7 tweaks to make Subnautica more balanced
crypticc62
Join Date: 2017-05-21 Member: 230650Members
Join Date: 2017-05-21 Member: 230650Members
The Homeless Vegetarian Freediver guide describes how it is possible to access every blueprint and every Precursor facility without building a base, consuming fauna, or using oxygen tanks. It also includes a list of 7 suggestions for rebalancing Subnautica to avoid exploitative strategies. Those tweaks:
Note that the goal is not specifically to make the game more difficult, but instead to maintain a more consistent level of challenge for beginning/mid/endgame and for novices/experienced players. The article goes into greater depth on how each of these changes would influence player behavior.
- Improve predator AI to make it harder to evade them
- Batteries should not recharge when used as a crafting ingredient
- Fabrication time should be longer for more complex items, but can be reduced by scanning duplicate fragments
- MK2 and MK3 upgrades for Pressure Compensator should have more distinct resource requirements
- Decrease capacity of lungs and basic oxygen tank
- Add more dangerous predators to Floating Island
- Increase temperature of some Aurora rooms to 60 degrees
Note that the goal is not specifically to make the game more difficult, but instead to maintain a more consistent level of challenge for beginning/mid/endgame and for novices/experienced players. The article goes into greater depth on how each of these changes would influence player behavior.
Comments
That guide fails to note that without tanks and the current oxigen duration, the game is incredible difficult and tedious. The same goes with not consuming fish or even constructing a base. Yes, you can get that homeless vegetarian freediver achievment if you are into that sort of thing. But this is a game, where you are supossed to have fun, not to autoimpose stupid and meaningless challenges
Improve AI so you die more. - No
Batteries 100% items - Batteries don't recharge, they are an ingredient. Crafted batteries shouldn't be 100% after crafting either by that logic.
Increase fabrication time - Waiting longer is balance in a single player game?
MK2 and MK3 are player choice and either a farm break, or a gather things out of your lockers break. - define "distinct"
Decrease oxygen - Reduce your basic function of exploration because you already know where you are going.... okay....
Increase deaths at floating island - because screw your reward for finding something cool
Auroura deaths - die more and reload 50 times before you can actually enjoy what you found here
Read the article and updating a few of these
Improve predator AI. Predators do not retreat from an attack regardless of damage dealt to them - I knife everything and some run and some don't.
The MK2 and MK3 seems fine if you already have the mats. If not, "go fish" - again having prior knowledge and getting X number of mat is faster, but you don't count because it's a balanced game for new players.
Let's sidestep for a moment to think about a different concept: In any game with an inventory system, a fundamental design question is: "If the player only needs a fixed quantity of something, how can they still be rewarded for finding more than that quantity?" The most common solution is to incorporate a money system, allowing the player to sell unneeded items and obtain a direct benefit. This wouldn't work in Subnautica, but what would? How could the player be rewarded for finding fragments for known blueprints in such a way that encourages exploration? Currently, the reward is 2x Titanium. Although this is thematic, it doesn't feel like a real reward in the same way that finding a new fragment does. This can lead to very disappointing gameplay when visiting wrecks that only contain fragments for completed blueprints.
Now let's turn to the idea of fabrication time. Subnautica is a game about finding progressively more satisfactory solutions to problems. Oxygen management, nutrition and hydration, defense against hazards, movement speed, storage -- all of these problems have basic solutions that are available immediately (eating cooked fish), solutions that reward exploration (finding nutritious plants on islands), and solutions that indicate mastery of the game world (setting up a farm for continuous food production). The major exception is fabrication of advanced items. If the game did have longer fabrication times for blueprint items, the player could either go out and explore while they wait (the basic solution), or they could build multiple fabricators for concurrent production (the mastery solution). However, the game would be missing the solution that rewards exploration, and would feel more tedious as a result.
My contention is that both of these problems can be solved with a fairly simple rebalancing of variables: after a blueprint has been assembled, scanning more fragments for that blueprint would reduce the fabrication time according to a geometric progression. For example, if the initial fab time is 120 seconds and the ratio is 1/2, then finding additional fragments would reduce the fab time to 60, 30, 15, 7, etc. Items that do not require blueprints could keep their current speed in order to maintain player interest.
Predators at Floating Island and hot rooms in the Aurora would not automatically cause increased player deaths or save scumming. Think about your own experiences encountering hazards in new biomes. You weigh the risks against the rewards, and make a conscious decision to either continue ahead, return to base and re-equip for a return visit, or abandon the expedition entirely. This decision making process simply does not happen at either Aurora or Floating Island.
