Ideas to improve the game
lordoverkill2
Join Date: 2017-06-30 Member: 231480Members
Join Date: 2017-06-30 Member: 231480Members
I know you guys have your hands full with the silent running update, but these are things I think could improve the game. 1. Diminish the rate you need to get food or water: A lot of time I spend in this game is spent on gathering food or water. I think more fish that can create water would be nice, but adding a food replicator (Dispenses food without needing to collect it) would go a long way to improving the game. 2. More islands: I love the islands in this game, but as far as I can tell they are very few in number. I would love to see more islands in the future possibly even more man made structures. 3. Being able to upgrade the seamoth in the cyclops: I read that you need to craft the vehicle upgrade station inside the moon bay because you need to dock. Why not just give the cyclops the ability to upgrade the seamoth? Also auto-repair for the seamoth would be nice in the cyclops. 4. A season pass: I would like to see content packs that we could look forward to. Updates could include new modes such as undead mode or a prequel mode where you can discover the story of those who lived on the planet before you, new biomes, exclusive weapons, new fish and new crafting items. 6. more upgrade slots and more upgrades. I appreciate you guys taking the time reading this.
Comments
There are plenty of easy ways right now to get constant food/water. The water filtration machine will do more than enough if you manage your power, and a couple pots of marble melons will easily give you a full food bar. For long term journeys use salt from the filtration machine to preserve Reginalds. These can easily be farmed in a alien containment.
The game isn't really about massacring or being massacred by monsters.
Danger, sure, but not running for your life the entire time.
I made a post in another thread about why I play without hunger and thirst.
Basically? There's never any mad scramble to GET food or drink, not even at first. Bladderfish and coral and salt are everywhere, for water, and fish are even more plentiful. Once you have the right gardens and a water filtration machine, it becomes a moot point. The filtration machine even gives you plentiful salt to cure various fish for storage.
On one hand, this means you can always eat... But on the other hand this means that there's never any question as to whether you'll have food. The only way to starve is to forget to resupply. It's not really a test of skill to avoid starvation, it's just a chore. Combined with how quickly the meters drain, and I found food and thirst added basically nothing FUN to the game experience. It's just busywork.
Take the Stalker for example:
What if the stalker was only interested in the player when they have equipment made from steel, and instead of attacking and damaging the player, they play with the character the same way they play with the metal salvage bits of the Aurora.
In this way, they present a unique danger, by hijacking motion controls and preventing the player from re-surfacing for air. The player can observe stalkers being mollified after feeding, or observe their disinterest in plasteel salvage (by showing a cargo box or something similar that they don't touch), which leads to learning to upgrade all steel equipment to plasteel.
The subs are each designed we it their own pluses and minuses so that they all have roles. The PRAWN has issues with getting out of deep areas by itself, which is were the cyclops comes in. The seamoth is an early game vehicle that can't go all that deep. Having a sub with both of these abilities would pretty much ruin the current balance of the game.
Have you ever faced a problem where you run out of power from your Cyclops and you are very deep. You have limited time to find even one power cell. You have one full and many empty ones, all in the same locker. You don't find that power cellin time because you can't easily sort them to order.
I just think about other survival games which have storage/sorting system. Even Minecraft haves it (some sort). I think Subnautica needs it very much
Essentially a device you carry in your inventory and then when you need it, you can use it to filter seawater into small amounts of drinkable water in desperate situations on the go.
The downsides are of course necessary to keep the game balanced... things like:
-it only works a certain number of times and produces small quantities of water.
-once used up, is consumed/destroyed and need to be crafted again.
-requires extensive crafting materials such as fiber mesh, purple brain coral sample AND a bladderfish to manufacture. So it doesn't just replace making proper water bottles.
but on the plus side:
-Available early in the game (kinda like seaglide is easily available before the seamoth, still-straw is available before the stillsuit)
-Allows you to have a portable emergency backup water source which can be used anywhere. (in a pinch, just piss in it. It'll filter it like a stillsuit).
-takes up only one inventory slot. So once you are out of water bottles, you know "this is my last backup, and it's not much".
Essentially, the still-straw is designed for those moments when you find yourself at the edge of a map without water.
It does keep you alive just long enough to find another water source, but not enough for extended roaming. Beasically when you have to use this, you know it's time to bee-line it towards the "home base".
So ...how about it?
The sunken Degasi ship wreck.
