A few smaller tweaks and feature ideas
SupermothX
Austria Join Date: 2015-09-22 Member: 208094Members
Austria Join Date: 2015-09-22 Member: 208094Members
Hey!
That Early Access was a very positive experience. I played it on high graphic settings (GTX970) and not a single crash. FPS were smooth , besides small lags when a new map part was loaded. Also, no savegame corruption
Build 23050 Sept 2015
The progression or how I played it through: Seaglide> built base in the Mushroom Forrest (top left)> Seamoth> Explored Underground Caves in 2 adjacent Zones >Cyclops> moved Mushroom Base inside Cyclops > Lots of crafting inside cyclops as a mobile base > Found the Isle and Grand Reef> build final large base > checked out 2 missing zones with spoiler map > done
23h playtime - well, until I had seen all zones and caves and felt done with the game.
A few small tweaks I would love to see:
Add a small inventory inside the pod
Not being allowed to drop items inside the pod felt odd. And when crafting
those small boxes, that cant be opened in the inventory, but have to be dropped
was just a hassle.
On the other hand, I can understand the small inventory and the lack of non-stackable items in order to prolong gameplay and having to swim more back and forth.
I basically had to drop most of my inventory on the seabed as an improvised storage unit.
Remove already learned blueprints from the sea floor
Many many times I had to pickup a blueprint, that I'd already learned, to check if it was a new one, ..or not.
Most of the time, not a new one.
On a side note, I was expecting to find some rare blueprints for my Seamoth and Cyclops somewhere deep down, but ultimately there was nothing down there. Had to check the wiki to find out that they were "just" craftable.
FOV too small
It felt way too small for a widescreen monitor. A lot of mouse cranking to check for predators.
Seamoth
Lovely piece! The only small complain would be when using the exit. The orientation after exit was always very disorientating. The player always looked in a different location than the Seamoth did. Even at very close distance to an object I had to do a 360degree orientation to find the object again.
Also, you might want to allow opening the inventory inside the seamoth.
Milder sound- & screen-effects
The Seamoth collision sound from tiny collisions felt way too loud and severe for just touching lightly on stone/fish.
The blood screen effects, when a tiny red biter fish stings/bites, with 5% damage, was as extreme as a boneshark bite, which felt odd.
Navigation
I did play as long as possible without a map as a spoiler.
I did never find some of the zones, even with the Cyclops, beautiful zones like: Grand Reef, Blood Kelp, Koosh, Floating Island. I would have never found them without a spoiler map, which I did avoid initially.
Plenty of nav beacons were used though, but still I could not find these zones without a map spoiler.
Emerging to the surface and orientating myself on the large spaceship helped a bit.
You might want to make the compass a starter quest or have it from the start (due to not having a minimap), for the casual gamer at least. I only found some Magnetite after I had the cyclops, to craft the compass.
A compromise for the survival feels might be a nav beacon that gets unlocked after exploring some caves in the starter/med zones (kelp, sparse, grassy), visually similar to the hand-placed beacons.
Edible plants as food
Just add it to some existing plants that are edible, quick fix, particularly for the vegetarians.
(The vines did not do much and were rotten in like 10secs
)
Edible larger predators
In addition to the vegetarian nutrition. Since you can kill the larger predators with the stun gun and knife, I felt that they should yield some good chunks of raw meat. Probably on your list already.
Not so small tweaks, that might have been mentioned already:
___________________________________________________________
Craftable Recharge Station for Bases, to recharge Power Cells
In order for solar power or reactors to actually make sense. Would require a "refill" back to base for energy, and give the base more purpose. Since the cyclops has it all (besides the moonpool console).
Small Main quest meant for mid/end game entertainment
Nothing fancy really:
Build Beacon at <location> to send distress signal home
Explore a certain small area or cave to find a cache of <fancy items>
I'm looking forward on playing it again when VR arrives next year, and after 3 or more content updates
That Early Access was a very positive experience. I played it on high graphic settings (GTX970) and not a single crash. FPS were smooth , besides small lags when a new map part was loaded. Also, no savegame corruption
Build 23050 Sept 2015
The progression or how I played it through: Seaglide> built base in the Mushroom Forrest (top left)> Seamoth> Explored Underground Caves in 2 adjacent Zones >Cyclops> moved Mushroom Base inside Cyclops > Lots of crafting inside cyclops as a mobile base > Found the Isle and Grand Reef> build final large base > checked out 2 missing zones with spoiler map > done
23h playtime - well, until I had seen all zones and caves and felt done with the game.
A few small tweaks I would love to see:
Add a small inventory inside the pod
Not being allowed to drop items inside the pod felt odd. And when crafting
those small boxes, that cant be opened in the inventory, but have to be dropped
was just a hassle.
On the other hand, I can understand the small inventory and the lack of non-stackable items in order to prolong gameplay and having to swim more back and forth.
I basically had to drop most of my inventory on the seabed as an improvised storage unit.
Remove already learned blueprints from the sea floor
Many many times I had to pickup a blueprint, that I'd already learned, to check if it was a new one, ..or not.
Most of the time, not a new one.
On a side note, I was expecting to find some rare blueprints for my Seamoth and Cyclops somewhere deep down, but ultimately there was nothing down there. Had to check the wiki to find out that they were "just" craftable.
FOV too small
It felt way too small for a widescreen monitor. A lot of mouse cranking to check for predators.
Seamoth
Lovely piece! The only small complain would be when using the exit. The orientation after exit was always very disorientating. The player always looked in a different location than the Seamoth did. Even at very close distance to an object I had to do a 360degree orientation to find the object again.
Also, you might want to allow opening the inventory inside the seamoth.
Milder sound- & screen-effects
The Seamoth collision sound from tiny collisions felt way too loud and severe for just touching lightly on stone/fish.
The blood screen effects, when a tiny red biter fish stings/bites, with 5% damage, was as extreme as a boneshark bite, which felt odd.
Navigation
I did play as long as possible without a map as a spoiler.
I did never find some of the zones, even with the Cyclops, beautiful zones like: Grand Reef, Blood Kelp, Koosh, Floating Island. I would have never found them without a spoiler map, which I did avoid initially.
Plenty of nav beacons were used though, but still I could not find these zones without a map spoiler.
Emerging to the surface and orientating myself on the large spaceship helped a bit.
You might want to make the compass a starter quest or have it from the start (due to not having a minimap), for the casual gamer at least. I only found some Magnetite after I had the cyclops, to craft the compass.
A compromise for the survival feels might be a nav beacon that gets unlocked after exploring some caves in the starter/med zones (kelp, sparse, grassy), visually similar to the hand-placed beacons.
Edible plants as food
Just add it to some existing plants that are edible, quick fix, particularly for the vegetarians.
(The vines did not do much and were rotten in like 10secs
)Edible larger predators
In addition to the vegetarian nutrition. Since you can kill the larger predators with the stun gun and knife, I felt that they should yield some good chunks of raw meat. Probably on your list already.
Not so small tweaks, that might have been mentioned already:
___________________________________________________________
Craftable Recharge Station for Bases, to recharge Power Cells
In order for solar power or reactors to actually make sense. Would require a "refill" back to base for energy, and give the base more purpose. Since the cyclops has it all (besides the moonpool console).
Small Main quest meant for mid/end game entertainment
Nothing fancy really:
Build Beacon at <location> to send distress signal home
Explore a certain small area or cave to find a cache of <fancy items>
I'm looking forward on playing it again when VR arrives next year, and after 3 or more content updates