Characterizing Marguerit in Below Zero
Ziusdra
WA Join Date: 2020-03-10 Member: 258646Members
WA Join Date: 2020-03-10 Member: 258646Members
Subnautica: Below Zero feels a lot smaller than the first game. Now, we know we have less physical space to work with, and typically one finds less biodiversity in arctic regions. But to make this game feel like it’s on the same scale as the first, I think we can quickly expand this game through its complex larger-than-life characters.
I’m not going to go too deeply into story suggestions (mostly because I don’t know what the story already has planned), but I think that you can tell a good character through items associated with them. Currently, the player can scan blueprints for a toilet, sink, and shower in Maida's base. I'm not sure what those have to do with her character (though it's kind of ironic, considering they function to bring cleanliness, and the place is anything but clean). Let me run through a few items that I think would help tell Marguerit Maida’s story and help Below Zero feel like a bigger game:
Ghost peppers
Marguerit Maida is a firecracker and a wildcard. It would help explain her anger and bitterness if one of the things she was forced to eat to survive were ghost peppers, found growing in an interior growbed in her base. The player should be able to pick some and grow some as well, giving the player a sense of what it was like for her living here for all these years, eating potato chips, sharks, and ghost peppers. I’ll leave the stats to you, but I imagine they would give some food and heat, and take away from your health and thirst (perhaps they cause a temporary drain on your thirst until you eat something different, the way it feels to eat peppers IRL). Furthermore, they enhance the mystery of Maida. Where the heck did Maida get these? the player is left wondering.
A great secondary use of such an item would be as an emergency deterrent to certain predators. Drop a few ghost peppers into a predator’s mouth, and watch it speed away from you, crying! Perhaps this mechanic could be utilized in order to help the player accomplish a Marguerit-related mission.
Customized Prawn Suit Upgrades
I love Maida’s custom prawn suit, it speaks a ton to her character. But since Robin is ex-Alterra too, allow the player to add on one or two of Maida’s upgrades to our own prawn suit. Perhaps a slasher arm, which could be crafted using the tooth of a Chelicerate (and let us obtain one by killing one with a knife. Not only does this put ourselves in Maida’s shoes literally, by donning a part of her prawn suit, but it also gives us some of the experience she had surviving out here).
More to her character, however, I think an ability upgrade that’s somewhat dangerous to the user, while providing a potentially big benefit, would be way on-character for her. Perhaps an upgrade ability that allows you to take damage in order to deal more damage (a stomp ability that damages the prawn suit but also damages whatever you stomp on?). I like the idea of something with high risk, but also high reward.
Besides, you can’t just tease us with Marguerite’s bada$$ prawn suit and not let us make our own! Haha.
Small, Wall-Mounted Aquarium with a Symbiote
Like the way we can plant single-item, small plants on the walls using the wall-mounted Plant Shelf, give us the customizability to have a small, single-occupant wall-mounted aquarium. These would be ideal in Marguerit Maida’s base. She has spent so much time alone, like the single occupants of the small wall aquariums, and Maida clearly feels trapped on this planet, like a fish in a small tank. It would be even more to her character to have these occupied by Symbiotes, acknowledging that she has bite but that she depends, symbiotically, upon another (depending on Alterra perhaps, or Robin, depending on how the story develops).
What else do people think could be added to the game to expand the characters? As we have seen from its first iterations, this game promises to be more character-driven than the first.
I’m not going to go too deeply into story suggestions (mostly because I don’t know what the story already has planned), but I think that you can tell a good character through items associated with them. Currently, the player can scan blueprints for a toilet, sink, and shower in Maida's base. I'm not sure what those have to do with her character (though it's kind of ironic, considering they function to bring cleanliness, and the place is anything but clean). Let me run through a few items that I think would help tell Marguerit Maida’s story and help Below Zero feel like a bigger game:
Ghost peppers
Marguerit Maida is a firecracker and a wildcard. It would help explain her anger and bitterness if one of the things she was forced to eat to survive were ghost peppers, found growing in an interior growbed in her base. The player should be able to pick some and grow some as well, giving the player a sense of what it was like for her living here for all these years, eating potato chips, sharks, and ghost peppers. I’ll leave the stats to you, but I imagine they would give some food and heat, and take away from your health and thirst (perhaps they cause a temporary drain on your thirst until you eat something different, the way it feels to eat peppers IRL). Furthermore, they enhance the mystery of Maida. Where the heck did Maida get these? the player is left wondering.