Basically, put an ANCIENT-looking sunken hulk of a destroyed ship somewhere on the very edges of the map. Preferrably just at the edge of the void (where the Deep Ocean starts).
Works just like aurora wreck parts, except with a twist: this one has been here for like 20 years, and it shows. It's overgrown with moss, kelp and rust, it's partially buried in the sand and dangerously tilted over the precipe of the Void.
This is all that is left of the Degasi ship. And the Degasi survivors just ...never found this wreck. The rest of the ship went over the edge, into the Void and is now unaccessible in any way (doesn't exist in the game).
It would be ironic if there would be some useful piece of tech in the wreck that would have almost certainly helped them (and now helps player) but they just never ventured this out into this direction. They just missed it.
Could drop some cool data entries there... like, what their life was before the crash.
The Degasi PDA says that they stripped the wreck down for supplies. So there is no wreck left. I doubt the ship was the size of the Aurora, so it was most likely in one piece.
True, they did use the parts of their old ship _that they could find_ to construct their bases.
But what if they just scavenged the parts that were easily available?
We have to consider how big their ship was.
I'd say it's safe to assume it wasn't as big as Aurora. But I don't think the Degasi was as small as the Sunbeam either, since one shot from the quaranteen enforcement platform was enough to pretty much vaporize the entire craft. After all, it was made for the elite executive staff of their megacorporation boss-class people. The datapad lore about the CEO class with their "personal entourages" etc. pretty much states that these were like mini-kings and would have the moolah to fly in style.
So it would make sense that their ship would be big enough to survive the initial strike without vaporizing and have at least a few bigger wreck-parts falling down into the ocean.
Then the survivors would gather whatever they could find and use that (and whatever natural resources they could find) to make their bases.
But that does leave a nice chance that they did miss several chuncks of the ship (or even the majority of it!) and just had to make do with whatever they could find.
So I don't think it's that far-fetched to think that there might be several pieces of the Degasi still missing in the ocean, in the deep parts that the survivors just never went into.
I'd like to see the overall difficulty of the game to be increased. I think predators are way too easy to evade, you can seaglide past pretty much everything. It would be cool to have to dive into caves to avoid faster, deadlier creatures. I think the cyclops is way OP as well. Sure it can't attack but you can just stop moving and shut it down and everything will leave you alone. Wait until silent running comes back, and run again. There's no real threat of death that I found in the cyclops.
A more severe punishment for dying would be cool too. Like losing all your gear. I'm surrently playing on the perma-death mode which adds a little excitement to encounters.
There are so many unnecessary things you can build that aren't needed to beat the game, like the PRAWN. I've never had and beat it. There should be some objective that requires you to build one (needing to drill into a cave for resources or a blueprint) so that players are forced to track down the components and build one. At this point, if you know what you're doing, you can get to the end of the game quickly without having to do much of anything.
They should also make the hatching enzyme materials harder to get. Maybe guarded by something. 3 of the 4 items needed can be found in the Emperor's aquarium at the end. They should also limit the number of times you can use the portals to the end game. Once you get down there, you have no reason to try and get back out, which would be a little more challenging.
The game is designed to cater the casual audience. The game isn't supposed to be all that hard. Most people don't want that.
The idea of losing gear on death is crazy. If your killed while in the Jellyshrrom caves with your seamoth (no cyclops) and lose your O2 tanks and seaglide, then how the heck are you gonna get them back? You have about 45 seconds to swim over 200 m down and the equip the tank, get your stuff, and get back to your seamoth. If your some where deeper, than your even more screwed.
Maybe not, but there are some of us who breeze through the game now, knowing where everything is and what to expect by now. They should add a custom mode, where aspects of the game could be made harder (or easier...) if a player so wanted it:
1. Change the day/night cycle (the nights are FAR too short)
2. Adding Nitrogen Narcosis; surfacing too quickly injures you (it's already implemented in game as a console code, but is never used)
3. Change damage values of creature attacks, or reduce efficiency of First Aid Kits (there's little risk of dying)
And so on and so forth. Everyone loves this game (myself included) but after playing a new save file for the 20th+ time, there's not much fear of taking chances as by now I know what to expect always.
I think the options should be there at least. They can cater to both audiences. I wouldn't mind losing things, I died (by drowning sadly enough) well into a hardcore game and lost the entire save file. It's just part of the fun for those that like a little more challenge. To each his own but I'd like some harder options.