The difficulty and replay value of Subnautica.
SushiDiver500
Join Date: 2016-05-28 Member: 217686Members
Join Date: 2016-05-28 Member: 217686Members
Earlier i posted a discussion about making the game more difficult, many people disagreed, some people agreed.
(If you're here just to complain, shut your stupid mouth, and tell why you dont think the game should be harder instead)
Also this game lacks most modules for replay value, how could that be improved? What could help?
(No complaining about the game, awesome and kind devs!❤❤❤)
So lets start with difficulty:
1. Subnautica is a very pretty game, and some people probably just want to explore, and relax.
Others, like me, prefer a challenging game expirience. And I never really felt like subnautica had too much to offer around this place.
The game is very easy if you ask me, and you can unlock all blueprints and build a mansion of a base in a single afternoon.
Stuff that would make the game hardere could be: Rarer materials, smarter creatures, weaker cyclops.Etc.
The games replay value is at the ocean bottom (down in the void outside the map) and if this doesnt get fixed subnautica will be utterly broken beyond repair, what could help this? Figure it would make an interesting discussion.
Love, SushiDiver500
(If you're here just to complain, shut your stupid mouth, and tell why you dont think the game should be harder instead)
Also this game lacks most modules for replay value, how could that be improved? What could help?
(No complaining about the game, awesome and kind devs!❤❤❤)
So lets start with difficulty:
1. Subnautica is a very pretty game, and some people probably just want to explore, and relax.
Others, like me, prefer a challenging game expirience. And I never really felt like subnautica had too much to offer around this place.
The game is very easy if you ask me, and you can unlock all blueprints and build a mansion of a base in a single afternoon.
Stuff that would make the game hardere could be: Rarer materials, smarter creatures, weaker cyclops.Etc.
The games replay value is at the ocean bottom (down in the void outside the map) and if this doesnt get fixed subnautica will be utterly broken beyond repair, what could help this? Figure it would make an interesting discussion.
Love, SushiDiver500
Comments
Besides, I have no doubt there will be oodles of mods for Subnautica (guessing there already are), allowing for various gameplay. The devs have a vision, and build the game to be played as they intend it to be (to a degree). Beyond that, it's a sandbox.
So, to give my REASON: the game is just fine, and fun, as it is. What more explanation does one need? The counter argument is: "I want the game to be harder, so it's more fun." *shrug*
We might as well discuss why we prefer certain toppings on our pizza.
Well those people aren't welcome, Dude. They're just not welcome!
This is a respectable forum for respectable people who want to have a respectable discussion!
This is not freaking Reddit, where the peasants roam with their upvotes and downvotes and childish crap!
They're designed in a very specific way, with very little random elements. They are essentially a static sandbox which has to behave in one, specific way otherwise it becomes completely ineffective.
There is no solution. Even if you made the game super hard, and made surviving almost impossible, once you know HOW to do it, you can do it every single time you play.
A leads to B leads to C and you can survive, no matter how hard those steps are.
And that is elitists yo, they are hiding behind buttons, not posting, basically just hangin' around. Sooooooo, what exactly is the issue of them being on these here forums, we hardly see them and as I said, sometimes they do have a core truth behind them when you have a post with 20+ disagrees
Also let's not spoil this thread ey, apparently we need to "shut our stupid mouth"
Like I mentioned in the other thread
- Adding to the difficulty and ramping it up gradually
- We do have to have a look at the unlimited resource generation and how easy it is to get to that point
- Tier based area denial is already on point and can be easilly and greatly expanded upon
- Option to customise the damage/hunger issues for hardcore mode
- Hardcore mode is not really hardcore, just because it has one life and no warning VOX...
For replay value
- More scripted events based on your tier or what you have done (triggers Terraria style)
- Semi random generation of cave systems, with rewards/rare creatures? (surely that could be possible with prefabs, I hope)
> I do believe this is actually going to be the natural progression of Subnautica's development to some extent anyways...
It would be a start if Subnautica would stop having an identity crisis and decide what it wants to be:
A survival game with a story.
