The pacifistic identity crisis that is Subnautica
uxlapogi
Join Date: 2012-10-31 Member: 165238Members
Join Date: 2012-10-31 Member: 165238Members
Love the idea of the game. Hope it will get finished. Spent hours in it even with its performance flaws.
But something bothers me and that is the passive-aggressive undecidedness.
I get it that the devs want to make a game were killing isn't what you should choose as solution, but there are several things that break that consistency and/or make it hard for me to believe in that philosophy.
1. The setting
You just barely survived a crash. You are stranded, you have no supplies and death through flora or fauna is likely. Or isn't it?
So instead of fighting for your life with tooth and nail you'd rather use a stasis rifle to keep predators at bay? Seriously?
2. No flora or fauna poses a real threat
Anything that attacks you, nibbles. It doesn't bite. Unless you venture forth unprepared and reckless there is nothing really posing a serious threat for your life.
3. Choosing not to kill serves no purpose/is not incentivised/does not give you an advantage
You get the pacifist stuff shoved down your throat, yet with the amount of shoving involved, you would expect to be a reason or benefit for that, moral implications aside.
Why does your character refuse to use lethal weapons? Is he a disciple of the "Order of her Matriachy the Grand, Seeker of Important Greatness without doing Harm" (OMGSIGH) and not allowed to harm flora and fauna?
No reason is given, no explanation.
There are two exceptions: Sea Treaders
and Stalkers. The former actually give you
The rest? If a creature is disturbing me while picking up resources, see the next point.
4. Yet... there is, the knife, the seamoth's "i'm-gonna-cook-you-alive" module (personal favorite) and the good old "NVM, I'll just ram you to death, you shouldn't have annoyed me."
Unless creatures are made invincible, the ending of their continued annoying existence is only one painful electroshock therapy away.
Also, whenever I steam through the ocean in my seamoth or the cyclops, every few seconds you can hear that sad, wet "THUD!" sound that a previously alive fish makes, when impacting my hull.
Similar to the flies on your windshield, 'lil bigger, but just as dead.
So in conclusion. Death awaits. Not deliberately. More accidentally deliberately. Or deliberately accidental? Not sure yet.
But something bothers me and that is the passive-aggressive undecidedness.
I get it that the devs want to make a game were killing isn't what you should choose as solution, but there are several things that break that consistency and/or make it hard for me to believe in that philosophy.
1. The setting
You just barely survived a crash. You are stranded, you have no supplies and death through flora or fauna is likely. Or isn't it?
So instead of fighting for your life with tooth and nail you'd rather use a stasis rifle to keep predators at bay? Seriously?
2. No flora or fauna poses a real threat
Anything that attacks you, nibbles. It doesn't bite. Unless you venture forth unprepared and reckless there is nothing really posing a serious threat for your life.
3. Choosing not to kill serves no purpose/is not incentivised/does not give you an advantage
You get the pacifist stuff shoved down your throat, yet with the amount of shoving involved, you would expect to be a reason or benefit for that, moral implications aside.
Why does your character refuse to use lethal weapons? Is he a disciple of the "Order of her Matriachy the Grand, Seeker of Important Greatness without doing Harm" (OMGSIGH) and not allowed to harm flora and fauna?
No reason is given, no explanation.
There are two exceptions: Sea Treaders
and Stalkers. The former actually give you
unlimited copper and lithium
(Bonus: big puppy eyes. DO NOT HARM!). The latter for their body parts if coerced.The rest? If a creature is disturbing me while picking up resources, see the next point.
4. Yet... there is, the knife, the seamoth's "i'm-gonna-cook-you-alive" module (personal favorite) and the good old "NVM, I'll just ram you to death, you shouldn't have annoyed me."
Unless creatures are made invincible, the ending of their continued annoying existence is only one painful electroshock therapy away.
Also, whenever I steam through the ocean in my seamoth or the cyclops, every few seconds you can hear that sad, wet "THUD!" sound that a previously alive fish makes, when impacting my hull.
Similar to the flies on your windshield, 'lil bigger, but just as dead.
So in conclusion. Death awaits. Not deliberately. More accidentally deliberately. Or deliberately accidental? Not sure yet.
Comments
But then why include lethal weapons?
Why not give the player a choice and reward non-lethal approaches? (As I said, Stalkers and Sea Treaders already do that, but overall that's not much)
Also, why not have both.
