Just some comments from a totally new player
RedDirtTrooper
USA Join Date: 2016-12-02 Member: 224437Members
USA Join Date: 2016-12-02 Member: 224437Members
Just purchased Subnautica over the thanksgiving weekend, and I thought maybe the devs would like some feedback from someone like me coming at the current game "fresh" as it were. First, it throws you right in the deep end. I feel like things could be made a little more obvious for new players. Explanations of things like the ability to carry multiple air tanks, the importance of scanning to recover tech, the fact that holstering items makes you swim faster, etc. All things that I didn't figure out until well after I probably should have. It was a little disappointing that there was no gender choice, although outside of the occasional instant shattering of immersion caused by a few voice assets it wasn't that big a deal once you got past the opening cut scenes.
I tried the different modes and I have to say that I found none of them really felt right to me. I mean, creative is fine I guess, just kind of pointless. Freedom feels like half the game is missing and there are all these useless items. And then there is survival. Survival is how I spent most of my time in the game, BUT I find it incredibly tedious so I cheat constantly. That feels pretty lame, and I loathe admitting it, but honestly the resource management wasn't hard, just frustrating. It was like every single thing was just constantly running out. I loved the living feeling of needing food, and water, and even air, but it was just so often and tedious that it was completely not fun once the novelty wore off. The levels of damage inflicted by things felt similar. Yeah, make things scary, yeah, make big things able to hurt me bad, but don't make one tiny little bitey fish take my health down to the teens because I can't ward them off with my almost useless knife because of their microscopic, infuriating hit boxes.
I'll start a new game swearing I'm going to be good, but it never works out.
it will start nagging me I'm going to die from dehydration or starvation, and the first two or three times I'll dutifully take care of it and then I hit the time after that and NOPE, not fun anymore, especially if I've taken care of making sure I can easily handle those requirements. So the console comes up and survival gets turned off. Then I'll hit the 6th time rushing back to the surface while trying to get needed scans out of a wreck or cut a door, and NOPE, so oxygen gets turned off. Then I'll swap out my fourth battery in the seaglide and NOPE, so energy management gets turned off. I'll get tired of going back to my pit/indentation/wherever titanium won't roll away pile outside of my base and building cost will get turned off. I'll load my game back up when I come back, and sure enough, I"ve kept building my bases and such as if survival and such were important, so I'll once again tell myself "THIS TIME WE'RE NOT CHEATING!" and the first 10-30 minutes I'll stick with it, but that's about it before one of the annoyances or another will wear me down.
I guess what I'm saying is, the gap between survival and freedom feels absolutely enormous, and where freedom feels like playing half the game, survival feels like I'm playing it at 10x speed with how totally obnoxious the resource management is. I really wish there was something in between, where a tank of air would give me something more like 15-30 minutes underwater, and I might need to eat or drink once or twice in an hours play time, and damage was less vicious and maybe the natural healing was several times faster.
Also do something/anything about storing resources so that I'm not just forming literal dump sites on the sea bed around my bases. It might be realistic, but it's ugly, and running back to them constantly because of the limited inventory space just feels bad. Honestly, I'd add a universal supply pool to the fabricator and just do away with any kind of inventory management for raw materials at all once they've been delivered to a base/lifepod/cyclops. It might be less realistic, but sometimes good gameplay trumps the hell out of any amount of realism.
And get rid of the crash powder requirement for the repair tool! Replace it with magnesium or something. The RNG on this material is just heartbreaking in the early game. One game I'd get it from the first group of crash fish I found. The next game I'd be baiting every crash fish I could find for over an hour and not see a single one. They either need to be a guaranteed drop EVERY time or they have no business whatsoever in the recipe for a piece of gear that almost all of your new players are going to consider an A #1 priority just from the sparking box in the crash pod.
I love the setting, and the exploring, and I want to see more of the story, and more of your creature designs, and building bases is awesome fun though. I'll definitely keep checking it out from time to time as new stuff gets added, even if I have to cheat constantly to make it seem more like recreation instead of a second job.
