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Imagine starting out at the bottom of the ocean with the prawn, but no grapple and no way to reach the surface, and having to make your way from one destroyed Alterra base to another, accidentally uncovering their nastiest secrets on the way as you search for some means to the surface. You uncover some grand threat to yourself/humanity/the universe, so by the time you finally see the sun you know you can't leave until you've chased down the macguffin and destroyed the doomsday device.
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Mar 22, 2021 18:31
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Nukelear v.2 posted:The first game still managed to handle lighting pretty well in places that logically should have been pitch black anyway. Subnautica has a lot of objects that produce light, but I wouldn't say that light is "handled" or capable of working as a mechanic in the current engine because 90% of the time whether you can see an object isn't decided by how lighting or vision would realistically work but whether the game has decided to render the object. The game can handle very simple cases like turning on a flashlight in a dark cave/wreck, but it has trouble with things like lights in the distance, which would be essential for any abyssal game. It definitely could work though, given how games like Outer Wilds handle lighting (Outer Wilds spoilers, do not read if you haven't played) like the dark/lit areas of Ember twin, lighting up areas with the scout, or seeing angler fish eggs/lights in the distance in Dark Bramble. The game does some serious technical wizardry though, in that anything that you could logically see can be seen, draw distance be damned. I think the biggest change necessary for an abyssal subnautica (beyond fixing the engine) would be that it'd need a replacement for the oxygen gameplay loop.
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Mar 22, 2021 19:13
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I just wish so much time clearly hadn't gone into all the above ground areas in BZ. The different biomes aren't much different really, and most of them feel either underdeveloped or just kind of co opted from the original. You can really feel how small the map is if you get the Seatruck speed mod. I kept trying to go down and find places to go down since in the original there is lots of places like that both open water and under the sea floor. I was getting pretty confused going towards endgame and finding out how much worse the map is size and variety wise. All this for above ground nonsense that all looks samey as hell, annoying unkillable leviathan mechanic oh and also you can skip like a ton of time the game clearly expects you to take on that stuff with prawn grapple+jets. Very disappointing overall as a follow up to one of my favorite, most memorable games ever.
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Mar 22, 2021 19:25
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I spent about 10m killing the Leviathan in BZ yesterday so I could get some mining done in peace, he respawned under 5m.
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Mar 22, 2021 19:39
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OgNar posted:I spent about 10m killing the Leviathan in BZ yesterday so I could get some mining done in peace, he respawned under 5m. If you're in the purple ish caves, there are two.
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Mar 22, 2021 19:43
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Below zero really lacks open spaces, especially deep water open spaces. The iceberg area is probably my favorite area to explore, but no area has the deep sea dread that some areas of the first game evoke.
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Mar 22, 2021 19:59
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WarpedNaba posted:Yeah, but the entire habitable zone of the planet is like 5 cubic km so... It's good to remember that games utilize abstraction in several different ways. Game worlds are often much smaller than their potential real life or alternate universe counterparts, in order to reduce development time, reduce the amount of time just spent traveling, and to consume less system resources. We see Subnautica as taking up this 'tiny' area because that was what the developers chose to create, but as a believer in The World As Myth, the real life multiverse version of Subnautica may very well have involved traversing a thousand kilometer diameter area.
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Mar 22, 2021 21:30
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Ambaire posted:It's good to remember that games utilize abstraction in several different ways. Game worlds are often much smaller than their potential real life or alternate universe counterparts, in order to reduce development time, reduce the amount of time just spent traveling, and to consume less system resources. it's good to remember that videogames aren't real
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Mar 22, 2021 21:37
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Serephina posted:I kinda think the game needs happy sunlit areas rather than everything being The Abyss, but then what would I know I enjoyed paddling around the early game areas. Even places that shouldn't be dark and cloudy in this game are dark and cloudy and you cant see poo poo.
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Mar 22, 2021 21:48
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Wafflecopper posted:it's good to remember that videogames aren't real You're killing my immersion, man
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Mar 22, 2021 21:56
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Suburban Dad posted:You're killing my immersion, man I think you mean e-mmersion.
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Mar 22, 2021 22:02
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Wafflecopper posted:it's good to remember that videogames aren't real As implemented by the developers, of course they aren't.
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Mar 22, 2021 22:08
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they aren't real in alternate universes either
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Mar 22, 2021 22:09
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Ambaire posted:As implemented by the developers, of course they aren't. You're aware diagetical theory and narrative conceptual thought isn't studied in the physics department, right?