Have stuff that you should protect and not kill and also have stuff that you better make damn sure won't get up once you pummeled it?!
Also, right now, the alien containment does not allow you to play fetch with stalkers.
However, I do believe that Subnautica is closer to its apparent goal of rewarding pacifism than you suggest.
Okay, 'rewarding' may not be the right word as, like you infer - there is little incentive NOT to use lethal force (except for those stalkers, which are adorable when you start treating them with metal and fish ^^ ). But I've rarely felt the need to kill in this game when a minor flesh wound from my knife sends most threats the other way when they realise that you're not going to become chum without a fight.
But them it does feel rewarding in a sense to not be the bane of all life in your vicinity. You're more of an observer, and that's reward in itself in this exploration focus game.
Back to the aforementioned stalkers, perhaps more rewards should come from being 'kind' the the fauna and flora. Perhaps by feeding schools of fish, for example there could be a population increase for you to harvest, or perhaps friendly stalkers could fend of a nasty leviathan that's pursuing you or damaging your base (just random examples off of the top of my head).
I would like to reinforce point number three - once you have a basic understanding of the games mechanics, none of the other denizens pose any real threat. This, in my opinion is the most valid argument made. This requires not one simple magic-bullet solution, but is to be approached from multiple angles. Firstly, the damage metric could be increase slightly to prevent you from being "nibbled" to death. This is the simplest solution, but alone wouldn't yield the desired results.
What could help is an improvement to AI. Hunters could be more likely to set up traps and ambushes, behave more like a pack or even block your retreat. Just some ideas...
As for whether lethal weapons should be included - I think not.
There's a plethora of other games I can play to kill things and I personally feel that Subnautica is not too far from the mark in attempting to deliver 'pacifist' gameplay.
Let's not think about all of those sharks that you've fed into your bioreactor.....
Sandshark are killed on sight, no exceptions. Unless I don't feel like it.
That would be awesome if it would require effort on your part. Right now it's just "and HE floateth above thyne waters, and he saweth, it was goodeth" and the game just hands it to you. "Only one Sandshark? Meh. Either I repulse it or it nibbles on my butt, and then scurries away. Oh, I forgot my Repulsor in the Sandm---yikes... *sandshark scurries away* well, I guess that's that."
That's not a threat, that's a joke. It's funny, but it also gets old fast.
I completely agree. Up the damage and make predators actually pursue you. The problem then is that you effectively get blocked out of areas with predators. Which would be ok if you had a pheromone or sonic reppelent option to deal with them in a way that doesn't mean you get shredded by a pack of them ganging up on you.
In my opinion the fact that the seamoth zapper does actually deal (lethal) damage instead if just stunning is a bug.
Did not drop a tooth... bioreactor. No tooth... reactor. Oh, tooth, back into the containment in anticipation of the next Tooth Fairy Games. May the metal salvage be ever in your favor.
This is really the only part of your comment that I disagree with. I think there should be lethal options. Not a conventional firearm (for practical reasons, as well as the original designers specific aversion to them) but I absolutely think there should be some deliberately lethal weaponry available to the player.
1. For success, the game needs to appeal to the widest possible market. That includes people who don't want to kill the aliens, and the people who do.
2. By offering both lethal and non-lethal options, you increase the number of strategies available to the player base.
3. This is a single player game (at least for now). Allowing the *option* to play lethal if you prefer harms nobody playing the game. Disallowing the option to play lethal harms every player who would prefer that option.
Let me explain #3 a little better. I think that advocating for limitations on other players, whose play style differs from my own, is selfish and wrong. If a player demands that I play the game his way ('absolutely no killing', etc) either directly, or by demanding changes to the game, then he is dictating how I am permitted to enjoy the game *I*paid for - I do not like that at all. For me to demand that all weapons be potentially lethal to the aliens is as wrong as someone demanding that all weapons have no potential to be lethal. There is no difference in someone's intent, if they get on the forums and try to impose their real world views about violence/guns/eating meat/whatever. They are trying to force me to play the game their way, and their way only. It doesn't matter if they try to do it with game rules, or forum guilt, they are still trying to control my personal game experience. This is wrong, full stop.
