Thoughts on higher difficulty levels and replay value
deepdiver1
US Join Date: 2017-04-20 Member: 229785Members
US Join Date: 2017-04-20 Member: 229785Members
Here are some thoughts on higher difficulty levels and increased replay value
1. Game is too easy now.
- Right now, the game is too easy. Once the map is known, its easy to get all resources to build everything, without having to build more than 2 or three small bases.
- The only things in short supply are silver and quartz
- Power is plentyful
- Growing food is practically free
- Oxygen essentially free
2. How to solve this:
- Create a need for resources, without increasing grind
- Increase the need for bases and certain new items, as resource sinks
3. How to increase the need to build bases
- Make base building useful/necessary in opening new areas/depths
3.1 To do this, use nitrogen/decompression system:
- staying at certain depths increases nitrogen over time
- rising with certain amounts of nitrogen will kill you quickly (damage)
- the only way to decompress is through a special decompression chamber
- this requires a powered base to which the decompression chamber is attached
- The decompression chamber should be gated so that getting the first one would be moderately difficult, e.g. by locating the blueprint in the Abandoned seabase in the Jelly Shroom cave.
- A late game upgrade to the Cyclops or the rebreather could eliminate the need to for the decompression chamber
- This in effect makes it necessary to build a base for each new level of depth in each region
- Also restrict growing sea flora to its proper depth; no more growing gel sacks in the shallows
3.2.Further increase the resource sink and base management aspect by making decompression use up base oxygen.
- Bring in base oxygen generation
(Although the company said they would avoid implementing oxygen generation because there were not enough sinks for it. With decompression, there would be.)
- Make decompression consume oxygen!
- Make oxygen tanks refill like batteries, recharged at base only.
- (The game until the first base is perfectly playable without additional tanks.)
- Oxygen generation for needs power.
3.3. Oxygen generation system:
- Use consumables, e.g. filters: salt + acid mushroon + fiber mesh
- Generate Oxygen either through electrolysis or through plants
- Electrolysis should need A LOT of power
- Electrolysis generates hydrogen, which can be used to create power but would need oxygen again, so requires building an above surface power station which then needs to be linked to bases
- balance so that rapid decompression needs a serious set-up
-- high oxygen consumption
-- high energy need
-- complex system
- Alternatively, generate oxygen through indoor plants
- indoor plants need special lamps, which requires power!
- oxygen tanks: refill, and also act as backup.
4. Enhance replayability with a randomized map
- with handcoded segments for main quest plugged in
- needs only smoothing of edges / transitions
5. Rewards from beacons (more resource sinks)
- Make in-game map become available by placing beacons in the world in connection with a special gps room or scanner room upgrade
- Add a GPS / wearable mapp app giving a minimap
--Add base interior map display whcih gives the updated map
6. Other ideas:
- Early game: more dangerous creatures
- Reef sharks in the "safe" shallows-- dorsal fin, enough said!
- Piranhas
- Add turtles to keep away piranhas; add turtle eggs and an early way to hatch them
- Add exhaustion -- need to sleep; can't swim forever.
-- This creates a use for a rubber boat in the early game
- Nutrient block fabricator
- More complex food needs
7. Many of these could be implemented as options through the start menu, or as modding options through a config file.
1. Game is too easy now.
- Right now, the game is too easy. Once the map is known, its easy to get all resources to build everything, without having to build more than 2 or three small bases.
- The only things in short supply are silver and quartz
- Power is plentyful
- Growing food is practically free
- Oxygen essentially free
2. How to solve this:
- Create a need for resources, without increasing grind
- Increase the need for bases and certain new items, as resource sinks
3. How to increase the need to build bases
- Make base building useful/necessary in opening new areas/depths
3.1 To do this, use nitrogen/decompression system:
- staying at certain depths increases nitrogen over time
- rising with certain amounts of nitrogen will kill you quickly (damage)
- the only way to decompress is through a special decompression chamber
- this requires a powered base to which the decompression chamber is attached
- The decompression chamber should be gated so that getting the first one would be moderately difficult, e.g. by locating the blueprint in the Abandoned seabase in the Jelly Shroom cave.
