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DEEP STATE PLOT posted:nothing in below zero is actually a threat at all so that'd just be a useless module Well, further to my point, the game should have been more expansive and dangerous so that those modules are needed. The absolutely best way to make one of these games, and OG SN hits this pretty hard, is that you make these challenges that seem insurmountable, and they might actually BE insurmountable... unless you discover a tool or ability. And maybe with a poo poo load of effort, you could get around these challenges without the ability/tool. And getting that tool or ability should require work, but once it's attained/developed, it makes any previous challenge a joke. Take eating in the OG SN for example. It's a really small version of what I'm talking about, but it still applies; you hunt for food, maybe you starve a few times when trying to learn the ropes... Then maybe you get the grav trap... But then eventually, you're harvesting melons and you have a water filtration system. That all took a lot of work, BUT food/water is essentially a non-issue, which is part of your reward for developing better methods of food/water gathering. It really does do it perfectly. It's a shame that BZ didn't quite hit that mark. I'd be cool with SN3 (or is it going to be considered SN2?) being a grander version of 1, but I can certainly understand Unknown Worlds not wanting to just remake the first game.
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Jun 25, 2023 21:29
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Well, this was certainly an interesting month to start playing Subnautica. I finished the first game with a bit over 40 hours of playtime. Great experience, mostly unspoiled (apart from a couple screenshots of bases in deeper areas when I was searching for building hints), my only regret is that I didn't really use the Cyclops at any point. The Seamoth was good enough for overworld exploration and the Prawn felt a lot more maneuverable down in the depths, so I ended up only making a couple runs with the Cyclops to shuttle supplies between my bases, on one of which I accidentally rammed and flooded a base. Plus it seemed very power-hungry if I turned on the extra upgrades. Scariest moment was during my first exploration of the Lost River, I went in from the bloodvine trench side, dodged some river prowlers and a ghost leviathan and somehow ended up at the deep Degasi base which was being patrolled by the first crabsquid I ever saw, nearly got the Seamoth destroyed by it as I was scanning inside the base, and then made a completely blind run for the surface while being chased by the crabsquid, a warper that had come in from somewhere, and another ghost leviathan. Never went back to that area again.
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Jun 25, 2023 22:37
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The thing I'm most disappointed with is (SN enemy spoilers) the Warper. They look scary, they make scary messages show up, they apparently killed everyone else and are hunting you, and yet the only mild terror I felt from them was when they warped me out of my seamoth when I was too close to a Reaper.
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Jun 26, 2023 00:45
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warpers are just fundamentally godawful enemies from a gameplay perspective
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Jun 26, 2023 01:21
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I don't get why their stupid gimmick of dismounting the player and doing little else was brought back for Below Zero, but apparently the developers like that set of mechanics.
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Jun 26, 2023 01:35
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I imagine warpers were originally much more threatening, but play testing revealed being dismounted and stun locked was not fun.
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Jun 26, 2023 01:37
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Some random thoughts: I think I loved the low-tech free diving, scrambling-for-resources stage of the game the most. It reminds me of the time I spent several weeks diving to find my lost wedding band. I think the camera drones were under-used. Sending utility ROVs into areas that are too deep/dangerous/toxic, etc. could be expanded into a bigger part of the gameplay progression. I have this sequence in my head about being stuck in a failing base without the gear to safely go outside, and having to use ROVs to gather the resources you need before your oxygen and or power runs out, and/or having to repair breaches, unlocking further sections, etc. from the outside with them. Is it possible to build bases at the ceiling of underwater caves? I don't think I ever tried it. I'll be seriously disappointed if there aren't any Peter Watts and David Mace easter eggs in the next game. That game is hopefully already past the need for inspiration stage, but check out Red Leviathan: The Secret History of Soviet Whaling for a ton of stuff that could be adapted to a dystopian aquatic sci-fi setting.