Note: I am *not* saying you (Lichemperor) are trying to do this. I am saying that this is one of the major reasons why I oppose the recurring suggestion that lethal options be prohibited from the game, and highlighting the behavior of many current/former forum trolls.
In practical game mechanics, I think they should simply add a further modification to each (potentially) lethal weapon system, and perhaps add an opportunity cost to using it. It takes more raw materials, or different ones, to improve the weapon or change its characteristics (range, damage, damage type). Advanced variants can only be crafted at the Modification station, which itself must be upgraded to make those advanced options, etc.
As an example, consider the only currently guaranteed lethal weapon in the game, the knife. You could add some options to it, in the same manner that already exists:
Titanium + Rubber = Knife
Knife + diamond = knife that stays sharp longer
Knife + battery = knife that cooks game fish when they are killed with knife
Knife + battery + different special materials = knife that stuns target briefly (and % chance to break off attack/flee temporarily)
Knife + special material + local toxic fauna = knife that injects a poison into target doing damage over time (DOT), must be refilled with toxic ammo (crafted separately, many varieties available, both lethal and non lethal)
Knife + pipe = short spear (handheld only), allows standoff distance when fighting a predator, or cutting acid shrooms while outside the acid cloud (weapon still suffers damage)
Knife + pipe + rubber = improved hand spear, allows for very fast initial thrust, almost impossible for a game fish to dodge (this is how real world hand spear works)
Knife + pipe + rubber (x4) = elastic powered spear gun that fires consumable ammo to short range (10m or so), uses 4 spaces in your inventory (4 in a line, not a square)
knife + pipe + magnesium = spear gun ammo (like a heavy dart) that is used up on impact with anything (target fish, terrain, etc), each dart takes up two spaces in your inventory
and so forth.
The same incremental increase in lethality could be applied to any of the existing tools/weapons in game, making them available, but at a cost in time/energy/materials/effort.
The lethal options that are in the game because not having them would break the realism. The only exception to that are the gas torpedos, which were probably included because it is cool to use the gasopods (knife was probably only meant to cut creep vine but slashing at things without harming/killing them would require an explanation).
Realism is already broken by having a rifle that acts like stopping time without having a primitive option to channel energy down a barrel to harm things, which would probably be a lot simpler.
There is also no non-lethal option that you can get early to fill the gap until you get the stasis rifle.
Worst part is, the seamoth zapper which is supposed to be a non-lethal deterrent is lethal.
I disagree that it is unrealistic that things are like that. We know very little about the Subnautica universe. It is possible that there is a feudal-japan-esque ban on weapons for everyone who is unauthorized. Having blueprints for weapons on all PDAs/constructors would make them too easily available (a knife might not be considered a weapon anymore because it's so primitive). The protagonist himself doesn't seem capable of entering new blueprints even if he knew how to construct a gun.
I always thought that getting the stasis rifle late was just because of pacing. I never saw knife/ramming as real options to begin with but that's probably just me.
And the Seamoth zapper is simply bugged and will be fixed, I guess.
I have the Bioreactor.
It's a Peeper Mass Murder Machine!
ANYTHING organic (living or not) that I can pick up, can be put into the Bioreactor. This is killing, just as surely as if I had taken a knife to it.
The developers obviously do not have the aversion to killing that we think they do, otherwise this game would be different. For instance, only plants in the bioreactor, no way to kill the Reaper Leviathan, (or other large creatures), fish would avoid the submarines and not get hit.
It would seem the developers do not want overt acts of killing. They don't want it to be too easy to kill, so the player goes around mowing down everything in sight. But... for a game that isn't supposed to be about killing, every animal implemented so far has a death animation.
We don't need weapons. Give as a DNA scanner that is actually a blender and shreds the fish and leaves biowaste or something after "scanning" is done.
But please devs, make your mind up.
Of course I could just be thinking too much in black and white. I still think some things would make more sense differently like a non-lethal seamoth zapper. Also, a cattle prod as low end predator deterrent would be a good idea I think.
They also need to look at the gas torpedoes, they just don't make sense doing damage if that's what they are trying to avoid so desperately.
If it's about survival, well, once the story is put into the game, you could basically survive off water and the sea life until you have a craft that can take you from point A to point B, you don't even have to navigate the depths. I don't see how that's fun, but, it'll likely be an option.