- A late game upgrade to the Cyclops or the rebreather could eliminate the need to for the decompression chamber
- This in effect makes it necessary to build a base for each new level of depth in each region
- Also restrict growing sea flora to its proper depth; no more growing gel sacks in the shallows
3.2.Further increase the resource sink and base management aspect by making decompression use up base oxygen.
- Bring in base oxygen generation
(Although the company said they would avoid implementing oxygen generation because there were not enough sinks for it. With decompression, there would be.)
- Make decompression consume oxygen!
- Make oxygen tanks refill like batteries, recharged at base only.
- (The game until the first base is perfectly playable without additional tanks.)
- Oxygen generation for needs power.
3.3. Oxygen generation system:
- Use consumables, e.g. filters: salt + acid mushroon + fiber mesh
- Generate Oxygen either through electrolysis or through plants
- Electrolysis should need A LOT of power
- Electrolysis generates hydrogen, which can be used to create power but would need oxygen again, so requires building an above surface power station which then needs to be linked to bases
- balance so that rapid decompression needs a serious set-up
-- high oxygen consumption
-- high energy need
-- complex system
- Alternatively, generate oxygen through indoor plants
- indoor plants need special lamps, which requires power!
- oxygen tanks: refill, and also act as backup.
4. Enhance replayability with a randomized map
- with handcoded segments for main quest plugged in
- needs only smoothing of edges / transitions
5. Rewards from beacons (more resource sinks)
- Make in-game map become available by placing beacons in the world in connection with a special gps room or scanner room upgrade
- Add a GPS / wearable mapp app giving a minimap
--Add base interior map display whcih gives the updated map
6. Other ideas:
- Early game: more dangerous creatures
- Reef sharks in the "safe" shallows-- dorsal fin, enough said!
- Piranhas
- Add turtles to keep away piranhas; add turtle eggs and an early way to hatch them
- Add exhaustion -- need to sleep; can't swim forever.
-- This creates a use for a rubber boat in the early game
- Nutrient block fabricator
- More complex food needs
7. Many of these could be implemented as options through the start menu, or as modding options through a config file.
Comments
It actually gives a use to base-building.
As a way of making the game harder but not requiring much programming, I think we should instead ask for very easy stuff. For example:
1. Increase resource requirements for everything in the game at higher difficulty levels.
2. Increase power requirements
3. Decrease power output from all the power generating buildings
4. Decrease food/water values of all foods
5. Increase attack damage for all fish
6. Increase collision damage from all fish
... etc.
These are all changes that can be made that require, I think, minimal programming and minimal testing.
Again, I think you ideas are great. I'd definitely like to see many of them added to the game. But I just don't see it happening because of the significant programming time required.
I understand; I think they already did some work on both nitrogen and oxygen generation. I hope they come back to it, perhaps as modding support.
The trick with just increasing resource requirements is to avoid grind.
I am totally for harder more dangerous creatures; in my game, I only saw a reaper once from afar. There should be more reapers, sharks, etc; reapers should attack bases -- base flooding, emergency scrambling, repairs, especially if oxygen was tight ...
The game has always been easy, apart from the very first time you play. That's unfortunately the curse of all survival games. It's unavoidable in this genre.
This is confusing. You want a need for resources, without grinding for resources? You want a need for more bases, as resources sinks? To fill resource sinks you have to grind, and to keep them full you have to continually grind. That's the very thing you said should be avoided. If you want more bases/more need for bases, you have to increase the grind for resources. It's inevitable.
You have to pick, because you can't have it both ways. Your two desires directly conflict with each other.
I do agree, however, that building serves very little purpose at the moment. The main reason you collect resources is for building, and the only reason you need to build is access to vehicles. Once you have that access, building serves no purpose. They put so much work into creating a building mechanic that (other than vehicle access) is essentially pointless.
Good ideas, and something that those of us who want a more "hardcore" survival experience would fully support. But, again, every single thing you describe means a LOT more grinding. Getting all the resources for multiple bases in each biome would be more grinding and mind numbing than anything I could imagine. I agree that building needs to be more useful, but simply making it mandatory and turning it into 90% of the game would be counter productive and a huge turn off. Decompression is something we've had discussions about before, but it comes down to the fact you need to grind more resources to build facilities, it's inevitable. Having a decompression facility in the Cyclops as you suggest would be fine, but it's just prolonging the same old problem: You build so you can have access to vehicles. Once you have that ability in your Cyclops, building once again becomes redundant. That's just prolonging/avoiding the problem, not solving it.
