef and Purnima, who are having fun conversations with the rest of the team but end up doing nothing besides constantly run search missions or collect resources from safehouses while my main team does everything.

And yeah, basically all missions in a campaign boil down to more or less the same approach once you've gotten far enough in. You might have some variation between campaigns: in my campaign I'm running a group of Anna Sofia (with a card that gives her a melee knockdown attack), Celestine (with cards that give her healing/stress relief on enemy stress breaks and a cooldown stress bomb AoE), and Ingrid, and fights tend to go: Ingrid and Anna Sofia knock down the nearest enemies, Celestine uses her signature to possess the scariest enemy in the middle of the main group, then they work on killing/stress-breaking enemies (as Celestine's signature refills whenever she finishes off a stress-broken enemy, and the rest of her kit is heavily slanted to stress-manipulation), and repeat until everyone is dead. I imagine different groups (especially with different undrawn cards) will play differently, but I'm pretty sure any given campaign will come down to "find a strategy that works with your group/cards, and do it repeatedly for every mission."

 

[Johnny X]

I would also like it if there was some tangible benefit from skilling up folks who aren't in main missions.

I mention a lot of these because the problems feel soluble, and the game is carefully and lovingly designed so I think the skill to do something about this is there. I don't mind the difficulty as such, it is more that the difficulty is not increasing challenge, it's making the game less fun.

 

[Cymsdale]

The developers don't seem to talk much so it's hard to know what the intent was behind the decision. Perhaps the idea was that you are supposed to focus on a few and maybe use different ones in different playthroughs? I'm not really sure that philosophy works for a game with such a long campaign; I imagine most players would like to play around with all the agents in one run.

What appears to be missing is some kind of fatigue system. There is basically no incentive to not just use the same agents every mission. Worse, the way skill points are handled makes it more of an incentive NOT to. Seems like a pretty big oversight.

 

[Zebedee]

Interesting OP and discussion.

I think the intent is to have a core of maybe 6 characters you use (3+1 for active missions, 2 for search missions) with a lot of things feeding into that - the ability to heal wounds instantly, the stress break offering penalties but allowing continued use or a change of team, the shared skill point pool, the randomised nature of search missions post week 4, and even the difficulty in actually getting a character permanently killed. Rubidium's closing sentence is kind of how I see things too, where the idea is to 'make the best of what you have' for better and worse to that.

Kind of agree that the incentives are a bit mixed messages on actually playing with those systems though - and this is the kind of game where YOLO ironman is very much an acquired taste. (I like it in theory, not so much with the real time portions of this game as they are for a number of reasons, but do appreciate reverse opinions have a point too.)

Don't quite understand the 'recruit all 10 base game characters' achievement - maybe it's something which can be done on easy difficulty where the doomsday clocks are a bit kinder to allow for a few more weeks recruiting them?

Agree with points on saves. Some of these maps can be pretty long to play through too. (Know there's been issues already around save games for some people even with things as they are.)

 

[Johnny X]

I acted on a suggestion from elsewhere and simply stopped caring about the clocks and went after the heists.

It's fun again.

Maybe it was luck or whatever but I did Strum's pyramid and the level hit that sweet spot where it was difficult but I felt like I did a smart job of it (an excellent tense fighting withdrawal, using all the consumables, loved it) and felt great about finishing it. Punched Strum in the face and stole his stuff right in front of him, 10/10 would ruin Strum's plans for world domination again.

Honestly think that some of these issues might be solved by, when you hit the first breakpoints, have the dreams and so on and the feeling of terror, but have Locke - or maybe even Nicky - chip in with something like 'we're not at Doomsday yet so we still have some time to prepare but we have to be vigilant' instead of making everyone feel that hitting the first breakpoint is a big failure.

ETA the lore in this game is really, really good btw. I really like the worldbuilding.

 

[$ilent_$trider]

Yeah, it makes me wonder what a following game in the same universe might be. Maybe the Lamplighters League fighting the USA and the Soviet Union during the Cold War to keep them out of the Tower?

 

[Rubidium]

I acted on a suggestion from elsewhere and simply stopped caring about the clocks and went after the heists.

It's fun again.

