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Cartoon Man posted:The sequel is more of the same with a much worse plot… Eh. I doubt it. Subnautica was pretty and novel, but the fundamental gameplay was for me tedious and uninteresting. I feel like once I understood the game I lost interest in it, if that makes any sense. The early trial and error when I was still working out what I needed to do, crashfish and stalkers were my nemeses, and every dive to the sea floor was tense were when I was having the most fun. Once I got all my tools and it was just a question of upgrading them, things simply turned into a grind and pixel hunt. Subnautica, for me, thrived on a sense of wonder and mystery. I think it hurt the game that once I got to a certain depth things were either harmless food sources or wanted to kill me. Cythereal fucked around with this message at 15:13 on Dec 3, 2022 |
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Dec 3, 2022 15:09
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Oasx posted:With the exception of the Sea Treaders Path, all the biomes are so big that you can’t really miss them when playing through the story, so I just put beacons down. Says you! I only found out about the Underwater Islands biome several months after finishing the game. Just never traveled west of the big space gun I guess?
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Dec 3, 2022 17:06
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Cythereal posted:And the core gameplay boils down to number go up -> click buttons to create means to make numbers go up more. I don't think there's any game that couldn't be reduced to those terms if you're going to call Subnautica that.
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Dec 3, 2022 18:13
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SlothfulCobra posted:I don't think there's any game that couldn't be reduced to those terms if you're going to call Subnautica that. It's exactly the kind of gear treadmill that drove me away from MMOs, to be honest. You spend most of your time with your tools gathering the materials (or just looking for the materials) to make better tools so you can spend time gathering the materials (or just looking for the materials) to make better tools still. Exploration for exploration's sake is discouraged by limited battery and power supplies, and the presence of sea monsters. I completely missed the existence of two entire biomes because there was nothing in there worth looking for, and I missed a lot of stuff in the Lost River because I inadvertently took the shortest and most direct route to the end of the game possible. Exploring further in the Lost River and the volcanic zones felt like it was more trouble than it was worth (and I hate the cyclops). I get the impression from talking with goons that all this is just part of the expectations for the genre, and what folks who like the genre enjoy. Fair enough, but if so Subnautica has convinced me to continue giving the genre a wide berth after this shot at it.
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Dec 3, 2022 18:22
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I barely want to know what you wrote in your time capsule.
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Dec 3, 2022 18:50
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Cythereal posted:It's exactly the kind of gear treadmill that drove me away from MMOs, to be honest. You spend most of your time with your tools gathering the materials (or just looking for the materials) to make better tools so you can spend time gathering the materials (or just looking for the materials) to make better tools still. It sounds like the basic gameplay loop just isn't your thing - that's ok, we all enjoy games different. From what you've written it is not likely that you'd enjoy other games in the genre. Subnautica is one of the best, if not the single best, examples of genre and if it didn't really click with you then your time would probably be more enjoyably spent in other games and genres.
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Dec 3, 2022 19:12
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Actually, now I'm curious; did you leave a time capsule? What did you write?
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Dec 3, 2022 21:45
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Cythereal posted:Eh. I doubt it. Subnautica was pretty and novel, but the fundamental gameplay was for me tedious and uninteresting. I feel like once I understood the game I lost interest in it, if that makes any sense. The early trial and error when I was still working out what I needed to do, crashfish and stalkers were my nemeses, and every dive to the sea floor was tense were when I was having the most fun. Once I got all my tools and it was just a question of upgrading them, things simply turned into a grind and pixel hunt. Do you feel like cheating the moment you hit a setback might’ve contributed to this loss of tension?
