Three big improvements
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United States Join Date: 2016-02-29 Member: 213640Members
United States Join Date: 2016-02-29 Member: 213640Members
I bought Subnautica at the beginning of this weekend and have logged quite a few hours into it. It's the most fun I've had with a game in a while, but there were three problems in the current build that stuck out to me. Here's my summary of those problems, along with my suggestions for what to do about them.
TL:DR Add a better fish scanner, add some way of dealing with predators before you get the stasis rifle and Seamoth weapon upgrades, and add a way of making it easier to catch fish. If you did that stuff it'd make the early game a lot more fun.
Problem 1: It's hard to figure out what's going on. This is kind of an inherent issue in the survival/exploration genre, you have to research the game beforehand so you already know what's what when you start (what each biome is like, how the enemies behave, what materials are a high priority, etc). If you don't do your research, you're going to die like a hundred times without accomplishing anything. Subnautica already has a very helpful wiki, but ideally you shouldn't have to bother with that, you should just be able to jump into the game as soon as you buy it and start making progress.
My suggestion: add a new scanner into the game. The scanner that's in the game now can tell you how enemies behave and what materials are good for what, but you have to be really close to stuff to scan it, and it takes a long time. This makes sense when you're scanning tech fragments, which currently is the scanner's most important function, but it makes it almost useless for scanning lifeforms. A stalker won't just hold still for 30 seconds while you swim right up to it and scan it, you have to have a weapon like the stasis rife to stun it if you want to do that, and once you have the stasis rifle the stalker's not much of a threat anymore anyway. My suggestion is to add a bioform/environment scanner that you start the game with, which can't scan tech, but can scan plants and animals from much further away than the current scanner and freezes time when you read the scan, so you can read the scan as soon as you get it (a lot like the scan visor from the Metroid Prime games, except only for scanning relevant things instead of every random rock and pile of sand that you come across, and you're never required to use it). The scanner could also give players a basic environmental summary when they enter a new biome, not telling them everything, just giving them an idea of what kinds of resources that area holds ("a high concentration of silver has been detected in this area" for example) and some hint of what kind of threats there are (for example, when you enter the dunes where the reaper leviathan can be found it could say something like "a massive bioform reading has been detected in this area, non-vehicular exploration is not advised"). These summaries would also be optional reading. The whole thing would kind of act like a tutorial that's only there if you want it.
Problem 2: you've got no good way of dealing with enemies until you get ranged weapons At the beginning of the game, when your only weapon is the survival knife, you're pretty much guaranteed to take damage every time you get in a fight with an enemy, which you inevitably will sometimes. That means that early on in the game the only thing you can really do to stay alive outside the safe shoals area is to bring along a bunch of first aid kits and keep healing yourself every time you take damage. That's kind of a dumb way of doing things, but just giving the player a powerful weapon like the stasis rifle right off the bat isn't a good solution either. Aggressive fish are supposed to be a big threat at the start of the game, taking away the risk that you have to go through to get good weapons would take away a lot of the fun and challenge. If there was some kind of in between it would make exploring the deeper waters a lot less of a pain.
My suggestion: add a chum bag (chum is a big wad of fish parts thrown into the water to attract sharks IRL, for anybody who doesn't know). Deploying the chum bag would attract nearby predators like stalkers and sand sharks for a short period of time, so you could temporarily draw them off from a spot where you want to scan a tech fragment or harvest some resources. You could make it so that it doesn't attract smaller fish like mesmers and biters, though, since they're easier to deal with using the survival knife. That way there would still be a risk. You could also make chum bags attract the reaper leviathan. Currently the only way to get past them is to either have a Cyclops or to get lucky and pass through their territory when they're somewhere else. You could make it so that the reaper can smell a chum bag from like a mile away, so you could set one and then double back and go around, but the reaper chomps up cum bags in one bite so you have to be quick.
Problem 3: fish hunting and water collection is a pain early on In a survival game like Minecraft, you can develop methods of farming food very early on so that collecting the food you need to survive takes up very little of your in-game day. In a survival game like Day Z, finding food and water is the whole point, there's no bases to build or tech trees to advance through, all the stuff you do is only to help you find food and water better. In Subnautica, neither of these things are the case. Finding food and water are not the main point of the game, and although you can get a water purifier and there is a farming mechanic now, it's a long time before you gain access to either of those things. On my first game I started out in survival mode but I opened up the console and switched to freedom mode after a little while because I got so sick of having to go find salt and chase peepers down when I wanted to be out exploring. I'm glad the freeedom mode is in there, but the food and water mechanic could actually be fun if it wasn't so time consuming.
My suggestion: Add a fish net. I know that's kind of what the gravsphere is, but that's not made clear if you don't do your research on the game (see problem #1) and it doesn't always work right. You could make a net out of plant fibers, go about your daily business, and then come back at the end of the day and collect a fish from it. It still wouldn't be as good as farming, especially if the net broke after a certain number of uses, so you'd have a reason to want more advanced tech, but it would take up a lot less time then having to go swimming after fish every single day before you can go out and do anything else. As for water, it would be nice if the material you needed for purified water wasn't also the material you needed for first aid kits, since, thanks to problem #2, you'll need a lot of those early on in the game. My advice would be either to make salt a lot more common (and respawning) or change the purified water recipe so that it requires something else.