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Mar 22, 2021 23:25
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I just finished the game, and it's neat. I don't think I ever played anything like it, and I really explored a lot of feelings I didn't know I had about the deep ocean, from weird repressed memories of a creepy episode of Little Mermaid to just the weird feeling of vertigo when you see the sea floor slope deeply away from you and you think anything could be down there. Also it's dark down deep, but it's incredibly less dark when the sun is out. I wish the game gave you a clock to better plan around sunrise, sunset, and eclipses instead of panicking every time things just turn black. I also generally have extremely poor spatial awareness in FPS games, and the fact that the one big landmark at the start of the game wasn't in the north meant that my internal compass was calibrated wrong and all my mental maps didn't work. I think that allowed the game world to seem a lot bigger than it was because getting turned around added a lot of extra space in my brain. I don't know what the game would be like with bigger areas, but I also don't know if they'd be able to make that work. The game has serious issues with draw distance and loading areas as-is, and when I went to the thermal plant and the final alien facility the game broke three times for each. It's also really interesting that there's really not much point to stockpiling resources unless you wanna go hog-wild with basebuilding, and the biggest reason to get into basebuilding is to store all the extra resources that I didn't actually have a use for at the time. That and getting a reliable source of water. I never got the nuclear reactor blueprints, and I never needed them so long as I could burn rabbit rays. There were some threads that were weirdly left dangling. I understand they didn't want to put any corpses in the game, but It's weird that there's no sign of what happened to most of them. I don't think any of the ingame creatures really match up to the damage done to the pods, and it's weird that two people made it to the floating island rendezvous, but there's no sign of the person who wanted to stay safe or the person who wanted to go out to help others. Feels like Yu had some relevance to the main character. It's also weird that there's no real sign of wreckage from the Degasi or the Sunbeam, like after they were relevant for a while, the game wants nothing more to do with them. Even with the aliens, there's more questions than answers. And then it's weird that the Sea Treaders exist way off in an area where I can imagine most people not finding them because there's no reason to go there. GamingHyena posted:The cyclops is awesome. It's an actual mobile base that you can cruise around anywhere you want and with even minimal care and a full battery pack its practically invulnerable. I disagree with all of this. On top of the Cyclops being a slow burden that could get demolished by a leviathan, it's just a poorly designed sub. There's no good way to control the pitch of the giant thing, so if you're going up and down, you need a space that can accomodate the whole fuckin' broadside (no space where you would ever need to go in the game can accommodate its broadside). It is impossible to look where you're going up and down while you're moving. And this is a game about verticality. The first thing I wanted out of the Cyclops is a bigger portable spotlight for investigating wrecks in the deep, but then it turned out that point in the game, wrecks were less relevant, and you can't keep the lights on in the deep because there's big dangerous things that the Cyclops can't escape vertically. The second thing I wanted was something that could carry the prawn and rescue it out of a hole if I hosed up, but it turns out the prawn's pretty mobile on its own and there are better tools for that. I think I was at my happiest in the Beemoth scooting around at speed with good visibility.
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Mar 22, 2021 23:38
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I kinda wish they had upgrades to make the Seamoth viable to the endgame. I enjoyed it more than the Prawn.
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Mar 22, 2021 23:42
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SlothfulCobra posted:There were some threads that were weirdly left dangling. I understand they didn't want to put any corpses in the game, but It's weird that there's no sign of what happened to most of them. I don't think any of the ingame creatures really match up to the damage done to the pods, and it's weird that two people made it to the floating island rendezvous, but there's no sign of the person who wanted to stay safe or the person who wanted to go out to help others. Feels like Yu had some relevance to the main character. It's also weird that there's no real sign of wreckage from the Degasi or the Sunbeam, like after they were relevant for a while, the game wants nothing more to do with them. Even with the aliens, there's more questions than answers. One of these threads is picked up in the sequel and is one of the cooler parts of the game. But yes, all your other criticisms are correct about the story. Cyclops is cool as hell though, just takes some time working with the cameras and you can operate it pretty easily. Seamoth is still my favorite too.
