Feedback - March Stable - Build 30230
project_mercy
Aurora Engine Room Join Date: 2016-03-27 Member: 214884Members
Aurora Engine Room Join Date: 2016-03-27 Member: 214884Members
Feedback - March Stable - Build 30230
This is feedback with about 35 hours of Stable, and a following 8-10 hours of 30600/30604 experimental.
I want to start by saying I've loved playing this game. I could spend quite a while gushing about all the things I love, but to make this more condensed I'm just going to comment on the things I think could use some improvement. This isn't meant to be negative. If it's not mentioned, it's probably because I love it.
I'm not going to mention anything directly to do with the fragment placement in Stable, as it's obviously been completely wiped. I will bring up experimental's changes for that at the end.
++ Survival/Food & Water ++
So, Large Tanks and Farming. I like the large tanks a lot, though it's sometimes hard to navigate around between the tank wall and the hand rails near any exits from the multi-purpose room. Maybe shorter hand rails would fix it.
The farming is just too effective. Everything in the beds just grow too fast. Two or three kelp plants outside will give you an almost endless supply of seeds. A single bed of any of the food plants is all you would ever need. I appreciate the fact we can now survive without a hunger-gatherer system of exterminating all life in an area and moving on, but it's sort of trivialized the survival aspects. It also trivializes the water purification as you can just keep eating fruit to make up for it. I think it would be easy to triple the growth time on any external or internal plants, and it probably needs to be higher. In addition, I feel it should require the input of water and possibly fertilizer to keep the beds going. This would mean that the water consumption of the plans was equitable to the water you would need to drink to keep up with it. For fertilizer you could use certain fish, which would still provide an advantage for keeping a food-based tank going. Other options might be a compost system for kelp or other plant life for those that didn't want to kill to keep their farming going. It would provide more to "do" while farming also, which I feel is a bonus. Possibly make growing inside really slow and then include the ability to install grow-lighting for a certain power constraint.
I was unable to get Acid Mushrooms to replicate. Until the charging system (especially the Cyclops charging) comes into play, batteries get used with staggering speed and each power cell consumes 4 mushrooms. The current speed of plant growth also means that you can basically string external grow beds around and put brain coral in them and within an hour or so you can create huge under-water air highways. It feels a bit odd and trivializes the already-placed brain corals. I'm not sure if being able to grow them is a good thing.
As for the water purification, I feel it's a big high on energy usage. A single cycle will consume more power than 3 solar panels can provide, and by night time it will kill all power. With the inclusion of the expected O2 changes coming up, that could be a big deal. As it is, there's no good way to stop the processing other than de-constructing it slightly. It needs a pause button.
++ Flora and Fauna ++
Another option other than farming would be a way to repopulate things in the wild. It would be nice if the loss of Flora left a spot you could plant something in. Even if it was just plant the same thing in, it would be a way that after reaping so much stuff in an area you could put it back. I'm not sure how this would be affected by the Terraformer, but since I've read it's probably going to go away then this might be easier to implement. Maybe convert the Terraformer to be used to replant lost flora.
Fauna you can somewhat repopulate with large tanks if you release them. The AI acts a bit odd for a while after you release a tank-grown fish, but I saw a Trello ticket indicative of fixing an AI issue with this, so it's possible this is already fixed. My issue with my released Fauna is that they still have a tendency to disappear or get eaten. It would be nice if there was some AI for the state of the ecology that would mimic changes in state, even better if your built-in AI voice commented on it as you went around like "This area seems to be suffering from some ecological impact". Possibly make it so the radiation from the Aurora early on starts this going. As the ecology degrades, there's a reduction in food fish, or the ones you pick up are sickly. The fauna gets sickly and starts dying off. If we had the replant option, then it would provide more things to do. You could basically spend time repairing biomes damaged from over-use or from the crash itself. Maybe if you got too many destroyed areas it would start producing horrible mutant predators to discourage just ignoring it all.
