Stop adding new features that are indistinguishable from trolling
WarpZone32
Join Date: 2016-12-13 Member: 224911Members
Join Date: 2016-12-13 Member: 224911Members
Ladies and gentlemen, Unknown World's finest update yet!
Now if you go down to the bottom of the ocean, your underwater diving/crafting/survival/exploration game becomes a low-quality indie horror game with the cheapest, lamest, least-earned jumpscares this side of whatever the latest Slender game is on mobile.
How is this supposed to add to the game, Unknown Worlds? Every underwater game doesn't have to be SOMA. And even if I were to accept that that were a legitimate artistic direction for this product, because brain infection or whatever, you've botched the execution of this horror angle so badly that it's comical and annoying instead of actually scary. I have never seen a player not look confused rather than frightened when they swim outside their ship and discover... nothing. Then a couple of minutes later, the youtube quality catscares start. Yeah. That's a good way to get people to quit your game. Do you track metrics for when people open the audio menu and mute the sound? Hmmm? Because I'll bet the numbers on that spike right about the time you choose to deafen your paying players for the crime of using headphones. You added content to your game that people literally used to troll each other with back in the 90s. I suppose eventually we'll get a full-screen pop-up picture of a pale face with pupilless white eyes or something. You open one of your sea lockers and a skeleton pops out.
Why? Why do you keep constantly adding features that induce mood-whiplash with each new update? WHY!?
I don't know what's worse at this point. The bugs you keep not fixing, or the new features you keep adding that make the game much worse than the game I originally paid for.
Jumpscares: Bad idea. Poorly implemented. Waste of time. Why are you spending man-hours adding features nobody asked for instead of fixing game-breaking bugs? The core gameplay and artistic direction of Subnautica at this point are about as coherent as the Trump administration's foreign policy. Every time you update the game, you make it worse. More annoying. More confusing. Less fun. More dumb. Less of a game. More of a chore. Less replayable. Forcing us all to start over. Stop. Making. Your game. Worse.
I don't think you even know what Subnautica is supposed to be anymore. You're just adding memes for the hell of it now. When does it stop? What's the point?
Pick a theme. And commit to it. You hacks.
Now if you go down to the bottom of the ocean, your underwater diving/crafting/survival/exploration game becomes a low-quality indie horror game with the cheapest, lamest, least-earned jumpscares this side of whatever the latest Slender game is on mobile.
How is this supposed to add to the game, Unknown Worlds? Every underwater game doesn't have to be SOMA. And even if I were to accept that that were a legitimate artistic direction for this product, because brain infection or whatever, you've botched the execution of this horror angle so badly that it's comical and annoying instead of actually scary. I have never seen a player not look confused rather than frightened when they swim outside their ship and discover... nothing. Then a couple of minutes later, the youtube quality catscares start. Yeah. That's a good way to get people to quit your game. Do you track metrics for when people open the audio menu and mute the sound? Hmmm? Because I'll bet the numbers on that spike right about the time you choose to deafen your paying players for the crime of using headphones. You added content to your game that people literally used to troll each other with back in the 90s. I suppose eventually we'll get a full-screen pop-up picture of a pale face with pupilless white eyes or something. You open one of your sea lockers and a skeleton pops out.
Why? Why do you keep constantly adding features that induce mood-whiplash with each new update? WHY!?
I don't know what's worse at this point. The bugs you keep not fixing, or the new features you keep adding that make the game much worse than the game I originally paid for.
Jumpscares: Bad idea. Poorly implemented. Waste of time. Why are you spending man-hours adding features nobody asked for instead of fixing game-breaking bugs? The core gameplay and artistic direction of Subnautica at this point are about as coherent as the Trump administration's foreign policy. Every time you update the game, you make it worse. More annoying. More confusing. Less fun. More dumb. Less of a game. More of a chore. Less replayable. Forcing us all to start over. Stop. Making. Your game. Worse.
I don't think you even know what Subnautica is supposed to be anymore. You're just adding memes for the hell of it now. When does it stop? What's the point?
Pick a theme. And commit to it. You hacks.
Comments
UWE has every right to add the features they're adding. Why? Because it's their damn game. If they want to add a couple jumpscares, that's fine. We don't have to agree with every little thing they do. This isn't design by committee. They're telling the story they want to tell the way they want to tell it. That's not going to agree with everybody. There are going to be narrative points and design decisions that not everybody's in love with. If this seems familiar, there's a reason for it: that's been the case in every single game back to the dawn of gaming.