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Jun 26, 2023 02:02
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Hannibal Rex posted:I think I loved the low-tech free diving, scrambling-for-resources stage of the game the most. Agreed! I feel the 'best' vehicle was the SeaGlide for mostly that reason. The SeaMoth was potent as heck as it trivialized the O2 loop, only to be seen again for Wreck Diving (which to be fair is stressful in a good way). There's a lot of magic about having to care that a shark might take a nip out of you or does that coral have spikes on it? etc. The Cyclops is a transformative experience again but I'm ok with it as it's very ponderous so it's more of a mobile base than a dart-about that replaces freediving, which is where most of the early game magic was happening and the Seamoth took away.
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Jun 26, 2023 02:11
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Did you find the ring??
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Jun 26, 2023 02:28
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Bad Munki posted:Did you find the ring?? After about five weeks. Someone was kind enough to lend me a small underwater metal detector, after that it was just a matter of perseverance. (Very abridged.)
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Jun 26, 2023 02:32
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GOAT sea
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Jun 26, 2023 02:36
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If you like the free cave diving parts of the game BZ has more of them and (imo) better ones. You actually have to get uncomfortably far from your vehicle and they introduced oxygen plants to encourage you to go further into caves without dying.
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Jun 26, 2023 02:38
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Rupert Buttermilk posted:Take eating in the OG SN for example. It's a really small version of what I'm talking about, but it still applies; you hunt for food, maybe you starve a few times when trying to learn the ropes... Then maybe you get the grav trap... But then eventually, you're harvesting melons and you have a water filtration system. That all took a lot of work, BUT food/water is essentially a non-issue, which is part of your reward for developing better methods of food/water gathering. What's great is that once you manage to overcome one challenge, the game will present you with a new one. You constantly feel like you're making progress but the game never becomes trivial. Subnautica is great about this, as is Raft. A lot of survival games are NOT.
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Jun 26, 2023 02:42
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ikanreed posted:I imagine warpers were originally much more threatening, but play testing revealed being dismounted and stun locked was not fun. remove their ability to teleport you, make them largely silent until they are very close, up their damage substantially and rename them as is they are just very, very irritating and not actually threatening
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Jun 26, 2023 02:45
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it's unfortunate that they never fixed or improved the pop in
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Jun 26, 2023 03:13
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Rupert Buttermilk posted:The thing I'm most disappointed with is (SN enemy spoilers) the Warper. They look scary, they make scary messages show up, they apparently killed everyone else and are hunting you, and yet the only mild terror I felt from them was when they warped me out of my seamoth when I was too close to a Reaper. The spooky messages were probably overboard. Both because it was such a big step up in the game directly threatening you in a way that the game was unwilling or unable to follow up on, and also it doesn't really dovetail with the storytelling in any of the escape pods. Complications posted:I don't get why their stupid gimmick of dismounting the player and doing little else was brought back for Below Zero, but apparently the developers like that set of mechanics. Did they? I don't remember that in Below Zero.
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Jun 26, 2023 03:27
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SlothfulCobra posted:The spooky messages were probably overboard. Both because it was such a big step up in the game directly threatening you in a way that the game was unwilling or unable to follow up on, and also it doesn't really dovetail with the storytelling in any of the escape pods. This confuses me too. The closest I can recall of this happening to me was the sea monkeys stealing your tools in the early game before they start helping you instead.
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Jun 26, 2023 03:33
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The Ice Wurm knocked you off of your Snowfox and not much else.
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Jun 26, 2023 03:36
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Serephina posted:The Ice Wurm knocked you off of your Snowfox and not much else. Lol if you used the lovely snowfox and didn’t just stomp through on a prawn.
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Jun 26, 2023 03:45
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DEEP STATE PLOT posted:remove their ability to teleport you, make them largely silent until they are very close, up their damage substantially and rename them To Fades 
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Jun 26, 2023 03:50
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Cartoon Man posted:Lol if you used the lovely snowfox and didn’t just stomp through on a prawn. I am a dumb goon, yes, and got lured in by zoom hover bike thinking that the fun of it was juuuuuust around the corner because it seemed like such a cool thing.