The rest of your post is much the same, so I won't continue quoting. Your version of the game would be way more fun for people like me, and I would support it entirely. But for the average player it would be far too boring. Everything you describe inevitably means a whole lot of grinding. So I say again, you have to pick, you simply can't have it both ways.
Yes please.
Lifepod mode: You can start in any of the abandoned lifepods, and you have to survive from there. Some, like number 7(bloodgrass) or 6(safe shallows), are easy, while numbers 4(crash zone) and 2(blood kelp) are harder. This would add the ability to make the start of the game easier/ harder.
Making all this optional would be the way to go, I think.
Right now, building a base with 1 foundation, 1 multi-room, one hatch, and bioreactor / thermal reactor takes about 15 titanium; which given its abundance makes it easy to built 10 bases in a few hours. I would not change those amounts. The fun should be in building the bases, figuring out how to get there safely with nitrogen , etc., then enjoying getting them running to produce oxygen, be ready as decompression stations etc.
I would make the cyclops decompression chamber a separate upgrade, a late game reward item, either before or after finishing the final quest, when you have practically explored and built a lot.
Instead of grinding 100 titanium to make 1 big base, you're grinding out 300 titanium to make 9 small bases. Why wouldn't a player just rush 1 big base, get a Cyclops and decompression chamber and never look back?
There are ways around this of course, for example say you have to gather the parts for the Cyclops and decompression chamber from lots of different biomes, right? So you have to build those smaller bases to go explore those areas.
Well then you just create resentment. I build these small bases everywhere so I could get this stuff, that's so annoying. It's cheap, artificial difficulty and artificially increasing the length of the game. And now I'm never going to use those bases again, they're a constant reminder of how the game wasted my time.
For me personally, building bases is the weakest part of the game and I don't really want to do any more of it, no matter how little resources you make it take.
Even the disgrace that was Fallout 4 you were at least building things that NPCs would inhabit, it felt useful and like a realistic thing your character might do.
In Subnautica you're just building ghost towns on the bottom of the ocean. It's depressing, lonely and the least fun part of the game. It's also completely unrealistic. One man wouldn't do this. He'd build a small habitat and live within his means. But that's just my take on it.
In fact, if this game had NPCs, other survivors, it would be so much better. You could use all those small bases as habitats for them, get them to live there, researching, resource collecting, just plain living. You don't resent having to build those little bases everywhere because you can find survivors and get them to inhabit them. They serve a long term purpose. I believe that's what the building is currently missing. Some sense of actual purpose, because no matter how you slice it, we're the only guy on the planet and it makes absolutely no sense for us to be building all this stuff.
I guess you are right that once a base has fulfilled its purpose to unlock a region, it's no longer really useful. But at least it advanced your game. Perhaps you would need it again when you go back for resource type x.
The cyclops is way cool -- who doesn't want to have a sub? -- but has the potential to break the game if not balanced right.
The point about spreading the bases out would be to have rewards from each base -- new region/depth becomes accessible. That way the associated resource gathering would hopefully not feel too grindy (shorter satisfaction loop, not like grinding to make 70 million credits for the next ship in Elite Dangerous ...)
Not really sure how difficult it would be, but it would certainly be worth it, and it's one decision by the devs that has never made sense to me. Being a lone survivor doesn't make much sense, and it makes the whole game feel very much like it was designed with multiplayer in mind. Multiplayer is the only thing that could possibly address the "emptiness" of the world as it's always been. It goes a long way to explain why people so often want multiplayer, because the game feels completely like it's been designed that way. Creating big empty bases like we do would make a lot more sense if there were multiple players to inhabit them.
Can you imagine playing The Forest on single player? How boring. But that's exactly what we're doing in Subnautica.
We know that multiplayer has never been the aim, and will never happen though, so it's quite perplexing. Personally I don't like multiplayer games and that's one reason I fell in love with Subnautica. A single player survival game like this really appealed to me. But over time it's become clear that this isn't really a very good single player experience. It's one more design decision you really have to question; Why didn't they design NPCs and more of "quest" system of gameplay? Go here, save person, develop settlement, create radio capabilities, find beacons, more survivors, story opens up from there etc. It's a natural progression, and that's why 99% of single player games in a similar genre follow some form of it. It works, it's always worked, and it will continue to work.
