Subnautica: If you're looking for me you better check under the sea

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Subnautica: If you're looking for me you better check under the sea

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General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

I played this game, it owned, I wish I could do it all over again for the first time. I loving hate crabsnakes. Those other guys, sure, they're trouble, but crabsnakes really wig me out.

# ¿ Dec 29, 2018 06:09

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# ¿ May 14, 2024 18:24

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Skippy McPants posted:

The lack of a map is dumb. I understand not starting with one, but there should a way to create one that fills in as you explore because you just end up outsourcing the feature to wikis anyway.

It's totally unnecessary once you have beacons, and you get the satisfaction of building the map yourself. Plus you get to name your own landmarks, which gives you kind of our own unique sense of the space. I don't know all the 'official' biome names but I'll never forget BLUEBALL ONE or CRAB DEATH HOLE.

# ¿ Dec 30, 2018 07:18

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Maps impose the human colonial gaze upon an untamed wild space, ruining everything that�s wonderful. :colbert:

# ¿ Dec 30, 2018 16:30

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Judge Tesla posted:

Eh, I've played many survival games and it doesn't make things more fun, I'm much happier looking around for materials and the only bars I need to keep happy are oxygen and health, that's more than enough for me.

I decided to build my base over a giant thermal vent hole because it looked pretty cool, had to scrounge up 50 titanium for all the materials but my tube base and 4 storage lockers are complete.

Stop reading this thread until you're done! You only get one first time through this game and you should try not to spoil ANYTHING.

# ¿ Dec 30, 2018 22:25

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

mortons stork posted:

Oh my lord I just made the Cyclops. Just when I think this game can't possibly get any better or surprise me anymore there it goes, getting better and surprising me again. This is the game changer holy hell.

It�s really wonderful. All the game needs is something to hit you with eerie sonar pings. You figured out you can build stuff inside, right?

# ¿ Jan 3, 2019 20:27

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Just be aware that silent running in your Cyclops eats up LOADS of power so despite the temptation you can't constantly run silent, run deep.

e for accidental page snipe: I do wish that there was a little more threat to your Cyclops in the late game, something that actually enforced stealth instead of just 'tank a few hits and power past'. Also I wish the game had a horrifying 'passive' leviathan, a huge squirming mass of arms that barely moves but which slowly sucks you in if you're nearby. Something to just give you the absolute creeps when you're near it.

# ¿ Jan 3, 2019 23:02

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

I left a bunch of alien tablets and a note to keep them with you while exploring, I hope I did good :ohdear:

# ¿ Jan 8, 2019 15:27

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Sulla Faex posted:

can't you just craft a wetsuit that automatically gravity sucks random fish into a waterproof grill and then feeds it into your mouth every 5 minutes. That seems like a reasonable solution. 2 lithium 3 ruby 1 diamond

In general I think you should be able to render all the rote tasks obsolete with base facilities. You can already handle water and food with melon beds, just need some kind of autominer for various resources.

# ¿ Jan 8, 2019 23:57

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

RazzleDazzleHour posted:

I just started and I'm getting mixed signals from the radio messages I'm getting about the Aurora. I interpreted the "hey the core is gonna go radioactive soon" as a warning, but then when it does you get rewarded with the radiation suit. I put the suit on to hang out closer to the Aurora and now I'm being told that poo poo's gonna hit the fan in 24 hours, but is that just another scripted thing that's supposed to happen or am I actually expected to do something about it this time (or ever)

You are expected to do something about it but there's no actual time pressure.

# ¿ Jan 9, 2019 00:44

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

The first time I encountered a strider was the first time I saw a warper and I thought warpers came directly out of strider butts.

# ¿ Jan 12, 2019 02:09

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Yeah I'm desperate for more Subnautica but I'm not touching this until it's final.

# ¿ Jan 21, 2019 23:03

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Yall who build deep bases in the Tree Cove and surrounds, how do you deal with the lack of table coral for circuits? You can't grow it, so it's the only material I found myself needing to go back to the Safe Zone to find.

# ¿ Jan 25, 2019 18:21

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Every zone up to the (lategame spoiler) inactive lava zone is intriguing and beautiful, even the barren dunes, but I thought the spoilered zone really needed a few more passes. There's just not a lot going on aside from the plot-critical business.

# ¿ Jan 28, 2019 06:48

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

PMush Perfect posted:

I STILL haven't found any Prawn arms and it's starting to get annoying and discouraging, because I don't feel safe going back down into the deeper parts of the map without a way to properly fight back against the monsters down there.

You don't ever really need to fight anything.

# ¿ Jan 31, 2019 23:11

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

I wondered what happened to the old writer and his latest Reddit posts are about COVID being new world order population control so he might have, uh, met some friction with the rest of the team.

I applied to write on Below Zero so I feel a little churlish criticizing it but I did think it was weaker than the base game, narratively.

# ¿ Jul 22, 2021 19:09

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Also wandering around the huge glacial biomes with no map made me genuinely angry, angry at video games. This game had horrible critical path signposting.

