Subnautica: Released (SPOILER WARNING past Post #1)

[Iucounu]

Minecraft was the first time I started thinking about this. I was so excited for what that game could have become. I thought at least he was going to turn it into a tower defense game where you build your own castle and the creatures try to get in, so you build turrets or hire archers or something. You could shape rivers and lava to create a moat. Etc. But none of this happened, he became a millionaire when it was still just digging holes and crafting shit. All that seemed to happen after that was adding more recipes of shit to craft. That is the last thing I wanted, but that's what we get for having bad consumers.

yep. I remember building my castle for the goblin hordes that never came.

7 Days to Die provides this, although building can be tedious.

Also Conan Exiles and some other games in the genre, I think.

In ARK Survival Evolved the dinos don't actively seek you out, but attack your base if they discover you.

 

[Demo.Graph]

# There is room to refine the gaming experience of Subnautica for a sequel.

Yes, but the devs had sabotaged them themselves in vanilla. Like, making scanning irrelevant for game progression (pokemon-like scan-them-all to get super powers and win the game was planned for S1) or completely ignoring pressure mechanics for player or making bases almost irrelevant (and getting flooding over the sea level).

then you know large bundles of cash exchanged hands

It says nothing about the game's quality. Retards are piling on candy crush in droves.

 

[anvi]

Playing Devil's Advocate here for a bit, before moving on.

# There is room to refine the gaming experience of Subnautica for a sequel. The original game had a lot of ideas going during Early Access, but were then removed for the full release. Being able to change the terrain yourself, for example, but that caused unholy strain on the engine, even beyond the strain the devs were putting on it in the first place.

# I reckon that Below Zero was a tech demo first and foremost, where additional features were implemented to see if/how they would work. Being able to teleport between two locations that were both mobile, was a big one on that front.

# Multiplayer was The No. 1 Most Requested Feature of the game during its development. Modders even got it working at one point, but I've heard rumors that the devs actively sabotaged their efforts and killed the mod.

# Big YouTube-players (vTubers?) had a huge role in hyping up interest for the game, Markiplier and Jacksepticeye in particular. If they're leading the charge on the sequel once it hits Early Access, then you know large bundles of cash exchanged hands. The multiplayer-aspect will get hundreds of Twitch-streamers into the game as well.

It stinks. All those youtuber 'influencers' and reddit, they are very cheap to pay off. Pay them a small amount and they will promote anything you want like their life depends on it. There are sites you can google to see how much it costs to promote anything you want on reddit. To me that was the only thing this company did well. They exploited the shitty modern world of social media and used it to create huge promotion. Same with Factorio. Agressively hyped and promoted everywhere, in places with gigantic young easily manipulated audiences.

If their game was awesome I would be fine with all of this. But the fact they do such a good job of promotion when the games themselves are unfinished and under developed makes me hate them.

1- There is lots of room to turn these games into something good. Land deformation sounds like a terrible idea because of the technical cost. The fact they even consider stuff like that instead of just getting busy adding content makes me hate them even more.

2- Never played Below Zero. I was bothered in the first game by travelling to the big metal base / abandoned ship / whatever. Spent ages creeping through the flames and shit and there is hardly anything there. And then you have to boringly swim all the way back.

3- Fucking multiplayer! People request that in every game but you can't just shove multiplayer into things without it changing so much. People thought with Skyrim, why can't I just coop with my buddy? Well because every quest is written for 1 person and every dungeon is designed for 1 person and every enemy is designed to be killed by 1 person and the world hardly has any enemies to begin with... It's a stupid idea. The main reason I hate it when people request this is because these are indie companies who can barely make a single player game. Yet people want them to make an MMO in a world of MMOs like WoW which has billion dollar budget... or games like Rift which still failed even after $200 million! That's what they get for promoting their shit on reddit and youtube. It is a double edged sword. Huge audiences, but they are stupid casual gaming plebs.

 

[jackofshadows]

Playing Below Zero finally. Honestly, I'm bored to tears. Like I'm playing some amateurish mod to the base game rather than full scale add-on from the original devs. Where's the new stuff? Speaking of, the new vehicle sucks. Why it has to be so damn slow? Right, because the new map is tiny as shit and cramped on top of that. Oh and in their streamlining rush they messed up and its recipe requires only 1 battery while the whole thing has 2.

I guess it's all like that because they planned the add-on will be rather story-based but then they realized that the story is total ass and scrapped most of it? I mean, it's all the same and of course they had to simplify even their new mechanic: cold. Like, I'm not even close to making I imagine some kind of suit or vehicle against that but you can pluck those fruits which magically heat you back up.

And yeah you guys weren't kidding at all about PDA voice over. That's some really fucked up shit right there. It could be fine, great even if this was some kind of parody but it's obvious they're dead serious with this. "PARSING... OXEGEN... WARNENG" with this obnoxious nasal voice like what the actual fuck?! I gotta admit at least the protagonist is voiced by that space racist-stripper from ME, she has a really pleasant voice.

I'll probably drop it. It's all the same shit, why should I be excited about unlocking the same damn recipes and build them all over again? And speaking of: why recipes are scattered around again - in the base game there was a massive explosion but somehow I doubt that's the case here.

 

[dextermorgan]

Oh and in their streamlining rush they messed up and its recipe requires only 1 battery while the whole thing has 2.

Original game was also wildly inconsistent with ingredients. Prawn suit, for example:

2x Plasteel Ingot
2x Aerogel
1x Enameled Glass
2x Diamond
2x Lead

See any power cells there? Because the final product comes with 2.

I'll probably drop it. It's all the same shit, why should I be excited about unlocking the same damn recipes and build them all over again? And speaking of: why recipes are scattered around again - in the base game there was a massive explosion but somehow I doubt that's the case here.

In the original, you had to scan the fragments because your PDA was damaged and the recipes were no longer in memory. That's why you needed to scan fragments to unlock the blueprints.

WARNING: Blueprint Database Corrupted
Damage to your PDA's hard drive has corrupted approximately 80% of stored survival blueprints. Blueprints may be reacquired by scanning a salvaged technology using the handheld scanner, or by downloading plans from a ship-board databox. In the circumstances these assets will most likely be found amongst wreckage from the Aurora.

I don't recall if lack of PDA blueprints was explained in BZ, but the PDA was issued by a different company, which would be a possible reason for lack of blueprints for Alterra equipment. It's not a good explanation IMO.

Anyway, plenty to criticize about BZ, I myself quit it many times before finally pushing to the (rather unsatisfying) ending, but you're doing a pretty shit job of it.

 

[-M-]

BZ would have been much more interesting if they bothered to actually implement a half decent temperature mechanic. The fact that it's just a very banal version of the O2 meter transposed to land makes it pretty clear that the team is either thoughtless and/or incompetent and the original game was a fluke. How you fail to implement temperature in the water while setting the game on an ocean planet is just baffling.

So what we end up with in BZ was just more Subnautica, but worse.

 

[Ironmonk]

The Subnautica clone in space that I posted before entered Early Access



I created a dedicated thread for it
https://rpgcodex.net/forums/threads/astrometica-subnautica-clone-in-space.152059/