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Dec 3, 2022 22:20
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General Battuta posted:Do you feel like cheating the moment you hit a setback might’ve contributed to this loss of tension? I feel like cheating relieved the tedium. I never felt like reapers were threatening, just irritating. MikeJF posted:Actually, now I'm curious; did you leave a time capsule? What did you write? I wished my successor good luck and left them a start for a productive garden - a gel sac spore and a deepshroom spore. And a little something to keep their garden safe from the sea bunnies. A crabsquid egg. MikeJF posted:But the most important question is: what did you name your Neptune? Eos As for what I left behind?  The Defiant, my fourth and final seamoth. The one vehicle in this game that felt unabashedly fun to use. Left abandoned in my primary base.  The Enterprise, a necessary evil and nothing more. Abandoned in the heart of the volcano, where the sea dragon will probably turn it into scrap.  The Heinlein, a neat vehicle in the wrong game. Very useful when specifically called for, but not suited for this game or its coding. Left derelict in the alien laboratory.  Stormhaven, my primary base throughout the game. Located in the safe shallows above a fumarole. Pretty, but decorating it proved unfortunately limited with the need to add reinforcements occasionally to keep up with the glass.  The Maw, located at the mouth of the Lost River and the only secondary base that I never deconstructed. A very useful secondary base for resource expeditions into the Lost River and the blood kelp region.
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Dec 3, 2022 23:27
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Cythereal posted:It's exactly the kind of gear treadmill that drove me away from MMOs, to be honest. You spend most of your time with your tools gathering the materials (or just looking for the materials) to make better tools so you can spend time gathering the materials (or just looking for the materials) to make better tools still. I think your criticism is interesting because so often you really didn't like some of the same features that I felt so compelling. In this case, I really liked how the gear treadmill gradually expands the map wider and deeper. The loop is that you push to the limits of your technology, you spend some time there, dipping in and out, and gradually your comfort with those spaces rises and you get better tech, you push deeper, etc. Extremely satisfying.
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Dec 3, 2022 23:29
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My first and only play through of SN1 was a sublime experience, nearly peak gaming for me (though the end got pretty tedious) and I think an important part of that was getting absolutely no outside takes on the game. As far as I was concerned I was the first person in the universe to meet a crabsnake or get zapped by a warper. No plot spoilers to metagame around, no cackling about Just You Wait to provoke my contrarian instincts, just a big ol planet and a lot of fish.
General Battuta fucked around with this message at 00:44 on Dec 4, 2022 |
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Dec 3, 2022 23:44
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Cythereal posted:I feel like cheating relieved the tedium. I never felt like reapers were threatening, just irritating. See and that makes me wonder how we played the same game. I treated reaper screams as "do not go there" alarms, which made gathering some cyclops pieces and getting into the aurora absolutely white knuckle. I can't imagine playing the game without having a sense of foreboding as you advance deeper and deeper, I have to believe knowing you had cheats available to remedy any ailment removes risk and tension. Although, I never died in my first playthrough, so maybe I had different goals and mindset toward it?
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Dec 4, 2022 01:44
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Pander posted:See and that makes me wonder how we played the same game. I treated reaper screams as "do not go there" alarms, which made gathering some cyclops pieces and getting into the aurora absolutely white knuckle. I can't imagine playing the game without having a sense of foreboding as you advance deeper and deeper, I have to believe knowing you had cheats available to remedy any ailment removes risk and tension. For me, hearing reapers and ghosts and sea dragons just made me go "Yes yes, you're very scary" while I rolled my eyes and kept on task. To me they felt like a nuisance, not a danger. For me, risk and tension came from getting lost and drowning. Which upgrades eventually made rather a moot point with the pathfinder tool and final air tank upgrades. The entire end run through the Lost River and lava zones felt weirdly muted and safe to me. Turning off the lights and turning on silent running meant I was almost never attacked by anything besides lava larvae and the occasional warper - again nuisances, not threats. For me, the random little caves I kept finding and exploring felt way more dangerous and tense than any wildlife, and part of when the game's tension deflated for me was when I realized that there simply was not anything in those caves worth the risk for. Part of the whole 'huge world, no reason to interact with half of it' issue I have with the game.