As for Predators, I think there's too many (outside of reapers, they're fine). I realize I just brought up horrible mutant predators, but going to some areas currently is just tedious. it involves a lot of waiting around in a Seamoth or whatever for the various piles of bone sharks and shockers or whatever to all get far enough away from some spot you want to go and then quick jump out, do something, and quick jump back in. It's kind of boring, and it just makes it feel like you need some more permanent way to deal with them, which I'm not a huge fan of. My record so far is, on one screen, 7 shockers, 4 bone sharks and 2 mesmers. They also end up eating far too many of the herbivores. I'd rather have a few sleek, aggressive things that you're scared of than just 30 stalkers or sand sharks floating around that you basically just have to ignore and/or knife because otherwise it would be a charnel house in every biome from the fleshy tower of babel from all the predator corpses you'd have to knife to not do the Seamoth hopin-hopout dance.
Speaking of knifing them all to death, I don't think it should be possible. Sure, drive them away with the knife, but killing them sort of sets a bad example that results in people feeling there should be a "next step" in their predator extermination policies. I vote for less prison shanks. If the ecology system above was in place, the loss of a predator should start a short increase in food fish, but then sickly flora and fauna and a spiral down from there. It would make it seem like killing all the predators was less of a huge bonus.
It would be nice to be able to build a sonic defence system to discourage predators near the base also.
++ Base Building ++
Base building is super fun. It's also super destructive at times without much recourse. I'd like to be able to build foundations at any level up to about 10-15 meters from the previous ground/foundation and have the legs automatically grow to that. There really isn't a good way to control this right now. Certain pieces allow you to rotate with the mouse wheel. I'd rather the mouse wheel control the up/down axis of the piece, and maybe just have a keyboard key to rotate. It would be nice to be able to place and rotate all pieces in the same fashion (the Moonpool being the worst transgressor of this).
I'd also rather it didn't wipe out any terrain when building. Currently there's no good way to restore terrain, you can just fill in holes with the Terraformer. It seems to increase the lag issues. I'd rather that the base wasn't allowed to be built in a destructive way, but if it needs that option to work, then allow use to restore the terrain/flora/etc. somehow if that base piece is removed. The Terraformer should be able to do that even if you remove its current abilities.
From what I've read about the O2 update, some of my feedback is going to be included in that. I would still be interested to require that you build actual O2 generators in the base. I would say start out simple with the ability to create CO2 scrubbers from crushed coral, maybe move on to harnessing brain coral, and then maybe electrolysis (also producing water and salt!) with sufficient power or who knows. It's something more interesting to add to base building. When the base power dies, I know the lights are supposed to drop in the O2 changes. I think it would be nice if there were security lights that stayed illuminated for 24 hours or so without power. Honestly, it might be nice to just allow that in general, so you can turn your main base lights off if you wanted. Sometimes if you have a deep base it's nice to stare out into the darkness.
I'd like to see the Moonpool room changed into just a usable room, and the Moonpool itself converted into an upgrade to that room. Maybe make it so you can fit two large tanks in it. This would help solve my issue with the large tanks taking up too much space in the multi-purpose rooms. It would also make a nice interior farming room if farming was given a more reasonable grow rate. You could also make a nice garden with small tanks and various planters.
The current glass-corridor vs. metal corridor with windows balance feels odd from a structural perspective. I would think a metal corridor with 3 windows should be more structurally sound than a glass corridor but it's way worse at -4 instead of -2. I think there should be a basic reinforcing panel with just titanium in it for a +2 structure.
Speaking of structure, I don't know of an easy in-game way of knowing what the current base structure value is at outside of console commands or add/deleting one of the components in the base. It would be nice if you had a console somewhere you could build that gave you the status of the base. Maybe even show graphs of power usage, leaks, etc.