Anyway, I'm sure there's probably a whole "hardcore" group of survival game enthusiasts who I've thoroughly horrified, so I'm sorry if I have offended anyone.
I tried the different modes and I have to say that I found none of them really felt right to me. I mean, creative is fine I guess, just kind of pointless. Freedom feels like half the game is missing and there are all these useless items. And then there is survival. Survival is how I spent most of my time in the game, BUT I find it incredibly tedious so I cheat constantly. That feels pretty lame, and I loathe admitting it, but honestly the resource management wasn't hard, just frustrating. It was like every single thing was just constantly running out. I loved the living feeling of needing food, and water, and even air, but it was just so often and tedious that it was completely not fun once the novelty wore off. The levels of damage inflicted by things felt similar. Yeah, make things scary, yeah, make big things able to hurt me bad, but don't make one tiny little bitey fish take my health down to the teens because I can't ward them off with my almost useless knife because of their microscopic, infuriating hit boxes.
I'll start a new game swearing I'm going to be good, but it never works out.
it will start nagging me I'm going to die from dehydration or starvation, and the first two or three times I'll dutifully take care of it and then I hit the time after that and NOPE, not fun anymore, especially if I've taken care of making sure I can easily handle those requirements. So the console comes up and survival gets turned off. Then I'll hit the 6th time rushing back to the surface while trying to get needed scans out of a wreck or cut a door, and NOPE, so oxygen gets turned off. Then I'll swap out my fourth battery in the seaglide and NOPE, so energy management gets turned off. I'll get tired of going back to my pit/indentation/wherever titanium won't roll away pile outside of my base and building cost will get turned off. I'll load my game back up when I come back, and sure enough, I"ve kept building my bases and such as if survival and such were important, so I'll once again tell myself "THIS TIME WE'RE NOT CHEATING!" and the first 10-30 minutes I'll stick with it, but that's about it before one of the annoyances or another will wear me down.I guess what I'm saying is, the gap between survival and freedom feels absolutely enormous, and where freedom feels like playing half the game, survival feels like I'm playing it at 10x speed with how totally obnoxious the resource management is. I really wish there was something in between, where a tank of air would give me something more like 15-30 minutes underwater, and I might need to eat or drink once or twice in an hours play time, and damage was less vicious and maybe the natural healing was several times faster.
Also do something/anything about storing resources so that I'm not just forming literal dump sites on the sea bed around my bases. It might be realistic, but it's ugly, and running back to them constantly because of the limited inventory space just feels bad. Honestly, I'd add a universal supply pool to the fabricator and just do away with any kind of inventory management for raw materials at all once they've been delivered to a base/lifepod/cyclops. It might be less realistic, but sometimes good gameplay trumps the hell out of any amount of realism.
And get rid of the crash powder requirement for the repair tool! Replace it with magnesium or something. The RNG on this material is just heartbreaking in the early game. One game I'd get it from the first group of crash fish I found. The next game I'd be baiting every crash fish I could find for over an hour and not see a single one. They either need to be a guaranteed drop EVERY time or they have no business whatsoever in the recipe for a piece of gear that almost all of your new players are going to consider an A #1 priority just from the sparking box in the crash pod.
I love the setting, and the exploring, and I want to see more of the story, and more of your creature designs, and building bases is awesome fun though. I'll definitely keep checking it out from time to time as new stuff gets added, even if I have to cheat constantly to make it seem more like recreation instead of a second job.
Anyway, I'm sure there's probably a whole "hardcore" group of survival game enthusiasts who I've thoroughly horrified, so I'm sorry if I have offended anyone.
Comments
For storage you've got your lifepod's locker and then you can build Waterproof Storage units with just a few pieces of titanium.
I think Magnesium would be better for the Repair Tool as well tbh. On top of that how many new players even check the crash pods after the fish leave?
