It has been some time since we talked about our future plans for Fallen London. This week, we are releasing a couple of updates, which makes it a good time to talk about what we are working on and what you can expect to see for the remainder of 2021 and onward.

Updates to Ambition reward items

After finishing the Ambition storylines, we’ve struggled to find a place for Ambition reward items in the game. We wanted them to feel powerful and special – ideally, the final reward you got from completing your Ambition should be the most treasured thing in your character’s life, a defining feature of how you see your character and how they relate to Fallen London. Those items should be powerful and unique, and they should remain so.

But the game also makes demands on us to make useful equipment available, and to continue releasing new items that are exciting and useful in their own right. We’ve refrained from overlapping Ambition rewards, for the most part, in their own slots, which has put a significant limitation in the design space for items.

We’re also sensitive to how Heart’s Desire players have often felt like their ending rewards are not particularly more powerful than the already very powerful things that they got along the way in the pursuit of their ambition. But we never really had headroom to make those end rewards even better.

To resolve this, we’ve decided to give Ambition rewards their own slot. We’re calling this the Treasure slot, to reflect the idea that this is the most important thing in your character’s life – whether it’s an object, an association, a relationship, or a position that they now hold within London.

We are also making items that will go in this slot comparably powerful to Companions. What this means is that unless your Ambition end reward is already a Companion, it will become somewhat more powerful, with added stat benefits.

This change is taking place today. What it means in detail:

Ambition ending rewards are now all in a slot specific to them, Treasure.
An Ambition ending reward is specifically the item you got when you completed your Ambition, which means that you can only obtain one.
Ambition rewards are all being leveled to the same power level in this new slot, which is comparable to a Companion. Most notably, this means they will all grant +2 to an advanced skill.

This will enable us to improve the availability of advanced skill items and strong item enhancements without diluting the unique utility of Ambition ending items. It also makes those items uniquely useful - with their unique slot, they can stack with anything else you have, enabling even more powerful item combinations than before.

The Khanate, Part II

This week, we will be releasing the second part of the Khanate zee-port. This is a moderately-sized expansion to the existing intrigue wheel, adding another chapter to the story, more possible rewards, and a new system that will allow you to explore and influence the politics of the Khanate.

This was originally planned as part of the initial release, but the Khanate as a whole ended up so large that we chose to split it into two parts. This second half is accessible to players who have already explored the Khanate and its intrigues, simply by initiating a new intrigue that will become available when we release the update on Thursday.

Hallowmas 1899

Hallowmas returns on October 25th! The feast of masks: a free festival, open to all Fallen London citizens. Here’s a preview of what’s new this year:

The Demon mask has been retired – don’t worry, it’ll come back at some point. With it, the corresponding masquerade at St Dunstan’s sacristy.
To fill its role, a new mask, and a new masquerade, has been added. We won’t reveal what it is just yet – but it’ll be a bloody good time.
You can now obtain all types of Confessions at any point during the festival. You will still get seven Confessions during the first week, and another seven during the second week.
Masks are now items you can equip in your hat slot! Put your mask on to see its Opportunity Card, now appearing at a higher frequency. They also grant quality enhancements – for the duration of Hallowmas. You will be able to keep your old Hallowmas mask as a memento, or purchase a permanent version for Fate.
And of course, new items are available for those who obtain Confessions. This year, we are also bringing back some fan favorite Companions from years past, who will also be available for Confessions.

One other significant change we are making this year is that not all items you obtain from Confessions are themselves companions, and not all items you bring to upgrade with confessions are companions either.

Between the Feast of the Rose, Whitsun, and Hallowmas, we found ourselves with three yearly festivals all focused on companions, so something had to give to help balance the types of items that we introduce with each festival. So, expect Hallowmas this year to have a couple of confessions that work a little differently. Those confessions will either require a non-companion item and give you a companion, or require a companion and give you a non-companion item. In those cases, they are not upgrades – rather, you’ll be getting a whole additional item, and keeping what you brought with you.

2021 and Beyond

There are other things we are working on that we are not necessarily ready to pin a launch date on. These are targeted to come out during the remainder of 2021, but some may slip into early 2022:

Updates to the Laboratory: We’ve known for a long time that players feel the Laboratory has problems. It incentivizes players to discard the vast majority of cards they draw – leading to a ton of clicking. We are working on addressing this, improving the lab, and adding a bit of new content too – but we wanted to do it right and make sure we are actually making the lab an enjoyable experience, which takes time.

Revamping Polythreme: Yes, Polythreme is our next destination in the Unterzee. This update will include improvements to the existing content and an entirely new activity in Polythreme. It’s a prominent place in the setting that we want players to care about and enjoy visiting.

A new premium story with a recurring activity: When we did Palaeontologist: Upwards last year, we did it as an experiment to see if that format would be well-received and successful enough to justify doing more. We’re happy to say that it was, and players have been expecting another thing like it for some time. Our busy content schedule has not allowed us to release one very soon after Upwards, but we are now working on another one.

That, plus the additional Living World Events we previously announced, makes up our content roadmap for the rest of 2021 – plus Christmas, of course.

And one last thing: We know some of you are eagerly anticipating the final epilogue to the Railway storyline. We don’t have a release date for this that we can publicly share yet, but we wanted to reassure you that we haven’t canceled or dropped this; it’s still in our plans.