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Jun 26, 2023 03:53
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DEEP STATE PLOT posted:remove their ability to teleport you, make them largely silent until they are very close, up their damage substantially and rename them That's annoying too because Subnautica doesn't actually want you to die. It wants you to be afraid of dying. An enemy that takes half your life without you knowing what was happening isn't fun. What warpers really needed was a sense of sudden overwhelming risk. The "patrol idly in most deep places" does several things wrong 1. It detracts from the narrative that they're actively hunting you by being everywhere, and not following if they do see you 2. It means they can't be "on all the time" because then when you pass those areas, they become incredibly annoying. 3. It limits how scary warping can be to merely getting you out of your sub. My fix: Have a visually distinct scout unit that occasionally teleports near you, at a rate proportional to plot advancement. It gives some very audible and visible "I'm scanning you" effects. If you break LOS, it teleports away. If you don't, warpers, plural, start teleporting in and actively pursuing you for a while. Not sure how to make that play nice with the cyclops.
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Jun 26, 2023 04:35
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ikanreed posted:
Give the Warpers their own Cyclops that chases you around.
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Jun 26, 2023 04:46
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ikanreed posted:Have a visually distinct scout unit that occasionally teleports near you, at a rate proportional to plot advancement. It gives some very audible and visible "I'm scanning you" effects. If you break LOS, it teleports away. If you don't, warpers, plural, start teleporting in and actively pursuing you for a while. Not just LOS. Have the scout unit home in on 'power emissions' or whatnot. It'll track you from further away if you're using a Sea Glide or have the lights on in a Sea Moth or what have you so in a similar way it incentivizes you to learn to turn off the Cyclops in response to threats, which cues the player on how to handle a nearby Leviathan. The punishment for not doing that is that the Warpers pop in and start damaging the submarine the way it's implied that they damaged the other escape pods that transmitted on their radios (the spawn pod's radio is broken even after repair, so that's why they never got a good bead on the player's position). Basically, an intro to Cyclops Leviathan mechanics. Play opossum, they go away. Also, since only Leviathans can damage the Cyclops, this makes Warpers way more menacing in comparison to where they are now that they can hurt your biggest boat.
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Jun 26, 2023 05:29
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I tried to do a run where I didn't kill any fish but that ended pretty quickly since donking off the seamoth glass kills em. Now anything annoying that gets too close to my base gets the grapplehook and drill arm treatment.
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Jun 26, 2023 05:50
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Cartoon Man posted:Lol if you used the lovely snowfox and didn’t just stomp through on a prawn. Prawn suit in subnautica below zero is the way to play. Enemies? punch them. ice-worm? punch them. Polar wolf things? punch them. More storage? you have that. Also, Punch everything.
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Jun 26, 2023 07:32
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Serephina posted:Agreed! I feel the 'best' vehicle was the SeaGlide for mostly that reason. The SeaMoth was potent as heck as it trivialized the O2 loop, only to be seen again for Wreck Diving (which to be fair is stressful in a good way). There's a lot of magic about having to care that a shark might take a nip out of you or does that coral have spikes on it? etc. The Cyclops is a transformative experience again but I'm ok with it as it's very ponderous so it's more of a mobile base than a dart-about that replaces freediving, which is where most of the early game magic was happening and the Seamoth took away. Agreed 100%. The Seamoth basically removes or trivializes all potential threats in the early, mid- and even part of the late game. It has effectively infinite oxygen supply, is small enough to bring into caves and narrow crevices and is fast enough to outrun all mobile threats. Even if something gets the drop on you, it can withstand enough damage for you to effortlessly zoom out of danger. My ideal SN2 would feature an upgradeable Seaglide as the baseline vehicle for the entire game, with any potential additional vehicles being for specific use cases (Prawn for >1000m exploration, possibly some variant of the Seatruck focused on resource gathering, etc).
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Jun 26, 2023 07:57
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I hate the prawn and I'm not afraid to say it. Seamoth forever.
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Jun 26, 2023 16:49
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Still think about how much cooler the Cyclops was than the Seatruck, even if it wasn't as practical
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Jun 26, 2023 17:08
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Anyone here played Forever Skies yet? It's still in EA but they just opened it up for sale/play. It's got some Subnautica vibes, though it's clearly not doing exactly the same thing. It sorta feels like *just* the Cyclops portions of Subnautica. You fly an airship over a ruined earth, setting down on the tops of ruined skyscrapers and stuff. The airship is fully customizable and it seemss like you could do a lot of stuff with it. I'm still pretty early on so I don't feel comfortable giving it my full endorsement, but so far at least... 