A great secondary use of such an item would be as an emergency deterrent to certain predators. Drop a few ghost peppers into a predator’s mouth, and watch it speed away from you, crying! Perhaps this mechanic could be utilized in order to help the player accomplish a Marguerit-related mission.
Customized Prawn Suit Upgrades
I love Maida’s custom prawn suit, it speaks a ton to her character. But since Robin is ex-Alterra too, allow the player to add on one or two of Maida’s upgrades to our own prawn suit. Perhaps a slasher arm, which could be crafted using the tooth of a Chelicerate (and let us obtain one by killing one with a knife. Not only does this put ourselves in Maida’s shoes literally, by donning a part of her prawn suit, but it also gives us some of the experience she had surviving out here).
More to her character, however, I think an ability upgrade that’s somewhat dangerous to the user, while providing a potentially big benefit, would be way on-character for her. Perhaps an upgrade ability that allows you to take damage in order to deal more damage (a stomp ability that damages the prawn suit but also damages whatever you stomp on?). I like the idea of something with high risk, but also high reward.
Besides, you can’t just tease us with Marguerite’s bada$$ prawn suit and not let us make our own! Haha.
Small, Wall-Mounted Aquarium with a Symbiote
Like the way we can plant single-item, small plants on the walls using the wall-mounted Plant Shelf, give us the customizability to have a small, single-occupant wall-mounted aquarium. These would be ideal in Marguerit Maida’s base. She has spent so much time alone, like the single occupants of the small wall aquariums, and Maida clearly feels trapped on this planet, like a fish in a small tank. It would be even more to her character to have these occupied by Symbiotes, acknowledging that she has bite but that she depends, symbiotically, upon another (depending on Alterra perhaps, or Robin, depending on how the story develops).
What else do people think could be added to the game to expand the characters? As we have seen from its first iterations, this game promises to be more character-driven than the first.
Comments
I like the idea but I first thought you meant something different when you talked about 'peppers'... not 'real' peppers. In my opinion, all kind of side effects are possible and I would probably go with altered hearing, hallucinations (lily paddler's hypnosis) or some other sorts of slow adiction (rather some immediate effects). And it doesn't have to be caused by a fish. Maybe the color-changing cave funghi or deep lily flower spores had some effects...
@ Customized PRAWN upgrades
Well, here's a fundamental issue: The player has access to a fabricator. So there's actually no real need for a leviathan tooth mod. Maida's base doesn't even have a source to power the base. The stomp idea is ok, but I don't like an aggressive gameplay, so I wouldn't use it.
What I would want for the PRAWN would be a different access point => at the rear (or upper rear) and not on the top. In the moonpool, it would dock sideways and you could enter it directly from the SeaTruck rather than to first exit the truck just to reenter the PRAWN.
@ Wall-mounted Aquarium
Well, they could just use the SeaTruck aquarium as an alternative for wall planters / windows. Done! It would actually be cool to access this special 'aquarium window' from both outside and inside the base. And it would be cool if it would 'catch' nearby fish.
@ Shower & sink
Well, I asked for 'personal hygiene' and got something to build. So a
I am not sure if I like the idea of giving ghost peppers a hallucinogenic property or an addictive property. That's not how I understand Marguerit. However, depending on what the story does with her character, maybe it would make sense to make her addicted to something that hurts her? Maybe in her loneliness and isolation, she has become a paranoid, delusional danger? If the game wants a character you're not sure whether you can trust, that would be an effective way to do it. (i.e. is it Marguerit speaking to me, or is it the drugs speaking?) However, I think her character as a dangerous renegade is enough to make the player wonder whether she can be trusted.
I like the idea of turning my wall-mounted mini-aquarium into a trap that fish can swim into and can be accessed from both inside and out. Great idea!
And yeah, I'm not convinced about the stomp-ability idea, either. I'm more interested in coming up with an ability for the prawn suit that describes Marguerit's behavior and personality. Some kind of ability that puts the user at risk but could potentially reward you well for it. Perhaps an ability to turn the prawn suit into a mobile grav trap? It would allow resources and fish to gravitate toward you, so you could pick them up and that makes mining easier, but also if they hit your suit with enough velocity, it could cause damage. All that light, too, and all those little fish as well, could attract predators. I dunno, just tossing ideas out there. Even if the prawn-suit-grav-trap is a good idea, I'm not sure it's a Marguerit-idea, which is what I'm aiming for.