Stasis Rifle & Drill Riding or Regarding the Murder of Innocent Leviathans
BertHunter
Join Date: 2020-06-07 Member: 261683Members
Join Date: 2020-06-07 Member: 261683Members
I spend the last month playing my free Eg copy of Subnautica and ran through all the emotions while scanning, exploring, crafting, building, fighting and fleeing. It was such a wonderful experience I actually own it and Below Zero now on Steam as well. Currently starting a second playthrough. Thank you Unknown Worlds for creating such a beautiful game!
Of course, if you love a game, you keep thinking of ideas to make it even better... at least for your own taste.
I have a lot of crude ideas floating around, like adding a bit more factorio to subnautica, adding more ways to use up power in bases, adding creature attacks against bases and nonlethal base defenses (sonic deterrents, shockwaves, actual shields like in the cyclops,...),...
While I would love to see them implemented in one way or another, they would probably take a lot of work to realize.
Something much more easier to add would be making leviathans harder to fight.
The first time I had slain a leviathan I soon lost all fear of them, even their bigger variants could not instill the same feeling of danger I had before. While the game was obvious still a blast to playthrough, I actually really missed that feeling for the rest of game.
Nonetheless I still like to be able to kill a leviathan, but it should be a great challenge to do so and so it's good that there are not that many ways to kill such a creature, but there are at least two ways which seem broken to me since they are safe to use and really not that challenging (Stasis+KniveCombo/Grapplearm+Claw&DrillarmCombo), so I would like to present an idea to fix them without getting rid of these cool items:
- Leviathans bucking off prawn suits
If grappled, leviathans could try to crash the prawn suit against the enviroment (probably hard to implement). AndOr make a barrel roll (either full animation or 'just' spinning the model) from time to time to break the grappling hook. Accurate and fast reacting players could still be allowed to hit it again with the grapple right away, but it should be hard to pull off. - Creatures breaking the stasis field of a stasis rifle when attacked
Each time a creature inside a stasis field takes damage, reduce the active time of the stasis field by X. ("The creature would go out of it's way to free itself from it and 'deplete' the stasis field energy")
X could be like 30% for small predators and 50% for leviathans. So you would need at least a 4th hit to incapacitate small predators and a lot more to kill a leviathan. The first leviathans a player meets, shouldn't break the stasis field immediatly, instead the player could be able to see the mistake they made by hearing a big roar/seeing the leviathan wiggle/the stasis field becomming yellow and or visible instable; bigger leviathans later on could even do 100% 'damage' to the stasis field or starting to damage it as soon as becoming trapped inside it.
After breaking free of a stasis field a leviathan could become immune or break each consecutive stasisField immediately for ~5sec and make a immediate counterattack against the player.
bullshitcode for visualization; I know it's a lot harder to do this:
Each time a creature inside a stasis field takes damage (or if easier to implement: is hit with a knive/thermoblade/clawArm/drillArm)
if(IsTrappedInStasis() && activeTimeStasisField >= 0)
{
if(smallLeviathan)
{
activeTimeStasisField -= maxActiveTimeStasisField/2;
playSound("leviathanRoar"); //andOr make leviathan wiggle || make stasis field yellow
makeLeviathanStasisImmuneAndInstantStasisBreaker(5sec);
counterattack();
}
else if(bigLeviathan)
{
activeTimeStasisField = 0;
playSound("leviathanRoar");
makeLeviathanStasisImmuneAndInstantStasisBreaker(5sec);
counterattack();
}
else
{
activeTimeStasisField -= maxActiveTimeStasisField/3;
}
}
Comments
As a developer, I'd say the issue isn't really the statis immunity threshold but the tool that causes the stasis. So instead of fixing the reaction, I'd fix the cause.
In my opinion, noone really needs a stasis rifle. And if such a thing exists in this world, I wouldn't even consider to build torpedos. Instead, I'd equip my SeaMoth with super-charged stasis guns right away.
The stasis rifle is the perfect weapon for this largely non-violent game. It allows players to neutralise threats and simply swim away.
Personally I never needed them against most threats. I can jump in / out of some vehicle and swim around and generally avoid being bitten.
But the stasis rifle totally belongs in this game.
I don't ever build or use torpedoes. Or the seamoth perimeter defense system.
But I'm not going to claim that noone really needs them.
They're available to us and we can choose to use them or not.
Which brings me nicely back to the OP.
This isn't a combat game and this is a scientific tool.
https://subnautica.fandom.com/wiki/Stasis_Rifle
"The stasis rifle uses patented technology to slow time around an entity to as near to a full stop as the laws of physics will permit, essentially anchoring the target in place without affecting its internal workings. It is designed to facilitate scientific and engineering operations by expanding the window of opportunity for action in time-sensitive scenarios."
That said, it is possible to mod the game and a break-on-hit for the stasis rifle effect would probably be extremely easy to do.
https://www.nexusmods.com/subnautica/mods/152