Notes from a new player
Quadriplegic
Toronto Join Date: 2017-01-10 Member: 226492Members
Toronto Join Date: 2017-01-10 Member: 226492Members
(Spoilers abound! (if that is a thing here))
Hi all. I started playing Subnautica just before the Precursor update and I have really enjoyed my time with it so far. I have deliberately avoided looking at the wiki or any resources outside of the game itself up to now, and I thought I would drop off some of my collected thoughts and criticisms (mild! I swear!) before I go spoiling whatever little bits I may have missed along the way. Apologies if any of this has been covered to death or would have been obvious to me with a quick google.
1. Player direction and gameplay loops - The early game does a decent job pointing you towards new locations and presenting the resources you need to build essential tools as you follow the lifeboat signals, but I ran into a wall when I ran out of lifeboats (this was before the Sunbeam signal), because reaching those signal points is not really what the game is about.
The gameplay loop of Subnautica as I know it now is: Explore new areas -> Find new blueprints/resources -> Use blueprints/resources to build new tools -> Use new tools to access new areas to explore.
The loop presented by the signals is: Receive signal -> Go to new location -> Retrieve PDA -> Return for new signal.
In other words, I spent a long time thinking I was playing a game about recovering data, and that through recovering data, eventually I would be given new technologies I could use to upgrade my data-gathering capabilities. When I ran out of lifeboats to find but still had very few blueprints, I realized the goals presented by the game and the actual goals of the game do not line up. This worked in conjunction with the next problem to form the largest roadblock I encountered.
2. The scanner - The scanner is not highlighted as the part of the basic gameplay loop that it is. Maybe I missed something or glossed over it in the early game rush of discovery, but for the longest time I thought the only things I could really scan were alien things: rocks, plants and animals. The idea of seeking out chunks of the shipwreck and finding objects like tables and potted plants to scan was one I stumbled upon by chance rather than design. Maybe I was being an idiot at the time, but I'm sure there are many idiots out there who would also like to swim around cool underwater caves and build potted plants.
3. Lack of essential blueprints - I think you can see how I got here. Once I learned how important the scanner was, I revisited the lifeboat signals and looked about. This meant I had access to some advanced technologies that I simply couldn't use because I hadn't picked up their earlier prerequisites. Things like aquariums and nuclear reactors without the basic multipurpose room. This wasn't the end of the world, but it was frustrating.
1-3 Solutions - These are all problems related to the directions for basic exploration given explicitly by the game not matching up with the actual goals and tech progression of the game systems. While I genuinely like that Subnautica falls squarely on the side of freedom on the player freedom vs. guided tour spectrum I think the focus on lifeboat signals (and apparent focus on recovering PDAs from those sites) is a bit misleading. I would suggest two small changes. The first is to direct the player at some point towards a chunk of ship containing items to scan. This will ensure the player knows about the usefulness of the scanner in finding new blueprints and keep them looking for new ship chunks and technologies as they continue seeking out lifeboat signals. The second is to place one of those signals either on or beneath the floating island, given the broad usefulness of blueprints like the multipurpose room and garden plots that can be found there. Perhaps one or both of these ideas are already in there, in which case, this idiot missed whatever clues were there. Consider there will be more idiots and take us into account.
4. Item descriptions - It was only very recently that I found out carrying more than one oxygen tank was a useful thing to do! I still don't know what the difference is between the two oxygen tank upgrades, except that one gives more O2 than the other. Same goes for the heated knife vs. diamond knife. Which is better? These are questions I'm sure I will have the answer to as soon as I check the wiki, but that information should ideally be available in game.
5. Food and water - Because I spent so long without even knowing that garden plots exist (let alone the magic of filtration machines!), I had to go on a lot of fishing and salt-finding trips to keep my base stocked with salted food and decontaminated water. Had I known about the floating island, there would have been about a tenth of the work I did to fill my lockers with salted peepers, but as the game stands there's a chance of more people like me thinking Subnautica is a lot grindier than it actually is. Even now that I have garden plots and filtration machines, I still find the thirst and hunger meters drop a bit too fast.
6. Power - For the amount of work one must do to build and power a nuclear generator, their output and running time are rather sad. I quickly decommissioned mine in favour of more geothermal and solar power.
I think that's about it. Please don't take this wall o' complaints as me not enjoying the game. I wouldn't have gone to this amount of trouble if I hadn't had an excellent time playing it. Now I'm off to read up on the things I missed and different survival knives.
Hi all. I started playing Subnautica just before the Precursor update and I have really enjoyed my time with it so far. I have deliberately avoided looking at the wiki or any resources outside of the game itself up to now, and I thought I would drop off some of my collected thoughts and criticisms (mild! I swear!) before I go spoiling whatever little bits I may have missed along the way. Apologies if any of this has been covered to death or would have been obvious to me with a quick google.
1. Player direction and gameplay loops - The early game does a decent job pointing you towards new locations and presenting the resources you need to build essential tools as you follow the lifeboat signals, but I ran into a wall when I ran out of lifeboats (this was before the Sunbeam signal), because reaching those signal points is not really what the game is about.
The gameplay loop of Subnautica as I know it now is: Explore new areas -> Find new blueprints/resources -> Use blueprints/resources to build new tools -> Use new tools to access new areas to explore.
The loop presented by the signals is: Receive signal -> Go to new location -> Retrieve PDA -> Return for new signal.