You can put everything above except Large Alien Containment into a Cyclops.
Of course, one wouldn't expect a new player to know all of that ^, and they shouldn't have to watch let's plays / read the wiki / visit the forums to figure it out, although the information is available if you glance at the amount of food / water different things provide, and read their tech descriptions upon scanning them.
It's a balance between too much hand-holding, and leaving struggling players alone in the waves (literally!).
Perhaps if the PDA AI were made to be a bit more helpful upon user request?
EDIT: Oh and gender is being worked on after 1.0 release.
http://forums.unknownworlds.com/discussion/146387/tips-for-begginers-add-yours#latest
I suppose I qualify as part of the hardcore survival group, but I also have some qualms about some recipe costs (the pressure module upgrades for the Seamoth and PRAWN annoy me. Why do I need a chip for each upgrade? There's already one in there! Not to mention the recipe repetition of the upgrades is boring.) and am vehemently against some folks's demand to make stuff like the Cyclops need even more plasteel ingots (though I do want power cells be included for consistency). I've been told to play Freedom/Creative mode then if I want an easy experience, which is preposterous because I do want my use for anything I acquire. It's just not a rounded experience otherwise. So while I don't think I'd as much enjoy the game as you want it, I do sympathize with your request. And you're asking for a new mode rather than an existing one be tweaked, so that's cool.
The crash powder is a problem about on par with silver. I recall reading the bad spawn rate is a bug that will be taken care of before V1.0. As long as it is a guaranteed spawn, it ought to be an acceptable ingredient even in early game.
Until such time that the devs look into the game modes or possibly even sliders, might I give a collector's advice? I'm not sure why you are dumping resources on the ocean floor (I never do that). A better strategy is to have one (or more) supply rooms with fabricator. You can have some five wall lockers + fabricator in a l-corridor, which should be enough in early game to collect yourself a stash of resources and have easy access to convert them. An MP room has room for 24 wall lockers minus whatever wall you need for something else and then has room left for regular lockers. Organize the lockers by theme, such as "electronic", "seeds", "faunastuff", "noblemetal", etc. and convert some resources in advance (can't go wrong with a backup storage of five per resource,[*] and five plasteel ingots are easier to store than fifty titanium and five lithium pieces). I also like to reserve one locker nearest to the fabricator for "project in progress" resources; ie, all the stuff I need for something I want to build but don't have everything for yet. It helps me keep track without obliging me to acquire everything at once. Which is what the advice comes down to: breaking down progress into exchangeable bitesize bits is a more manageable approach than operating on immediate goals. Might be all of this is useless noise you've already tried well before, but at the chance you haven't, doesn't hurt to type.
([*]Says the person who always has a locker for a little less than each separate resource.)
Like written above, its sometimes hard to take care about food, water and oxygen (in my case one reason may be the lack of translation). But i think i can handle it ... thanks to lots of guides here and on other sites.
My biggest problem is another than the discripted - I have a big problem with the beasts. I use the invisible cheat, but it seems not working during using the seamoth. I'am afraid of dying in result of a heart attack when i meet a reaper next time. Sure, i'am a special anxious person. I took a look on several lets plays and these players are sometimes scared too. But not that much i am (my husband want me to deinstall the game because he don't want to hear me scream anymore).
It's not the possible damage or death ingame i am afraid of, it's the 'booh effect' (sorry, dont know a word for it). Therefore i don't want to miss hunger, dehydration, oxygen or poisen, i just dont want to get shocked to death. A new friendly mode would be very nice. And yes, maybe the game wasn't made for people like me. But it's so awesome and the most beautiful i've ever played. Would be nice to see more of it.
Don't worry, I'm pretty sure the game was made for people like you too.
