Subnautica: Released (SPOILER WARNING past Post #1)

[Unkillable Cat]

Yes, it's all coming together. To give a 'short' update:

# The game is currently fully playable in Early Access right up until the endgame, which is being withheld until the 1.0-release just like with Subnautica.

# More flora is scannable, but most results just read "TBD", I'm hoping they finish them all up before release.

# Overall the gameplay is much tighter - the game world is smaller and not as deep as it was - maximum depth in Subnautica was 1654 meters, in BZ you don't even break the 1000-meter mark (in what's playable right now, that is).

# But the hand-holding is real in this one. You can find a fairly detailed map with "notable spots" on them early on, and there's really nothing stopping you from bee-lining to these places once you have that map.

# Surface areas play a much bigger part.

# There's a new creature akin to the Mesmer, except this time its gimmick part of the creature's defenses, not its hunting tool. Go on, give it a look!

# IMO The Seatruck is a brilliant idea, but fails in execution. It's sorta like a hybrid of the Seamoth and the Cyclops, except driving a worm is an even bigger headache than driving the Cyclops. And I can't see myself using any of the modules anyway, except perhaps the teleporter, which currently appears to be an endgame-tier upgrade.

# The P.R.A.W.N. is still God, and He can descend upon the Glacial Basin and show the worms who's Boss. As-is the PRAWN negates the Snowfox completely, so I'm hoping they fix that.

# The Stasis Rifle is gone, so scanning down leviathan-class predators is actually QUITE DANGEROUS now... unless you beat the crap out of them with the P.R.A.W.N., that is.

# That said, the hardest animal to scan in the game is... the Skyray. STAND FUCKING STILL, DAMNIT!!!

# There's a large area to the southeast full of tall glaciers - and it's only used for one story-related conversation, and it's so forced you can just feel the HNNNGH-going on in the background. I hope they do more with this area.

# BZ actually introduces a supporting cast! Well... sorta. Alterra had staff on 4546B, and you can find their quarters, scan their bios and even see images of them and listen to their audiologs. But the Big Question is... where are they now?

# Mr. Coffee got an upgrade, you can now craft a thermos and fill 'er up! Take that disgusting swill with you wherever you go!

# There's a new craftable 'god-tier' foodstuff, it grants +100 Heat, +80 Food and a fair amount of water. The problem? It's a salad.

# New base modules include a fridge, a recycler and bathroom-stuff like a shower and a toilet, but the last two were just for show the last time I played. Maybe that'll change.

# There are SO MANY posters and cosmetics in BZ. I had to build a wall just to hold them all.

# Currently there's a way to break the game's story progression pretty badly (just ignore that S.O.S.-signal everyone's talking about as long as possible) so that the protagonist can literally end up talking to herself at times.

 

[Ivan]

how scary?

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Funny you should ask... in my opinion it actually isn't that scary. That's one of the problems with BZ, in trying to tighten up the game a lot of the cool parts came loose and ran off. It's more... mysterious than scary now.

 

[Demo.Graph]

Hello, Subnauts!

tl,dr - incoming price hike for both Subnautica games, best get them during the upcoming Steam Xmas-sale.

Ahoy, matey!

 

[lightbane]

Can you use harpoon guns in this game, or are the devs still anti-guns retards?

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Can you use harpoon guns in this game, or are the devs still anti-guns retards?

They removed the Stasis Rifle, feel free to guess why.

 

[cvv]

I noticed the game is feature complete (except the very ending) so I gave it a swing.

It's a very similar deal to the first game, unsurprisingly, but with more annoyances.

