A big problem of Subnautica's basic "looks"
Classic319
Join Date: 2010-11-06 Member: 74789Members
Join Date: 2010-11-06 Member: 74789Members
( i just copied my post from Subnautica steam community )
We all know Subnautica is so beautiful so that it is probably one of the most beautiful games ever. But in my opinion, Subnautica has a big fundamental problem with its "looks".
It is, that we can't recognize and feel the real size of a creature or of an objective.
The best example is, while people get freaked out or shocked by big whales in the sea, we don't actually get freaked out that much by Reefbacks, which in fact should be bigger than any sea creatures on earth.
Yes, Reaper Leviathan is enough big so that it is a horror but still looks -because of some unknown graphical problem- far smaller than its real size, in-game.
Crab Squid should be like at least 10 times larger than a human but those just look and feel like a size of a lion at most.
I don't know what is the problem. Probably a FOV issue? But this often decreases the intensity of Subnautica.
I know someone will never play Subnautica again if we can feel the immense size of those creatures :P, but i think not fixing this issue will be a big disadvantage for the atmostphere of Subnautica(which is already great enough, though).
Btw. i will just give you a link of the size comparison between the player and a crabsquid :
http://vignette4.wikia.nocookie.net/subnautica/images/6/68/Crabsquid_Concept_Art.jpg
I'm sure noone has "felt" that enormous size. In game Crabsquids sometimes look even cute to my eyes.
.......so, how do you think?
We all know Subnautica is so beautiful so that it is probably one of the most beautiful games ever. But in my opinion, Subnautica has a big fundamental problem with its "looks".
It is, that we can't recognize and feel the real size of a creature or of an objective.
The best example is, while people get freaked out or shocked by big whales in the sea, we don't actually get freaked out that much by Reefbacks, which in fact should be bigger than any sea creatures on earth.
Yes, Reaper Leviathan is enough big so that it is a horror but still looks -because of some unknown graphical problem- far smaller than its real size, in-game.
Crab Squid should be like at least 10 times larger than a human but those just look and feel like a size of a lion at most.
I don't know what is the problem. Probably a FOV issue? But this often decreases the intensity of Subnautica.
I know someone will never play Subnautica again if we can feel the immense size of those creatures :P, but i think not fixing this issue will be a big disadvantage for the atmostphere of Subnautica(which is already great enough, though).
Btw. i will just give you a link of the size comparison between the player and a crabsquid :
http://vignette4.wikia.nocookie.net/subnautica/images/6/68/Crabsquid_Concept_Art.jpg
I'm sure noone has "felt" that enormous size. In game Crabsquids sometimes look even cute to my eyes.
.......so, how do you think?
Comments
Standing in front of an elephant would feel really massively massive but in Subnautica not, although many creatures are far larger than elephants.
M8, there are only three countries in the world which don't use the metric system.
Not quite what I meant... I meant that the distance traveled doesnt feel like meters, but feet. Meters should be 3 ft 3 inches once converted and they feel more like 1 foot. You can be 20 meters down and it certainly doesn't feel like you're nearly that deep. Maybe its my perception, but it doesnt feel quite right with the measurement.
a blue whale is 30 meters long
It just doesn't feel that big
Simple experiment (although I am not sure it's still doable) - build a scanner room with a window, grab a camera and look through the window inside. You will see your character standing there. Note how your whole idea of the room changes, how much smaller it suddenly seems to be. That's what third person camera does - it provides the context, so to speak.
But maybe this impression we're getting is actually an illusion. If there are any gamers who play this game in VR, please tell us if you get the same impression about the scale.
Numerically 10 meters to me is huge, if you are used to feet than yes you have to avoid the mistake of assuming 10 feet. They could change everything to milimeters but then who gets granular on a depth gauge? "Now passing 23,342 millimeters."
It's the camera view angle and the lack of depth perception. I've seen a 2 meter bull shark through a rov camera and it looks like a big fish. I've dived into water with 2 meter long white tips and they felt like they were 4 meters long.
I can live without 3rd person POV. I'll invest in 3d when the price point lowers maybe that'll make the difference.
Agreed, it sorta seems like a lot is set in stone at this point.
Exactly, I mean 10 meters down is deep enough to put a three story building, but in-game it doesnt feel much different then hopping into a swimming pool. I does feel bigger than millimeters at least, lol.
What does 250m of vertical distance look like in real life?
Above: Aprin Tower in Dubai.
The thing is that's 1/2 the average depth of the Jelleyshroom caves. Now there is a spot near the southern safe-zone thermal vent that drops right down on top of Wonderland base so you can do a near beeline dive from the surface to that base, and it does not feel like over ten football fields.
https://youtu.be/EEezkmcPjcI?t=1h59m40s
The other issue is the really far view distance and there is no real need to get up really close to anything (ie. you can pick up quartz from pretty far away compared to your model size) that makes everything look small.