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Jun 26, 2023 21:48
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Comte de Saint-Germain posted:Anyone here played Forever Skies yet? It's still in EA but they just opened it up for sale/play. It's got some Subnautica vibes, though it's clearly not doing exactly the same thing. It sorta feels like *just* the Cyclops portions of Subnautica. You fly an airship over a ruined earth, setting down on the tops of ruined skyscrapers and stuff. The airship is fully customizable and it seemss like you could do a lot of stuff with it. I'm still pretty early on so I don't feel comfortable giving it my full endorsement, but so far at least... I've been watching Spanj play it. I played the demo and it felt a little lacking. I'm still on the table getting it. I mean I likely will. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_Oj8jkZJbY Playlist https://youtu.be/u_Oj8jkZJbY?list=PLeXxYGyW3yFSFU9OJtgCEOEWcMKuRMDyJ OgNar fucked around with this message at 22:24 on Jun 26, 2023 |
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Jun 26, 2023 22:19
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I read some of the early access reviews and they say it shows promise but hasn’t got a lot of content yet. Needs more love from the dev team.
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Jun 26, 2023 22:21
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Just finished Subnautica yesterday. I felt the ending was weak. I was spoiled on the core parts of the game (releasing the cure and curing yourself) but not the context, so it was a bit jarring to go from exploring and discovering PDAs and piecing the story together to the first sapient being you encounter infodumping on you, then explicitly providing the recipe necessary to end the game. Also the final recipe might have been a bit lovely, I guess? I had collected every plant I had seen, so I had them all, but if you didn't it might have felt a bit like misdirection since they're all otherwise useless. None of this is much of a problem, as I didn't play the game for the story. The building is fun, if limited. I built Scanner Rooms in a roughly triangular pattern over much of the surface biomes and down through the Lost River and lava zones because I didn't like manually searching for ores, and I do recommend that if searching for ore is not your bag. Trivializing finding resources didn't seem to hurt the experience much for me though, since it meant I did have to keep notes on which base could see which ores and spend considerable time traveling between them and actually collecting the resources. As for vehicles, Seamoth Supremacy, would have used it through endgame if allowed. The Cyclops is also a good time, awful to do anything resembling precise maneuvering in (so the moment it becomes necessary you're expected to be actually good at driving it) but being able to carry a base minus scanner room is a considerable advantage. The Cyclops is a combat vehicle in a non-combat game, so if you want to punch fish I understand the draw, but otherwise the default arms are extremely finicky at picking up loose resources to the point where I lost interest and until I got to 900 feet I did not use it for anything but punches. The Grapple/Drill combo makes gathering large resource chunks alright, but the grapple range and projectile speed are both so low that I was falling from the ceiling about as often as I was spider-manning across caverns. Game's also got bugs like whoa, or decisions so strange they read as bugs. (Late game mob spoilers) The Sea Dragon Leviathans, River Prowlers, Crabsquid and Lava Lizards (basically every aggressive mob in the cave system) all travel through walls with no fanfare. There is also a single Ampeel who sometimes voyages through multiple solid walls to hang out in the Disease Research Facility containment room. The Stalker does this too, but more rarely and it seems to go directly at them more often so it might be intended as like a "hiding in a hole" thing, but the Sea Dragon Leviathan outside of the Primary Containment Facility in particular will sometimes just hang out halfway inside the wall to the right, and sometimes he'll even go chill just inside it. This wall has a texture issue that allows you to clip the camera through and see him while he does this, and he's not in any idle state, just doin' regular mob poo poo, sometimes even shooting fireballs so i suspect something might be wrong. Hostility is also all over the place, I didn't get attacked by any Sea Dragon Leviathan until I had ended the game, and I drove both the Cyclops and Prawn right past the one outside the Primary Containment Facility without violence, but then post-game one of the ones in the Active Lava Zone snuck up behind me while I was unloading my Prawn storage, killed me, then murdered my Prawn. Maybe the one just isn't aggressive? I've noticed that one of the Ghost Reapers in the Lost River never aggros unless you directly ahead of him again not sure if intentional or weird bug. I also got the "Reaper grabs Seamoth, teleports it 40 feet above the sea for no reason where it hangs forever" bug on this playthrough the only time I brought a Seamoth near a Reaper, and I've noticed non-hostile mobs clip through the Cyclops when it's stopped and clip into bases reasonably frequently, and I've clipped into (and fortunately out of) wreck walls or wreck debris on several occasions. I did not play with mods so I can't attribute this behavior to that, and I have a modern rig so I doubt it was starved for resources. All I know about Below Zero is that Marg the Merc is back in some context, and the Snow Fox apparently sucks poo poo. I'll actively avoid further spoilers and buy it at the next sale and maybe I can post my playthrough here. Shit Fuckasaurus fucked around with this message at 03:59 on Jun 28, 2023 |