There's nothing in any game that everybody loves. Same goes with every book written and film shot. Is that a crime? Is it trolling? No. It's creative choice. Hell, I don't agree with a bunch of their decisions. Precursors? Not a fan, at all. It's a tired angle. But it's their choice. I don't have to like it. I don't even have to respect it. It's part of the game. So I can either get over it or put the game aside.
Ever since the whole Mass Effect 3 ending kerfuffle happened, the gaming community seems to widely believe that now everybody gets a say in development. No, no they don't. Nothing would ever get finished. We're not going to agree with everything. It's that simple. CoD's single player campaigns are going to continue being too short. Bioshock, if not allowed to just die a natural death, will continue to be derivative with mechanics that no longer apply. It's the nature of the beast.
Yep, you paid money for Subnautica. So did I. So did, theoretically, everybody else on the forums. And when we did, we had to acknowledge the great big warning they put on the tin: This is a game in progress and will change. Not all change is for the better by some standards, while by others it's perfect. There are no right answers and no wrong answers when it comes to crafting a story.
Oh, and while we're on the subject, calling UWE "hacks" is incredibly inappropriate. If everyone who writes something you don't personally like is a hack, then you have a dangerously narrow view of the world. Plus, condemning them as hacks over the unbelievably minor transgression of adding some jumpscares is ridiculous; you're invalidating everything else they did because you don't like something they've done now. That's being a turncoat of Benedict Arnold level.
The bugs are being worked on. Go check Trello and see for yourself. Bugfixes take time. It's not like erasing a stray pencil mark - you need to make sure your fix isn't breaking something else. And bugfixing before the entire program is assembled is an enormous pain.
In short, calm down. A lot. If you want to have a reasonable discussion over a design choice, to roll it around the community and let others weigh in - like we do every day on the forum - great. But if all you want to do is scream and rant about something that doesn't fit into your little box of "good gaming," go do it on Facebook where that kind of tantrum belongs.
Poorly-done, badly-timed, thematically inappropriate horror game cat-scare noise. Again, people couldn't seem to tell whether this was a bug or a feature. Here's an idea; If you can't tell the difference, maybe don't put it into the game!
And the reason I'm so mad is because this was the last straw. I'm sick and tired of this abusive relationship. Unknown Worlds has no respect for its players. None. Zero. I tried. I tried so hard to believe that they were actually going to fix things. That they had a plan. That the game would eventually stop getting worse and worse with every update and eventually start getting better. But every single time I give them a second chance, Unknown Worlds Pisses In My Ocean yet again.
They don't care. They have never cared. About me or about you. I'm sick of trying to help them right this sinking ship of a game. They don't care.
And scifiwriterguy, stop making apologizes for the huge corporation here. Unknown Worlds doesn't need your defense. It already has your money.
I toned down the caps. We can agree to disagree on a lot of things in my post, but you're objectively right about the caps. I was angry. This is all coming from a very dark place. I originally bought this game to try and relax, and it's brought me nothing but seven flavors of grief over the years. I'd love to finish it so I could get some closure, but I can't even make it to the end of whatever the current content is because it keeps crashing.
It's not just about the game, though. It's also about the complete erosion of trust. Back in the Natural Selection 1 days, Unknown Worlds was amazing. What happened to them? I ask myself that every time NS gets worse.
"It's their game" is a straw man argument. I never said it was illegal or morally wrong for them to put jumpscares into the game. I said these jumpscares are poorly done and thematically inappropriate.
And funny that you should mention "Design by committee." Features shoehorned in even if they have nothing to do with the rest of the game, art direction that's all over the place, buggy releases nobody ever bothers to fix... read your game dev diaries. Read your Tales from the Trenches. This is exactly what a designed-by-committee game looks like. It's just the committee in question is convened around a table in Unknown Worlds's office, not on its forums.
Click on the first video link I posted, way up in the first post. That is the most hyperbolic example I could find of a horror element snuck into a game that, on its surface, is not marketed to make you think it's about horror. That's the trolling Unknown Worlds did here. And the worst part is they didn't even do it well.