It's a matter of game pace vs realism. With reality usually being complicated and boring compared to game design.
Everyone is of course entitled to their own opinion but I'm just going to go ahead and disagree.
Perhaps there is theoretically room for improvement in some matters of scale but the game is very nearly finished and there's plenty of big and scary. I still just about brown my pants when a reaper sneaks up behind me and grabs my seamoth. And the sea dragon leviathan is about double their length and much bulkier.
The only time anything about the game has ever felt small to me was when speeding across the relatively small (by surface area) map in a seamoth.
It'd be nice if we could tweak things like this and the FOV! Hopefully those tweaking capabilities will eventually be added.
Well, if that ever happens, it'll be after 1.0.
By the way folks, not wanting to give you the wrong impression, but... i have a Rog Swift 3D screen and nvidia V2 glasses and i still get the scale issue, its not a VR problem. Third person imho could solve this. Either that or maybe tweak the "head camera" focal distance to be more compatible with the human eye.
@ EnglishInfidel
My lifepod went west, i mean way west, i have spent 12 power cells just to try to track it down, only to realise it can never be reached, however i was able to see the other side of the orange moon...speaking of perspective, scale and realism, it seems to be orbiting only a few hundred meters above the ocean...
In every 3-d person games every object is made twice as big as it is in real life relative to the size of the human. That is because the camera is above the head of a human character, and normal-sized objects seems smaller than they really are. Take a good look at you surroundings in basically every third person game and you'll notice that everything is scaled. Yes this effect is the reason of gigantic buildings in every RPG game.
As for the topic, to realize the true size of objects you need to put something of the size you already know that would serve as a reference.
This effect exists in real life diving as well.
For example, once I was swimming in the sea, and the water was absolutely clear. It seemed that the bottom was like 1m below, while in fact it was 20 or so. I noticed a can of beer just below me. It looked like this can was tiny, like less than cent coin in size. While in reality it was of course a normal beer can that some freak dropped into the sea. It just was deep deep below and looked small because of that.
Human brain and sensory systems are designed for moving on land. When we swim or fly our brain starts to do weird things)
Interesting.
I also noticed that it is a real immersion killer to watch life from a few feet behind your own head...
The same goes for slowing down acceleration.
I guess that depends on what games you are used to play=)
For example I had no immersion problems when I played Dark Souls 3)
When you play first-person game you have no side vision. When you are not get used to it, you will feel very weird (I certainly did when after years playing only TP I tried FPS again). Actually, this also can be immersion-breaker! Third-person camera kinda works as side vision substitution.
PS. I used to work in video game industry. I remember designers toyed a lot around camera and its parameters testing different ideas, e.g. size of props and indoor and outdoor levels, FoV, and so on.
Mind you, I'm someone who finds the Dark Souls games low budget and poor quality, so whatever.
1st person is definitely the only option at this point anyway.
Another thought occurred to me along these lines.
Object like the 'Common Coral' in the safe shallows biome are actually gigantic and impressive... but over time we get desensitised... so adding more smaller critters or changing the size of some vegetation for a sense of scale might help a great deal.
Similarly, having low visibility water conditions occasionally occur would assist in getting a sense of scale in different environments.
And there are environment scaling issues I have written about.
I somewhat agree. You can see that they saved money on lots of stuff (sometimes quite creatively - e.g. they reused player animations for humanoid monsters whenever possible) and it have some nasty bugs, e.g. camera lock is extremely bad (80% of my deaths happened because camera unlocks in the middle of the fight and turns into opposite direction to the boss... and it can't be rotated quickly because it is Xbox controller; great example how camera should NOT be implemented in third person game).
But it is not of poor quality.
Btw Dark Souls are great example of environment scaling: pretty much everything there is cyclopic size - including enemies - but, amazingly it often doesn't seem that way) (e.g. knights are intimidating, but you usually don't feel that you are fighting with 3 meters tall giants). Ahh camera...
Yes, for example Morrowind feels pretty big when you play it. But its smoke and mirrors (may be not intentional though): if you play mod to Oblivion that imports Morrowind island into it you can clearly see how close everything is, and the world suddenly feels very small!
In the original Morrowind, the island was covered by opaque fog (basically rendering limitation of early 2000-th) and player character speed is low, and roads are indirect (e.g. you usually have to walk around something), so distances between everything seems huge.
In Oblivion they introduced rendering of remote landscape and the world suddenly has become small, while in fact it was 4 times larger!