In the case of the Aurora, access is restricted by the need for specific tools -- radiation suit to approach, propulsion cannon to unblock the doorway, laser cutter and repair tool to bypass doors -- but none of these relate to risk. The only risks that currently exist can be mitigated by supplies found within the Aurora itself -- first aid kits, nutrient blocks, filtered water, and batteries. Hot rooms would force the player to answer the same question that the game asks in all other locations: accept risk, regroup and revisit, or ignore.
Floating Island is perhaps an even more egregious example than the Aurora. Perhaps the player stumbles upon it by accident, or perhaps they find it by listening to the communicator, or perhaps they just look up the location on the wiki. Maybe they assume it will be dangerous and bring all of the tools at their disposal, or maybe they know it is completely safe and arrive with an empty inventory. All of these players receive massive rewards without ever encountering a problem to solve or a risk to calculate. Predators that can be seen from a distance would solve this problem: "Should I just run in? Or should I retreat and build a weapon? If I don't have any weapons, where can I find blueprints?" These are the types of questions that result in engaging experiences for players of all skill levels.
First I must say, you are a very convincing person. Second, I like a lot of these ideas very much (except oxygen changes) but you have very valid points about risk, and the way the game is played.
I put together a video called "The Oxygen Problem" which explains how the player can steadily increase their range and tech options without ever needing to manage their oxygen supply. I encourage you to view it, and perhaps to try playing without oxygen management and observing how little it affects your gameplay.
The oxygen problem, such as it is, is that the tanks have such woefully low capacity as to be laughable: even a pony bottle gives you more air than a basic tank in-game. If we're being honest, dive times should be on the order of 30+ minutes in the shallows, not 30 seconds. The oxygen issue is pretty divisive, and short of mod effects, there's nothing to make both sides happy. What we have is a compromise.
You need to be very, very careful about adding risks in a game where the player has no effective means of self-defense. Environmental hazards are sensible and within the scope of the player's ability, so fire, radiation, debris - all of these are blocks the player can overcome. The Aurora was designed with that in mind. But adding hostile land creatures more capable than cave crawlers would require rebalancing. That means either making the PC tougher (which negates the addition just made and necessitates rebalancing all the other creatures as well) or giving the PC a means of self-defense - a weapon - which isn't going to happen. Absent those two mitigations, all it's likely to do is breed resentment and rage quits. It was one of the fundamental problems of Mirror's Edge: your character will have the combat abilities of a toddler, so now we're going to pit you against a SWAT team. And...rage quits. Without a weapon, the majority of players view a combat situation (or what should be a combat situation) as a cheat by the developers.
So adding more capable land predators isn't likely to bring good results, but adding environmental hazards, like the hot rooms in Aurora that you suggested, present problems that the player can solve. Environmental puzzles, if you like. Get these fires out, that should reduce the temp - a problem with a solution that the player can reason through rather than have to rely on luck to get by. Atmospheric and compelling. Even if the hazard can't be eliminated, it can be managed through multiple playstyles - run faster or bring medical supplies? Search or sprint? That's in line with the design ethos of the game and creates survival situation problems for the player. Good all around.
I really can't get on board with your concept of reducing fabricator time for multiple pieces located, though. There's really no reasonable explanation why that should happen. We're talking about molecular construction - finding more examples won't refine anything or improve the fabricator itself. But there's a larger issue at play here. Finding additional examples of an item you can already make gives you practically no reward, agreed. But that's as it should be. Not everything the player finds should be useful or valuable. Finding your ninth seaglide fragment would be useless, and it shouldn't be rewarded. The devs decided to throw us two titanium so it's not a total loss, but even that is generous. Tying fabrication time arbitrarily to the number of fragments found is a 1990s game mechanic, and then the game devolves into a frustrating hunt to find all these little fragments so I'm not stuck staring at a fabricator for three minutes. Reducing something that is only an arbitrarily-assigned frustration isn't a reward.
Now, although I don't think those particular ideas fit well in the base game, there's nothing saying they wouldn't have an ideal home in an alternate game mode or super-hardcore mode. But as part of the vanilla experience, I think the equation is tilted a little too strongly toward cost rather than value.
One idea that came up in a related Reddit thread was to switch the capacity of bare lungs (45) and the basic O2 tank (30). In addition to being more realistic, this ends up being more balanced in the early game: Players who always make an oxygen tank early on will experience no change in their gameplay, while players who challenge themselves to get by with the bare minimum are strongly encouraged to make the O2 tank when they otherwise wouldn't have.
But the player does have options for self-defense, many of which can be used on land: stasis rifle, propulsion rifle, gravsphere, Prawn suit. Floating Island predators should be more threatening than the Cave Crawler (which the player can literally walk past), but weak enough that the aforementioned options are useful. As long as that balance can be struck, the player will be presented with a risk/reward/puzzle that is consistent with other dangerous biomes.