Again, you're strawmanning. Of course, they can put whatever they want to into the game. I never said they couldn't. I said what they did choose to put in their game is poorly executed and pointless. Just like they have the right to put whatever they want into their game, I have the right to express a critical opinion. (And yes, before you even go there, they also have the right to deny me a platform for that opinion. I'm not gonna censor myself out of fear of being censored by the people I'm trying to help.)
Mass Effect 3's ending sparked controversy because it flew in the face of the core fundamentals of the series up 'till that point. (Read: Sci-Fi adventure with just enough branching dialogue complexity to make it seem like your choices mattered.) CoD's short campaigns aren't as big of a deal because the people who keep buying CoD are doing it for the multiplayer. Bioshock is doing its own weird thing since Infinite, half clinging to the artifice of Bioshock 1 and 2, half trying to take it in a new direction. I kinda think it's too much of an outlier to apply here, but I will say that it's hardly a proper sequel to System Shock. (Fortunately, those are probably on the way, now that those remakes are coming out. But I digress.)
There is no such thing as a wrong story. There is however, such a thing as a poorly-told story. Horror beats that aren't scary. Jokes that aren't funny. Surprises that everyone saw coming. Metaphors that don't parse. References that don't land. Symbolism that gets misunderstood. Peppering jumpscares randomly into my late game is not good storytelling.
That's one level. The other level is how they keep changing the theme and tone (and thus, the emotional purpose) of the whole game every time they do an update. I don't even recognize the franchise at this point. I just called it a franchise without thinking about it, even though the series is less than one game long. That's how much it's changed over the years. It's the beta that plays like a mismanaged franchise!
Are you defending a cornfield from crows, or something? I ask because you keep making all these straw men. People who perform their craft poorly or cynically are hacks. I used the term correctly. You can argue that it's an emotionally loaded term. You can't argue that it's inappropriate. The whole reason the phrase exists is to allow someone like me to express contempt for the bad decisions made by people like them. They'll prove me wrong when the horror in the game works.
False. I want them to return to form. They used to be the best. What happened to them?
What does that even mean? They're a corporation. I'm a consumer. I don't owe them any loyalty. Neither do you. Why are you debasing yourself like this? You're not their lapdog. Have a little self-respect. You don't owe them anything. They already have your money. If anything, they owe you.
Doesn't change the fact that every man-hour spent adding features instead of fixing bugs makes the problem worse, not better.
Like you said, it's not design by committee. It's my opinion. I'm not going to ask the community, "Hey, what do you guys think my opinion should be? Is this game an 9 out of 10 or a 10 out of 10?"
I've tried being nice, I've tried being patient, I've tried constructive criticism... I even fanboyed it up with that Salvage Wars thread. Frankly, nothing ever works. It's gotten to the point where it makes me mad just thinking about it. The overwhelming feeling of betrayal. Of loss. Unknown Worlds built up a reserve of goodwill when they built and maintained Natural Selection 1 way back in the Half-Life 1 engine days. NS2 stumbled a little, but it was trying, dammit. Subnautica started out as a promising concept, but it's just been a torturous slow-motion train wreck ever since then. Now the mismatched, cynical design choices and devil-may-care attitude towards QA has been piling up for so long that the promising concept is no longer visible. It's buried beneath layers of caked-on emotional manipulation, fake difficulty, game-breaking bugs, and less severe immersion-breaking bugs, in-game references to NS as a game, ham-fisted callbacks to the Kharra trying to spin this as an NS prequel, and release notes that read like they're writing players a speeding ticket for being too good at the game.
It's an abusive relationship. There's no trust left. Unknown Worlds has screwed the pooch on this game so many times that I no longer expect anything different from them. But I'll be damned if I'm going to just roll over and take it.
Second time stamp: I have noticed that sometimes the game will start an ambiance soundtrack only to cut it off a few seconds later. While I haven't encountered anything quite as alarming as Markiplier, the brief bit you can hear sounds a lot like the ambiance you encounter the farther down you go.
Now in regards to the rest of your asinine post: How the F*** can you say they have been abusive or lack respect for their player base? Just look at their official Trello page or better yet the Bugfixing Trello where the are working of the game DAILY, it's as close to real time as you can get with watching the development process.
