[Long] Thoughts on the game
scylk
France Join Date: 2018-03-12 Member: 238949Members
France Join Date: 2018-03-12 Member: 238949Members
Hello
So I played Subnautica after its release. Basically I loved my experience, but also felt really frustrated because in my opinion this game has a lot of flaws, and could be much better than it is.
So I wrote around 5 pages on what I think are these flaws as well as improvements ideas. I mainly did it for my own sake but it kinda fits here, so here it is:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1avxBzfQ6w919uBt7jI15a-ByURxnb7edWIqsi8WVr2Y/edit?usp=sharing
So I played Subnautica after its release. Basically I loved my experience, but also felt really frustrated because in my opinion this game has a lot of flaws, and could be much better than it is.
So I wrote around 5 pages on what I think are these flaws as well as improvements ideas. I mainly did it for my own sake but it kinda fits here, so here it is:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1avxBzfQ6w919uBt7jI15a-ByURxnb7edWIqsi8WVr2Y/edit?usp=sharing
Comments
1. For the vehicle oxygen stores, (in this case, the seeamoth,) it only makes sense that they'd be able to support the player for about five minutes of the player being inside the vehicle. Or, if you really want to make it better, set it to about two minutes of oxygen in which the player can be inside the seamoth and make another chain of upgrades relating to oxygen stores. Another upgrade which'd be handy here could be an oxygenator module which, (rather than the infinite oxygenator which the seamoth has at the moment,) would only really be noticeable once the player hops into their seamoth after it's been sitting for awhile. That is, it would generate something like twenty seconds of O2 per minute when the player is not inside the seamoth. Of course, this'd have a very different behavior than it seams like at first becasue you must remember that while the player is not in the seamoth, their own O2 is depleting and so it's still very far from god level.
2. Make hostile creatures like stalkers and bone sharks faster!!! In the early game, you can outrun a stalker if you think on the go by swimming through reef tubes, triggering crashfish, and spooking gasopods. But later in the game, the improved flippers allow the player to easily outrun these predators. But this sucks. The stalkers should have a swim speed equal to the player's improved flippers; a factor forcing the player to think more quickly and try daring things like A: Not going near stalkers in the first place, or B: crazy stuff like turning left at the last moment and trying to pass the stalker by before they have time to turn after you; something which could buy you time to pop off into a cave. Or, as this might be too hard on the player, remember the bit about the Kharaa giving its carrier more offensive characteristics, I guess. Creatures infected with the Kharaa might have a tendency to put on an extra push of speed after the player. Bonesharks which are infected might have a tendency to go after the Cyclops as well and possibly even other creatures of their own species.
3. As for the whole 'I made a 40-meter long nuclear submarine out of the stuff I found in my pockets' thing, this really needs fixing. I suggested awhile ago that the player be able to find some items around the map, put them in a 3D Printer storage module, (a thing which might be something like moonpool size,) and simply place the materials for the cyclops cockpit in a crate and have it 3D printed in a moonpool hangar and use something like the recipe for making the observation habitat wing. Then, they could craft the mid section of ship's hull with all of their full inventory stuffed with titanium ingots in their hangar, and then put that somewhere, then craft the aft section of the ship with their entire inventory full of computer chips, copper wire, and titanium ingots, print it in the hangar, and then, finally, print the engines. The overall process would have a realistic resource cost considering the massive size of the cyclops next to the very small sizes of the player's pockets. But still not perfect.
4. Yes, all crafting recipes are screwed up except for things like the survival knife and a couple others
5. Yes, each PDA entry should put a date tag on it saying on which day after the player crashed did the PDA show up. That is, the day after you crash, any detected PDA entries would have the date tag '2' on it. The next day, they'd have '3' and a week later, they'd have a '1w, 3' on them; as the 'w' would stand for 'week'. A PDA entry received 84and a half after you land on 4546B would say '12w 3' or something. The current week and day after the game's start would also be displayed in the upper right hand corner of the PDA in all windows.
6. A map would be amazing. With a certain vehicle upgrade or perhaps the scanner room HUD chip installed in the PDA, the scanner room could reconstruct a 2D map of the terrain as you traverse it and then send it back to your PDA for monitoring. The player can then doodle on the map and circle some things in red and take their OWN notes on it as they please; with ability to go 'back' and remove something and to 'save' it so that next time they log in, the map from the previous session would be intact.
One thing to note about the Kharaa is that is specifically shuts down the immune system, making the host vulnerable to other diseases. On the side, it does alter the brain chemistry, making them more aggressive (a bit like rabies, really), but does not yet impart special abilities onto the host. That comes much later in the Kharaa's evolution, with Natural Selections' Kharaa variant.