1. The vibe and exploration is great again but with less awe and wonder since it's not novel anymore.
2. The Seatruck is a nice idea but only the storage module is somewhat useful. Also I wish it had some sort of manipulation arm so you don't have to clamber out and back in for every little rock.
3. The lack of any mapping mechanics was seriously pissing me off. In the OG I kindda got over it bc the biomes were distinct enough and a map wasn't strictly necessary (altho it'd be nice). But in Below Zero it's infuriating, especially in the extensive Glacial Basin/Arctic Spires biome. Everything fucking looks the same and you're constantly looping around like retard. And even in the ocean a basic navigation tool would be goddamn helpful, it's a gigantic world and some of the caves are fucking mazes.
4. Vast majority of what you scan is purely cosmetic. You can build a fortress of a base with all kinds of bells and whistles (10 different kinds of beds, tons of posters, pictures, plants etc.) but it's all completely useless for the gameplay. I wish it was better integrated - if you HAD to sleep, if there was some use for all the decorations (i.e. morale system), if you could research and prepare better food stuffs etc.
4.1. Speaking about useless, you never really need your Prawn suit, sadly. Everyone's favourite mech from the OG got sidelined in Below Zero since the max depth upgrade for the Seatruck is 1000 meters and the deepest point of the game is also at 1000 meters. So the only use for the Prawn is drilling the resource nodes which is annoying since you have to lug it around just for that.
5. Food and water is a stupid chore. After spending two hours in the OG Subnautica I quit and started a new game without having to eat or drink. I like survival elements, loved to hunt and eat in Kingdom Come for example, but in Subnautica it's just not fun at all. Your water consumption is stupid, you have to clutter half of your (already limited) inventory with water bottles whenever you go for a longer trip. The devs clearly realized this so they gave us a water reduction tool but as usual in Subnautica - things are incredibly easy to miss in this giant, murky world so I've only found it in the late game.
6. Devs' retarded attitude towards combat roars back. The world is jampacked with aggressive nasties who'd chase you across the map to bite your face off and all you got is a weak electrical shock at a melee range. Trying to evade FOUR Shadow Leviathans with their AoE grab attack in the cramped crystal caves was very fucking entertaining. Not. What's even worse those beasties ARE killable, it's just incredibly fiddly, arduous and grindy. But the devs aren't gonna give us any reasonable way to deal with these monsters because their brains rotted away from smelling all that hair dye and vegan farts in their stuffy offices.

Both the OG and Below Zero are games that could've been dazzling gems. Unfortunately they got only one aspect incredibly right - the vibe and exploration. They fucked up everything else.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

my review of this and the original:
fuck water

 

[JDR13]

Does crusty_cuckleford ever not shitpost?

 

[Ezeekiel]

I noticed the game is feature complete (except the very ending) so I gave it a swing.

It's a very similar deal to the first game, unsurprisingly, but with more annoyances.

1. The vibe and exploration is great again but with less awe and wonder since it's not novel anymore.
2. The Seatruck is a nice idea but only the storage module is somewhat useful. Also I wish it had some sort of manipulation arm so you don't have to clamber out and back in for every little rock.
3. The lack of any mapping mechanics was seriously pissing me off. In the OG I kindda got over it bc the biomes were distinct enough and a map wasn't strictly necessary (altho it'd be nice). But in Below Zero it's infuriating, especially in the extensive Glacial Basin/Arctic Spires biome. Everything fucking looks the same and you're constantly looping around like retard. And even in the ocean a basic navigation tool would be goddamn helpful, it's a gigantic world and some of the caves are fucking mazes.
4. Vast majority of what you scan is purely cosmetic. You can build a fortress of a base with all kinds of bells and whistles (10 different kinds of beds, tons of posters, pictures, plants etc.) but it's all completely useless for the gameplay. I wish it was better integrated - if you HAD to sleep, if there was some use for all the decorations (i.e. morale system), if you could research and prepare better food stuffs etc.
4.1. Speaking about useless, you never really need your Prawn suit, sadly. Everyone's favourite mech from the OG got sidelined in Below Zero since the max depth upgrade for the Seatruck is 1000 meters and the deepest point of the game is also at 1000 meters. So the only use for the Prawn is drilling the resource nodes which is annoying since you have to lug it around just for that.
5. Food and water is a stupid chore. After spending two hours in the OG Subnautica I quit and started a new game without having to eat or drink. I like survival elements, loved to hunt and eat in Kingdom Come for example, but in Subnautica it's just not fun at all. Your water consumption is stupid, you have to clutter half of your (already limited) inventory with water bottles whenever you go for a longer trip. The devs clearly realized this so they gave us a water reduction tool but as usual in Subnautica - things are incredibly easy to miss in this giant, murky world so I've only found it in the late game.
6. Devs' retarded attitude towards combat roars back. The world is jampacked with aggressive nasties who'd chase you across the map to bite your face off and all you got is a weak electrical shock at a melee range. Trying to evade FOUR Shadow Leviathans with their AoE grab attack in the cramped crystal caves was very fucking entertaining. Not. What's even worse those beasties ARE killable, it's just incredibly fiddly, arduous and grindy. But the devs aren't gonna give us any reasonable way to deal with these monsters because their brains rotted away from smelling all that hair dye and vegan farts in their stuffy offices.

Both the OG and Below Zero are games that could've been dazzling gems. Unfortunately they got only one aspect incredibly right - the vibe and exploration. They fucked up everything else.

They haven't learned anything from the weaker aspects of the first game... Just sad.

