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ShuttleBug wrote: »

Calarand77 wrote: »

I agree that the other passengers' presence needs to be somehow shown and... proved to the player, for lack of a better word. And you don't even need to show the bodies to create the feeling of loss. All it takes to make this work within the rating is a lone item hand-placed by the devs here and there. More personal belongings - a photo, a sock, a bunny slipper, a fancy futuristic toothbrush, actual paper book, a garishly colored ipod, etc. Little private things that a human being would take with them on a space journey far far away from home, and that would look slightly out of place among the other items in game. Aurora does have a little bit of those, like posters and mascots, but to make this work, we'd need much more, especially in the lifepods and wrecks, to make the ship look actually lived-in. Also, imagine approaching one of the broken pods and seeing a single shoe first somewhere on the seafloor nearby. It would add immensely to both the sense of danger and urgency. Letting the player collect those items, keep them in the base, would in turn help create a sense of longing for lost friends and simply for human contact.

I could imagine the player picking up some stuffed animal, staring at it for a few seconds, then setting it down on a bed. Small things like that could really show the player was actually connected to the rest of the crew without requiring bodies or voice acting.

Like this?

Your argument makes perfect sense. But this is a issue in a lot of other media's. The goal of Subnuatica is really your enjoyment. The Avatar you play as, and the crews that die, aren't the important parts of the story. Building, the world, and the goals are. Think of it another way. Take the film Die Hard. Hans Grubber takes over a brand new company building in order to steal money. His team takes hostage of over 30 people. Out of those 30 people. The audience only cares about 4. I don't care about the other lives, because I don't know them/they aren't the point of the movie. I only care about John, his wife, and very loosely Mr. Takagi, and the drug idiot who got himself killed. Outside the building, I only care about Officer Powel, and the Limo Drive. While news reporters and other SWAT team members where killed.

This is a survival game. And the only core part of the game is the surviving location. Yes, it would be interesting to know about more stuff about the character. We do get some ideas of the outside world. From the people that we hear/read logs from. Everyone is unprofessional in Alterra. Because they forgot they left their mics on. So we hear their chatter. It gives you something from the universe. But our care is towards this water planet. Just like how we follow Ripley killing Aliens. VS seeing her at home and feeding Josey.

https://imgur.com/a/R5K9S scroll down a little if you want the textless version

To explain the idea, when whales die they create a 'whale fall', a place where their decomposing body landed is eaten by critters on the ocean floor, creating a tiny ecosystem and a creepy pile of giant bones as well

My related posts with awesome ideas by the commenters, some that I added to this concept pic: https://www.reddit.com/r/subnautica/comments/7l9ifm/a_whale_fall_is_where_the_body_of_a_whale_landed/

https://www.reddit.com/r/subnautica/comments/68qvyp/structure_idea_a_dead_reefback_whose_bodyshell/

https://www.reddit.com/r/subnautica/comments/7mwyun/spooky_location_ideas_an_old_crew_burial_and/

What are your thoughts?

@Olmy
I highly appreciate you guys reading this thread at this stressful moment of the game development.
I don't want to be annoying so I will insist on it just one last time:

I feel that it is really important that every room spends a little bit of energy.
Right now you can build a giant subaquatic base with one biorreactor, put 1 single mushroom in it and never run out of energy (or just build 1 single highly inefficient solar pannel as long as it gets 1 energy). You won't be able to charge batteries in this base, but you will have oxygen, Medical Kit Fabricators and unlimited food and water forever. You will have unlimited alien containment tanks hatching eggs, etc.. and no need for any real source of power

Right now (freshly tested):

• solar pannel = max 15.3 energy/min (this one from wiki, not tested)
• biorreactor = 50 energy/min
• Thermal plant = around 62 energy/ min (not tested today)
• nuclear plant = 250 energy/min
• Water Filtering Machine = -51 energy/min
• Scanner Room = -29 energy/min

----

I suggest the power consumption to be something like:

• Water Filtering Machine = -30 energy/min (decreased from 51)
• Corridor = -1 energy/min
• observatory = -1 energy/min
• Multipurpose Room = -2 energy/min
• Alien Containment tank = -2 energy/min
• Moonpool = -5 energy/min
• Vertical connector = -0.25 energy/min? (just to prevent abuse)
• interior growbed = -5 energy/min
• Medical kit fabricator = -5 energy/min

Example:
Then you increase a little the power production of the nuclear power to 350 energy/minute or 400 energy/minute and it suddenly becomes a must-have for large bases

And please, limit the number of thermal plants on a single thermal vent, because late game materials are not the problem when you build something that require 0 maintenance

Final note: this will be much more controversial to implement after v1.0 because some people with larger bases will have energy problems. In the same way that the Hull Reinforcement change would probably produce some drama if it happened after v1.0. That's why I am suggesting it now


@garath

I'm dreading posting this, so I want to start by saying that I love this game. I burned myself out on it last summer and have only played in short bursts since, but this game sits in my heart as one of the greats (and it's not even in full release yet). I want to jump back into it as soon as I can and experience all of the changes that UW have made in those six months.

