Not random enough?

whoppaXXL

Special Pre-Order #169 reports back in ...


Once in a while I start the game and dive in for a few hours, I test a mac build, or just cheat myself "nocost" to try out new stuff, cause mostly I dislike crafting systems.

I would call myself the "adventurer" type of gamer. I have a high demand on aesthetics and quality which UWE always nailed. I love variety, being confronted and being tested. I hate repetitive scenarios, search and collect modes (depending on what it offers me) and time wasting (not to be mixed with adventuring!)

I would say the most important part of the game is building a platform for your own existence on this alien planet, hence you go exploring a lot and craft yourself to tech heaven. However, all those funky crafted toys, the literal sandbox below you and the few special game scenarios (exploring the crashed Aurora) is all there is to it.

I'm not saying this is bad - It is great, UWE already came a long way to the current build and as a long time fan I know what they're in for. I have no doubt they will improve and make it better.

But.

The world fails to absorb me. I've seen it all already. As I said crafting stuff is half the fun, but in the way it forces me to interact with the world, the world can't keep up. It's just collecting stamps in a kind of way, I sure can take that dive into this dark shallow cavern and try to find stuff, but I can also stay in relaxing sandy places and find most of it, too. If I were Indiana Jones or Lara Croft I would be bored the hell out of this. We don't need action necessarily, but much more random events that force us to react to the environment in new ways. That make every dive a new adventure, so it feels really alive and unpredictable. If UWE accomplishes this, it will gain much more traction in the gaming community, in my opinion.

How those random event's look.. Well, sky is the limit - and with the quality aesthethics of UWE I can see a lot of eyecandy that is worth taking a bath for, just think of a nice meteor shower or something. I didn't want to make this a suggestion thread, but just post my input after some months of silence.

Thanks guys, keep it up.

Captain_Pyro

I don't know if that really solves the problem or just stretches the time until you finally saw everything and it becomes repetitive. IMO the game's strongest side is showing off this marvelous alien world. The problem being that unlike crafting there is no mechanic to aesthethics. If you seen it, you seen it... that's it. Like a museum. Even if there are hundreds of nice details to a painting, sooner or later you get it and go on. I think random events in the world would just be those small details. Even if you seomtimes see something new, the number of suprising events will hit a limit at some point and what you need then is more fundamentally different stuff to gawk at.

I think it'd be better if the devs work on expanding the world than creating more details to existing areas. I don't say that i'm completely against random events, but i think they should be very low on the priority list.

CrawlinChaos

I'm not sure if the original poster is aware of this, but the developers intentionally chose not to use procedural generation for Subnautica so that they could put more attention in crafting the details of the world. While this is of course very admirable, it does mean that there will inevitably be a point at which you have 'seen it all, done it all'. I am not saying that procedural games are better in a way, as I have played many (I actually bought into the alpha of Minecraft, lol) and I've found myself finding sameness in their randomness after awhile. Same thing for games like the GTA series and virtually every MMO, which have 'random events' built into them. Those also lose their charm quickly after you've experienced the same 'random' event 20 times. I guess what I am saying is that there really is no such thing as a game where every time you play its a new adventure. Reality is that you are always going to wear a game out eventually. What I've noticed is that people who manage to play games for ridiculous amount of time (1000+ hours) are able to do so because they *make* their own adventure. They have surely seen everything the game has to offer, so what they do is try to approach the game in as many different and creative ways possible. Take for instance my own experience in Skyrim, which I logged a modest 500+ hours into. Did I spend 500 hours playing the same character? No. I must have created dozens of different characters, with different mods and playstyles. I can vividly remember spending a lot of time outside the game planning out my next character and doing research on how to make it work best. That is a mark of a good game; that you are playing it in your head even when you aren't actually playing it. Did I get burned out from it eventually? Yes, most certainly. But I got a lot for my money. Overall, what I think the developers need to focus on is giving the player as many choices as possible when it comes to playing the game. Whether or not this entitles adding random events to the game depends on how they want to approach that goal. It really should be about what the player can do though, not what the world can do, though obviously those aren't not mutually exclusive things.