Let me also direct you to this UPDATE THAT CAME OUT ONLY A FEW DAYS AGO. UWE have been busting their A**ES off trying to get a GAME BREAKING bug fixed in a stable build on a console that has rabidly been waiting to dive in(
If you bought this game expecting Early Access to be smooth and polished, well consider this your wake up. And if this is some sort of over-reaction to the changes to the Cyclops: calm ya tets, they know and are addressing those concerns when the update to the stable build goes live.
I stand corrected. They didn't add new features that are indistinguishable from bugs. They added new bugs that are indistinguishable from features. That's almost as bad, in a way.
That aside, I probably got as mad as I did because this is what playing this game and being a fan of NS has been LIKE for me for the past two years. My level of trust for this company has gotten so low that I couldn't even give them the benefit of the doubt on a bug that other people pointed out was a bug. Instead, my brain was just like "God dammit, this is the First Diamond's audio cue all over again."
I'm just sick of something so promising and beautiful, getting darker, and darker, and darker, until we all drown.
It hurts to play.
Actually, it's not a straw man. The "straw man argument" concept involves replacing the original point of contention with a different one, then logically defeating the new argument, not the actual point of disagreement. "It's their game" is a defense; it's a direct rebuttal of the argument that their recent choices in storytelling are in some way incorrect.
If UWE were a AAA design house with millions in the budget and hundreds of employees, you'd be absolutely correct. But the troubles of Subnautica are, in this case, symptoms of a different ailment: a large project being built on a small group with very limited resources. Everybody has to wear several hats. The problems aren't a case of too many focus groups with conflicting opinions, they're the ordinary teething troubles a game has as it wends its way through the development process.
Yes, you do have that right. And if you look carefully, I never said you were in the wrong for calling UWE out on their choice, or even that the storytelling devices they used were totally justified; I took issue with how far you took it. Calling them hacks and running their work into the ground was uncalled-for. Take issue with the actual problem, by all means. But don't burn down the house because you don't like the kitchen table. I'm not a fan of all their choices, either. The whole Precursor thing struck me as fairly lazy storytelling, a deus ex machina dressed up as an alien. But since the story isn't even finished yet, I have to give them the benefit of the doubt. The third act is still being written.
No, it's not. Jumpscares are for suspense what the throwaway joke is for comedy. It's a quick, cheap tool used to keep the audience in the correct frame of mind. When a joke falls flat, we still recognize it as an attempt at humor, so we keep looking at the work in that light. When we hit a jumpscare, sure, it's a cheap shot, but it keeps us uneasy - as it's meant to. High storytelling? Absolutely not. But not without its uses.
That's the crux of the issue right there, and one I've been fighting with, too. The problem is that when we were introduced to the game, it was just an open playground. Almost no narrative whatsoever. Just a guy in the ocean trying to survive. Minecraft with much better graphics and stuck in the ocean. I loved that about Subnautica.
Now they're adding story to the empty world they'd created. They can't return to form because there was no form. They'd created a blank canvas of a world; now they're painting the picture. In doing so, it's going to take away from that relaxing sandbox experience because all storytelling is about conflict. Before, the conflict was simple: avoid things that kill you. Now there's a larger story, with greater conflict to it, and that changes the whole feel of the world. It's the same problem that Microsoft created when they did the whole "Minecraft: Story Mode" thing. It's a departure from the fundamental ethos of the world to date, and that didn't sit well with a lot of people. The difference is that MS released that as a separate game because Minecraft was already finished. In our case here, the game is unfinished.
In a traditional development cycle, this problem could never have happened for one simple reason: nobody would've ever seen the game in its prior state. There would be no dissent because there'd be nothing to compare. But because of the whole Early Access system, it puts people into the game world before it's reached its final state. Don't misunderstand; done right, Early Access is a great tool for developers and a boon for gamers. But we need to remember that the game is still under development, no matter how good it looks. And development inherently means additions and changes which will alter the feel and play.
Defending artists and their choices is neither debasement nor the actions of a lapdog. I don't owe them anything, that's true. But I also don't have to stand by when someone launches what I feel are unfair attacks, and it's happening more and more across every medium. It's not about whose argument is right - often, the complaints are spot on and completely valid - but they almost all miss the core of what creativity means. "Midichlorians suck!" Yes, they do. "Kirk is supposed to be more take-charge and impulsive!" Yes, he is. And I agree that midichlorians were the dumbest thing to ever happen to Star Wars while believing that Pine's Kirk is a better portrayal of a character than Shatner's. Agree or disagree with the complaint doesn't matter, though. I'm no more going to tell those people how to write their stories than I'd want anyone to dictate mine. We can disagree like civil people, but when we stoop to just throwing insults, neither side is going to listen.