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Jun 28, 2023 03:55
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Plastik posted:Just finished Subnautica yesterday. I felt the ending was weak. I was spoiled on the core parts of the game (releasing the cure and curing yourself) but not the context, so it was a bit jarring to go from exploring and discovering PDAs and piecing the story together to the first sapient being you encounter infodumping on you, then explicitly providing the recipe necessary to end the game. Also the final recipe might have been a bit lovely, I guess? I had collected every plant I had seen, so I had them all, but if you didn't it might have felt a bit like misdirection since they're all otherwise useless. None of this is much of a problem, as I didn't play the game for the story. I agree I would have been perfectly happy if all the plants for the cure had been in the pool area. I don't find the lava zone, particularly fun, and by the time I'm ready to get the things for the cure I don't need an additional gameplay loop where I search for plants I barely remember exist
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Jun 28, 2023 04:39
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The portals all lead directly to those plants. Except the special one, which is there.
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Jun 28, 2023 04:43
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Oasx posted:I agree I would have been perfectly happy if all the plants for the cure had been in the pool area. I don't find the lava zone, particularly fun, and by the time I'm ready to get the things for the cure I don't need an additional gameplay loop where I search for plants I barely remember exist The ultra-secret part of all that is: that all the requested plants are actually quite close, as all the teleporters to hiding-in-plain-sight surface bases will each lead to one of the plants/correct biomes. It's very elegant!
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Jun 28, 2023 04:46
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I accidentally spoiled some of the endgame for myself reading about the game before I played it, so when I reached the Sea Emperor I already knew a bit of what was going to happen, and one I realized that the manner of its reveal is exactly meant to look like an endgame boss about to start beating your rear end as a fakeout right before it just tells you how happy it is to see you I kinda realized I had cheated myself of a nice little twist.
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Jun 28, 2023 05:06
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About 15 hours into Below Zero and I have yet to find a good place to put a main base. The lifepod area is too shallow, the radio tower island is central enough but surrounded by predators and not very visually appealing underwater, and the lily pads and vent areas are pretty but practically at the edge of the map. There's a stretch of kelp between the lifepod and the robotics base that I tried settling at, but the nearby jellyfish loved humping the structures and making it a hassle to move around. Maybe I'll find some deeper cavern later on. Plot spoilers: So far this voice is acting way too nice for a species whose previous commandment was 'nuke everything in orbit' so I'm curious if it's going to pull something once I build the body.
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Jun 28, 2023 06:25
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Promethium posted:About 15 hours into Below Zero and I have yet to find a good place to put a main base. The lifepod area is too shallow, the radio tower island is central enough but surrounded by predators and not very visually appealing underwater, and the lily pads and vent areas are pretty but practically at the edge of the map. There's a stretch of kelp between the lifepod and the robotics base that I tried settling at, but the nearby jellyfish loved humping the structures and making it a hassle to move around. Maybe I'll find some deeper cavern later on. There's really one good area to build a base IMO: the twisty bridges, facing the heat vents toward the sunken ship lots of room, great vistas for base-building, no leviathans, reasonably centralized.
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Jun 28, 2023 07:16
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This whole thread opening a big can of cope branded “actually I liked using the Prawn Suit on the surface making everything take 10x longer and it wasn’t just because I couldn’t get a hang for the SnowFox controls. Also unrelated but the above water sections took sooooo long clearly bad design”
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