We're excited to keep pushing the boundaries of Fallen London with new, stranger storylines. But the journey to the endgame and the very newest stories can be a long one. It takes many weeks of real time – if not more – to reach the new content boundary, and the nature of the game means that extremely dedicated play only gets you there a little bit faster. This is very unusual for any sort of role-playing game!

Don't get us wrong, this journey is part of the core experience of Fallen London – the path to the boardroom of the Great Hellbound Railway begins in a Spite alleyway, chasing cats – but it doesn't need to take quite so long.

At the time, the Making Your Name activities were built with the understanding that there was only so much story remaining beyond them, and paced with those plans and boundaries in mind. These days, Fallen London is gigantic, and there's no risk that you'll run out of stories if, for example, you proceed through the University investigations a smidge more quickly. In fact, that's preferable; the number of storylines beyond the University investigation is far larger than those before it.

So this week we've implemented a series of progression changes across each of the Making Your Name storylines, aimed at accelerating progress and reducing repetition leading up to the Person of Some Importance milestone.

What’s Changed?

In short, these changes are aimed at reducing the amount of time you spend doing the same thing during Making Your Name. Especially in the later stages, Making Your Name stories could require spending a significant number of actions on activities that remained static. There could also be a significant variation in the action investment required to make progress between different attributes, making some attributes quicker or easier than others.

These changes aim to (somewhat) standardise the length and experience of Making Your Name, and bring the average number of actions required to make progress down. This streamlining also corresponds to an increase in the amount of experience given out by these core activities. This should ensure that you can complete Making Your Name more quickly than before, but still have high enough attributes when you finish the journey.

What this is not is an extensive redesign of Making Your Name: all the same stories and activities still exist, they just no longer take as long to complete. We're aware that some of these pieces of Making Your Name are showing their age by now, and we get a lot of feedback about revisiting or substantially changing older activities and areas. These kinds of changes are not off the table! But large-scale redesigns take a lot of time, and in the meantime we want to make the experience of reaching A Person of Some Importance, the Evolution storyline and eventually the Railway (and the Secret Next Thing!) a bit smoother.

A brief overview of changes include:

Reducing the length of the University Investigation.
Retuning the activities for:
- Master Thief
- Duelling the Black Ribbon
- A Procurer of Savage Beasts
Reducing the Fascinating requirements and difficulty checks of pursuing Romances at Court.
Reducing the actions required to complete Works at Court.
Adding additional sources of free or discounted Expedition Supplies prior to uncovering the Correspondence Stones.
Adding additional ways to procure Expedition Supplies using attainable early-game resources.
Reducing the number of Terms as Governor required to regain access to Court.
Removing the reliance on Rare Successes to gain access to the Wars of Illusion.
Reducing the length of the Days of the Week loop within Mahogany Hall.

We'll post a more complete list of changes in our usual patch notes. Thanks for staying with us. Very soon we'll be ready to unveil Fallen London's next big storyline – keep your eyes peeled.