Subnautica: Released (SPOILER WARNING past Post #1)

[Burning Bridges]

There is a record of a sailor who survived for 10 days in an open boat without water

The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor - Wikipedia

He licked some condensation and drank small amounts of saltwater, which is theoretically possible, especially if you can dilute fresh water. Up to 40 per cent of salt sea water is absolutely tolerable.

Thirst in Mid-Ocean, from Kon-Tiki Across the Pacific by Raft by Thor Heyerdahl - Litro Magazine

In any case, previous hydration and physical state, minimal activity, improvisation and will to survive are the unknowns.

 

[Assisted Living Godzilla]

Those trees give you almost no food or water, and the seeds takes up lots of inventory space which makes them impractical for going out for long periods of time.

Those trees contain huge amount of water and some of food in each fruit/seed (same thing in that case) but only if you eat them right away, yes. Given game's hunger/thirst ratio their fruit are ideal to replenish all while you're near your base/Cyclop. They aren't suited for long travels w/o Cyclop but for that purpose Aurora's food and water was enough for me. Game's map is not as big as it seems, same goes for the game's overall length. But sure you can just build the water machine and power it up just to be safe. Take more water and salt some fish.

But instead, because the game lets you only drop stuff outside but not inside, you've got to go outside, drop some stuff, go back inside, get what you want, then go back outside to get the stuff you dropped.

Do it once, learn from your mistake and manage it better next time. Idk why it's such a big deal for you.

You end up hunting for the nondescript rocks hoping they contain the metals you need to progress.

If you'd scanned them with manual scanner and read related pad sections you'd learn that they contain specific type of resources (irrc 2 for each 'nondescript rock'). Moreover, they are always tied to specific piece of enviroment so you don't even need scanner room like I mentioned earlier. As far as I remember, scanner room was added very close to release if not after it. Thouse like me who played a bit of EA have barely used it ever.

No way to locate the resources you need other than going in circles around the initial base in hopes of somehow stumbling upon them.

Well, you just played it the wrong way even 'everyone play as he like' statement aside because you wanted to progress, not to just enjoy the view.

The final straw was when I was finally able to craft a radiation-resistant suit and go near the crashed ship only to discover there's nothing there and there's a time limit on top of it.

The game can confuse with radiation, that's for sure. First you might stumble upon it and think it'll always be there but in fact that's just temporal restriction to player from exploring the ship. After the ship explodes, radiations is gone and will be back again only if you won't bother to explore it fast enough and repair the reactor. And only then, you'll need the radiation suit. Questionable design but you're probably didn't pay attention to game's announcements much as well.

But the seeds take up four slots, which makes them totally impractical as food you take outside with you in the Prawn Suit. And the Bulbo tree only gives you 8 food and 10 water per seed, which I wouldn't call a huge amount of food or water. The bottles from the machine give you 50 water, and the common Pepper gives you 32 food with Reginald giving you 44 food.

I do have trees where I'm at in the game, now, but they're just backups I'll use forgot going out. Having the trees now, or the other stuff I have now doesn't change my original point though: Which is the rate at which you must eat and drink makes the game, the start of the game, what could be many hours of the game, more tedious than need be.

 

[Joggerino]

Just don't give this developer any money. Never forget Simon Chylinski

 

[jackofshadows]

But the seeds take up four slots, which makes them totally impractical as food you take outside with you in the Prawn Suit. And the Bulbo tree only gives you 8 food and 10 water per seed, which I wouldn't call a huge amount of food or water. The bottles from the machine give you 50 water, and the common Pepper gives you 32 food with Reginald giving you 44 food.

I do have trees where I'm at in the game, now, but they're just backups I'll use forgot going out. Having the trees now, or the other stuff I have now doesn't change my original point though: Which is the rate at which you must eat and drink makes the game, the start of the game, what could be many hours of the game, more tedious than need be.

That's why I said "when you're near your base/Cyclop". If you're able to decently manage your inventory there's always like 12-20 empty slots so you walk up to your trees, slash-slash several seeds, eat them, slash-slash again, plant one right away if it's expired and go back to what you've been doing. All it takes is like 30 sec. For sorties you have to take few bottles of water anyway (because any fruits are spoiling too fast) and maybe nutrient bar just to be safe but that's another story.

When you hassle with this survival mechanic (in a survival game) at the start and then at some point it ceases to be any issue whatsoever you gain satisfaction. Only it ceases to be an issue too fast/too simple to solve to begin with ergo much less satisfaction in this case.

