Color

NerdyEric

So recently I got and have been playing a lot of Ark Survival Evolved. One of my favorite parts of the games are of course, the creatures. Similar to subnautica. One thing about ark's creatures that they have over subnautica is color. Every single one of subnautica's creatures have only one color except for the few that have a variant for the lava biome or other. But what I'm recommending is something similar to ark where creatures that set color regions with a list of colors that region can be. For instance the manta ray instead of being blue and orange could be white or green. The stalker could have a slight red of the back instead of purple. Etc and etc. This could be a way to make more creatures feel different without actually having to add in new ones. Just an idea obviously the examples I listed could work for any creature with any color (but I think it would be wise to make sure that creatures can't be rainbow colored)

DrownedOut

Wouldn't that make scanning confusing or "necessitate" redoing the fauna ? For example, if the eyeye and red eyeye would remain as they are and you'd add an alternatively colored eyeye that is still an eyeye, that strikes me as inconsistent.

Tarkannen

I dunno... I see where you're going at with that idea, but I don't necessarily agree with it. in Final Fantasy XI, they have various creatures you fight to gain EXP and levels or hunt for new gear. Over the years as new expansions were added to the game, the developers added a few new unique creatures to each expansion but also recolored some pre-existing ones as well. Ostensibly they were detailed as being a genetic relative of a common creature or an exotic strain adapted to a new environment, hence why they were different colors (examples: Rabbit, Crawler, Mandragora).

Now I do applaud the developers for taking this direction of logic and appreciate their attempts to do that. It adds a sense of newness to the game, as you see a new twist on a familiar face. And it cuts down on development time, as they can just reuse existing assets: models, frameworks and animations - they just change the color palette and texture and boom! New creature in a fraction of the time and money. There's nothing wrong with that idea there.

However I feel that if relied on too much, it comes off as just cheap effort or minimal investment towards the game's design. While Subnautica does use this to a certain degree already (such as the Peeper/Oculus or Cave Crawler/Blood Crawler models), UWE doesn't rely on it as a crutch. They have just enough diversity across the biomes - even if some biomes share a fish family, it's not so blatant that each biome feels unique of itself. And of those pairs I previously mentioned, they had their models changed so its not just carbon copies with new paint: The Oculus is much larger than the Peeper and has slightly larger eyes, while the Blood Crawler is more spindly and honestly far creepier than its land-dwelling cousin. (Why does it squeal like it does anyways??)

In short: If they want to add more variants of existing fish, I'm all for it. But I would rather see more interesting design changes (et al Peeper/Oculus) instead of just recolors of what we already have on 4546B.

ShuttleBug

I would like to see a crabsquid variant (different color or slightly larger/smaller) in the Blood Kelp. The Blood Kelp atmosphere gives off a feeling of isolation since everything is a little different than what your used to. I agree with keeping pure recolors limited because, like @Tarkannen said, it becomes a bit cheap with too many. Recolors could be possible placeholders for further design changes until UNW gets the time to work on a new and unique variant.

I saw something on the Trello page about adding variations in each species so one fish looks slightly different than the other one, but I think that was posted in the "Maybe after v1.0" section.