If it's about threat, I don't know what you're missing, because wandering anywhere below 150 meters in most biomes is dangerous if you don't keep an eye out. There's literally an achievement 'No Narcosis' once you dive deep enough; if being out in open water doesn't bring upon some sense of unease and disorientation, you must have a strong constitution.
If it's about risk vs reward, try taking on a Leviathan with a knife. I've only seen one once since I started playing, I didn't step foot out of my Cyclops, and have avoided that area since. And I'm pretty sure that's not even the scariest thing in the sea.
If it's about realism and technology, well hey, the game's set like 5 million years in the future on an alien planet, but that doesn't really change physics; if you steer a Seamoth through a school of fish, obviously you're gonna take a few out on impact. And unless you're playing in creative mode, all the actions you take, from travel, to defense, to simply using lights and oxygen, that all depletes energy, and if you're just wildly spamming critters with defensive systems a few too many fathoms down, a mite bit far from base, you run the chance of running out of energy and air.
All things considered, the choice is yours. I'm pretty sure the devs recognize that. You're dropped onto a foreign world, alone, with nothing but your wits and a broken lifepod. You can sit twiddling your thumbs, waiting for death or rescue; you can carefully scavenge material and survive at a base and eventually try to reunite with your crew; or you can put your fins on, grab a radiation suit, and build a fleet of vessels and conquer the sea, from the sunny sandy island to the darkest, dreariest depths below.
The only one that needs to make up their mind seems to be you......
Don't you do almost the exact same thing here that you say is selfish and wrong? You keep on asking for more weapons to be able to play the game your way. The devs already said that they won't add weapons and even explained why. But still you keep asking them to change their game to enable you to play it your way. Isn't that even more selfish and wrong?
And pulling the "I paid for it so it has to be like I want it to be!"-card is plain wrong. That way each and every player that bought the game would have a right to "demand" changes as they see fit...can you see the problem that arises with that? You can never satisfy all the players out there and you can't change the game in a way that everyone will like it.
I guess that no one forced you to buy Subnautica and I asume you had access to trailers and maybe even some "Let's plays" which displayed quite nicely what you can expect from the game and what not. You obviously decided to buy the game anyway since you seemed to like what you saw and now you ask them to change it so that it suits your prefered playstyle? I don't know but that seems really wrong to me.
No, I'm doing the exact opposite thing.
Advocating for options is the opposite of advocating for limitations.
I want the option to use a lethal weapon (or a lethal strategy). Doing so in no way prevents any other player from playing the game using non-lethal weapons (or non-lethal strategy). On the other hand, advocating for the exclusion of all lethal options does in fact prevent other players from playing the game the way they want to.
I didn't 'play a card', you ignored the first 90% of my sentence where I said
Again, advocating for more options in the game is the exact opposite of advocating for more limitations.
You're not really quoting the Devs when you tell me 'the Devs already said they won't add weapons, and even explained why'. You are superimposing your dislike for *lethal* weapons and mixing comments from others of the No Weapons Ever faction with some very select comments by the Devs. Nothing in Subnautica supports a 'NO weapons' policy. Not the in game story, not the official comments from the Devs, and certainly not the changes in the game since it was opened to EA players.
The original designer explained why he wanted a game without firearms (a specific form of weapon) and has pledged to never put firearms in this game because of his personal beliefs. He also said he wants to avoid having the game devolve into an underwater shooter game, where the point of the game becomes 'kill everything'. There are already weapons in the game - weapons, not tools - they are just aren't deliberately lethal. The Devs have added weapons to the game since it was first opened up for players. Unless you don't consider 'torpedoes' to be weapons, anyway. This part of the debate has been covered at least a half dozen times in other (now locked) threads, and I'm not going to get sucked into another one.
As far as me 'demanding weapons', no actually I haven't. My post was in response to the OP's questions and opinions (where I agreed with nearly everything he said). I explained very briefly why I disagreed with one point of his post, why I think we should have the option of lethal weapons, and then suggested one example of how those options could be added to the game using the existing construction system. This is the "Ideas & Suggestions" area of the official forums, it is *exactly* where the Devs ask us to post suggestions about what we want to see in the game.