As nice as a map would be for ease of exploration, I do understand why the developers haven't implemented one. The lack of a map forces the player to learn through experience, rather than relying on a map, and may result in the player getting turned around, adding to the sense of discovery and the fear of being lost at sea. Just yesterday, I was a couple degrees off on my course while heading to the Lost River cave entrance, and discovered a kelp forest and a mushroom forest I had never encountered on my hundred trips to the cave. If I had had a map, it is likely the discovery could have been spoiled for me (depending on the map system), and that I'd have maintained a perfect course. It made me confused, wondering if I somehow reached the opposite end of the map, though I was just a stones throw away from the cave. Too many games give players a detailed map, and in my experience, forces a reliance on these maps to progress in a timely fashion. (like with the Metroid Prime trilogy's heavy map usage)
I think the Scanner Room's map system is the best option, though I do agree with many that implementing a Scanner room into the Cyclops would have been easy and logical.
I didn't suggest that the Kharra would implement special abilities onto the host; only that a creature driven to would likely swim a lot faster than it would otherwise. The thing is in calories; when hunting, it'd be inefficient to burn too many calories by putting on a tiny push of speed. However, an animal being pursued might be able to call upon a few more calories. And if your brain chemistry has been altered, (specifically to behave more aggressively,) it might be easy to get a sort of heightened adrenaline rush.
While these are good points, a map could be a later game item. Note that the PDA map would be something along the lines of the scanner room HUD chip.
True, the map could work as a late-game item. Upgrades for vehicles I think would be the best bet, though positioning with the tight spaces could be a challenge.
Although I agree that all the things you've listed are problematic, I don't really agree with the sulitions you've suggested.
For me, Subnautica is still an exploration game. And that means that players should be able to forget certain starting inconveniences later on, in order to keep them willing to discover new areas and try out new things.
Oxygen:
To give the Seamoth a limited oxygen supply would achieve nothing, except to force the player to dive up every now and then, wasting their time without adding any sort of 'fun' to the game.
Likewise, it's always possible to carry more than one oxygen tank with you. Therefore, you could say that oxygen only results in a reduction of inventory space. Ergo, the game could limit the available space and keep the oxygen the same, and the result would be a similar inconvenience & waste of time (f.e. by increasing the size of other items => normal fish = 2x1 // 2x2; energy cells = 2x4, wreckage = 4x4 or even larger, etc.))
Hostile creatures:
Same thing here. To increase the damage of a bite would simply increase of number of medkits players will carry with them, reducing the available inventory space. Or it would increase the number of times players will load an old save game. And the request for better weapons might just pop up more frequently.
So in regard of crabsquids consuming energy for good:
Unless crabsquids would deplete all the reserve energy cells you stored somewhere, all it would achieve is to force players to kill the scrabsquids and then replace the energy cells, resulting in a more violent or outright aggressive gameplay.
And in case you want them to deplete every energy source:
Remember the larvae that leech energy? If you want so experience how much 'fun' the idea to lose all the energy is, just dive down to the lava sea and let them suck up all the energy of the Cyclops, thereby also disabling the docking bay.
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What you might want to achieve instead is to make the interactions with these creatures rather more interesting than more deadly. (And you could always avoid the stasis gun & upgraded fins, if you really like a challenge)
Because just compare Subnautica with other games: Do you need to fuel up cars in Far Cry? Or do you need to feed your horse in Witcher 3, Skyrim or Assassin's Creed?
Don't get me wrong: I LOVE inconveniences, but they have to be fun (not grindy) amd provide a unique game experience.
First off - most of these comments are criticisms but I want to emphasise that Subnautica is probably the best game I've played in many years. It might be the game I've liked the most since HL1. Many have already lavished the game with praise so I don't want to go overboard but the combination of mood, narrative tone, visual style, amazing audio, an abundance of atmosphere, dark humour, genuine strangeness and relatively open ended problem solving based gameplay ticks pretty much every box for me. A rare achievement!
Now, on to my criticisms \ thoughts (insert subjectivity disclaimer here):
[Goes without saying but lots of spoilers below!]
Mapping – this is a tricky one. I really want to say that I’m wholeheartedly on-board with this game having no map. I even designed myself a mapping system with nav beacons at fixed points and then made a grid with pre-calculated triangulation distances (thanks Excel) – filling this in turned out to be super time consuming & fussy (I didn’t have enough coloured highlighters for all of the biome types!) though so I never completed this map. That said I suspect I would have had more fun at a better pace if I’d have had some sort of visual in-game reference.
Navigation etc and misc (clearing areas, seeking wrecks, general progress etc.) - I made a few wrong choices early on in terms of directions I picked for exploration which led to a much longer & more frustrating early game than I think was intended, e.g. missing key resources and certain blueprints for a fairly long time - maybe there are ways to non-invasively let the player know if they are at least on the right track?
Random small bugs etc.
Prawn is a bit un-fun
Difficulty
The game is “easier” than other survival games but honestly I think this is part of why it’s such a good game. This puts it at odds with lots of currently popular games (including many that are ostensibly in Subnautica’s category) where the “how not to fail” puzzle can be a bit oppressive and can sometimes crowd out the “how do I progress” puzzle (including many especially egregious instances where the “puzzle” you are currently working on is something you chose for yourself rather than something like reaching the next authored plot point). I’m 100% happy with Subnautica being a bit on the easy side for a survival game – I wouldn’t want the environment to be much more lethal\punishing. I've enjoyed plenty of games where death is more of a feature but for me I think the appeal of Subnautica is precisely that its a bit more Myst than it is Rust.