Here's a thought experiment I'd like you to consider, which is one of my favorite tools for testing design ideas: imagine all previous versions of Subnautica featured variable fabrication times as I described above. Think about how you would solve that problem. Maybe you would make a point of searching for extra fragments before starting production, or maybe you would set up a little factory with multiple fabricators, or maybe you would develop a habit of fishing/exploring while waiting for a major project to finish. With some experimentation on your part, and some tweaking of variables by the developers, eventually you would grow accustomed to the experience.
Then imagine in a release, the devs announced that they were scrapping the variable fabrication time, and everything would now be almost instantaneous, and previously meaningful fragments would be changed to give 2x Titanium. Try to imagine the range of reactions that players would express. Some would certainly praise the decision for increasing the game's tempo, but there would definitely be players who would find it frustrating. "What am I supposed to do with my 5 fabricators now?" "I really liked having down time to explore cool areas, but now I feel like I have to be constantly harvesting resources to keep up." "This is a solution in search of a problem, and it's too unrealistic."
The point is that with a variable that so fundamentally affects the feel and pacing of the game, any change will feel disruptive to players who have gotten used to things being the way they are. But the game is still in early access, where disruptive ideas can and should be explored, especially if they have the potential to make the game feel more involved. Worst case scenario is variable fabrication time just doesn't work, and so it gets reverted in the next patch. Best case scenario is it opens up exciting new avenues for the designers to explore. Is that not a worthwhile tradeoff?
Damm your not too bad at making videos mate, you have a solid argument but even less than 30 might be good for hardcore, maybe 20-25? there should also be changes to the way that oxygen goes down during 'stressful' situations such as combat or finding a leviathan and creeping by unnoticed.
History lesson time: earlier versions of Subnautica had a "Fragment analyzer", which was a box you could put blueprint fragments in to unlock. You only needed one, but that took forever, and you could reduce the time by putting more fragments of the same type. The devs moved away from that system to the handheld scanner we have today. Take a look at the first Jacksepticeye videos to see the old system in action.
A reasonable solution, although I still think the tanks are excessively nerfed.
Granted, those options exist, but are mainly mid-game at best. If you show up at the Aurora unprepared (and most players do the first time around), you can't explore very far. It's a carrot - you want to go further, but there's an obstacle, so now you know you need to overcome that obstacle. A dangerous creature that can maim or kill the player is a stick - and one that lots of designers (inappropriately) use as map boundaries to keep players in line. (Good example of a bad idea: the sea leeches in Half Life 2. Go too far into the water and you get eaten. Player learns to stay out of the water.)
For a new player stumbling upon an island (which is a great feeling), then immediately ending up running for their lives and probably getting eaten (not a great feeling), it could create a box-in problem. One of the ongoing issues with the Aurora is that many players report that they didn't think the Aurora was accessible until they read that it was. The thing's radioactive, it's on fire - a lot about it says "stay away." So, they do, and end up missing out on some pretty important stuff until they find out they were wrong. I'd be concerned about creating the same feeling about the islands. "The game is Subnautica, and I just got my head handed to me for going on land...maybe I'm not supposed to do that. Dry land is death. Okay, I guess I'm supposed to stay in the water." I'm not saying that every player will come to that conclusion - just like not every one fails to get the Aurora idea - but it is a likely issue.
In many cases, yes, it is; and in all cases, it's definitely worth considering and thinking about.
Devil's advocate, a counterargument would be the dead-time problem. Let's say I want to go onto the Aurora. Okay, I'm going to need a propulsion rifle. I gather the stuff I need, start the fabricator...and now I need to wait five or ten minutes before I can get on with enjoying the game. There's nothing else I want or need to do right now, and the only thing stopping me from moving ahead is this...timer. Thanks to their overuse by lazy designers in mobile and Facebook games, timers have largely become a hated feature even when they make perfect sense. (Like, for example, when a molecular manufacturing tool works faster than a microwave.)
When we look at other games in the survival genre, most have very compressed timelines for things that should take a while. Cooking, fishing, building a tree hut with satellite TV...all done at a click or in a few seconds. It's a concession to playability over realism. And, yes, the notion of collecting multiple pieces to shorten time is a valid solution to that problem, no doubt about it. But when players feel put upon, they tend to react negatively. Telling them to go find a dozen needles in a haystack the size of the game map so that they don't have to sit and twiddle their thumbs while their seaglide fabs is likely to get them annoyed.
I'm in no way whatsoever suggesting that delayed gratification is a bad idea - in fact, we could stand to have a lot more of it in our daily lives - and having people wait for fabrication is entirely reasonable. But as a concession to gameplay, there's an equally compelling reason to avoid it. Mainly, it comes down to a design choice.