I bought the game because I liked the idea of a scuba diving themed game, and I'm a real world diver. I bought it because I like survival themed games, and I've played many others. I bought it now, in Early Access, because I wanted to participate in the play test of the game, and see if there was anything I could do to help the game reach Release without bugs or bad game play. So I've been doing things like playing the game a lot, reporting bugs, offering suggestions, and advocating for things that I believe improve the game for as many people as possible. Does that answer your question about why I bought the game?
Giving players options can severely backfire. Think of cheats. Many people have a lot less fun with a game when they use them and for those players it would be better if they weren't there.
Also advocating for lethal weapons in the game on the basis of choice is stupid. We have many (underwater-)games with weapons already, why not have one without for the people that want that?
Have a heart for pacifists and people that want a story about a better humanity
So...adding choices means that the players will automatically choose those choices over their own preferred style of play? Someone who prefers to play non-lethal now, will suddenly become a violent player if he has the option to do so? That the player who formerly worried about conservation, and depopulation of the biosystem will suddenly toss all of that out the window and go out to sterilize the entire game world? You think that every player, including yourself, is a genocidal maniac who is only stopped from cheating and mass destruction by the game designer choosing to restrict lethal options? Wow, just...wow.
You freely admit that having lethal weapons is a 'much more logical solution' (your words), and yet you say the devs should avoid implementing it? How logical is that?
You also say that having a choice is stupid? George Orwell would approve of that, I suppose.
I'd like to see your list of 'many underwater games with weapons', please. Subnautica is on the list already, of course, since we've had weapons in this game since day one.
'Have a heart for pacifists and people that want a story about better humanity'? By allowing non-pacifists a choice in how they play, I'm somehow preventing you from playing as a pacifist? Oh, that's right, you're one of those pacifists with no self control - you only play pacifist because you can't get your hands on a spear gun and commit mass murder.
And by the way I am not advocating for more limitations nor am I promoting a no violence/zero killing way of playing the game. I just accept the games design as it is and the fact that we are not likely to see much more weapons/tools that can be used in a primary lethal way.
Of course torpedoes are normally deadly weapons but the Vortex ones they first introduced are clearly not. I have not used the Gasopod torps so I can't say how lethal they are or if they act more as a repellant for the predators.
And it is not like we havn't already some lethal options. They just have their downsides which is fine by me. You can kill anything up to Bone- and Sandsharks with the knife if you maneuver a bit to avoid the bites (Maybe even a Reaper but I never tried that). You can ram almost anything to death that is not bigger then the Seamoth but you risk taking damage (which can even be mitigated to some point with the collision upgrade). You can use the perimeter defense system to kill if you so desire. Sure it costs alot of energy to kill a Reaper Leviathan and you can't kill an Ampeel that way...but you clearly have lethal options.
The only thing you could consider me guilty of is that I like the idea of the game that you no matter how far into the game you progress, never will be on top of the food chain. My guess is that this is a decision to further build on the no firearms way of the devs and that is why I defend that approach. There are so many survival games where you will absolutely dominate anything you had to fear or avoid in the beginning as soon as you reach a certain character level or tech level. Subnautica positions you near the top of the food chain later into the game but never really on top. So you still have creatures to fear without having to worry about each Stalker or Sandshark. Is that so bad? Can you only really enjoy Subnautica when you can spearfish Peepers and poison Stalkers?
Don't twist my words around like that.
No, not every player will do that but gameplay wise it will automatically be a logical choice, not in real life, since in real life one bite of a Stalker would very likely be lethal and you would try to keep a distance of 100m at all time.
Also it isn't necessarily logical in the game since we don't know anything about the Subnautica universe, I explained that in another post before.
Being a mass murderer in video games is also something different than in real life. Only conservative politicians think otherwise. Please don't steer the conversation there.
And yes choice CAN be something bad. Humans act against their own good quite often. That doesn't mean we should go for a 1984 dystopia but in this case the goal is to make the game with the greatest enjoyment out of Subnautica. And that can be negatively affected through lethal weapons. Just as cheats are also always just optional but will potentially reduce when you use them.
Also f*ck you for your insults and stop purposely misunderstanding me.
I twisted nothing around, I quoted you.
You made directly conflicting statements one after the other, and I called you on it. You do it again, in your most recent reply, too.
I didn't steer the conversation to politics, I didn't even mention it, you did.
You claimed several things as facts, I asked you to provide a list or link to those 'facts', and you didn't do that.
I didn't insult you, I didn't curse you - that's something YOU couldn't help yourself from doing when you couldn't actually back up your 'facts'.