- If my cyclops had ever been destroyed I think I would have always just quit & reloaded rather than spending time crafting a new one. It might have been interesting to have been forced to recover from some kind of disaster (e.g. plot point maybe where leviathan attacks your base or some such) but given that (for me) most of the fun in this game is discovery it’s not clear that rebuilding stuff you built once already would be that engaging.
- Lethality of fauna – instead of making them more likely to kill the player or destroy crafted items it might be better to have increased difficulty by having the creatures exhibit surprising behaviours that you have to figure out how to work around – e.g. more things like warpers pulling you out of your vehicle at inopportune moments, the crab squid disabling your electronics etc.
- Maybe rather than just killing you and forcing you to reload a save you could have large creatures could do things like attach themselves to your vehicle forcing you to figure out how to detach them (I'm imaging large squid tentacles enveloping the cyclops!).
- It’s tempting to think that the reason leviathans aren’t so scary by the end of the game is because you figure out they aren’t really that threatening and mostly just whizz right past them. I don’t think this is true though – if they killed you more often you’d just end up trying to get past them over and over punctuated by gameover screens and they’d lose their menace all the same. This happens in “normal” games with more lethal enemies all the time. Its mostly unavoidable I reckon - unless you make sure the player never gets to interact with the monsters outside of scripted jump-scares etc. which probably wouldn't desirable for this sort of game.
- Crafting “difficulty” – some of the larger items maybe could have done with having higher resource requirements – but many of the small items are probably balanced correctly (for my tastes anyway - I personally don't mind if the recipes don't make sense). I wouldn’t want to have to “grind” lots more resources in general but by the end of the game I had waaaay more of everything than I actually ended up needing and the rocket in particular “feels” like it requires weirdly little to construct (by that point in the game) so I could have happily worked on a few more “big” construction projects.
- Refining – I agree 100% with the OP - blood oil is hard to transport which gives you a small problem to solve & encourages you to setup a remote base to manufacture benzene which looks like it might be interesting gameplay but turns out not to be super relevant (you need very little benzene as it turns out) and doesn’t really come up again which is a wee bit of shame and feels like an under-explored source of gameplay.
- That said the game already has some ferrying & inventory management annoyances (oops I forgot the thing I need let me travel back to get it oops I can’t pick it up because my inventory is full oops these containers are full too so I can’t empty my inventory etc. etc.). Maybe a storage room that allows you to access containers, cabinets, player inventory, inventory of docked vehicles all in one place and feed them to the fabricator would be a nice QOL feature? Again if this seems OP make it require lots of resources to construct the Storage Management System - have it be an optional QOL improvement and a resource sink for your excess resources.
- I’d love a way to directly upgrade regular batteries and cells to ion. Nitpick but it would make me happy!
- I’m not sure why the game has you “respawn” after death – it doesn’t make much sense and doesn’t add anything I don’t think – do many people continue playing rather than reloading?. Does it make more sense to have an ideally rarely seen game over screen for those occasions?
- Redundant cyclops features 100% agree with OP – the shield upgrade, silent running mode, decoy torpedoes etc. made me think that at some point I’d need to make a long, stealthy, scary journey with the cyclops but in my playthrough this never came up. Maybe the prawn & seaglide could have a lower effective operating range forcing the player to put the cyclops into scary situations more? That said I’m not sure that piloting the cyclops into the caves for instance would be an altogether fun experience (based on how busy some of those caves are & how the cyclops handles) so this would probably require the game to ask the player to cover larger distances in open water.
- Maybe the seamoth could be even more vulnerable to damage \ fauna interference thereby reinforcing the cyclop’s role as a safer way to travel?
Sometimes the breadcrumb trail fails and this can lead to frustration – this can be enthusiasm sapping because time spent trial & erroring and “re”-exploring means you end up having to do survival admin over and over again with no sense of progress.- I really struggled to find sulphur in the early game – I was watching Day9’s youtube videos recently and noticed he overlooked the sulphur nests too initially so it’s not just me!
- I just couldn’t find the entrance to the volcano area with the power installation inside it. I had been up and down and all over that mountain and even built a scanning base on it but just totally missed the "door" itself. I then re-explored loads of the deeper parts of the map (for maybe the 2nd or 3rd time!) before just googling it. I had even been all the way up to the impassable door of the next installation long before figuring out how to get into the power plant (much easier to find the giant glowing pit leading downward than the tiny dark door in the volcano).
Scan-ability highlight, before approaching something it would be nice to have a visual indicator if its scannable (from a longer distance). Lots, and lots of things in the game look like they should be scannable but aren’t which is dissapointing. Alternatively make everything scannable (somehow…)!The map mod on Nexus does exactly what you describe/want it do.
It's a great tool altough I have to agree on eyemessiah's vieuw upon initial mapping. Nullifies pretty much what this game is about . I play all my games vanilla first time through and it was a much more fun experience actually looking around for stuff than to follow my compass/map.