As the last point on this section, and I know it's been brought up before, but I wish there was a way to make the building process be a bit more hands-on. It seems odd to just sort of pop a huge water-tight room out of a handful of metal in the span of a few seconds. I'm not a huge fan of giving negative points without a suggestion, but in this case I just don't have a compelling one.
++ Resources ++
The experimental changes are going to fit somewhat into this.
I'm not a huge fan of there being a finite amount of resources in any given game. It gives you a sense that it's all sort of futile, because eventually there's a physical constraint (console commands not-withstanding) to what you can do in-game. The inclusion of the farming change and external beds means that a lot of the constrained resources can now be grown. You're still stuck with a finite supply of minerals though. This is exacerbated by the changes in Experimental that removed the plethora of Fragments around. They were a huge supply of Titanium, which means if you felt like spending some time harvesting, you at least could get a decent stash of titanium. While it was still finite, it was a much larger number. Now, titanium is extremely rare. In fact, everything is extremely rare except for Gold and Diamonds which seem to be in abundance in the deep but have extremely limited usage at this time.
I would like to see mines included in the game. You would have to prospect for them. Maybe get a rough idea from the map room and then have to swim out and use the scanner to find them. You would need to produce a mining platform that you would build over a mining vein. Probably string some power lines to the miner to let it do its work. Maybe require you clean it up regularly and/or build hoppers for the result. You could also tie the mine into the ecological impact idea up in the previous sections. Early mines caused ecological damage, later mines could be less efficient but more ecologically sound. Heck, maybe even make it adjustable. After mining an area maybe the person could then restore the ecology. Mines would play out, but new ones would show up based on usage and some randomness.
++ Fragments, Blueprints and Upgrades ++
This starts with a combination of Experimental and Stable.
As mentioned, the change to moving fragments into the Wrecks has had a pretty large impact on the game. First, the reduction in all the Titanium is felt. It also means that the vast majority of the biomes out there have become mostly worthless, which I feel is a huge loss. You used to have to scour each biome looking for fragments. Then when you found them they basically weren't hugely important any more. Now it's just skimming around hitting whatever wrecks you can find (which unfortunately are in fixed places) and the rest is just a fly-over state. Switching to the ecology system and/or the mines would at least give you some reason to go back into each biome. I guess the DNA system helps somewhat with that, but again it's just a one-time thing.
There's a few wrecks currently in the shallower biomes that have locked doors. If you're new to the game you would have no idea where to go find a Diamond to build the laser cutter. Currently it's even possible that most of the fragments that spawn spawn inside those locked wrecks. I think locked wrecks are cool, but I'm not sure how to integrate them in a better fashion. Maybe make an upgrade option for the cutter. The early on doesn't require diamonds. Maybe start it with a Plasma cutter that takes gold and titanium, and then later on upgrade it to a laser cutter.
Which moves me on to the blueprints and upgrades. I like how you switched to showing certain blueprints after you acquire some of the base materials for it, but the progression still moves in leaps and bounds. I know you're adding more wrecks in, but the blueprints need to be spread out, and be more accessible and should encourage exploring each biome. Right now there's nothing in the shallows but desks and chairs. I think a lot of the current starting items could be moved into the shallows or into the kelp forest. A good example is the radiation suit. That's like the 4th thing I always fabricate. It sort of trivializes the whole Aurora radiation fluff. The first game I played on experimental the first thing I found was the Cyclops engine upgrade in the Aurora because I couldn't find anything but chairs and desks in any wreck above 60m. While I'm not attempting to suggest a linear progression system, I think the progression should start from a shallow to deep progression and encourage spending time with each chunk of things before you move to the next. I find both Stable and experimental to be rough at this. This means basically not only finding blueprints, but maybe using time and resources in that area to refine the blueprints such that you can build the things you need to progress to the greater depths. I'd like to see the modification station be an early (shallows or kelp) blueprint, and the upgrades themselves are also blueprints. This turns it back more into the "workbench" idea, but I feel it makes things a bit more in-depth.