Or an exploration game with survival elements for giggles.
So far it's the latter. And I don't think that's a good direction considering so far the story is kinda eh. It certainly isn't driven by the story like that of TWD or Journey. So it can't rely on that. What it needs is balanced gameplay to complement this game. So far the game is not balanced. It feels VERY automated by late game. Like the game plays for you while you look at stuff and complete the story, avoiding the occasional nearby shark or Reaper.
There are a few things that can change this:
- Making Warpers a bigger threat that will actively hunt you down as you progress... Instead of just regular fish with tele powers.
- Getting rid of the damn Med Kit Fabricator.
- Force players to take care of trees to an extent, or at least plant them near fresh water access with sunlight. That means you cannot take them on the Sub.
- Implement damage to Sub by Leviathans ASAP. We have to see how well this feature needs to be balanced out.
These four things will add more central conflict and make the game feel less automated.
If the game is too easy for you, why not come up with your own ways of making it more difficult? Three heart runs in Zelda, One tank runs in Metroid, and nuzlocke runs in Pokemon all arose due to players much like yourselves.
Devs seem more focused on adding content to the game than balancing difficulty at the moment and if that's the case I agree with them. What's the point of balancing out energy usage to be in perfect balance when Ion batteries and power cells are going to be added later? What's the point in balancing out hunger and thirst when there's going to be new mechanics that interact with them later? What's the point balancing out how much damage creatures do and take when new ones are going to be added later, etc? You'll just have to redo all of that work fine tuning things because a recent update added space apples or coffee, every single time something new is added.
Energy and batteries are a prime example right now. There's not much point in trying to make their management more difficult because wrecks have a tendency to spawn multiple laser cutter doors on top of each other last I checked. This is obviously a bug and getting batteries to a point of perfect balance is kinda pointless when they're going to get a buff when its fixed later on.
I'm not worried about difficulty at the moment. Just get the game done and fix bugs/performance first, please.
That all said I don't mean to sound like I'm raining on your parade if you want to brainstorm changes to the game to affect difficulty and make it more fun for you, tone is hard to get across sometimes. I just don't see the need for the devs to be concerned with it yet. From what I hear some people over on Xbox can't even load saved games currently.
I agree about the Warper needing to be more deadly. It is a hunter-killer unit, after all. Just make it dumb, like most automated machines that deal with nuisance creatures mostly would be (it was designed to take out Carar infected fish, and unless something large gets infected and requires multiple units to respond, it shouldn't be too hard to distract it by swimming away, at least until the player is fully infected and seen as a high priority target for them).
@SushiDiver500 - if people are getting snarky in your thread, you can always ask them to tone it down, and if they don't, you can always page @ Foxy and request moderation, especially if they're being rude.
See here:
https://unknownworlds.com/subnautica/community/
You should know better than using the "don't like, don't use" argument.
"Don't like the balance of the Cyclops? DON'T USE!" Because it totally isn't the Devs JOB to make a competent game right? @pie1055
Also, "The game isn't multiplayer so you don't have to worry about balance" you don't seem aware about how balancing works.
The Forest would be no fun if the cannibals NEVER attacked you except once or twice. It would be frustrating if the cannibals attacked you ALL THE TIME RELENTLESSLY! Balance needs to be kept.
It's great for what it is. I wouldn't expect it to be something it isn't.
And yet when criticism comes its way:
"It's Early Access"
When praise comes:
"The game is perfect the way it is!"
Is "Well jeeze, bro, I like the game the way it's heading" really that odd a concept to wrap your head around? Like, some people might have different ideas and desires for the game, and maybe some people aren't looking for the same thing you think Subnautica should be?
So why is it masqurading as a survival game if that isn't the direction it wants to go?
It certainly has survival elements in it. It's gameplay has it. But apparently we can't balance the survival because "that isn't what the game is supposed to be" even though all evidence points to the contrary.
My goodness, it says right in the description of the game that it is about survival. So the Devs need to just remove food and water or survival elements all together and stop pretending to be one, or it needs to shapen up and give itself a competent gameplay mechanic and not a half-finished one.