Not saying you should. You clearly feel strongly about this and that needs to be redressed. You have options. Write them a direct letter of complaint that the developers will actually read. Petition for a refund. Delete the game in protest - which is a pointless gesture that doesn't do anything, granted, but it's still an option. But writing a letter or asking for a refund is productive. Going on a tirade in a forum accomplishes nothing. There's no end-goal. There won't be a massive uprising.
Look, I understand and, believe it or not, I empathize. And I get the need to vent. The sheer number of times I've paid for something that ended up letting me down to the point I was furious I was out money is proof. FTL made me want to put my fist through an iPad, and I paid nine bucks for that - which in App Store money is huge. I'm out over $40 apiece for a certain title on Steam that was just so bad and broken that it couldn't be played. Pissed as hell, no doubt. Should I have demanded a refund? Probably. I didn't; my choice. Maybe some day I'll reopen it to see if they repaired their problems. Maybe not. But I do know I'm not buying anything else from them, and that's the choice that makes a difference. I could've gone onto their forums and just screamed myself blue about how their game sucks, they suck, rahr rahr rahr, even giving good examples of why the game sucks, but it would've accomplished absolutely squat. The best case is one of the development team posts "ask for a refund," which I could've done on my own. We're fortunate the UWE listens to the community like they do, but people - all people - only listen when they feel the other person is being fair. Otherwise, most people do the same thing they do when they run into the guy screaming outside the Port Authority about how everything is a conspiracy: they just walk right by and don't pay any attention.
I also understand the rage that builds up when you feel you aren't being listened to. I think anyone who's ever done time in the corporate world knows that feeling. And I know all too well that sooner or later, enough pressure builds up that you just blow your stack.
No, I don't much like the direction Subnautica has taken as of late. I actually agree with a bunch of your core complaints. But the third act is still underway. I'm not going to start throwing stuff at the screen because the movie has done some things I wouldn't have if I were writing it. Let them finish. Let them wrap up the story, add the things they want to add, and then bugfix. They're going to do all three. We're still deep in the development cycle here, where weird stuff happens as a part of life. When the story's finished, then we can see what merit their choices along the way did or didn't have. Otherwise, we run into a situation where Empire Strikes Back is completely altered because someone at the midpoint says "Space slugs? Oh, come on." The movie turned it around. The UWE team is still writing the story.
The problem, our problem, is that we're used to how it was back when the world was still a blank canvas. Some of us, myself included, liked it blank. But that's never the way it was intended to stay.
Think you need this
the bumping on the side of the cyclops isn't supposed to be scary because its a fucking bug, and unintentional bug that is likely going to be fixed in the near feature
I'm not sure what that noise in markiplier's video was, but i think that it was some form of audio glitch relating to the music.
I get that you're not happy or satisfied with their game, but like others have pointed out, it's still in early access - the game IS NOT FINISHED YET, so there are still problems to fix and issues to address. Yeah, we paid money to play the game; but that basically makes us beta testers. It says when you start the game that it's in pre-release; when you first start playing from a savegame file it says "Press F8 to report bugs". Why are you so upset about bugs and problems; everyone we report helps to stamp out the problem for everyone.
Wasn't Natural Selection 1 just a Half-Life mod? It wasn't built from the ground-up as its own game. Just like Defense of the Ancients is arguably the grandfather of today's MOBAs, but DotA was originally a custom mod for Warcraft 3. You could then argue about how NS2 is vastly different from Subnautica, but therein lies the crux... it's nothing like Subnautica! Natural Selection is a first-person shooter with a real-time strategy twist, and NS2 built from their experience to make something good better.
For Subnautica they decided to go a completely different route and make a first-person survival game that takes place underwater. UWE hasn't done abything like this before (and let's be honest, neither has anyone else) so of course there will be glitches and problems - they're trying do make the best game possible. And considering the closest games on the market are "The Forest" or "Stranded Deep", I think they are doing a dang good job.
Well... since you brought politics into it...
At least UWE can run a functioning website that doesn't cater around a failed policy which hurts its consumers, and make promises that they never intend to be fulfilled.
#ShotsFired
So I'll just leave this here