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Mar 22, 2021 23:53
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SlothfulCobra posted:I just finished the game, and it's neat. It's cool to hear fresh opinions and thanks for the post! Regarding plot and lategame stuff: (I won't use many spoilers as the game's been out for ages and the sequel is around the corner): -The pods are explicitly harmed by the Warpers (the teleporter dudes) As they're a bio-weapon designed by the aliens to stop anyone from disturbing the quarantine. They go non-hostile once you cure yourself and lift said quarantine -The cyclops can explicitly go everywhere, the game is designed to allow its fat rear end to barely squeeze in to every major area. This may have coloured your opinion of it's use. Serephina fucked around with this message at 23:59 on Mar 22, 2021 |
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Mar 22, 2021 23:56
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There’s a simple mod that allows the Cyclops to strafe left and right, and that improves the handling ability of that sub far more than you’d expect.
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Mar 23, 2021 00:01
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If you try to treat the Cyclops like a vehicle that holds a bunch of stuff, it's very frustrating to use. If you treat it like a base that you can move around, it's a lot more fun. There's a reason it can carry another, more agile vehicle along with it. You can get mods that let you max out the Seamoth's depth and add Prawn drills to turn it into a does-everything vehicle. It's definitely a lot more convenient, but it does kind of diminish the utility of the other vehicles. By default each vehicle has a good niche - Seamoth for exploration and transportation, Prawn for resource gathering, and Cyclops as a mobile outpost. With the Super Seamoth I tend to find myself just zipping back to one of my main bases whenever I need to rather than using the other two vehicles.
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Mar 23, 2021 00:01
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Microcline posted:Subnautica has a lot of objects that produce light, but I wouldn't say that light is "handled" or capable of working as a mechanic in the current engine because 90% of the time whether you can see an object isn't decided by how lighting or vision would realistically work but whether the game has decided to render the object. The game can handle very simple cases like turning on a flashlight in a dark cave/wreck, but it has trouble with things like lights in the distance, which would be essential for any abyssal game. Sorry I didn't mean that light would be a mechanic or they'd need to do actual ray tracing or anything. Just that they could hand wave away being able to see relatively well in the deep the same way they did before with a few random light emitting objects that somehow illuminate the whole area. Edit: Which is how you still get varied and interesting biomes. I think the oxygen gameplay loop would stay, you'd just have to get into subs/bases to refresh. It would definitely change the starting experience since that relies on surfacing a lot. Like mentioned above starting with a vehicle would be the answer to that, a prawn suit would be a great choice. In terms of new mechanics, I'd modify the current crush depth. Instead of crush happening near instantly at exactly a specific depth, it would be a constant stress your vehicle is under that could only be fixed in moonpools (natural/alterra/alien/cyclops2 whatever the story needs.) Depth modules could elongate that time possibly to forever for certain depths, but the deeper you go the faster you are crushed. They could use fractures in the glass as the feedback mechanism for your current status, hairline fractures become spider webs become shattered. With the right sound design it could be terrifying. Basically I want to ratchet up the thalassophobia since BZ was missing that and it really seems to be the part of Subnautica that most people really remember. Nukelear v.2 fucked around with this message at 00:34 on Mar 23, 2021 |
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Mar 23, 2021 00:19
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Wingnut Ninja posted:If you try to treat the Cyclops like a vehicle that holds a bunch of stuff, it's very frustrating to use. If you treat it like a base that you can move around, it's a lot more fun. Well, that's another reason I didn't like it. I had no need for a mobile base, most areas were in easy transit time of my base and when I needed to be someplace further I could create a nice little stopover to store water bottles. If the intent wasn't to have the cyclops as a method of transit, they could've easily shaped it differently because the hallway doesn't really seem roomy. (from a first person perspective where you really don't know how much room your body takes up) Checking the cameras constantly would make things even slower, and by that time I had the cyclops, I had already discovered all the easily cruisable biomes, so there wasn't a really point to peaking around constantly. The only thing the Cyclops really did was teach me to be comfortable with not seeing most of the space around me. I think I also spent a longer time at base swapping out power cores to charge them up. Another mechanic I didn't know about until it was too late was air bubbles. I didn't know that brain corals secreted air bubbles to keep you alive, and I built an air pump because I thought I needed one to make a good underwater base, but I guess it's for making deeper sources of air and that could've been useful early on.