Common term for "booh effect" is "jumpscare". And Subnautica does have a lot of jumpscare critters, warpers being my least favorite. They're nearly harmless currently, but they always get a scream from me if they teleport too close. Best advice I can give is to (carefully) set up bases nearby creatures that scare you. Having them as neighbors for a while reduces their fear factor and instead of going "Aaah, something bit me!" you'll go "I say, my neighbor, Charlie the Mesmer, bit me! That scamp!"
I'm not sure what exactly it is to you seek from a friendly mode (less monsters?), but I do know UWE is working on fixing the pop-in issues and reducing creature aggression somewhat.
TBH, you are indeed correct, the game throws you into the deep from the get go, it all starts to stabilize after a while when you've finally got stuff set up. The learning curve isn't that high, it's just not much is explained (also as part of pre-release status of course, but feedback on this issue does show it's an issue)... Early game needs better information, but as usual games like these have always been wikigames (one monitor the game, other monitor the wiki). They need to be fused together in a more streamlined gameplay way, I guess...
I just think an easier survival type mode with less pressure(my personal vote would be to call it Explorer Mode) would be super fun. I want all the immersion of the survival stuff, it's just that I find the pressure of it so very, very aggravating. As an example, food and water. Food and water were interesting to me during the early part my first game. It took me a long time to figure out I how to make bleach(don't laugh). So I was constantly worrying about peepers and bladder fish, and where did they go, and where will I find more, but then once I figured out ways to take the pressure off it just stopped being interesting to me. Indoor grow beds + bulbo trees and melons and it stops being an interesting mechanic and just becomes a minor annoyance distracting me from the serious business of exploring scary acid filled rivers. Now, you can't even really worry me about it early in a new game. I can swim to the floating island blind, and then I've got bulbo and melon seeds and indoor grow bed and multi purpose room plans, and I don't ever have to worry about acquiring food again, and without that need the mechanic of having to waste time with it over and over again just became a chore with zero positives for me. Once I had battery and cell chargers the same thing happened for power. These are not things I have difficulty with, they're just things that I don't see as interesting, compelling, or even slightly entertaining.
I am glad they're adding a gender choice though. I know it's not a big deal for immersion for lots of people, I just find it hard to put myself in a characters head space of the opposite gender or invest myself emotionally in them as much unless their personality is really well defined by the narrative, like Adam Jensen in Deus Ex or something similar. I mean, dude was kind of the default in most games for years, so I'm used to it, but it's still much nicer to have the choice.
Honestly, I would be pretty satisfied if they would just put in a console command for survival(food and water together or separate would be fine by me), oxygen, and energy that was the same as the damage command, so you could set the multipliers to what you wanted. Sure, it wouldn't be as clean and fancy as a new mode in the main menu, but it would have the same end result. Like, I put in damage .5 pretty much all the time, because the amount of damage by default just feels too high to me. I'd love to have a similar type of control to how fast some these other bars drop down. Being able to put in Energy .25 would definitely be better than just coping with the default rate after I load a game until I'm so fed up that I just turn it off altogether.
http://forums.unknownworlds.com/discussion/145054/storeroom-mfr-module-and-a-cyclops-version
I already came up with a resource management notion. Grabbing up loads of stuff is both good and bad. Good in that it makes it far less irritating. Bad in that once a player has loads of every resource, resource management is trivial, and the only real resource is things that can't be farmed. (I've wound up with a Minecraft base that boasted hilarious amounts of barrels with every conceivable resource being automatically produced, due to mods.)
These states... overlap, even. Which is stupid, and a definite development problem. PVP is a solution in multiplayer scenarios, but for SP, farming resources always feels really stupid to me. When I did Planet Explorers (after I fixed it trying to melt my video card), I just got a few of any given resource, then set it to 5000 via Cheat Engine. Screw sitting there mining for hours, I ain't doin it.
For an SP game, though, having players get to a certain point manually is good. But then making them collect resources over and over? That's just boring busywork. Planet Explorers made you do a lot yourself, but once you get a colony rolling, you can task your worker drones with collecting resources. It's not fast, but it runs while you do the INTERESTING stuff, which is a huge bonus.
