Subnautica

The Game Room
121

Subnautica is one of the best games I have played in recent years.

But maybe it’s time to talk about some of the negatives?

  1. For me, I had to hit the online guides a couple times and was glad I did.
    Because I got stuck, and then the solution would be something dumb like I missed some PDA or whatever from a wreck I had already explored.
    Or e.g. I thought I had completed everything on the Aurora, but didn’t realize the prawn suit was there also.
    I know: most people reading this will think I’m lame, so just think of it this way: for idiots like me, it’s very easy to get into situations where you have no clue what to do next, much more so than most modern games.

  2. I’m in two minds whether it’s a feature or a bug: no way of quickly going from location to location. In a way it’s good because you do get the explorer feeling when you’re far from your base, but on the other hand an awful lot of my “playing” time was just holding W and watching a number go down.

  3. Lava levels. For me the levels at the end were somewhat annoying and it was just a drive to complete the game.
    (This may be partly because of a bug with the cyclops though: on my machine, in the inactive lava zone and the blood trees biome, if you’re in the cyclops the screen is black, and if you turn on the lights it’s white, but either way you basically can’t see anything.)

122

My own issue with the game is no interactive and dynamic map. That’s a serious flaw, IMHO, and in terms of the game really makes no sense. You can build a magical electric submarine out of a few parts but you can’t build a map? Also, I would have liked the resource scanner on the larger sub. These don’t have to be something given to you at the beginning…by all means, make us go out and find the plans so we can build it. A minor one but still would be nice is, why can’t I make the concentrated food bars? Again, you don’t have to just give it to us, make us find it, but for late game they are essential for long exploration missions away from your base. I saved back every one I found for just this, and I was fine, but if I didn’t know this was coming and ate the things it would make the final leg of the game much more difficult I think. Nothing sucks as much as finally getting down to where you are wanting to search and running out of food, knowing you’d have a fairly long trek back up unless you found the portal.

123

I think the biggest example of this is cave sulfur only being found in the sulfur plants after a Crashfish has tried to kill you. Even Yahtzhee pointed out that he spent days trying to find it, because he’d always swim as far and fast as possible from a sulfur plant.

Salt cured Reginalds give you about 2/3 of the food of a Nutrient Block. And if you plant a few Bulbo trees and Marblemelons on your sub, you’ve got nearly infinite food & water available, though you do have return to the sub for it.

124

I do both of those things as well as a few more. Still would be nice to have the capability. As with the others I mentioned, it’s minor…but it would add to my own enjoyment of the game. YMMV of course.

125

Oh yeah, I’m all for nitpicking games, just didn’t know if you knew about the planting food on your sub trick.

My nitpick - the scanner room is nearly useless for no good reason. They give you the HUD chip, so you can find the resources while you’re swimming around, but all it give you is a target marker, with no range or depth data whatsoever. Which makes it impossible to figure out where the closest one of whatever you’re searching for is, or if it’s actually in a cave below you, etc. The scanner room itself clearly can detect the range, since it puts the resource as a point on the topo map it generates, why can’t it just send that data to you?

126

You can figure out which fragments on the scanner are closest by the way that the icon changes as you approach it. I can’t actually remember how it works without firing up the game, but I had no problem heading towards the closest items the scanner was pointing out. You can also judge by parallax - closer objects will change their bearing more as you move than further ones.

127

I did the parallax trick, but it really only works if you’re already close to something. Plus if you’ve got a large field of targets, it can be hard to keep track of the one you’re following when the screen is cluttered with 2 dozen targets that are actually 300m away.
I don’t know if they’ve changed it, but the icon doesn’t change at all whether the target is 1m away or at the extreme range of the scanner room.

Bonus thing I liked about the scanner room - the stalkers constantly stealing the remote cameras.

128

I’m of two minds whether adding range indicators to the resource targets would be helpful. On the one hand, it would obviously be nice to have that information at a glance, rather than having to infer it. On the other hand, as you note, the display already gets very busy with large numbers of resources, and a bunch of numbers might just make it harder to read. (On the gripping hand, adding dozens of constantly updating numbers to the display might have also caused a performance hit.)

I actually liked the stalkers stealing the cameras. Not only is it show environmental consistency, but it was a funny little WTF moment the first time I activated a cam and found it swimming away. (It didn’t hurt that I kind of needed stalker teeth at the time, and it led me right to some.)

129

So THAT’S what that is!

I noticed that after demolishing the scanner station I put in Safe Shallows (to test how the room works) i was left with a camera icon on my screen. I haven’t gone to retrieve it yet, but that’s what must have happened – a stalker stole it!

130

Having the color of the scanner outline change would be a non-cluttered solution to make the distance more clear. Far objects could be blue, and the closer an object is the redder it gets. But I never have trouble with it, excepting sometimes it’ll send you to resources that are on the other side of a cave wall and the entrance isn’t close.

131

They could have made it that only the 3 or 5 closest resources show up on the HUD. Would have fixed the clutter & the perfomance issue.

I had a stalker grab a camera while I was using it. Didn’t help that my first base was right next to a huge Kelp Forest, so it was teeming with stalkers. But it definitely added to the immersion & consistency of the game, since stalkers collect metal scraps anyway.