 

[Zombra]

cvv Sounding pretty good from your description. I assume beacons are still craftable so you can do your own mapping, just like in the first game, which I really enjoyed. I always hated the Prawn Suit - there was a great user review which implied that you were kind of forced to use it all the time but I'm glad to hear this is not the case. Also glad to hear that once again combat is not the focus - not every game has to end with "and then you get the rocket launcher". Sounds like there's still no substitute for the Seamoth but you can't have everything I guess. Looking forward to this more now, thanks for the update.

 

[polo]

I played it like half a year ago and it was pretty ok, but sharp on the edges and obviously incomplete. I agree in some of the aspects you mention. Mapping was not an issue tbh, food and water mechanic can be tedious at the beginning but then its ok.
I do agree below zero has almost no improvements over the first one.

 

[jackofshadows]

I didn't have any problems whatsoever with navigation in OG thanks to handplaced and my own beacons. Same with food&water not sure why it's labeled as an issue. It's rather too easy to handle with plants and trees, they've simpliified this aspect too much imo. Especially since it's an optional feature. I mean, it's a survival game after all.

Prawn for drilling only seems weird but what about killing mobs in it? It was posible in OG although I didn't bother with it and just tried to ignore them at all times (ripper literally ripped me one time tho).

What about plot stuff? I've heared pretty disturbing things about some woke shit but then they get rid of it?

 

[cvv]

Sounds like there's still no substitute for the Seamoth but you can't have everything I guess.

There's the Seatruck, which is like Seamoth except you can hitch various modules to it like wagons to a train - storage module, animal trapping module, personal quarters module etc. - so it's like a mobile sea base. A p. cool idea but again, the only really useful module is storage. The downside is you don't have any solar charger or sonar upgrade (at least not yet).

And yeah, if you don't mind the lack of a mapping mechanics or lack of combat you'll have fun.

 

[cvv]

I didn't have any problems whatsoever with navigation in OG thanks to handplaced and my own beacons. Same with food&water not sure why it's labeled as an issue. It's rather too easy to handle with plants and trees, they've simpliified this aspect too much imo. Especially since it's an optional feature. I mean, it's a survival game after all.

As I said, a lack of mapping is only an annoyance in the ocean. But it's a real fucking pain in the ass in the overworld which is tiny in OG but vast in BZ.

Also in most survival games the survival element (food and water) is actually fun. Maybe because it's a bit more involved and sophisticated. I think in Subnautica it's annoying because it's so simplified it's a boring, annyoing chore.

 

[cvv]

I do agree below zero has almost no improvements over the first one.

They seem to have solved the horrific texture popping issue. In OG it was so awful it was almost comical. In BZ there's next to no popping (then again I've a brand new rig so don't quote me on that).

 

[polo]

I do agree below zero has almost no improvements over the first one.

They seem to have solved the horrific texture popping issue. In OG it was so awful it was almost comical. In BZ there's next to no popping (then again I've a brand new rig so don't quote me on that).

I dont remember the texture problem tbh, i do remember saving the game while in the prawn in an island and falling to my death when realoading.

 

[lightbane]

6. Devs' retarded attitude towards combat roars back. The world is jampacked with aggressive nasties who'd chase you across the map to bite your face off and all you got is a weak electrical shock at a melee range. Trying to evade FOUR Shadow Leviathans with their AoE grab attack in the cramped crystal caves was very fucking entertaining. Not. What's even worse those beasties ARE killable, it's just incredibly fiddly, arduous and grindy. But the devs aren't gonna give us any reasonable way to deal with these monsters because their brains rotted away from smelling all that hair dye and vegan farts in their stuffy offices.

So, no harpoons yet because "guns are bad!" mentality. Didn't the devs fire one of their own for not being pure enough?

 

[markec]

6. Devs' retarded attitude towards combat roars back. The world is jampacked with aggressive nasties who'd chase you across the map to bite your face off and all you got is a weak electrical shock at a melee range. Trying to evade FOUR Shadow Leviathans with their AoE grab attack in the cramped crystal caves was very fucking entertaining. Not. What's even worse those beasties ARE killable, it's just incredibly fiddly, arduous and grindy. But the devs aren't gonna give us any reasonable way to deal with these monsters because their brains rotted away from smelling all that hair dye and vegan farts in their stuffy offices.

So, no harpoons yet because "guns are bad!" mentality. Didn't the devs fire one of their own for not being pure enough?

They fired the guy that did the sounds because he liked some Paul Joseph Watsons twitter posts and commented how mass immigration is bad.

 

[Poseidon00]

I want to like Subnautica, and it's fun for the first few hours, but then its glaring weaknesses show up more and more. I won't go over them again since other posters already made good points.

If they want to lean in to the living world and survival aspect of the game, then they should make it more than surface deep. I would enjoy just looking out of the window of my base if the creatures did more than just swim randomly and occasionally attack prey (but not eat it). Give a little more in the way of the life cycles of these creatures. And there are only a handful of unique species. Less than, like, 20 overall. It works better as a demo than a fully fledged game.