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Dec 4, 2022 01:52
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... If, after getting three Sea Moths eaten, your reaction to leviathans be rolling your eyes, and the radio logs and associated bread crumbs held no interest... I'm going to have to agree that this is not genre of entertainment you're looking for.
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Dec 4, 2022 04:37
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For the person who bugged me via PM: I never saw the second Sunbeam event at all.  I got the radio call with the Neptune plans before the Sunbeam plot resolved, so I finished the game before ever seeing what would wind up happening with the Sunbeam.Ardeem posted:... If, after getting three Sea Moths eaten, your reaction to leviathans be rolling your eyes, and the radio logs and associated bread crumbs held no interest... I'm going to have to agree that this is not genre of entertainment you're looking for. All losing my sea moths meant was that I needed to spend time grinding up the materials to replace them. I was consciously choosing to ignore the radio because I wanted to save the lives of the Sunbeam's crew, because that's how I play video games, I like saving peoples' lives.
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Dec 5, 2022 17:54
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Why would ignoring people on the radio save their lives?
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Dec 5, 2022 18:05
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The event where they die is specifically triggered by a radio message. however, if you shut down the big gun before the Sunbeam arrives, they don't attempt a landing because of too much debris, thus saving their lives without ignoring the radio entirely
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Dec 5, 2022 18:22
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I am shocked, just shocked that Cythereal cheated themselves out of a fun time by playing like an idiot and then complaining about the consequences of their metagaming
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Dec 5, 2022 18:24
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BattleMaster posted:The event where they die is specifically triggered by a radio message. But why would you, a character in the game world, believe that ignoring your answering machine could cause a spaceship to avoid danger?
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Dec 5, 2022 18:27
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No Dignity posted:I am shocked, just shocked that Cythereal cheated themselves out of a fun time by playing like an idiot and then complaining about the consequences of their metagaming Wait. This isn't the same person that refused to do their class quests in final fantasy xiv?
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Dec 5, 2022 19:06
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Duodecimal posted:Wait. This isn't the same person that refused to do their class quests in final fantasy xiv? No that was CJ, a different obstinate idiot in the FF14 thread
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Dec 5, 2022 19:22
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Duodecimal posted:Wait. This isn't the same person that refused to do their class quests in final fantasy xiv? I have done every class quest in FF14. No Dignity posted:I am shocked, just shocked that Cythereal cheated themselves out of a fun time by playing like an idiot and then complaining about the consequences of their metagaming I made a choice about how to progress the story based on the information available to me. Personally I was assuming that the radio was in fact two-way and they just didn't write dialogue for the PC to help with the immersive self-insert aspect of the atmosphere they were going for.
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Dec 5, 2022 19:22
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Cythereal posted:Personally I was assuming that the radio was in fact two-way and they just didn't write dialogue for the PC to help with the immersive self-insert aspect of the atmosphere they were going for. WHY WOULD YOU ASSUME THAT??
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Dec 5, 2022 19:32
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The first message from sunbeam makes it pretty clear they're not hearing you.
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Dec 5, 2022 19:33
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How does ignoring an answering machine help stop a spaceship? How does ignoring the answering machine where you pick up all the distress calls from your fellow survivors help save anyone’s life?
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Dec 5, 2022 19:37
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General Battuta posted:How does ignoring the answering machine where you pick up all the distress calls from your fellow survivors help save anyone’s life? So many lives lost thanks to this one survivor’s intense desire to isolate 🥺
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Dec 5, 2022 19:42
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Yeah, I don't get that. Unless you have knowledge of the game outside of the game, you wouldn't have any idea what happens. It's meant to be a surprise. Like the first indication that the mountain gun is a gun is during the sunbeam incident. There's literally no way to have known that beforehand, unless you read ahead, but if you read ahead, you'd also know that it doesn't actually affect your game in any fundamental way.