That would be awful.
Balance is about trial and error. You really think it's a good idea to wait until the game is launched to balance a core mechanic of the game?
Oh gosh and golly gee how dare a game that says right on the front page that it is in development have something that's in-progress? How were we, the players, supposed to know that a game that discloses itself as being in Early Access is in development and is subject to change?
Sheesh, man, you got stock invested in this game or something? I can appreciate a few criticisms and critiques tossed at a game, but you've entered into some sort of obsessive fervor over this game.
Having your say about what you would like is one thing, but at this point, you seem to just want to argue with folks on the forum. I would grant you that forums are for discussion, but nobody really seems to want to have a healthy debate with you. Perhaps move on? *shrug*
Of course some sliders would be an easy solution for eveybody.
So... people who like the way it is should be deprived of half the gameplay because you think that portion should only be if it's all of the game? It's okay that you have very strict ideas of what a survival game may and may not be, but for some of us (ie, me) SN is just the kind of formula that makes survival games attractive. It's not wrong for SN to try something a little fresh and find itself appealing for different reasons and/or to a different audience.
Considering the launch is supposed to be May 2017, I'd say there is reason for concern.
Gee golly gosh, a legitimate criticism. Better whip out my "early access" argument and call it a day!
It SUPPOSED to have a difficulty gap?
It's SUPPOSED to be difficult the first half and easy the second?
What? There's nothing to say here: do you understand how games work?
This isn't a feature or freshness. This is incompetence.
"We shouldn't have survival elements because that'd make it a survival game."
That's the whole point. This game isnt a unique survival game. It's a bad survival game. It's difficult the first couple hours, then you can practically speed run it through. Areas that should take an hour or two to explore fully takes less than ten minutes. Creatures cannot touch your tech and you're rarely forced outside them in any situation.
This game has no identity. It doesn't know what it want's to be.
It has survival elements, so that tells me the gameplay is meant to be survival oriented. Big woop it has a story. How is that an argument against having an actual good survival game? It's not. It's a cop out to ignore the glaring issue.
The game already stands out on its own right. It's already clear. So what do you fear losing by adding on the the survival game play THAT IS ALREADY IN THE GAME?
I ask for creatures to still be able to stand a threat to you despite advancements in technology. Is that really too much to ask for from this community though?
He's right, you know. If UW intend the game to be a survival game, then it's a long way off from that. If they intend it to be a walking simulator, then why sell it as a survival game? Right now, it's trying to be both, so it's succeeding at neither. I think some additional mode choices (e.g. a challenging difficulty and a suicidal difficulty) would solve the problem neatly by giving survival people options that suit them, without breaking the fun for anyone who wants the game to feel like it does now. Regardless of what happens, 1.0 is approaching day by day, and balancing requires iteration, so hopefully we'll start seeing work on balancing sooner rather than later.
Right. I won't be the first to tell you that you are being unpleasant. Instead of doing all this e-yelling and leaving negative reviews on Steam, you can also pick up my question from the other thread to explain what exactly you are yelling about because I can't make head nor tail of what your stance is. Like, this is the first time I see you explicitly address the difficulty gap of SN, which I don't disagree with you on, but am confused you bring it up in response to something of mine that isn't about the difficulty gap at all but rather genre policing/gatekeeping.
Well, geez, if I were looking for an exploration game, found SN marketed as only that, and then discovered I'd have to dodge angry fishes, manage food & water & air, and would be halted in my progress by stuff I need to find >somewhere< on the map, I'd be peeved. And the suggestion a game can't be two genres is preposterous; action-adventure games are literally that! Part action, part adventure. They generally don't have the story power of full adventure games or the skill challenge of true action games, but they manage to strike a nice balance between the two. Purists are free to dislike, but fact is there's a huge market for those games.
You and RB are doing this thing where you treat survival games as more worthy than exploration games. It's annoying, to say the least.