So there you go, those are my suggestions. Thank you for reading through this wall of text, and please let me know what you think.
TL:DR Add a better fish scanner, add some way of dealing with predators before you get the stasis rifle and Seamoth weapon upgrades, and add a way of making it easier to catch fish. If you did that stuff it'd make the early game a lot more fun.
Problem 1: It's hard to figure out what's going on. This is kind of an inherent issue in the survival/exploration genre, you have to research the game beforehand so you already know what's what when you start (what each biome is like, how the enemies behave, what materials are a high priority, etc). If you don't do your research, you're going to die like a hundred times without accomplishing anything. Subnautica already has a very helpful wiki, but ideally you shouldn't have to bother with that, you should just be able to jump into the game as soon as you buy it and start making progress.
My suggestion: add a new scanner into the game. The scanner that's in the game now can tell you how enemies behave and what materials are good for what, but you have to be really close to stuff to scan it, and it takes a long time. This makes sense when you're scanning tech fragments, which currently is the scanner's most important function, but it makes it almost useless for scanning lifeforms. A stalker won't just hold still for 30 seconds while you swim right up to it and scan it, you have to have a weapon like the stasis rife to stun it if you want to do that, and once you have the stasis rifle the stalker's not much of a threat anymore anyway. My suggestion is to add a bioform/environment scanner that you start the game with, which can't scan tech, but can scan plants and animals from much further away than the current scanner and freezes time when you read the scan, so you can read the scan as soon as you get it (a lot like the scan visor from the Metroid Prime games, except only for scanning relevant things instead of every random rock and pile of sand that you come across, and you're never required to use it). The scanner could also give players a basic environmental summary when they enter a new biome, not telling them everything, just giving them an idea of what kinds of resources that area holds ("a high concentration of silver has been detected in this area" for example) and some hint of what kind of threats there are (for example, when you enter the dunes where the reaper leviathan can be found it could say something like "a massive bioform reading has been detected in this area, non-vehicular exploration is not advised"). These summaries would also be optional reading. The whole thing would kind of act like a tutorial that's only there if you want it.
Problem 2: you've got no good way of dealing with enemies until you get ranged weapons At the beginning of the game, when your only weapon is the survival knife, you're pretty much guaranteed to take damage every time you get in a fight with an enemy, which you inevitably will sometimes. That means that early on in the game the only thing you can really do to stay alive outside the safe shoals area is to bring along a bunch of first aid kits and keep healing yourself every time you take damage. That's kind of a dumb way of doing things, but just giving the player a powerful weapon like the stasis rifle right off the bat isn't a good solution either. Aggressive fish are supposed to be a big threat at the start of the game, taking away the risk that you have to go through to get good weapons would take away a lot of the fun and challenge. If there was some kind of in between it would make exploring the deeper waters a lot less of a pain.
My suggestion: add a chum bag (chum is a big wad of fish parts thrown into the water to attract sharks IRL, for anybody who doesn't know). Deploying the chum bag would attract nearby predators like stalkers and sand sharks for a short period of time, so you could temporarily draw them off from a spot where you want to scan a tech fragment or harvest some resources. You could make it so that it doesn't attract smaller fish like mesmers and biters, though, since they're easier to deal with using the survival knife. That way there would still be a risk. You could also make chum bags attract the reaper leviathan. Currently the only way to get past them is to either have a Cyclops or to get lucky and pass through their territory when they're somewhere else. You could make it so that the reaper can smell a chum bag from like a mile away, so you could set one and then double back and go around, but the reaper chomps up cum bags in one bite so you have to be quick.
Problem 3: fish hunting and water collection is a pain early on In a survival game like Minecraft, you can develop methods of farming food very early on so that collecting the food you need to survive takes up very little of your in-game day. In a survival game like Day Z, finding food and water is the whole point, there's no bases to build or tech trees to advance through, all the stuff you do is only to help you find food and water better. In Subnautica, neither of these things are the case. Finding food and water are not the main point of the game, and although you can get a water purifier and there is a farming mechanic now, it's a long time before you gain access to either of those things. On my first game I started out in survival mode but I opened up the console and switched to freedom mode after a little while because I got so sick of having to go find salt and chase peepers down when I wanted to be out exploring. I'm glad the freeedom mode is in there, but the food and water mechanic could actually be fun if it wasn't so time consuming.
My suggestion: Add a fish net. I know that's kind of what the gravsphere is, but that's not made clear if you don't do your research on the game (see problem #1) and it doesn't always work right. You could make a net out of plant fibers, go about your daily business, and then come back at the end of the day and collect a fish from it. It still wouldn't be as good as farming, especially if the net broke after a certain number of uses, so you'd have a reason to want more advanced tech, but it would take up a lot less time then having to go swimming after fish every single day before you can go out and do anything else. As for water, it would be nice if the material you needed for purified water wasn't also the material you needed for first aid kits, since, thanks to problem #2, you'll need a lot of those early on in the game. My advice would be either to make salt a lot more common (and respawning) or change the purified water recipe so that it requires something else.
So there you go, those are my suggestions. Thank you for reading through this wall of text, and please let me know what you think.