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Mar 23, 2021 00:54
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zzMisc posted:Imagine starting out at the bottom of the ocean with the prawn, but no grapple and no way to reach the surface, and having to make your way from one destroyed Alterra base to another, accidentally uncovering their nastiest secrets on the way as you search for some means to the surface. You uncover some grand threat to yourself/humanity/the universe, so by the time you finally see the sun you know you can't leave until you've chased down the macguffin and destroyed the doomsday device. This would have been a better idea for the sequel IMO. Basically do an inversion of the original's formula instead of more of the same.
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Mar 23, 2021 01:15
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SlothfulCobra posted:Another mechanic I didn't know about until it was too late was air bubbles. I didn't know that brain corals secreted air bubbles to keep you alive, and I built an air pump because I thought I needed one to make a good underwater base, but I guess it's for making deeper sources of air and that could've been useful early on. For all its faults, BZ improves on this by making the oxygen plants much more apparent and integral to early exploration. They could have explained air pumps a bit better as well in the original, when I was starting out I thought you had to have an oxygen pipe leading from the surface to any underwater base you constructed or it wouldn't have air and was really confused when I couldn't find a way to connect the air pipes to the base I built. Then I realized all you need is power for oxygen and the surface air pumps aren't really much use with how they actually work. By the time you're going deep enough that running out of air becomes a serious threat you'll already have the Seamoth as a source of oxygen and building out pipe networks from the surface down is never necessary.
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Mar 23, 2021 01:17
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I made one of those pipe setups the first time I played subnautica and never again. It took like 30 pipes to get air to were I was and really that was too deep and should already have a seamoth.
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Mar 23, 2021 03:35
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SlothfulCobra posted:On top of the Cyclops being a slow burden that could get demolished by a leviathan, it's just a poorly designed sub. There's no good way to control the pitch of the giant thing, so if you're going up and down, you need a space that can accomodate the whole fuckin' broadside (no space where you would ever need to go in the game can accommodate its broadside). It is impossible to look where you're going up and down while you're moving. And this is a game about verticality. That's definitely annoying, but the cyclops takes basically no damage from bumping into terrain, so you can get through a lot of passages that seem too tight (like the mushroom fields river entrance) by rubbing against the walls and floors. It even gives you a bit of pitch when you do it. The wall-rubbing is essential to the intercourse symbolism that the devs were clearly going for.
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Mar 23, 2021 03:44
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SlothfulCobra posted:Checking the cameras constantly would make things even slower You can still move while looking through the cameras and they give you an unobstructed view up or down. The only things you can't do are interact with the cyclops modules or change engine power, etc. which are really the only reasons to not be using the cameras temporarily. Once you understand how the leviathans aggro works, they don't pose any significant risk to the cyclops, so it's a practically indestructible movable base with infinite power in the depths, assuming you have the thermal generator installed. It is a bit of a pain to get it down there and back up again though. Fortunately there are teleporters all over the lower areas, so you only really need to go through once. I think one of the strengths of the original game is how it doesn't force you to play a specific way though. I watched a speedrun once where they never use any of the vehicles besides the seaglide. Two upgraded tanks gives you plenty of air to reach the endgame areas if you know where you're going.
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Mar 23, 2021 13:56
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NoEyedSquareGuy posted:For all its faults, BZ improves on this by making the oxygen plants much more apparent and integral to early exploration. They could have explained air pumps a bit better as well in the original, when I was starting out I thought you had to have an oxygen pipe leading from the surface to any underwater base you constructed or it wouldn't have air and was really confused when I couldn't find a way to connect the air pipes to the base I built. Then I realized all you need is power for oxygen and the surface air pumps aren't really much use with how they actually work. By the time you're going deep enough that running out of air becomes a serious threat you'll already have the Seamoth as a source of oxygen and building out pipe networks from the surface down is never necessary. I finished the whole game without building a single air pump because they confused me as well. Between bases and vehicles surface air pumps are pointless. Personally my biggest wish for subnautica was if you could link lockers to the fabricators and automatically use any minerals items inside. I probably spent a quarter of the game either labeling, organizing, or traveling to lockers so I could build stuff. My other wish is that there was some way to recycle the floating lockers because it took me a while to build my first base and by that point I had a dozen or so lockers floating just below the life raft. Eventually I took them all and stashed them in a base I never went to just because I was tired of looking at them. Unrelated question: Is it possible for the nuclear rods to run out of fuel? I built a ton of nuclear reactors in the game but never had to replace a rod.