In stable you build your basics, and then collect all the fragments in shallows/kelp forest/etc. in a few hours,(about 40-50% of the blueprints) and then you move on and collect all the Cyclops and other parts (another 40%'ish) and then it's just cleaning up a few items down in the deep grand reef. Maybe I'm just too used to grinding in games, but it feels like it moves in huge spurts and I don't feel you make the most of each thing you find.
More abandoned sea bases would help, by moving blueprints for a lot of the basic sea base blueprints. In fact, maybe ALL the seabase things could be required to be scanned. Extra points for making it viable to either salvage the abandoned sea bases or repair them.
++ Fragments/Experimental ++
Finally, explicity to do with the new Fragment system, I'm not currently a huge fan. Maybe if the wrecks moved around, and if the fragments/blueprints were placed better it would be a step forward, but currently I feel like I don't see any return on my exploration investment since it's all a craps shoot, and since I already know where all the wrecks are there isn't a lot of magic in it. While adding more wrecks makes it so I don't know where they are yet, eventually I'll still have them all mapped out. Given the fact they're currently the only gate-check in the game, it also encourages other people to just load up maps or youtube videos on all the wrecks. Spreading them out and figuring out how to make some (most/all?) of the wrecks be dynamic would be a huge boon.
If anyone actually read this far, thank you for taking the time. I have high hopes for Subnautica.
This is feedback with about 35 hours of Stable, and a following 8-10 hours of 30600/30604 experimental.
I want to start by saying I've loved playing this game. I could spend quite a while gushing about all the things I love, but to make this more condensed I'm just going to comment on the things I think could use some improvement. This isn't meant to be negative. If it's not mentioned, it's probably because I love it.
I'm not going to mention anything directly to do with the fragment placement in Stable, as it's obviously been completely wiped. I will bring up experimental's changes for that at the end.
++ Survival/Food & Water ++
So, Large Tanks and Farming. I like the large tanks a lot, though it's sometimes hard to navigate around between the tank wall and the hand rails near any exits from the multi-purpose room. Maybe shorter hand rails would fix it.
The farming is just too effective. Everything in the beds just grow too fast. Two or three kelp plants outside will give you an almost endless supply of seeds. A single bed of any of the food plants is all you would ever need. I appreciate the fact we can now survive without a hunger-gatherer system of exterminating all life in an area and moving on, but it's sort of trivialized the survival aspects. It also trivializes the water purification as you can just keep eating fruit to make up for it. I think it would be easy to triple the growth time on any external or internal plants, and it probably needs to be higher. In addition, I feel it should require the input of water and possibly fertilizer to keep the beds going. This would mean that the water consumption of the plans was equitable to the water you would need to drink to keep up with it. For fertilizer you could use certain fish, which would still provide an advantage for keeping a food-based tank going. Other options might be a compost system for kelp or other plant life for those that didn't want to kill to keep their farming going. It would provide more to "do" while farming also, which I feel is a bonus. Possibly make growing inside really slow and then include the ability to install grow-lighting for a certain power constraint.
I was unable to get Acid Mushrooms to replicate. Until the charging system (especially the Cyclops charging) comes into play, batteries get used with staggering speed and each power cell consumes 4 mushrooms. The current speed of plant growth also means that you can basically string external grow beds around and put brain coral in them and within an hour or so you can create huge under-water air highways. It feels a bit odd and trivializes the already-placed brain corals. I'm not sure if being able to grow them is a good thing.
As for the water purification, I feel it's a big high on energy usage. A single cycle will consume more power than 3 solar panels can provide, and by night time it will kill all power. With the inclusion of the expected O2 changes coming up, that could be a big deal. As it is, there's no good way to stop the processing other than de-constructing it slightly. It needs a pause button.
