Marking "Pure" Saves

Dystroxic

This is an idea from an old open-world single player game I quite enjoyed: X3: Reunion.

The idea stems from the concept that in a single player game like this, some players might not get a high level of enjoyment out of it because there's not really a purpose to spending hours finding blueprint fragments, materials, etc. when you can just spawn them in with the debug console. The same thing was true with X3: Reunion, which had a console where you could spawn anything in. So what they did was make it so that if you ever enter a command in the debug console, it marked your saved game name with an asterisk, to denote that it wasn't a "pure" saved game.

Would it be possible to do something similar in Subnautica? If the player uses the debug console, their saved game on the main menu gets marked with some sort of undesirable symbol? This way, when I finish building my massive underwater cities without cheating, I can prove to my friends that yes, I really am that skilled and I didn't cheat . But at the same time, it still allows people to play around with the console if they just want to experiment.

Sigmalx

sometimes, its really needed to use the debug cheat. I have had instances where I need to use debug or I am screwed out of my save file period. like if you get stuck while entering the seamoth from the cyclops, or you need a damage modifier to deal with an overrun fishtank... in reality, you can do a lot without debug, but sometimes you need it when plan A has failed and Plan B wont be reliable. in short, you shouldn't be penalized just have a list of debugs active.

RichieC

What you're talking about are glitches, which will hopefully be ironed out by final release. Perhaps make it so there's no penalty using certain emergency commands, like one for killing your character if you get stuck.
Better yet, make it possible to reload from a previous checkpoint where all was working well to prevent the necessity of using the console.

RichieC

In Half Life, using console commands deactivated Steam achievements. I imagine it would be the same with this game.

Dystroxic

RichieC wrote: »

What you're talking about are glitches, which will hopefully be ironed out by final release. Perhaps make it so there's no penalty using certain emergency commands, like one for killing your character if you get stuck.
Better yet, make it possible to reload from a previous checkpoint where all was working well to prevent the necessity of using the console.

Yes, some would be ok to use (i.e. any that don't benefit you, like respawning). And you're right, this is targeted for the main release, which (in theory) should be much, much less likely to have debug commands needed to get out of bugs.

RichieC wrote: »

In Half Life, using console commands deactivated Steam achievements. I imagine it would be the same with this game.

It might be, but there aren't really any Steam achievements anyways, so that's kind of a moot point. It would be interesting to have a developer comment on whether the debug console deactivates achievements though.

Sigmalx

some people (like me) really only use nocost and fastbuild, and no other commands. and on the rare cases an item command.

Dystroxic

Sigmalx wrote: »

some people (like me) really only use nocost and fastbuild, and no other commands. and on the rare cases an item command.

"nocost" and "fastbuild" would certainly be classified as "cheats" though. It would be nice to be able to prove that everything you built was hard-earned and legitimate. For a sense of accomplishment and pride