ETA: Did anyone else hold their breath whenever you were racing towards air and not sure you’d make it?

132

Well, I cranked up Below Zero last night, and I feel it’s off to a good start. There’s an interesting hook and some fun characterization, and it’s still got the Subnautica feel to it. I’m probably already driving the devs up the wall with reports, although I’ve only managed to severely break the game once in the first hour. (That’s really pretty good, especially for early access. Breaking and fixing software is what I do, and breaking games is just emergent gameplay for me.)

That would be a good solution, visually, but I would still be concerned about the performance hit.

I never actually used my scanner room much. I did enough resource farming during early access, before the scanners were functional, that I already knew where to find most things. I mostly built the room to play with, and because it looked cool on my base; I think the only practical use I made of it was finding stalker teeth one time.

On the general gripes front: I agree that the lack of a native, in-game map is jarring. Possible implementation: Require the player to acquire/fabricate a mapping chip for the suit and place at least one beacon in addition to their life pod. Placing an additional beacon adds depth information. A mapping upgrade for the scanner room adds resources to the map.

From the developer standpoint, I can see why they would be hesitant about including a map, though. The verticality of the game environment makes it difficult to represent in a map. They may have decided they didn’t have the resources to implement a map that lived up to the visuals of the game. Obviously, we’ve seen player-made maps, and they can be quite useful–but if they were native to the game, I imagine that we’d be here complaining about how crude they are.

133

I would prefer a crude map to a complex map, though. I’m imagining something like this:

Let’s say the game world is 10 x 10 x 3 kilometers. Let’s say you can see about 100 m in any direction during most of the game.

The map could simply be a 50 x 50 x 15 rectangular prism made up of cubes. Each cube would represent a cube 200 m on each side.

Cubes you haven’t visited yet wouldn’t show up on the map. Cubes you’ve explored would show up with some sort of color code: maybe green for land, cyan for open water, royal blue for water/seabed, and red for underground, or something like that.

The cube you’re in would flash.

You could put a note on a cube, which would turn it yellow: “Ruin/explored” or “Ruin/unexplored.”

When you have active beacons, they could slowly pulse, or change from their default color to white, or something.

In other words, I’m imagining a mostly abstract map. You don’t need a map that shows every ridge and cave, and that level of information would be overwhelming anyway. You want a map that helps you remember where things are, know where you’ve been and where you still need to explore, and that lets you make notes.

On a similar note, did others use the cheeseball strategy of using barely-started buildings as landmarks? Getting to the underground river was tricky and required following a specific, unclear path; so I started building a lot of corridors, about 100 or so meters apart, to leave a “breadcrumb” trail to get there. Buildings glow and are high-visibility before they’re completed, so it was really easy to see where I’d put them.

I could’ve used beacons, but those are kind of a pain in the butt to use, and I justified my cheese by thinking of them as HUD signals.

134

By “verticality”, I didn’t mean detailed topography, really. The game takes place at a lot of different depths, connected by routes that may be sheer vertical drops or convoluted tunnels. A single-layer map would struggle to represent that; you’d likely get something like the player-made maps with pins marked “Cave”, or “Lost River Entrance”, or whatever. That would be useful, of course, but I think it would fall short in terms of the game’s aesthetic. I think they could have made a good-looking map along those lines, and I wish they had, but I suspect it came down to resource prioritization.

I’d really, really like to see one in Below Zero, though. It’s harder to justify the lack in the new scenario.

I just used beacons, since I didn’t find them all that awkward. I kept a few in the locker nearest the hatch, and at each intersection, I’d grab one, pop out of the Cyclops and place it. (I made my Cyclops into a full mobile base and took it everywhere, so I had storage, fabricator, and everything handy.)

135

The awkward thing about them was the turning them on and off. If you leave them all on, you have a super-cluttered screen. If you only want to turn on the ones that lead to a particular place, it’s clunky to go to that screen to turn them on and off, and also to make sure they’re labeled systematically. Of course you can have a limited number of them, but I like having a lot of breadcrumbs in appropriate places.

Basically, I wanted beacons that would only show up when I got within visual range. The half-built buildings worked perfectly that way.

136

I recently got a PRAWN suit drill arm, and I’m pretty excited to finally finish off the Cyclops blueprints too – just one short. I feel like I’m about to unlock a whole new part of the game – one where I’m not quite so strapped for resources.

137

Did you ever try the pathfinder tool? (Once again, by the time it was available, I pretty much knew where things were.)

138

Yep, it’s not that big an issue but when I went on Nexus mods and saw a mod that would make the blips size by distance, it was the first one I installed. Forget better visuals, forget more upgrades for the subs, that one.

139

Just finished the game.

Screw Alterra. I assume filling the Neptune’s (aka GCU Of Course I Still Love You (abbreviated)) lockers with diamonds & uranite won’t pay off my bill?

140

Huh. I think I played very briefly with it at some point but didn’t quite get why it’d be useful. Reading the Wiki description, it sounds like it was what I was looking for, only never realized existed. Oops! When I inevitably replay Subnautica, I’ll totally give it a try.