++ Flora and Fauna ++
Another option other than farming would be a way to repopulate things in the wild. It would be nice if the loss of Flora left a spot you could plant something in. Even if it was just plant the same thing in, it would be a way that after reaping so much stuff in an area you could put it back. I'm not sure how this would be affected by the Terraformer, but since I've read it's probably going to go away then this might be easier to implement. Maybe convert the Terraformer to be used to replant lost flora.
Fauna you can somewhat repopulate with large tanks if you release them. The AI acts a bit odd for a while after you release a tank-grown fish, but I saw a Trello ticket indicative of fixing an AI issue with this, so it's possible this is already fixed. My issue with my released Fauna is that they still have a tendency to disappear or get eaten. It would be nice if there was some AI for the state of the ecology that would mimic changes in state, even better if your built-in AI voice commented on it as you went around like "This area seems to be suffering from some ecological impact". Possibly make it so the radiation from the Aurora early on starts this going. As the ecology degrades, there's a reduction in food fish, or the ones you pick up are sickly. The fauna gets sickly and starts dying off. If we had the replant option, then it would provide more things to do. You could basically spend time repairing biomes damaged from over-use or from the crash itself. Maybe if you got too many destroyed areas it would start producing horrible mutant predators to discourage just ignoring it all.
As for Predators, I think there's too many (outside of reapers, they're fine). I realize I just brought up horrible mutant predators, but going to some areas currently is just tedious. it involves a lot of waiting around in a Seamoth or whatever for the various piles of bone sharks and shockers or whatever to all get far enough away from some spot you want to go and then quick jump out, do something, and quick jump back in. It's kind of boring, and it just makes it feel like you need some more permanent way to deal with them, which I'm not a huge fan of. My record so far is, on one screen, 7 shockers, 4 bone sharks and 2 mesmers. They also end up eating far too many of the herbivores. I'd rather have a few sleek, aggressive things that you're scared of than just 30 stalkers or sand sharks floating around that you basically just have to ignore and/or knife because otherwise it would be a charnel house in every biome from the fleshy tower of babel from all the predator corpses you'd have to knife to not do the Seamoth hopin-hopout dance.
Speaking of knifing them all to death, I don't think it should be possible. Sure, drive them away with the knife, but killing them sort of sets a bad example that results in people feeling there should be a "next step" in their predator extermination policies. I vote for less prison shanks. If the ecology system above was in place, the loss of a predator should start a short increase in food fish, but then sickly flora and fauna and a spiral down from there. It would make it seem like killing all the predators was less of a huge bonus.
It would be nice to be able to build a sonic defence system to discourage predators near the base also.
++ Base Building ++
Base building is super fun. It's also super destructive at times without much recourse. I'd like to be able to build foundations at any level up to about 10-15 meters from the previous ground/foundation and have the legs automatically grow to that. There really isn't a good way to control this right now. Certain pieces allow you to rotate with the mouse wheel. I'd rather the mouse wheel control the up/down axis of the piece, and maybe just have a keyboard key to rotate. It would be nice to be able to place and rotate all pieces in the same fashion (the Moonpool being the worst transgressor of this).
I'd also rather it didn't wipe out any terrain when building. Currently there's no good way to restore terrain, you can just fill in holes with the Terraformer. It seems to increase the lag issues. I'd rather that the base wasn't allowed to be built in a destructive way, but if it needs that option to work, then allow use to restore the terrain/flora/etc. somehow if that base piece is removed. The Terraformer should be able to do that even if you remove its current abilities.
From what I've read about the O2 update, some of my feedback is going to be included in that. I would still be interested to require that you build actual O2 generators in the base. I would say start out simple with the ability to create CO2 scrubbers from crushed coral, maybe move on to harnessing brain coral, and then maybe electrolysis (also producing water and salt!) with sufficient power or who knows. It's something more interesting to add to base building. When the base power dies, I know the lights are supposed to drop in the O2 changes. I think it would be nice if there were security lights that stayed illuminated for 24 hours or so without power. Honestly, it might be nice to just allow that in general, so you can turn your main base lights off if you wanted. Sometimes if you have a deep base it's nice to stare out into the darkness.