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Mar 25, 2021 07:07
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I wonder if there's enough titanium in the game to make an air pump from the surface to the lava castle... with breathing points every 100m or so. Distance loading might mess it up, though. Or instead of an air pump, just one long sequence of corridors and ladders.
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Mar 25, 2021 07:48
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I don't quite get the people who complain about how hard the Cyclops is to use as a vehicle, but then maybe because I treated that as part of the fun. Also endlessly amused that the giant industrial submarine with the size and handling of a truck is the stealth option.
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Mar 25, 2021 08:06
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Ghost Leviathan posted:I don't quite get the people who complain about how hard the Cyclops is to use as a vehicle, but then maybe because I treated that as part of the fun. Also endlessly amused that the giant industrial submarine with the size and handling of a truck is the stealth option. Auditory stealth, not visual stealth. IRL, some of the largest subs are also the quietest.
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Mar 25, 2021 08:09
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Stop bashing the cyclops  The problem isn't the cyclops, the problem is the game world and missions were not built for it.With all the ending missions sending you into tight caves.I'd love to play with cyclops from the start of the game. This sequel would take place in another part of the planet that's more open. Use it as a mobile base to explore, send out the Seamoth or prawn for the caves. Upgrades to the cyclops would include a nuclear reactor, a double vehicle bay and size and engine upgrades and more rooms.
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Mar 25, 2021 08:09
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GamingHyena posted:I finished the whole game without building a single air pump because they confused me as well. Between bases and vehicles surface air pumps are pointless. I think there's a QoL mod that does let you use nearby lockers for materials. Below Zero has a reclaimer/recycler IIRC, haven't used it though. Not sure if it's my experience (being annoyed at sea lockers and trying to avoid them) or updates to the early game, but it wasn't hard to pretty much avoid them entirely in BZ. I think the fuel rods can eventually run out of power but it takes quite a while. I only built the nuke reactor most of the way through my most recent playthrough after coasting with the bio reactor for all of Subnautica, and like 30-40 hours of Below Zero 
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Mar 25, 2021 08:13
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I completed the whole first game without using a second air tank, because the first time I made a spare I assumed it would just fill up with air sitting in my inventory. When it failed to do that, i.e. didn't have any air in it the first time I swapped to it, I figured that multiple tanks just wasn't a game mechanic.
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Mar 25, 2021 08:18
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Ambaire posted:Auditory stealth, not visual stealth. IRL, some of the largest subs are also the quietest. Weirdly enough makes sense. Especially with the implication that most Leviathans rely on hearing rather than sight.
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Mar 25, 2021 08:18
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Ambaire posted:
I've seen a few videos pop up in my suggestions for that, here's one. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vlfVO-6omo
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Mar 25, 2021 08:40
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Kazzah posted:I completed the whole first game without using a second air tank, because the first time I made a spare I assumed it would just fill up with air sitting in my inventory. When it failed to do that, i.e. didn't have any air in it the first time I swapped to it, I figured that multiple tanks just wasn't a game mechanic. It used to. Just had to keep spare tanks in your inventory to get the passive benefit of more air. That was removed during Early Access.
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Mar 25, 2021 09:26
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I really would love one more installment focused on the open sea/deepest depths. The Sea Emperor was great but I want bigger, and hostile. Or at least not outright friendly.
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Mar 25, 2021 09:36
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Ghost Leviathan posted:I don't quite get the people who complain about how hard the Cyclops is to use as a vehicle, but then maybe because I treated that as part of the fun. Also endlessly amused that the giant industrial submarine with the size and handling of a truck is the stealth option. I loved the "operating sci-fi industrial equipment" aspect of the Cyclops and Prawn. Planning a route for my Cyclops through the caves and the difficulty of it was part of the fun for me. If there's another followup, I would want the game to be designed around using the Cyclops as a mobile base more than the original. I was hoping for that from Below Zero but it just got the axe...
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Mar 25, 2021 11:53
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The problem with the Cyclops is that it creates an entirely different gameplay than what people experience normally throughout the game. The design doesn't prepare you for the spatial awareness needed to operate a 177 foot sub in tight spaces; switching cameras to ensure your tail/keel/sides aren't going to scrape along some cliff edge. I'm trying to think of other modern games that have a similar dichotomy: Assassin's Creed (Ships) or Titanfall (Mechs), maybe but they're nowhere near as punishing in mechanics.
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Mar 25, 2021 16:49
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