New Player Experience - Suggestions
Lallante
Join Date: 2016-10-11 Member: 223045Members
Join Date: 2016-10-11 Member: 223045Members
Hi
I've recently started Subnautica, and am a veteran of many many other open world survival, building and resource management games. My first feedback will focus on the new player experience (first few hours).
Basic tutorial
The game is crying out for a basic tutorial. Once you've put out your capsule fire (which is a great intro), picked up your PDA and jumped out of the pod...you are kinda left on your own except for the occasional hard-to-spot poorly labelled tooltip. Maybe I'm just an idiot, but I had no idea until I watched some youtube videos that you could catch fish with your bare hands! Many basic mechanics which later seem obvious are initially completely opaque, but could be taught with a very very simple tutorial that took you through some steps with simple tooltips and ideally beacons to make it quick and easy too. At a minimum this should take you through collecting and processing food and water and making your first tools (at least air-tanks, flippers, knife, scanner). An exploration game where you are required to watch third party resources containing spoilers to get going is kinda self-defeating.
Less initial blueprints
On a similar note, opening the fabricator menu for the first time is daunting and doesnt make too much sense. Most blueprints only appear once you've collected the relevant raw materials, so what led to the 20 or so initial blueprints being exceptions? Presumably so you know what to work towards...but there is a better way. It would be far better if initially you only had blueprints for the very basics initially, and new blueprints unlocked as you crafted those basics. So maybe at first only filtered water, cooked fish, titanium, glass, rubber are open, and then as you collect those things bleach, sterile water, salted fish, flippers, o2 tanks, knife etc unlock so you know what to get next. In combination with the tutorial system described above this would vastly improve the new player experience.
Better warning about the dangers of different biomes
Unless you've read some guides, it's not obvious that all of the resources you need to get going can be found within a few hundred metres of your starting position, and it's tempting to go on longer journeys that end in frustration/death. A simple tooltip that popped up when you first swam too far from home that said "Perhaps the resources I need are closer to my escape pod? This way looks dangerous without better equipment" would help a lot.
Better storage
For a beginner, you have no idea what is useful and used a lot and what is not. Right under the starting capsule there are hundreds of Acid Mushrooms...something you will only need a tiny number of for a coupel of batteries in the initial few hours. But you dont know that. The result is obvious - you run out of storage space having filled it with hundreds of collected resources. Floating lockers dont provide much reprieve (having to craft and deploy two-three just to empty your inventory once is a big pain, and throwing stuff away causes people with a history in games like this intense mental anguish. Is there a better solution that wont upset balance too much? Perhaps a deployable "single item" storage bin that only takes one thing and cant be picked up with its contents inside, but can take a lot of contents?
Hell while we are on this topic, using left click to open, rename and pick up storage containers depending on where you precisely click, while being buffetted by the current, is a horrible mechanic. Please implement something like click = open, hotkey+click = pickup, doubleclick = rename.
Conclusion
Anyway the overall theme is not so much "more handholding", as this is after all a survival and exploration game, but generally "avoid requiring players to watch/read guides on what to do".
I've recently started Subnautica, and am a veteran of many many other open world survival, building and resource management games. My first feedback will focus on the new player experience (first few hours).
Basic tutorial
The game is crying out for a basic tutorial. Once you've put out your capsule fire (which is a great intro), picked up your PDA and jumped out of the pod...you are kinda left on your own except for the occasional hard-to-spot poorly labelled tooltip. Maybe I'm just an idiot, but I had no idea until I watched some youtube videos that you could catch fish with your bare hands! Many basic mechanics which later seem obvious are initially completely opaque, but could be taught with a very very simple tutorial that took you through some steps with simple tooltips and ideally beacons to make it quick and easy too. At a minimum this should take you through collecting and processing food and water and making your first tools (at least air-tanks, flippers, knife, scanner). An exploration game where you are required to watch third party resources containing spoilers to get going is kinda self-defeating.
Less initial blueprints
On a similar note, opening the fabricator menu for the first time is daunting and doesnt make too much sense. Most blueprints only appear once you've collected the relevant raw materials, so what led to the 20 or so initial blueprints being exceptions? Presumably so you know what to work towards...but there is a better way. It would be far better if initially you only had blueprints for the very basics initially, and new blueprints unlocked as you crafted those basics. So maybe at first only filtered water, cooked fish, titanium, glass, rubber are open, and then as you collect those things bleach, sterile water, salted fish, flippers, o2 tanks, knife etc unlock so you know what to get next. In combination with the tutorial system described above this would vastly improve the new player experience.
Better warning about the dangers of different biomes
Unless you've read some guides, it's not obvious that all of the resources you need to get going can be found within a few hundred metres of your starting position, and it's tempting to go on longer journeys that end in frustration/death. A simple tooltip that popped up when you first swam too far from home that said "Perhaps the resources I need are closer to my escape pod? This way looks dangerous without better equipment" would help a lot.
Better storage
For a beginner, you have no idea what is useful and used a lot and what is not. Right under the starting capsule there are hundreds of Acid Mushrooms...something you will only need a tiny number of for a coupel of batteries in the initial few hours. But you dont know that. The result is obvious - you run out of storage space having filled it with hundreds of collected resources. Floating lockers dont provide much reprieve (having to craft and deploy two-three just to empty your inventory once is a big pain, and throwing stuff away causes people with a history in games like this intense mental anguish. Is there a better solution that wont upset balance too much? Perhaps a deployable "single item" storage bin that only takes one thing and cant be picked up with its contents inside, but can take a lot of contents?
Hell while we are on this topic, using left click to open, rename and pick up storage containers depending on where you precisely click, while being buffetted by the current, is a horrible mechanic. Please implement something like click = open, hotkey+click = pickup, doubleclick = rename.
Conclusion
Anyway the overall theme is not so much "more handholding", as this is after all a survival and exploration game, but generally "avoid requiring players to watch/read guides on what to do".
Comments
The game doesn't really have an overwhelming amount of features. And I think that adding a holding hand will take away a lot of the appeal. (Sorry, but your ideas are very hand holding).
As for storage, that issue is really only a problem early game. My advice is just hold back the desire of greed. Just because you see a resource, doesn't mean you need to loot it. Inventory management will always be an issue, and adding additional storage options is just a bandaid fix.
As for the idea of finding resources, you're on an alien planet and the idea of the game is survival and exploration. If the game told you where resources were, even generally, it would sort of destroy part of the exploration. It doesn't really make much sense either. So I disagree with you on this point.
The PDA states that you're supposed to find survival resources on the planet. Why would including a scanner to locate those resources not make sense? Have it give more precise instructions on how to find the nearby basic items, and vague directions for things in more distant locations.
Aye. It seems to me that the PDA is designed to enable the survival of an untrained person. So some basic guidelines should be given.
Just look at the Aurora. They had tons of equipment and stuff. The crewmembers of the Aurora were probably setting up a very heavy industrial level mining operation, and suddenly you are the only survivor and down to the very basics chipping some limestone nodes with very basic tools and catching fish by hands. I don't think anyone living in that distant future would know what to do without some help, especially after just waking up to a smoking escape pod and general catastrophe.
So some degree of "hand holding" should exist I think, it would make sense storywise.