In other words, I spent a long time thinking I was playing a game about recovering data, and that through recovering data, eventually I would be given new technologies I could use to upgrade my data-gathering capabilities. When I ran out of lifeboats to find but still had very few blueprints, I realized the goals presented by the game and the actual goals of the game do not line up. This worked in conjunction with the next problem to form the largest roadblock I encountered.
2. The scanner - The scanner is not highlighted as the part of the basic gameplay loop that it is. Maybe I missed something or glossed over it in the early game rush of discovery, but for the longest time I thought the only things I could really scan were alien things: rocks, plants and animals. The idea of seeking out chunks of the shipwreck and finding objects like tables and potted plants to scan was one I stumbled upon by chance rather than design. Maybe I was being an idiot at the time, but I'm sure there are many idiots out there who would also like to swim around cool underwater caves and build potted plants.
3. Lack of essential blueprints - I think you can see how I got here. Once I learned how important the scanner was, I revisited the lifeboat signals and looked about. This meant I had access to some advanced technologies that I simply couldn't use because I hadn't picked up their earlier prerequisites. Things like aquariums and nuclear reactors without the basic multipurpose room. This wasn't the end of the world, but it was frustrating.
1-3 Solutions - These are all problems related to the directions for basic exploration given explicitly by the game not matching up with the actual goals and tech progression of the game systems. While I genuinely like that Subnautica falls squarely on the side of freedom on the player freedom vs. guided tour spectrum I think the focus on lifeboat signals (and apparent focus on recovering PDAs from those sites) is a bit misleading. I would suggest two small changes. The first is to direct the player at some point towards a chunk of ship containing items to scan. This will ensure the player knows about the usefulness of the scanner in finding new blueprints and keep them looking for new ship chunks and technologies as they continue seeking out lifeboat signals. The second is to place one of those signals either on or beneath the floating island, given the broad usefulness of blueprints like the multipurpose room and garden plots that can be found there. Perhaps one or both of these ideas are already in there, in which case, this idiot missed whatever clues were there. Consider there will be more idiots and take us into account.
4. Item descriptions - It was only very recently that I found out carrying more than one oxygen tank was a useful thing to do! I still don't know what the difference is between the two oxygen tank upgrades, except that one gives more O2 than the other. Same goes for the heated knife vs. diamond knife. Which is better? These are questions I'm sure I will have the answer to as soon as I check the wiki, but that information should ideally be available in game.
5. Food and water - Because I spent so long without even knowing that garden plots exist (let alone the magic of filtration machines!), I had to go on a lot of fishing and salt-finding trips to keep my base stocked with salted food and decontaminated water. Had I known about the floating island, there would have been about a tenth of the work I did to fill my lockers with salted peepers, but as the game stands there's a chance of more people like me thinking Subnautica is a lot grindier than it actually is. Even now that I have garden plots and filtration machines, I still find the thirst and hunger meters drop a bit too fast.
6. Power - For the amount of work one must do to build and power a nuclear generator, their output and running time are rather sad. I quickly decommissioned mine in favour of more geothermal and solar power.
I think that's about it. Please don't take this wall o' complaints as me not enjoying the game. I wouldn't have gone to this amount of trouble if I hadn't had an excellent time playing it. Now I'm off to read up on the things I missed and different survival knives.
Comments
I dunno how much of this as changed since you started playing, personally I only got the game after the Precursors update, but I was made aware of blueprints scanning very early by stumbling on Powerglide parts. So I knew about needing the scanner early on. I know of at least two crashed lifeboats that are also right near chunks of the Aurora and scannable parts.
I don't think your suggestions would hurt the game however.
More descriptions in general is always good, but what we have right now was enough for me. I'm used to survival games though, so maybe the point of view of someone new to the genre would help.
Would be nice to be pointed toward the floating island, you can definitely completely miss it. My suggestion about that would be to find an approximate map of the area in the lifeboat, the systems could have started mapping before shutting down, giving us an idea of what is around. I would appreciate more functionality added to the lifeboat in general, but that's just me.
Having to fish constantly definitely got on my nerves, more so because I always try to play as a vegetarian, but also just because it was so time consuming. I also found the hunger and thirst rates too fast, but I also want the whole day/night cycle to be slower. As of now it makes sense if we consider the time pass faster ingame than in real life.
Didn't even try the nuclear reactor because I want to have the greeniest base possible. A mini nuclear plant should run a very long time, or at least have a huge output. But maybe it's about game balance VS realism ... ah well
1-3: Scanning stuff seemed to come pretty naturally to me, because I tried to scan everything. However, all I got from early scans was a PDA entry, which is 'just' lore... I didn't expect to get useful things from it because new blueprints were already unlocked by picking up things like the kelp seeds. IMO the importance of the scanner definitely needs to be pointed out more explicitly, even if its just in text.
4: I was over 20 hours in before I heard on a Let's Play that oxygen tanks stacked.
5: A lot of this would be solved by getting the Multipurpose room unlocked sooner/easier.
6: I get that the game is all about Violence & Non-Renewables Bad... but honestly, a Nuclear reactor's fuel rods don't run out in 10 days (closer to 4-6 years).
These aren't particularly 'complaints', just observations which might improve the game experience for other new players.
I'm sure you know all of that ▲ by now, but there it is.
QFT
Or just make the nuclear reactor a "quantum" nuclear reactor, and make the energy it generates only usable by certain devices.
So, I guess I wish that had been more obvious, too.
All in all, that's pretty good for a sandboxy craft-'em-up in early access. Kudos to the designers for making one where checking the wiki constantly isn't mandatory.