 

[Assisted Living Godzilla]

There is a record of a sailor who survived for 10 days in an open boat without water

The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor - Wikipedia

He licked some condensation and drank small amounts of saltwater, which is theoretically possible, especially if you can dilute fresh water. Up to 40 per cent of salt sea water is absolutely tolerable.

Thirst in Mid-Ocean, from Kon-Tiki Across the Pacific by Raft by Thor Heyerdahl - Litro Magazine

In any case, previous hydration and physical state, minimal activity, improvisation and will to survive are the unknowns.

To be clear I'm talking like the most low end of these things in relation to this game where you're in danger of death without having your midday drink. The point was that instead of airing more towards reality they made the rate at which you must eat and drink very video gamey to drive the player into a contact loop of find, following, and catching fish for food and water; and that the rate at which the game has you needing to stay in that loop can make many hours of the game more tedious than need be. Especially at the rate your unsalted cooked fish starts going bad. It seems like the thinking was to made your starting point overly tedious so when you had a bunch of still later you'd really feel it; the problem is depending on how quickly you get stuff that starting point could be hours, and for me anyways the tedium of the opening hours didn't become any less annoying (or stop feeling like bad game design) just because I eventually found ways to overcome them to a certain degree.

But not at the activity level of the player in Subnautica.

Everyone who has scuba-dived knows that afterwards you habe a dry throat and later, a ravish appetite.

I would love for your activity level to tie into the rate at which you need to eat and drink in this game.

 

[dextermorgan]

Dude, all the tools you need to get over this hurdle are in the game. It's not the dev's failure that you're not using them, it's yours. For example, the starting area provides supplies of salt and gravtrap fragments, and the trap itself is very easy to make. Build one, plop it near your first base/lifepod and pluck the bladderfish it captures whenever you come back and you'll build up a good supply of water in no time. Same for salted fish.

Later on when you get the plant beds you can sate hunger and thirst with bulbo/melons exclusively and save the non-perishables for longer expeditions. Later yet you get even better/easier methods for producing non-perishables in the form of alien containment with breeding fish, deep mushroom farms for HCL production, water purifier units, etc. The only real struggle is at the very beginning, before you've made your first trap and built up stores of food/water, after that it becomes completely trivial.

If you didn't want to bother with the hunger/thirst mechanics, why choose survival mode anyway?

EDIT
Confused HCL with Bleach which only requires tube coral sample and salt and gives 2 bottles of water, i.e. even easier to produce.

 

[Zombra]

But my realism! I should be able to play for at least 200 hours before my character gets thirsty! Because that's what would make this a good game!

 

[Burning Bridges]

I don't get it either.

I'm usually highly susceptible for unrealistic, repetitive gaming (for example survival games where you needlessly click on trees or rocks all the time) but in Subnautica you catch 2 Peeper and 2 Bladderfish a day, that's 4 clicks with the mouse, then later in the base you prepare them. Thats called a meal. Of course in rl we all despair that once a day we must spread butter on the toast and fry an egg and that this can't be automated, but that's life.

Subnautica has many weaknesses but this isn't one.

 

[cvv]

in Subnautica you catch 2 Peeper and 2 Bladderfish a day, that's 4 clicks with the mouse

And that's exactly why I can't stand the eating/drinking mechanics in this game. If you decide to put survival stuff in your game you better make it involving and interesting.

I can see them thinking "We gotta have eating/drinking in our game but we don't wanna inconvenience modern audience too much so we'll make it as banal and chore-y as possible". That's retarded.

A great example of a well implemented survival system is Don't Starve. Hunting, foraging, preserving and cooking food is a big part of the game and it's fun precisely because it's not streamlined into a simplistic, boring sludge.

 

[jcd]

Many of these crafting recipes are pants on head retarded too. I had to look up how to prepare drinkable water, because it's so unintuitive (extract water from fish? create water from bleach? and bleach is made from salt and corals?).

Hunting for these fish is supremely annoying too, because they're small and fast targets, and my old man reflexes aren't what they used to be back in the day. To me, this game is not about testing your reflexes, but your planning abilities, and the survival mechanic should reflect that. Instead you have an arcade mini-game and arbitrary crafting that's impossible to figure out if you go in blind.

 

[dextermorgan]

So being given a fabricator that shows ingredients, a PDA that has a help article for anything and everything you can make, access to a scanner tool from the get-go, and the PDA literally telling you hey go and scan things to find uses for them isn't enough handholding? Dude, it's not the game that's being obtuse here.