I'd like to see the Moonpool room changed into just a usable room, and the Moonpool itself converted into an upgrade to that room. Maybe make it so you can fit two large tanks in it. This would help solve my issue with the large tanks taking up too much space in the multi-purpose rooms. It would also make a nice interior farming room if farming was given a more reasonable grow rate. You could also make a nice garden with small tanks and various planters.
The current glass-corridor vs. metal corridor with windows balance feels odd from a structural perspective. I would think a metal corridor with 3 windows should be more structurally sound than a glass corridor but it's way worse at -4 instead of -2. I think there should be a basic reinforcing panel with just titanium in it for a +2 structure.
Speaking of structure, I don't know of an easy in-game way of knowing what the current base structure value is at outside of console commands or add/deleting one of the components in the base. It would be nice if you had a console somewhere you could build that gave you the status of the base. Maybe even show graphs of power usage, leaks, etc.
As the last point on this section, and I know it's been brought up before, but I wish there was a way to make the building process be a bit more hands-on. It seems odd to just sort of pop a huge water-tight room out of a handful of metal in the span of a few seconds. I'm not a huge fan of giving negative points without a suggestion, but in this case I just don't have a compelling one.
++ Resources ++
The experimental changes are going to fit somewhat into this.
I'm not a huge fan of there being a finite amount of resources in any given game. It gives you a sense that it's all sort of futile, because eventually there's a physical constraint (console commands not-withstanding) to what you can do in-game. The inclusion of the farming change and external beds means that a lot of the constrained resources can now be grown. You're still stuck with a finite supply of minerals though. This is exacerbated by the changes in Experimental that removed the plethora of Fragments around. They were a huge supply of Titanium, which means if you felt like spending some time harvesting, you at least could get a decent stash of titanium. While it was still finite, it was a much larger number. Now, titanium is extremely rare. In fact, everything is extremely rare except for Gold and Diamonds which seem to be in abundance in the deep but have extremely limited usage at this time.
I would like to see mines included in the game. You would have to prospect for them. Maybe get a rough idea from the map room and then have to swim out and use the scanner to find them. You would need to produce a mining platform that you would build over a mining vein. Probably string some power lines to the miner to let it do its work. Maybe require you clean it up regularly and/or build hoppers for the result. You could also tie the mine into the ecological impact idea up in the previous sections. Early mines caused ecological damage, later mines could be less efficient but more ecologically sound. Heck, maybe even make it adjustable. After mining an area maybe the person could then restore the ecology. Mines would play out, but new ones would show up based on usage and some randomness.
++ Fragments, Blueprints and Upgrades ++
This starts with a combination of Experimental and Stable.
As mentioned, the change to moving fragments into the Wrecks has had a pretty large impact on the game. First, the reduction in all the Titanium is felt. It also means that the vast majority of the biomes out there have become mostly worthless, which I feel is a huge loss. You used to have to scour each biome looking for fragments. Then when you found them they basically weren't hugely important any more. Now it's just skimming around hitting whatever wrecks you can find (which unfortunately are in fixed places) and the rest is just a fly-over state. Switching to the ecology system and/or the mines would at least give you some reason to go back into each biome. I guess the DNA system helps somewhat with that, but again it's just a one-time thing.
There's a few wrecks currently in the shallower biomes that have locked doors. If you're new to the game you would have no idea where to go find a Diamond to build the laser cutter. Currently it's even possible that most of the fragments that spawn spawn inside those locked wrecks. I think locked wrecks are cool, but I'm not sure how to integrate them in a better fashion. Maybe make an upgrade option for the cutter. The early on doesn't require diamonds. Maybe start it with a Plasma cutter that takes gold and titanium, and then later on upgrade it to a laser cutter.