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Dec 5, 2022 19:52
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Rupert Buttermilk posted:Yeah, I don't get that. Unless you have knowledge of the game outside of the game, you wouldn't have any idea what happens. It's meant to be a surprise. If I recall It's possible to enter the Quarantine Enforcement Platform and gain hints to its purpose before the sunbeam (although many players won't have, since there's a permanent cloudbank preventing you from seeing the Mountain Isle from a distance. The sunbeam incident is there to, among other things, draw you to the island if you haven't found it. But people who look at maps tend to zoom straight there.) MikeJF fucked around with this message at 20:40 on Dec 5, 2022 |
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Dec 5, 2022 20:37
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MikeJF posted:If I recall It's possible to enter the Quarantine Enforcement Platform and gain hints to its purpose before the sunbeam (although many players won't have, since there's a permanent cloudbank preventing you from seeing the Mountain Isle. The sunbeam incident is there to, among other things, draw you to the island if you haven't found it) This is what happened with me. I stumbled into the mountain when I was working my way towards one of the Degasi signals, and if you click on everything inside it hints at what's going on. Then my next stop was the Aurora, and the PDA told me that the ship sustained damage from unknown weapons technology. The pieces were not hard to connect, and I stumbled across it because I was ignoring radio signals because I already had other stuff I was investigating. Up until that point I was treating the radio as 'I can't figure out where I should go next, please give me a hint.' The only thing I would have actually appreciated a hint towards, after I stopped using the radio, was the life pod down in the blood kept to point me to that region. Edit: IIRC, my exact process of discovery was I found the mushroom forest and went exploring from there, passed the bridge into the mountains (this was where I lost my first two seamoths), and noticed this huge seamount that turned out to be the mountain island. Cythereal fucked around with this message at 20:47 on Dec 5, 2022 |
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Dec 5, 2022 20:42
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I still do not understand why you thought that avoiding your radio answering machine would stop a spaceship from showing up.
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Dec 5, 2022 20:47
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General Battuta posted:I still do not understand why you thought that avoiding your radio answering machine would stop a spaceship from showing up. Why is having a basic sense of pattern recognition and an understanding of scripted events and triggers apparently so hard for some people to understand? Subnautica is many things, but clever about its plot or scripting thereof is not one of them.
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Dec 5, 2022 20:52
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What if the ship just showed up on a timer anyway, like the Aurora’s explosion? It seems more likely to me you were just spoiled on the plot and wanted to do it the “best” way, which is fine, but maybe not a good reason to say the game is insulting you - nor to act like you’re “saving lives” by sequence breaking the story. By that standard you could save everyone on the Aurora by never pressing “new game”.
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Dec 5, 2022 20:57
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You monster.
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Dec 5, 2022 21:03
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That's why I don't boy or play most FPS games that come out. Conscientiously objecting.
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Dec 5, 2022 21:06
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In terms of progression in a survival game, I found Subnautica did it wonderfully.
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Dec 5, 2022 21:55
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Please keep this person away from any focus group sessons for future games
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Dec 5, 2022 22:11
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Tiny Timbs posted:Please keep this person away from any focus group sessons for future games Me, or cythereal?
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Dec 5, 2022 22:42
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Rupert Buttermilk posted:Me, or cythereal? The one who meta-gamed the least fun way to optimally "solve" Subnautica.
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Dec 7, 2022 18:24
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Between this thread and the Valheim thread it really reinforces the fact that other people play these games for significantly different reasons than I do. The biggest fun and challenge for me in these games is making a visually appealing base that's functional within the constraints of the game. Part of that fun is making sure I have a place to put resources within the constraints of the game That is intuitive and allows me to grab what I need quickly for building projects. A mod that makes it so that one locker can store all materials or a mod that automatically pulls materials from boxes removes challenge in the same way as making yourself immortal or spawning materials in does.
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Dec 7, 2022 20:48
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I don't think a box that pulls materials you've stored from other boxes is removing anything but tedium and nowhere near making yourself immortal. That's a weird take.
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Dec 7, 2022 21:07
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