Maybe it was luck or whatever but I did Strum's pyramid and the level hit that sweet spot where it was difficult but I felt like I did a smart job of it (an excellent tense fighting withdrawal, using all the consumables, loved it) and felt great about finishing it. Punched Strum in the face and stole his stuff right in front of him, 10/10 would ruin Strum's plans for world domination again.

Honestly think that some of these issues might be solved by, when you hit the first breakpoints, have the dreams and so on and the feeling of terror, but have Locke - or maybe even Nicky - chip in with something like 'we're not at Doomsday yet so we still have some time to prepare but we have to be vigilant' instead of making everyone feel that hitting the first breakpoint is a big failure.

ETA the lore in this game is really, really good btw. I really like the worldbuilding.

Yeah, the Heists and other scripted missions are definitely highlights. Marteau's level was probably my favorite from an atmosphere-perspective, spooky as hell.

 

[Jacobkosh]

It's astonishing to me that they managed to build a narrative where the slick, glad-handing capitalist is arguably more horrifying than the Nazi. Everything about Marteau and his plot gave me the existential heebie-jeebies. The game throws surprisingly dark sometimes but does so deftly enough that it doesn't do violence to the breezy, adventuresome tone.

I want to congratulate @Johnny X on a really thoughtful and actually quite entertaining critique (no need to feel self-conscious about the length, it was clear and cogent the whole way through). I'm happy to cosign the bulk of the comments, particularly the frustration at the game's mixed incentives.

The gameplay actually remained fun for me right up until the end - or rather, it only started feeling a bit rote and unsatisfying around the time I hit the final mission, although the last battle was a delight again. It probably helped that I genuinely enjoyed the engine I'd built, where Ana buffed Eddie into an infinite-turn-taking machine, whereas popping smoke and diligently stacking evade sounds like a virtuous chore.

 

[Pickles GRR]

I do think two of your points counter one another. If you save scum relentlessly you will always have your A team available. If however you respect the outcomes of bad fights you will have injured or, more seriously, Bad Carded agents who you cannot, or really do not want, to send out on missions so you need a bigger team.
This suits me pretty well in theory as with eg some of the old X-Coms you could get into a death spiral as your losses were permanent.

This doesn't really deal with the absolutely catastrophic failures so you'll always have to find a level of reloading that you are happy with.

I also think that the fact you cannot usefully recruit all of the agents is a feature as it increases replayability - you can pick whichever agents you fancy to start with in subsequent plays.

I share your appreciation for the style and tone of the game and the delightful cast of characters. I also have some of your initial reservations about the randomness of the cards. I like that there is randomness but after a while I just junk all the cards. The cost for the level 4 and 5 cards is ridiculous.

For myself I really dislike the real time stealth part - as I do not like real time or stealth gameplay much at all. This plus certain frustrations with the interface meant I have stopped about half way through (19 weeks). The clock is relentless but it's also always going to be 30 odd weeks, unless there's a late game feature I have not seen.

 

[Ken-Sw]

They made the game partly real time - and disappointed the turn based based players
They made the game partly turn based - and disappointed the real time players
That just left the players in the middle that like both
They added a Doomsday Clock !!! I and a lot of players HATE clocks/timers in games.

Paradox Interactive has today decided to write down capitalized development costs for the game The Lamplighters League, in addition to the regular degressive amortization done during the game’s first three months. Overall, this will result in that all of the game’s capitalized development costs of MSEK 320 will be recognized as costs in the fourth quarter of 2023. The game’s impact on profit before tax for the fourth quarter is estimated to MSEK -248. The write-down stems from a revised sales forecast, which was established after the game’s release.

“The Lamplighters League is a fun game with many strengths. Even though we see cautiously positive player numbers in subscription services, the commercial reception has been too weak, which is frankly a big disappointment. Game projects are by their nature always risky, but at the end of the day we haven’t performed at the level we should. It is painful but makes us more eager to roll up our sleeves and do better,” says Fredrik Wester, CEO of Paradox Interactive.

This disclosure contains information that Paradox Interactive AB is obliged to make public pursuant to the EU Market Abuse Regulation (EU nr 596/2014). The information was submitted for publication, through the agency of the contact person, on 10-10-2023 22:10 CET.