Which moves me on to the blueprints and upgrades. I like how you switched to showing certain blueprints after you acquire some of the base materials for it, but the progression still moves in leaps and bounds. I know you're adding more wrecks in, but the blueprints need to be spread out, and be more accessible and should encourage exploring each biome. Right now there's nothing in the shallows but desks and chairs. I think a lot of the current starting items could be moved into the shallows or into the kelp forest. A good example is the radiation suit. That's like the 4th thing I always fabricate. It sort of trivializes the whole Aurora radiation fluff. The first game I played on experimental the first thing I found was the Cyclops engine upgrade in the Aurora because I couldn't find anything but chairs and desks in any wreck above 60m. While I'm not attempting to suggest a linear progression system, I think the progression should start from a shallow to deep progression and encourage spending time with each chunk of things before you move to the next. I find both Stable and experimental to be rough at this. This means basically not only finding blueprints, but maybe using time and resources in that area to refine the blueprints such that you can build the things you need to progress to the greater depths. I'd like to see the modification station be an early (shallows or kelp) blueprint, and the upgrades themselves are also blueprints. This turns it back more into the "workbench" idea, but I feel it makes things a bit more in-depth.
In stable you build your basics, and then collect all the fragments in shallows/kelp forest/etc. in a few hours,(about 40-50% of the blueprints) and then you move on and collect all the Cyclops and other parts (another 40%'ish) and then it's just cleaning up a few items down in the deep grand reef. Maybe I'm just too used to grinding in games, but it feels like it moves in huge spurts and I don't feel you make the most of each thing you find.
More abandoned sea bases would help, by moving blueprints for a lot of the basic sea base blueprints. In fact, maybe ALL the seabase things could be required to be scanned. Extra points for making it viable to either salvage the abandoned sea bases or repair them.
++ Fragments/Experimental ++
Finally, explicity to do with the new Fragment system, I'm not currently a huge fan. Maybe if the wrecks moved around, and if the fragments/blueprints were placed better it would be a step forward, but currently I feel like I don't see any return on my exploration investment since it's all a craps shoot, and since I already know where all the wrecks are there isn't a lot of magic in it. While adding more wrecks makes it so I don't know where they are yet, eventually I'll still have them all mapped out. Given the fact they're currently the only gate-check in the game, it also encourages other people to just load up maps or youtube videos on all the wrecks. Spreading them out and figuring out how to make some (most/all?) of the wrecks be dynamic would be a huge boon.
If anyone actually read this far, thank you for taking the time. I have high hopes for Subnautica.
Comments
++ Cyclops ++
The biggest issue I know you're already working on, which is docking and charging. I won't go into that then. I love the Cyclops game play but there's somethings I wish were different. The biggest being I think you need a way to display the topography around you or have some sort of visual sonar indication so you can "ping" the world. Either way it's hard to see down though, so a topographical map like the Seaglide has would be handy. I'd like to see the other control panels maybe do something, including giving a structural report and a readout on current crush depths and such. I'm hit or miss on building things inside of it. While it's nice to basically turn it into a mobile base with farming options and such, it sometimes feels cheap and makes building bases feel less important. I wouldn't mind it shrinking slightly and having a fixed storage system. I think it would be neat if you could use the Seamoth bay to instead pick up things on the ocean floor for moving (like my mining platform previous mentioned).
It's also been mentioned that it's hard to see out of the cyclops in the dark. The ambient light is really high and reflects off the glass. Also when you're out in the water the light can be sort of blinding. Without the topagraphical map and the relation to the Cyclops I find I end up getting stuck on things all the time.
The controls also don't feel.. right. I'm not sure exactly why, but I feel like if I have two adjustable prop planes on each side I should be able to rotate it quite easily, but right now it turns like a sled. You also don't really have any indication what pitch/yaw/roll you're at other than visual indicators. It would be nice to be able to perform maneuvers that took those things into account.
Thanks again,
PM