Have a great day.
You have a very strange opinion of how I enjoy Subnautica. Its also wildly inaccurate, but I find it more strange than insulting that you seem to view me that way. All because I advocate for more options in game play. /shrug
After a day or so in game, have you not reached a point where you no longer have to fear or avoid creatures that posed a threat at the beginning? Thats the situation you say you don't like in other survival games, and yet it holds true in Subnautica as well. You should (and do) rapidly dominate the game environment, and none of the things that were a threat to you in the first few hours of play pose the slightest threat to you.
I have no idea how well you are doing in your game, but in mine I *am* at the top of the ecosystem. Just like in real life, there are creatures on planet that are larger and physically more powerful/dangerous than a human, but unless you are stupid enough to try and challenge them 1-to-1 in their environment and without any of *your* advantages (tools, weapons, tactics), they pose no threat at all. Reference any number of threads by the No Weapons faction, where they try to explain just how easy it is to avoid being eaten by anything in game, without weapons. Those threads clearly demonstrate that the human survivor has rapidly moved to the position of Apex Predator on planet, even without deliberately lethal weapons, because nothing is more powerful/dangerous/cunning as the old fashioned 'human with tools'. They may introduce something bigger, badder, scarier later...but at the moment, the player *is* the dominant life form in game. Adding options for weapons isn't going to change that, one bit.
You claimed I would suggest all players that were consciously playing pacifistic would become mass murderers when given the option when I was saying that more players would opt for that option because it is a logical choice, which would in the long run make the game more boring. You claim I would think all players were genocidal mass murderers. I call this purposely misunderstanding aka twisting my words around. It's not about quoting it's aabout interpretation.
I say that adding lethal weapons could detract from general game enjoyment. Show me my contradiction.
Also, call me illiterate but where did you ask me for a link or list of facts? As far as I'm concerned almost nothing in this thread is about facts it's all practically opinion. We're not throwing studies around or anything like that.
And telling me Orwell would be proud of me I recognize as an insult. As is that I lack self control. Or are these supposed to be praise in this context and I don't get it? Enlighten me if so.
Why argue when we have what we have? And we're here to share an opinions, not to blame each other.
Yea, that was pacifistic)
I think I have an explanation to that mess -> we dont have lethal weapons because Aurora never has one. It's technical ship with ingeneering purpose - building "warpgate" to space sector.
All things that we "build" are NOT weapons, they'a tools.
And you build everything using "constructor" that dont have blueprints of "spergun" or "grenade" or "rocket launcher".
That peoples fly there to build, not to fight.
Some explanation.
Like noted, only one thing that you may carry deal straight damage. Its a knife. Thousands years of evolution but knife is still here. Because its indispensable. Why cut the bread (or wire, or sharp pencil) with expensive laser, or dimension cutter? Plate of steel and peace of rubber - tool is ready.
All other things just look like weapons. In the form of gun because its comfortable to hold and use.
Stasis rifle can slow fire or engine that barely explode, it may stop falling cargo that otherwise kill person. Kind of...
Torpedos can use to destroy some enviroment (in building or harvest purposes), or deliver hazardous materials in such places (gas torpedo).
Only modifications that allowed to such blueprints is replacing some materials.
That is why my base still standing without lascannons and underwater turrets!
P.S. Still, speargun ca be crafted buy bare hands, someone notice that somwhere upward. Pipe, silicon, titan or whole scrapmetal, goddamn, I dont need that futuristic ray-builders to have smth that take dinner to my plate wuithout 3-hours of pursuit!
P.P.S. And yes, nobody scare you after some hours of playing. Rather maybe that giant snakes...
You said that players who are offered a choice of lethal weapons will choose that option, period. That means, by your statement, that players who previously played as pacifists would suddenly opt to play otherwise. No twisting of words, no misinterpretation of what you stated.
See my comment on your first quote above. Adding options cannot possibly detract from game play. All you have to do is not exercise those options, which you are of course free to do - unless you believe, as you stated above, that merely having the option will somehow force every player to employ those options.