 

[Burning Bridges]

So the real problem is that you're not able to catch fish because they are too fast for you.

 

[jcd]

If I remember correctly, the recipe for water isn't available until you scan the fish that you need for making water. Scanning is a pain in the ass, because it's interrupted every time the fish swims away, and there's nothing that suggests you'll need this particular fish for survival. You need water to survive and you're not informed properly how to acquire it. I could let it slide if it was something nonessential.

Remember that this is something that happens while you're still unaware of how the game works in general. It communicates with the player very badly.

 

[jcd]

So the real problem is that you're not able to catch fish because they are too fast for you.

That too, but in the beginning I'm not even aware that I should chase after them, or that it's possible to catch them with your bare hands in the first place.

 

[Burning Bridges]

How do you ever complete any game if you complain about such non issues.

The problem with Subnautica is the fucking engine that pops objects all the time that are not directly ahead of you. And not the fact that you need to watch someone else play for 5 minutes to figure out how to get food and water and build stuff.

 

[jcd]

I don't watch let's plays and don't read walkthroughs. I don't like the idea that I should look for outside information to know how to complete a game, when that information should be communicated to me inside the game.

 

[ValeVelKal]

tedious

I've got some bases with the nuclear reactor

I mean, it's a sandboxish game and everyone play as he like but whining about 'tedious' stuff like nessesity to drink which can be turned off comlpetely at the start or can be easily neglected after trip to the island on what, 1-2 hour of playing? Which is an actual flaw unlike some stuff you've listed - the mechanic is too simplifyed which doesn't make sense given the fact that it's optional. You just grow food on any, even 1 room base or on Cyclop and that's it. So, as I was saying, whining about that while having multiple bases with nuclear reactor (which yes, is completely fucking redundant and that is another obvious flaw) seem crazy to me. You don't actually need multiple bases in this game by the way.

The combat aspect of the game is fucking terrible.

There's no combat aspect in this game. Well, maybe except for the headcrabs, allright but that's it. You can safely ignore all the fauna and be aware only about the reapers but their danger comes from ability to get you under the textures, that's beyond annoying and cost me 2 hardcore attemts until I memorized their habitat.

Scanner room - kinda reduntant if you learn where each resource comes from via manual scanning. But with HUD chip it might be useful towards the end.

This is stupid. I wasn't whining about needing to drink water, I said the rate at which you need to eat and drink is tedious. It's too gamey. In reality you can go a few days without drinking water and at least a week without eating before you just die. In Subnautica you're in danger of death if you don't drink water for like half a day or something ridiculous like that. I don't want to play the game without eating and drinking because that's part of the game, a huge part, but they pushed the rate at which you need to do these things into tedium. It only really gets better once you get the water system and the hot knife, because then you've got water bottles that have 50 water instead of 20 (as well as all the salt you want to preserve fish) and a can get cooked fish at any time...and I didn't have these within a couple hours of starting.

Multiple bases makes shit easier. I don't want to have to go back and forth between my first base and like to the islands or the entrance to the underground river. Also makes finding shit way easier since I can just scan some to area for whatever or resources and see if there may be some paths around.

You know when you say there's no combat aspect, and then after writing it out you remember there is, it's ok to just go back and delete it? Those crawlers are a combat aspect, and they're all over the islands and the ship. I'd also call the Warpers and Mesmer more direct combat aspects too since they're actively more hostile than the other hostile creatures. I'd even kind of file trying to hit fish with the hot knife so you can cook them quick under "combat," at least an aspect of it, even if you aren't in a fight. Like I said, I didn't mind it being bad in the beginning when enemies seemed more designed to avoid, but then the game starts throwing in more standard enemies.

Inventory - just learn how to manage it, do not pick up everything you see.

This is fucking stupid. Yeah, that's what I do. But it's dumb I have to do that, and I didn't know the inventory system was so stupid when I started. It feels like an inventory system made by someone that never played a game with an inventory system before, and is under the impression they're just figuring shit out themselves. What makes this dumber is the game doesn't let you drop things in a structure, but it will let you do it outside of one. So instead of just throwing some shit on the ground right where you are to move some stuff around quick it makes you run around a bit.

The guy wanted an exploration game where you don't have to manage eat and drink, where you can pick up whatever you want, and with more developed combat. The guy just wanted to play ELEX 2, OK, so give him a break !