To address the OP directly - put quite simply, I am happy with where Subnautica falls on the spectrum between survival and exploration. I don't think it needs to be harder because different games will inevitably fall on different sides of the survival/exploration gradient and Subnautica happens to fall closer to the exploration end, but with a few survival elements thrown in. I frankly don't care for more dangerous monsters or more punishing food/water experiences - if anything, I would rather have more building options, more resource types and more customization eg paintjobs for buildings. I've always played in Survival and always will, because I do like that little sense of tension in my gaming experience, but to say that I particularly want it any harder... really not.
I want... more types of buildings. Larger alien containments. Teleportation. Electronics! I want more underwater caverns, and more secrets to discover, and more treasures to plunder. More keys and mysteries and puzzles to solve. And all that doesn't have to be difficult survival-wise to be engaging. The fact that it also has a storyline, and survival elements, doesn't mean they have to become the focus of the game entirely and overbearingly. I am quite happy with where they are. The 30 seconds warning when you're running out of air, that rush of fear when you get turned around and can't find the exit to that wreck you're in, the mad scramble to find your Seamoth beacon when you can barely tell which way is up -- that's plenty enough survival excitement! While it is true that death carries very little penalty - it doesn't need to. Humans instinctually avoid death and the mere threat of it is enough to cause tension in the scene.
For a game that is retailing at ~$10 USD I have already sunk well over 50 hours into it - and plan to do more, which is more than I can say for several AAA games going for 5-6x that price. That's for a single playthrough. I plan to do it once more on full release. And then I would put it down and likely never play it again. And that's FINE! 100+ hours of entertainment for $10? How is that remotely insufficient for anyone? Are you that entitled that you expect infinite replay value out of $10? I'm not saying it's a bad thing - I'm also saying you shouldn't expect it.
Not all games need replayability to be good games. There are many adventure games like Curse of Monkey Island or Myst that also have zero replayability, yet no one would call them bad. Subnautica is an interesting and unique hybrid of exploration/survival/adventure and I would rather they spend developer time polishing up the actual gamebreaking bugs than attempting to implement further difficulty levels or replayability at this point.
The only thing that would improve replay value for me would be randomized terrain generation, but I quite frankly don't expect that to be possible here. Do remember how much you are spending here. In the end it all comes down to money and if and when Subnautica 2 comes out, with randomized terrain and multiplayer, then I will gladly put down even more money for that experience.
We want Subnautica to pick it's damn poison. I could care less if it were survival. Maybe it would be a good thing if it weren't. Who knows: the team is trying to be an exploration-adventure-survival with the survival element kinda just half put in. I want them to finish what they gol dang started, it has nothing to do with genre elitism.
Simply because people disagree with an unpopular opinion doesn't make me a troll nor does it make me dense. How can I take anything you say seriously if you're openly willing to say something so fallacious and moronic?
On the note of survival games; the goal is to make it a good survival game if you're going to put gameplay elements of survival in it. I'm not necessarily looking to make it hard. I'm looking for it to be consistent.
And I don't agree with your idea of replay value and price. The Forest has far more replay value than Subnautica, looks great, and the survival is excellent because as you progress further along the cannibals become more violent... and it's cheaper. So I dont buy the "they can only do so much" argument when all I'm asking for is a bit of consistency and balance.
The survival elements are already there. They just need to be consistant.
When I say difficulty, I don't mean make the game harder.
I want the game to remain consistant. I want late game to be just as dangerous as early game if not moreso, Cyclops and technology be damned.
Ok, please don't yell at me. This is an internet discussion forum, let's keep this civil. (even though internet discussion forums are likely the most hate / rage - infested place known to mankind)
I agree, the game does get easier as you go along. And again, I agree it gets a bit boring as you fill your large lockers with loads and loads of gold and diamonds. But - the reason the game seems harder at the start is because you don't really have any time to build a seabase, or color your cyclops, or do any other kind of leisure activities. It's just flat out survival. Most open world games start this way.
For example:
What I'm trying to say is, when you start a game, any game, you really only have one real path to progress down. As the game progresses, and you play more hours into it, you get new opportunities for things to do.
WAYS TO CURE BOREDOM IN SUBNAUTICA
He's baaaaAAAAAaaaack.