 

[Jaedar]

Speaking about useless, you never really need your Prawn suit, sadly.

I don't recall ever needing it in the first game either.

 

[<3sRichardSimmons]

Speaking about useless, you never really need your Prawn suit, sadly.

I don't recall ever needing it in the first game either.

You for sure need to use it complete the game.

 

[Jaedar]

Speaking about useless, you never really need your Prawn suit, sadly.

I don't recall ever needing it in the first game either.

You for sure need to use it complete the game.

When though? Iirc both the sub and the prawn can go to the deepest cave when fully upgraded, and the protagonist is immune to pressure changes, so you really just need it for a portable air supply.

Admittedly I quit the game when there was only the final scavenger hunts + rocket building left.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Funny, I just experimented over the weekend with the modding community for Subnautica, and whether it's worth it. I'll let you draw your own conclusions.

First obstacle is the mod manager, which is apparently so straightforward that it just installs (into the Subnautica-folder within the Steam folder) and doesn't tell you anything more.

I had to figure out on my own the following:

# The mod manager is incompatible with the multiplayer-mod, the most popular Subnautica-mod of them all. This appears to be more by design rather than proper incompatibily, as it's the only Subnautica-mod that's incompatible with the mod manager.

# All mods most be unzipped from their files into a folder that has now appeared within the Subnautica-folder, and they must be in their respective folders as they all require their own Javascripts.

# The mod manager won't work with the Experimental Build of Subnautica, even though the current Experimental Build is actually almost bug-free and far more stable than the last Stable-release.

# A UI-addon for the mod manager allows users to manually select which mods are (in)active during each session, otherwise they're all active. Strangely enough, this addon requires an API from NexusMods to even function, so I didn't bother with it.

I browsed a good deal of mods, found quite a few that interested me, and installed them. The mod manager only rejected one of them as being incompatible (due to being outdated) so I chucked that out and tried again, and it all seemed to work together.

I play for an hour, save my game, then when I came back later and tried to reload that save the game crashed to desktop. Every single time. I tried troubleshooting the problem, only to find that the mod manager authors divert all inquiries to their Discord-server. For obvious reasons I'm not doing that, so they can just rightly fuck off. Uninstall.exe for the win.

Opinion? Subnautica is due for a new Stable release, and maybe then things will improve somewhat on the modding-side, but until then there's no reason whatsoever to even think about modding the game.

Oh, and the mods I found that were interesting:

- DeExtinction, the only mod that adds new critters. Most of them are just alternate floating foodstuffs, but there's at least one leviathan-sized critter in there.
- Nightvision, courtesy of a craftable chip.
- Means to craft and use both the Ancient Sword and the Alien Rifle.
- A mod that overrides all limitations on where buildable items can be placed. (I think this mod was the guilty one causing my game to crash.)
- A mod that supposedly fixes one of the major reasons for slowdowns.
- Quality-of-life improvements for base habitats, including on/off-switches for all lights and the water purifier.
- A mod that allows me to salvage almost every debris-item from the Aurora for resources.
- Upgrading the depth-meter to include surface altitude.
- Means to make ingots for more resources such as copper, gold, silver, lead, etc, which can then be smelted back down into individual units.
- A mod that adds depth modules up to Mk 5 for the Seamoth, and improves the overall stats on it with each upgrade, making it faster and tankier.
- A sleep-management mod. The game starts by telling that you have been injected with a drug that removes your need to sleep for 12 days, but after that you'll need to have crafted a bed or your Tiredness-meter will eventually kill you.

I steered clear of mods that made the game too easy, like weapon-systems for the vehicles, inventory-upgrades and crafting-management stuff. There were also a couple of tryhard-mods that made crafting recipes "more realistic" or some such bother, I left those well alone.

EDIT: Point clarified.

 

[<3sRichardSimmons]

When though? Iirc both the sub and the prawn can go to the deepest cave when fully upgraded, and the protagonist is immune to pressure changes, so you really just need it for a portable air supply.

Admittedly I quit the game when there was only the final scavenger hunts + rocket building left.

No, apparently you're right and I'm wrong. I could have sworn that the Cyclops tapped out at a depth of 1500M, but apparently it shares the limit of 1700M with the Prawn Suit, so yes you can finish the game without the Prawn Suit.

That said though, I don't know why you would want to. The Cyclops is so cumbersome to control, and the Prawn Suit is far more versatile to maneuver, can harvest resources much more efficiently, and gives you some actual defensive capabilities compared to the walking target that the Cyclops is.