 

[cw8]

Don't get the complaints about food and water. You literally can build garden beds and potted plants inside your base or Cyclops. Go to the 2 islands and chop off some good plant samples or get the Kelp seeds and grow a full load of plants. You can just eat the fruits and plants from your own base and still have a ton of them as decoration glowing up your base.

 

[Burning Bridges]

I don't watch let's plays and don't read walkthroughs. I don't like the idea that I should look for outside information to know how to complete a game, when that information should be communicated to me inside the game.

Which is fine imo but it makes it incredibly much harder, not only with Subnautica.

A great many years ago I also tried to play games like Elite without a manual and know how rewarding it can be to figure something out completely by yourself. Some other games on the other hand, I never could even start. The idea of a quest compass had not been had by anyone yet.

 

[Burning Bridges]

Don't get the complaints about food and water. You literally can build garden beds and potted plants inside your base or Cyclops. Go to the 2 islands and chop off some good plant samples or get the Kelp seeds and grow a full load of plants. You can just eat the fruits and plants from your own base and still have a ton of them as decoration glowing up your base.

Well to be fair they think it is repetitive and there is reason to that.

But then I think a game in which you conquer an alien planet with nothing but a swimsuit and entire submarines are assembled by a mouse click is so ridiculously simplified that the pescetarian minigame was my least concern.

 

[Assisted Living Godzilla]

The guy wanted an exploration game where you don't have to manage eat and drink, where you can pick up whatever you want, and with more developed combat. The guy just wanted to play ELEX 2, OK, so give him a break !

I don't have any problem with needing to eat or drink in the game. Just the rate at which you're at the verge of death if you aren't constantly eating and drinking. When your only source of food and water are the fish, and this can be hours, it just becomes tedious to constantly go out to get the fish you need and then go back to turn them into whatever. I mean, if a day was like 2 hours like in Dead Rising, instead of 20 minutes, needing to eat and drink every day wouldn't be nearly the hassle it is since doing that cuts into how long you can be out looking for stuff.

Looking up how long a day last in this game I wonder when the last time some people played this was. Because it looks like before last year days were longer and the rate at which you needed to eat and drink wasn't as quick.

If I remember correctly, the recipe for water isn't available until you scan the fish that you need for making water. Scanning is a pain in the ass, because it's interrupted every time the fish swims away, and there's nothing that suggests you'll need this particular fish for survival. You need water to survive and you're not informed properly how to acquire it. I could let it slide if it was something nonessential.

Remember that this is something that happens while you're still unaware of how the game works in general. It communicates with the player very badly.

Yeah, scanning shit can be a pain in the ass. I really wish you could have scanned the fish while holding them, since you can hold them, and as far as I can tell this serves no function at all other than to seeing a fish in your hand. Alternatively the scanner could have just been better, even if it required an upgrade. Was a little surprised there wasn't a scanner that could be put on the Prawn Suit to more safely scan some of the stuff in here.

Some of the presentational stuff in this reminds me of Metroid Prime, the scanning being one of them, so it seems a little weird how badly some aspects of this feel given that game came out more than ten year before. I mean this game basically feels like an open world Metroid Prime that's set on an ocean world with survival mechanics, base building, and bad combat; where instead of finding upgrades in the world to get you further along you find either the blueprints or parts to build the upgrades yourself with the resources you find.

 

[Zombra]

I don't have any problem with needing to eat or drink in the game. Just the rate at which you're at the verge of death if you aren't constantly eating and drinking. When your only source of food and water are the fish, and this can be hours, it just becomes tedious to constantly go out to get the fish you need and then go back to turn them into whatever. I mean, if a day was like 2 hours like in Dead Rising, instead of 20 minutes, needing to eat and drink every day wouldn't be nearly the hassle it is since doing that cuts into how long you can be out looking for stuff.

It's almost as if they intended a progressive gameplay loop.

 

[<3sRichardSimmons]

Specifically complaining about the food/drink system seems pretty weird when you can also just opt of it through the difficulty setting.

 

[orcinator]

Specifically complaining about the food/drink system seems pretty weird when you can also just opt of it through the difficulty setting.

You can't change the difficulty after you start. I assume he's in the same boat as me where he expected the survival elements to matter instead of just being an extra bit of tedium that offers 0challenge.

 

[jcd]

I tend not to activate the game journalist crutches in games I play. I think it paints a fuller picture of what the game is supposed to be like if you play it on default settings, since that's the path the developers take into account the most.