# ¿ Jul 22, 2021 19:14

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Half this game is like twisty little caves with no visual signposting that turn out to lead to key plot points. Makes me pine for Lost River and the cove tree.

# ¿ Jul 22, 2021 23:13

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Subnautica is very good, even with a few rough edges (sorry Obama guy). BZ made me appreciate the original game even more because in so many ways it�s Subnautica with bad design choices instead of good ones.

# ¿ Aug 4, 2021 16:06

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Fiction-wise my Big Beef with Bee Zee is the failure to do anything interesting with alan the alien. You've got this representative of a radically abhuman species in the protagonist's head and the writers choose to use this as a way to explain what's special and interesting about humans: we're mortal, we face every day as a chance to make new discoveries, we like hope, etc etc. Alan basically becomes your space buddy. This is thematic territory that's been mined out by decades of past work. Now, if my av didn't give it away, I like and appreciate SF that tries to really grapple with how very alien the alien could be. Wouldn't an organism that views bodies as disposable chassis have its own perspective on the ecology of this planet? Wouldn't a chimera built on the harvested best traits of dozens of species have something to say about how the protagonist relates to and exploits her environment? Would they be horrified by their codependency with this single, destructible human? Would they see themselves as a curator of diversity and a protector of ecosystems, or as the apex authority over a horrific chaos of unguided evolution that (ultimately) reached up and devoured them? Would they even be able to communicate with the player character in words, or could they instead use something like operant conditioning to guide the player into the behaviors they want? A human being is a highly specific, highly contingent organism, a peculiarity, a rarity: not a generic touchstone to use as a baseline against which aliens are contrasted. If the game really wanted to use the alien as a mirror to the human, why not get Alan going on what makes humans unique, rather than our own myths about who we are? For instance: human beings are not strong individual thinkers or problem-solvers. We are evolved to take social cues, to identify experts and mimic them. Our cognition is in some respects inferior to a chimp's or a bird's on basic logic tasks. Get Alan digging at that stuff. Make them ask the player "why are you alone, when your mind is meant to be with others?" And make the player ask the same question right back at them: aren't you meant to be part of a network? (Tie in the fact that the player could be using wikis and forums and reddits to guide their behavior!!) Most of all, make Alan's presence in the character's head a presence in gameplay as more than a beacon-giver. Let them speak through mechanics as much as words.

gently caress I wish I could've worked on this :negative:

e: and if the emotional goal of the story is to create a bond with alan the alien, well, all the better to make him really strange! Make that bond a tenuous connection across a gaping chasm of eons of divergent evolution and it's all the more meaningful! Get the player wondering whether this thing even has theory of mind or whether you're interacting with a machine learning model of a human-friendly psyche while the real alan broods in there being unknowable. Make every moment of grace, charity, and trust truly unexpected and uncertain. Alan's body is menacing, Alan's promises are uncertain. Use that to create doubt. Then, if you want a happy payoff, reaffirm that the bond really does exist, that Alan really does value you as more than a tool.

General Battuta fucked around with this message at 14:14 on Aug 5, 2021

# ¿ Aug 5, 2021 14:08

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Silent Running will look tempting but it MURDERS your batteries.

# ¿ Oct 10, 2021 04:56

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

FlamingLiberal posted:

Are there any good strategies for doing longer travel in the Cyclops other than to pack a bunch of power cells? It seems like the cells deplete very fast.

Stop going everywhere on silent running

# ¿ Dec 1, 2021 16:59

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

General Battuta posted:

Stop going everywhere on silent running

# ¿ Dec 1, 2021 17:57

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

FlamingLiberal posted:

Is BZ worth playing? I�m not sure if it�s something I will immediately play after I finish the base game but I�m just curious.

Original Subnautica is one of my favorite game experiences ever, jank and all. BZ was a really lovely chaser. It makes you wonder if you actually liked Subnautica at all.

Earlier poster has it right, just go play Outer Wilds instead.

# ¿ Dec 5, 2021 16:55

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

The writer got replaced and if you check out his Reddit account the reasons why are pretty obvious.

e:

quote:

A Counter-Narrative
Let's suppose for sake of argument that the worst of our fears are true regarding how the social structures on our planet are set.

Highly competent people born into well-connected families are exercising influence behind the scenes to set global narratives/mythologies/ideologies in order to eliminate personal threats and maintain or grow their relative power, at the expense of everyone else. These people are at best misguided and self-righteous in believing they know what's best for everyone, and will stop at nothing to achieve their ends (because in their heads it's right). At worst they are psychopaths who don't even try to justify the harm they cause in pursuing their goals.

Let's say all that is true (and I think it is). Probably it has always been true (with arguably different quantities of power distributed differently at different times).

One might say: but OP, things are getting worse. Technological development like mass media, nuclear weapons, the internet, AI, robotics etc is allowing greater global power to be concentrated in fewer hands. And one might be right.

AND AT THE SAME TIME. I put it to you that if all that is true, then there is also an equal and inverse reaction which we are not looking at so much.