But there is one problem with this game that really bugs me. It may just be a personal thing so feel free to completely disagree, but I find the game very unsatisfying in the long run. It has some glaring issues regarding the expansion of this universe that will leave me wanting so much more after the game ends. Again, these issues may be personal, but I think it would be healthy to get these thoughts out there.

The game starts with you jumping into a life pod and ejecting out of the Aurora. The Aurora explodes, the life pod lands in the ocean and you are left on your own. As you look at the enormous ship on the horizon you may start to ask questions like Where did that ship come from? or Did I have any friends on that ship that I should be worried about? or How developed is humanity? Can they create ships as big as moons or is this ship the largest they can construct? And although you do find out that there were other people on the ship and you read their stories of the crash, you fail to discover whether your character knew them personally. You rarely even hear any mention of where they came from; you only hear about their lives during and after the crash. All you know about them is what they were like and what they did just before and during their time on 4546B.

When you journey to the Aurora you find it irradiated and burning. There are no corpses in sight; only broken technology and PDA diaries. This detracts from the emotional weight of the Aurora crash substantially. I know they were trying to keep an age rating, but this ship doesn't feel lived in at all. There is no sign of human life other than their scattered PDAs. The emotional impact of something is directly affected by your involvement with it; when all I have that links me to this crew is PDA entries it doesn't get me invested. Sure, it's sad that they died, but it doesn't bring with it any real emotional impact. The most emotional part of Subnautica is by far (and spoilers) the Emperor's death and the hatching of her young. You feel something when she dies, and this is because we met her, we interacted with her, we knew her motivations and her struggles and we helped her overcome them. If we were given text that just told us that the Emperor had died and her young had hatched the emotional weight would be nowhere near what it is now.

And this is a recurring theme in Subnautica and my problems with it; I feel a lot more invested with the planet than I have ever felt with Alterra or the Federation. I am constantly interacting with the planet and its creatures, I am constantly watching them interact with each other. I love this planet and everything on it because I've spent hundreds of hours exploring, seeing and interacting with these creatures and everything like that. I haven't seen the Federation or my crew mates in-game so I feel nothing for them.

And here's where it all falls apart for me. This is the main point of this post so I guess I'll just put it on its own line in bold with italics and all that:

What I feel as a player contradicts what my character feels. Our motivations don't align.

When it comes down to it, your character's motivation is to leave this planet and return to Federation space, but you never feel the urge to complete this task as you don't know what your character is going back to. Your main reason for playing this game is to explore and experience the world that you've found yourself on, whilst also building vehicles and bases to suit yourself. There's a real disconnect between the player and the character in this game and it bugs me. In, say, Portal, Chell's task is to escape Aperture Laboratories and maybe kill GLaDOS along the way. You as a player are playing the game to do puzzles and solve them, and you feel a connection with the character because there's sympathy there. You are programmed to hate GLaDOS and see her as an enemy like Chell does, and you want to reach and kill her in the same way as the character. You could even take a newer, simpler game like Enter the Gungeon. The characters you play in that game have a sole task: fight through the Gungeon and acquire the artifact at the end. You as a player have that same motivation because it lines up with your gameplay (that being shooting bad guys, becoming stronger and progressing through the levels).

This is Subnautica's biggest weak point for me; you and your character have very different motivations for doing what they do. The character would B-line for where the plot asks him to go so that he can escape the planet whereas the player wants to explore and get to know the world they're playing in. It doesn't line up and it detracts from the experience, as I'm constantly left asking myself: Why is my character exploring the Grand Reef and looking for titanium to build a base when he already has the necessary equipment to get the the Prison? In this case I either, begrudgingly, go to the prison as it's what my character would do, or I would continue what I wanted to do and still feel that disconnect.

To conclude this, I love Subnautica. I honestly can't get enough. The gameplay is great, the creatures are fantastic and the concept is innovative and fun. The development team is doing an amazing job at fleshing out this world and everything on it. The only problem is that me and my character both have staggeringly different motivations. I play to experience the world that is being presented to me and explore it and discover more about it, but my character wants to get off as soon as is possible, to return to a Federation I know nothing about. This may not be a big problem for many out there, but for me immersion is key. It's difficult to put my mind inside a character who wants completely different things to me.

But that's just my opinion. The disagree button's there if you don't really think I'm on the money.

Hey guys, thanks for the feedback. We're making the following changes to power production to reduce the amount of maintenance required to use nuclear reactors and to address balance issues with some of the farm-able plants.

• Reduced all bio reactor fuel values by ~15%
• Increased marble melon growth time to 1000 seconds.
• Additionally reduced marble melon energy content by 20%.
• Reduced gel sack energy content by almost 50%.
• Doubled the energy content of reactor rods, so they last 80 minutes each, but we may adjust further.
• Removed glass from reactor rod recipe