For SN, I'd love to see the underused lower rear portion of the Cyclops replaced with resourcing drones. 1-2 small little AI drones that simply run out and grab any resources they can make a path-find to, so you can just get NEAR stuff, and a little bot zips out and grabs it for you. Park the Cyclops over resource deposits, drop out a dual-drill PRAWN, and grind the rock up, and little bots collect the stuff and bring it to the Cyclops for you.
Cut out busywork and middleman stuff, players should get to do the fun stuff in SP games. Clicking on rocks and dragging inventory around does not qualify.
The Charlie-thing sounds interesting. I think I'll give it a chance and start with a sand shark. There is one some meters away that looks like an Isabell for me
I can answer that one; NPCs do not attack buildings. Makes sense, because they (warpers excluded) have no reason to view it as anything but landscape. Even the EMP fiends do not respond to the base's light. I've not tried it personally, but people who built in the DGR after the EMP move was implemented report that the crabsquids do respond to the shining of a flashlight from the base, but not the baselight. Similarly, the attack affects the flashlight, but not the base. However, vehicles parked in a moonpool are not considered part of the base and creatures will attack it still if they can reach it. I learned that the hard way. I've got pics of it here. One of my polish requests for V1.0 is that this no longer happens because it's not logical for the fish to view parked vehicles as lifeforms and it could potentially get you stuck permanently.
Friendly mode or a non-console option to be left alone sound doable to me. I hope you'll get it. In the meantime, I hope you and Isabelle will hit it off well.
In all honesty, the name was randomly picked during playthrough as something better than "Mx. Mesmer", but I realized it was fitting and kept to it.
Fair enough. I know you wouldn't be the only player happy with an "Explorer Mode" so here's to hoping the devs will look into finetuning the modes/wolrd options. And no laughing on the bleach thing because in all honesty that could do with some highlighting. It's one of those thrown in the deep end situations.
1. They're working on a female model, so don't get all tumblr butthurt over it just yet.
2. Regarding material storage, It'd be nice to have larger storage options, like a Cargo Crate, but a lot of your problem requiring you to make a big "Dump site" can be solved by not grabbing literally everything you see and taking it home before you have a use for it.
Yeah, beacons are REALLY helpful for stuff you want to find later- and seeing as there's no official "map" in-game, you're going to want to be marking points of interest. I think I only figured that one out after a solid 30 minutes of searching for an elusive thermal vent. that I was sure I'd seen before.
Can you not, if only because this has already been answered by 0x6A7232.
I'm going to try not to be a bitch here, but your equating my request, as a woman, to be able to choose a female avatar, because it makes me more comfortable and immersed, with tumblr style political correctness and radical feminism is both insulting and incorrect. So, don't do that.
Then suddenly the devs get bad reviews about how the game balance got bad and the devs listening too much at hardcore or veteran players. The devs wonder what happened (who got the idea to make the safe shallows more deadly?) and make a trello card to address their own problem. And again think they can simply tune their survival parameters to fit all player needs. But is it really possible to please everyone with a single set of difficulty settings (other than a few on/off settings)?
There are no settings for O2 rate, food & water rate, energy consumption rate, creature aggression, creature roaming range, heath recovery rate, radiation damage, resource/fragment distribution strength and more parameters that could allow to tune the game for the testing player (we are still in early access). As such the devs can't monitor those settings from the players to find out what the player base actually likes and cluster/group them into a few presets that could then define a game mode. The devs have to listen to their fans and mainly interpret what they like or not.
I can only give you a simple advice: Use creative to experiment building bases, catching small fish with your hands and learn a bit about the safe shallows or more, before you really start survival. That should ease the survival pain a bit, because you can use creative mode as a tutorial.
The rest is probably up to the devs. Maybe they can change freedom mode into a second difficulty preset that offers everything that survival has, but simply allowing a relaxed, non-challenging gameplay. Otherwise I fear it ends up like sitting between two chairs.