You're clearly having some issues with comprehending the concept, so let me offer an analogy. If you order the vegetarian dinner at your favorite restaurant, every time you visit, suddenly discovering they now offer steak (in addition to your favorite vegetarian dinner) is not going to turn you into a meat eater who refuses to order the vegetarian dinner. it simply offers more options on the menu, thus making the restaurant more appealing to a wider customer base. Adding lethal options to certain weapons in game will not suddenly turn every pacifist into a murderous player. Now, if you demand that the restaurant NEVER ADD a meat dish to its menu, so that it remains exclusively vegetarian, which of us is trying to control the meal choice for future diners at that restaurant? If I add a dish to the menu without removing any, I have done absolutely nothing to interfere with your meal choices.
When I said this, in response to your claim that there are already many underwater games with lethal weapons: You must have missed that while you were losing your cool.
Again, you must have missed the wording while you were losing your cool. I said Orwell would approve of the comment "having a choice is stupid". At no point did the word 'you' enter my comment, either directly or implied. My statement stands as written - if you recognize why Orwell would have approved of your comment, and THAT embarrasses or offends you, I can't help that, you are the one who said having choices in a game is stupid.
TL;DR: I say you should have a lethal option, but it should have an impact on your game.
Again, i never see vegetarian fish that eat smth so I can cut as many grocery as i want. Plants are inaffected by that means.
Current state of it - just spawn as many as devs decided. And your impact in ecosystem, how great it can be? And how you can reduce fish population? Killing 100, 1000, 10000? Ocean is big, spawn grow fast, eggs lying somewhere.
Even with gun we to slow to change smth. So ecosystems not need at all. And we dont need a gun, except one to hunt and defend yourself.
In that case I opposite the idea of including firearms. My suggestion - there must be multipurpose tools and maybe hunting gear.
Storyline give us one door to have smth that reeeeealy can make damage. Its the weapons of mercenary, Magda or how she was there? She go away from her mates to build another base. I guess she have more than a pistol, because her purpose is to protect her employers from pirates.
Take it or leave it.
By opportunity cost, I mean you have to do more/have more to make a lethal variant. You'd need to find a suitable blueprint, or perhaps build a machine that allows blueprints to be modified. Something in the style of the current Modification Station, except it can modify blueprints in your PDA. A machine like that might be a good long term way to introduce new blueprints (of any kind) into the player inventory, if the Devs wanted to do so at a later point. For lethal variants, you'd need more raw resources and/or finished components, added to a base item to make the advanced variant (the same way you improve Fins or Tanks, now). Anything that has a ranged attack (like a rubber band powered speargun) would require ammo to be crafted separately, and the ammo would take up space in your inventory. The opportunity cost there is having less space to carry gear, if you want to have plenty of ammo. Ammo would need to be an expendable/consumable item, so you have to choose what to use your resources on - a durable item, or an expendable unit of ammunition. This is the same choice you have to make with torpedoes currently, and one of the reasons why I don't bother with them.
Not being a programmer, I have no idea if/how they tie your actions to the spawn rates in a biome. It used to feel like no matter what you did (hunt or not) the fish all vanished, but it seems to have gotten better (the area around my base hasn't automatically become a barren wasteland, like it used to). I don't think they'd need to make any special changed to the way the ecosystems work now, simply to add options to the weapons.
Do you know what wouldn't make sense? If you shot a freaking stalker with toxic gas and it just wouldn't harm it.
Why does it have to be toxic gas?
Well, to be fair, the gasopod shits do damage you too.
_ " I have no weapon ... just a knife, i can't charge in a biome freely for farm resources. i need observation, patience and just wait the good moment for rush resources when the shark turn his back ".
If you decided to put a gun in this game, to put something who can kill an agressive creature, you totally broke this core gameplay (it will be a free challenge for 1% of player to not use any lethal weapon).
If you create lethal weapon, the players will farm it, grab some ammo and go to a new biome, kill monster, get resources, kill monster, get resources, like every classic MMORPG or survival game. Moreover, the actual agressive creature are not made for being a threat to an armed player, they just go straight to you without any dodge comportment for challenge the shooter.
The entire game is made for challenging the player without any lethal weapon, to force the player, even after 50 hours of gaming, to always stay alert by a simple stalkers when he try to go out from his Cyclops.
and please, don't look about gas torpedoes, it's expensive, it can't kill every time, and you have just 4 slot of munition (nobody base his exploration on gas torpedoes), static rifle + knife is just a better combo than that, it not really broke the developper's gameplay decision.