Biome Crossover
Deathbane
Join Date: 2012-12-30 Member: 176770Members
Join Date: 2012-12-30 Member: 176770Members
I haven't played much of the game, only around 140 odd minutes or so since acquiring it, and liking what I see so far.
What im worried about though, is the locking out of content and creatures to specific biomes.
This creates very static gameplay - if i know im not going to encounter a particular threat or challenge necessarily because im in a particular biome thegame quickly becomes dull.
Biomes therefore begin to act more like 'levels'. This is ok for some games, but for a game so focused on exploration etc as Subnautica is, I fear it could end up stilting the game experience just like early releases of say Starbound and their silly leveled planet mechanics.
Biomes should have much finer blending, between both fauna and flora and should be relevant for all the duration of gameplay in some fashion. Even when you reach the 'endgame', there should always be something to explore, encounter or be surprised in at even the 'Safe Shallows' biome.
I think this can be solved by natural interaction of creatures and their environment to some extent. Maybe you will encounter a new subtype of a creature, for example, or maybe a reaper leviathan has decided to come to scour the supposedly 'safe shallows' to feed out of desperation, forced away from the ship due to radiation. Of alternatively 'deep sea' creatures are suffering a famine and risk coming into higher pressures to feed at night etc. This leads to natural encounters that surprise and challenge the player arising out of creature AI and keep the game fresh, rather than predictable based on your location
An example which happened to me the other day was when somehow, a bone shark appeared in the safe shallows at night and attacked me. It shook me out of the complacency of feeling safe because i was in ' the beginner biome ' which made the game vastly more interesting. Even if this was a bug, it was actually a welcome change of pace.
On a slightly off note, it doesn't make sense to make the reaper leviathan simply a 'boss' to guard the ship and have it stuck in that role. That is horrifically 'gamey', and does not help the sandbox feel the game is going for. Using them as an example, they should be able to turn up anywhere where their 'ideal environment' is set, alongside a tolerable range for what depth etc they are capable of surviving, and be driven by factors that affect the local population (food abundance, radiation and other pressures that could induce more 'wanderlust'). This leads to more emergent play.
Having an increased chance to encounter them there to make it a bit of a challenge, fair enough, but especially when radiation increases, everything should vacate the area and it should be environmental challenges which permit the player from entering that area.
I know this is early access, so thats not a criticism, but just something I felt needed bringing up. Having progression, a sense of story etc is fine, but it should not be forced in to the detriment of the 'living world' experience which will make or break subnautica. I would not like to see it fall into being water minecraft.
What im worried about though, is the locking out of content and creatures to specific biomes.
This creates very static gameplay - if i know im not going to encounter a particular threat or challenge necessarily because im in a particular biome thegame quickly becomes dull.
Biomes therefore begin to act more like 'levels'. This is ok for some games, but for a game so focused on exploration etc as Subnautica is, I fear it could end up stilting the game experience just like early releases of say Starbound and their silly leveled planet mechanics.
Biomes should have much finer blending, between both fauna and flora and should be relevant for all the duration of gameplay in some fashion. Even when you reach the 'endgame', there should always be something to explore, encounter or be surprised in at even the 'Safe Shallows' biome.
I think this can be solved by natural interaction of creatures and their environment to some extent. Maybe you will encounter a new subtype of a creature, for example, or maybe a reaper leviathan has decided to come to scour the supposedly 'safe shallows' to feed out of desperation, forced away from the ship due to radiation. Of alternatively 'deep sea' creatures are suffering a famine and risk coming into higher pressures to feed at night etc. This leads to natural encounters that surprise and challenge the player arising out of creature AI and keep the game fresh, rather than predictable based on your location
An example which happened to me the other day was when somehow, a bone shark appeared in the safe shallows at night and attacked me. It shook me out of the complacency of feeling safe because i was in ' the beginner biome ' which made the game vastly more interesting. Even if this was a bug, it was actually a welcome change of pace.
On a slightly off note, it doesn't make sense to make the reaper leviathan simply a 'boss' to guard the ship and have it stuck in that role. That is horrifically 'gamey', and does not help the sandbox feel the game is going for. Using them as an example, they should be able to turn up anywhere where their 'ideal environment' is set, alongside a tolerable range for what depth etc they are capable of surviving, and be driven by factors that affect the local population (food abundance, radiation and other pressures that could induce more 'wanderlust'). This leads to more emergent play.
Having an increased chance to encounter them there to make it a bit of a challenge, fair enough, but especially when radiation increases, everything should vacate the area and it should be environmental challenges which permit the player from entering that area.
I know this is early access, so thats not a criticism, but just something I felt needed bringing up. Having progression, a sense of story etc is fine, but it should not be forced in to the detriment of the 'living world' experience which will make or break subnautica. I would not like to see it fall into being water minecraft.
Comments
You can catch fish in other biomes and bring them to your own and release them and they'll swim around and stay there. I have a number of fish from 200m deep swimming happily around at 10m. I was rather hoping they'd explode or something when released.
As for not getting involved.. the game is a learning curve really, you start in your shallow area, learning how to fish, collect, cook, eat etc.
Then adventure out to get silver, to make cpu's to make more advanced machines, you'll find the stasis rifle component, which you need to stun fish, here you'll come into contact with stalkers, whose teeth you need to build the cyclops, in starting area you'll find the seamoth component, needed to build the seamoth, later on, you'll need lithium to make plas steel for cyclops and gold to make a component used in cyclops as well, this will push you further out, where the sand shark lies. After that there really isn't alot to see. 3 small areas melded together to test various ideas. I expect in the released version to find these areas maybe bigger, maybe not, they seem to work well as is, once you get the cyclops you'll likely, if you haven't already discover the mushroom tree and eventually the crashed ship and likely if you're lucky the floating island.
I've restarted and completed this demo if you think of it like that, start to cyclops maybe 20 times on freedom and survival. Now I am content just to swim with the fishes and play hide n seek with the crash pods. The game is a nice splash of colour on an otherwise dull life
I think to have the more instant death critters coming into the beginners area would be ignorant of the need for new players to learn the game. They should be in their own areas, waiting to be discovered. If you want them to spice up your life, build a base where they live.
You won't typically see many reef borne species leaving reefs much or delving deeper. Most deep sea fish do not surface out of the abyss as they have evolved for that environment (in fact they tend to pop or just die after leaving the deep seas) Some species such as sharks and larger schooling fish like Tuna and Marlin will wander a lot in the ocean, but they tend to like open water more than reefs.
As it stands though, there is more than one "Safe Shallows" biome and if you check out some of the others you may notice a Stalker or Gasapod wandering into them occasionally. Not to mention some of the tunnels tend to guide you into other zones and such. There's a tunnel in one of the Safe Shallows that exits into a Grassy Fields biome that has an opening for the Jelly Shroom caves; so there is some stuff if you look for it.
1. Their spawn points are placed in specific areas,
2. The game only moves/animates animals that are within visual range.
This means that if a stalker is moving towards you, and you move fast enough, it will basically freeze in place once it is out of range. Next time you get near, it will unfreeze and continue on its path. So, the animals can move to different areas - but it would take you leading them like sheep...
It would be AWESOME if they designed some kind of simplified off-camera AI that extends in a very large circle around the player. Of course, this adds memory and CPU overhead that UWE may be unwilling to tackle - especially in a 32bit memory environment.