The devs started survival reading an interesting arcticle about how games should do survival. They posted a link to this article. And the article mentioned how survival should change or shift from simple food and water things to energy getting the problem and such things.
But the way the game handles it, doesn't quite work that well. For example, even if you now have a stillsuit, farming and a water machine to give you all the water you need, you still have to keep an eye on water consumption all the time and aren't relieved from water consumption by automatic handling. You have to keep a lot of water bottles with you for far expeditions, because you can't upgrade your suit, but can only take one type with you. So in late game you swim around reinforced or rad protected, but without stillsuit and rather bottles with you. The bottles aren't autoconsumed like the O2 tanks, so you could ignore accessing your PDA for drinking. The best way to deal with it would be giving the water machines a big bottle cache and autoconsume the bottles in inventory. But the game limits the machine to 2 bottles for challenging reasons. It's like as if the devs can't really accept the idea of adapted survival progression that would eliminate thirst after the first working water machines. The same with the stillsuit that isn't offered as an upgrade. Another example is food handling. No interesting recipes but also no automatic food consumption for food that only serves a function to still hunger. Either I should have automatic fast food consumption or a bar with meals and cocktails dispensing machines based on recipes, but manual consumption.
So back to adapted survival. That simply means that once you set up next gen water processing, you never have to care about thirst again. If someone complains that then there is no longer water survival, he didn't really get the concept of adaptive survival or is only half-hearted with adapted survival. Which is the case of this game using survival.
A small suggestion list:
Why is it here? Because adapted progressions could create a relaxation through a shift in challenge rather than either having only eternal relaxed exploration or eternal challenge.
The same could be done with predators challenging the player if done right. The player should be able to find tools dealing with the predators in a way that once you have them, you should no longer have to fear a certain kind of predators. This is only true to a small partial part of the game. Three quarters of all predator challenge is being able to outmaneuver or avoid them, which is only good for veterans or hardcore players. Only a quarter is having some part of weapons or equipment helping partially against them. The devs clearly focused too much on a general non escapable challenge aspect.
If they were to make a new game mode, I would call it "Custom"
Don't yell at me yet...
I have been playing Subnautica for at least a year. I love the game and each new update is amazing. But I agree, a game mode where things take place in a more relaxed pace would be so much fun. Especially for people like me who play for about an hour a night and just want to hang out underwater having fun. (I would still play the normal game 70-80% of the time though)
So here is my idea...
Enter "Custom game" mode;
This would allow for the player to create a bit of customization to tailor the game to their tastes at the expense of not being able to get any achievements (or having Custom specific achievements only) The range of customization would be fairly small. But would also be fairly powerful in changing the gameplay.
You could have a series of options for certain aspects of the game.
Animal aggression: 0 - 10. (normal would be 5. 0 would be off.)
Air tank storage in seconds: 30, 90, 120, 240, 480, 960, off.
Hunger/thirst rate. 0 - 10 (normal would be 5. 0 would be off.)
Damage: 0 - 10 (normal would be 5. 0 would be off.)
Day/night cycle speed multiplier: 0.125, 0.25, 0.5, 0.75, 1.0, 1.25, 1.5, 2.0.
You could possibly add more things. But really those are the only ones that matter that I can think of.
This would let players make the gameplay easier and more relaxed OR much harder and much more intense.
((NOTE: Once the game rules are set and the game loads, you cannot change the rules. The save would always have the rules set before loading the custom world. This makes it less of a cheat and more of a custom map setup. Once set up, you can never change it. You would have to make a new map with new rules.))
Thoughts?
On the custom game mode, it needs to record statistics on how many players are using which options to allow the devs to get an idea of what the playerbase prefers. Would help with the balance/challenge issues the game seems to have recently.
Gotcha right here fam:
http://forums.unknownworlds.com/discussion/146508/ditch-difficulty-modes-add-customizable-game-options-to-new-game-screen