The more power we suppose is held by these elites, the more power we must necessarily assume is held by the people.

Let's say the pandemic was manufactured somehow in order to facilitate the control of the global population. Well, there are is a growing and significant portion of the population who will refuse the vaccine https://www.scmp.com/news/world/united-states-canada/article/3099792/coronavirus-one-third-americans-would-refuse

Let's say the MSM is partly designed to cover up global paedophile rings. Well, they got complacent, and now (partly thanks to MSM) middlemen like Epstein, Maxwell and Prince Andrew are losing power and public confidence. https://www.express.co.uk/news/royal/1332529/prince-andrew-news-duke-of-york-royal-family-latest-jeffrey-epstein-ghislaine-maxwell

Let's say education and corporations are conspiring not to educate children but to train them as obedient workers. Well, there is a relative uptick in demands for shorter working hours and provision of mental health support.

Let's say powerful elites want a NWO and a fully surveilled, medicated populace who pose them no threat.

The reason they don't have that is because everywhere they turn there are capable, kind, empathic people who resist them. And there are more of us than of them. That is why there is still hope.

the last post on his account from 9 months ago

General Battuta fucked around with this message at 16:40 on Dec 9, 2021

# ¿ Dec 9, 2021 16:35

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

PDP-1 posted:

https://twitter.com/UnknownWorlds/status/1512146852258459649

Subnautica 3 in the planning stage?

Applied for this, wish me luck

# ¿ Apr 11, 2022 19:12

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Oldstench posted:

Or do you just tolerate it because it's as close to more SN as we're getting?

https://twitter.com/UnknownWorlds/status/1512146852258459649

(i'm starting at this job next week)

# ¿ May 12, 2022 23:08

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

I would (and this means nothing for whatever they're making, I haven't even been onboarded, for all I know it's just a krill customization simulator) ideally like more non-inevitably-lethal interactions with predators. Teach them you're not worth the trouble, get an uneasy truce going, keep a wary eye on them in case it's been lean feeding lately. Learn the seasonal rhythms, when they get territorial, when they're bulking up for the cold season. That seems a lot more interesting than murdering all apex predators.

You can roleplay the tragic grizzly bear guy maybe, get too comfy, think you've tamed the power of aquanature. Fool!!

# ¿ May 12, 2022 23:58

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

ate poo poo on live tv posted:

This dude isn't "tragic." He is a loving idiot and the natural consequence of people who project human empathy onto non-human creatures.

Yes, I know. That is why I called him a fool.

# ¿ May 13, 2022 05:48

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

OgNar posted:

Just encountered the bug where the game thinks I've done things already.
Like finding those things that give blueprints but they're already open, and DeGassi PDAs missing.
Quit in the hopes that its unbugged next time.

Just to be sure, you have a working carbon monoxide detector right

e: this isn't snark I'm serious

# ¿ Jun 3, 2022 13:23

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

No Dignity posted:

Congrats to General Battuta for getting to work in such a famous and popular author's world

Different teams, I'm afraid.

# ¿ Aug 24, 2022 00:24

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Comrade Koba posted:

Did they ever give any details about why they decided to change almost everything about the BZ storyline from how it was initially planned and presented in the first EA release?

I believe it was pretty public, no inside baseball here, that people didn�t like having lots of other NPCs around because it compromised the sense of loneliness. The original story had a space station in orbit supporting you and supply rockets and stuff. It was more crowded.

Again this is REALLY not behind the scenes info, just what I�d heard from friends who played the EA versions.

# ¿ Sep 22, 2022 22:02

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Endless Trash posted:

I mean I can�t complain. Writing a sequel to a game/book/movie that has a Precursor/Ancients/Forerunner race that is consistent and interesting and satisfying is basically impossible

It's not

# ¿ Sep 22, 2022 23:46

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

It can carry a fabricator and unlimited food/water in growbeds, which is pretty nice.

# ¿ Sep 29, 2022 20:07

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

A version of the Alan story was present in the early Early Access drafts of Below Zero. (In fact, Alan's name is derived from 'Almanac' which is what the Architects were called in that early story.) I'm not sure if it involved building a body for Alan or him getting stuck in your head, though. I think the sister story came later.

# ¿ Nov 20, 2022 18:09

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

ThisIsJohnWayne posted:

That's the thing, education won't make it any clearer. Technically a studio that size should be able to do it in a weekend just about.

You can't even get a patch through console cert in a weekend.

# ¿ Nov 24, 2022 17:33

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

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.

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.

Do you feel like cheating the moment you hit a setback might�ve contributed to this loss of tension?

# ¿ Dec 3, 2022 22:20

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

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

# ¿ Dec 3, 2022 23:44

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Why would ignoring people on the radio save their lives?

# ¿ Dec 5, 2022 18:05

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

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?

# ¿ Dec 5, 2022 18:27

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# ¿ May 14, 2024 18:24

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

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?

# ¿ Dec 5, 2022 19:37

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Subnautica: If you're looking for me you better check under the sea

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