I don't know, and this has been off-topic, but yeah.
As for the multiple base system giving a shorter satisfaction loop, what you say does make a lot of sense. Lots of little gratifying steps would definitely work better as long as it was implemented well. (Unfortunately I don't have much confidence that it would be.)
That seems kinda silly to add a time-gate like that to the game.
It might be more realistic, but it certainly doesn't add any "FUN" factor.
Exactly. So because of strange design choices early on in development it's now stuck in a weird limbo, not really knowing what it wants to be. It feels like a multiplayer game, but it isn't. It's a single player game, but it doesn't quite feel like one, and it certainly hasn't been designed like one. And it's far too late to change anything. All you can do now is shrug.
Feels like a single-player game to me.
I already explained "what choices?!?" and they're glaringly obvious, and if you still disagree then that's fine, good for you. But personally I'd like more from 2017.
To put it really simply, there's a reason why single player sole-survivor games have never been popular, especially when compared to either single player games with NPCs or multiplayer games. Perhaps you, however, would be happy playing The Forest or 7 Days to Die on single player. Maybe you'd be fine playing Minecraft by yourself.
Surely you can understand that what's fun for you isn't fun for other people. There's a lot of people who really enjoy a realistic experience, more akin to a simulator than an adventure game. For a lot of people, realism = immersion = fun.
At one point in the development cycle, I think they experimented with completely random map generation. It sounds like they weren't happy with the results and chose to create instead a mostly fixed map. If they had been able to go with completely random terrain generation, I think that would have dramatically increased the replay-ability of the game. Currently, after a few times through, we know exactly where each life pod, large wreck, etc can be found. Can you imagine playing a game of Subnautica in which the location of everything was completely random? In theory... what if even the room layout of the Aurora were randomized? What if you had to explore around the Aurora just to find which part of the ship to enter?
If you look at the game 7 Days to Die, I think they feature two game modes:
1. Fixed map
2. Random gen map
I think it is the best of both worlds. For absolute brand new players, they can pick the fixed map and then refer to the quite extensive note on the internet describing where to find resources, etc. Then, at some point along the way, the more experienced player can graduate from the "fixed" map to the random gen map.
In a future expansion, it would be awesome if the developers provided support for a random gen map.
Don't folks usually go play other games when a particular one that they've tried doesn't cut it for them?
It's pretty obvious that the Dev's of this game have a set design-philosophy in their heads at this point.
I don't really see Them going in the direction you are suggesting.
That's not to say that some form of realism may not be added in the future, but it probably won't be in a manner that adds more of a time-gate to the players actions.
< shrug >
Also, you expressed your opinion and some of us replied with our thoughts.
And we did it without having to go into "attack mode" and be insulting toward you.
You on the other hand, started out by demeaning our comments because you apparently believe we are less informed than you are.
Perhaps in the future, you might try being a bit less pompously, conceited toward your fellow posters.
No. Especially not when it's an early access game that they've backed. I'm pretty tired of explaining this to people, but that's the whole purpose of early access; so the community can help direct the game the way they want it to go.
I don't think they will either, and I haven't for a very long time. As I've said before, time and time again, it's the idea of what could have been that hurts so much. We're still going to discuss it because it's important to know where things could have gone better, and because that's what forums are for. It's also important for any development team of any product to receive and understand criticism, so they know where they're faults are. That's the only way they can ever improve.
I once again have literally no idea what you're talking about. Nobody has insulted or attacked anybody.
You apparently do not realize it, but this came across as completely dismissive and insulting.
Insulting? I think you're too sensitive. If you're offended, too bad, so what?
Fine, how about in the future you stick to talking about the Topic at Hand, and not about Other Posters.
That way you won't have to worry about insulting anybody.
I'm not worried about insulting anybody. It's not up to the world to tailor it's behaviour to suit over-sensitive people, it's up to those people to tailor their behaviour to suit the world.
In other words; get over it.
And you're right this conversation is over.
If I was a weaker man I might even be offended. Fortunately, coming from you that's no different than a toddler calling me a poopoo face and throwing his minion out the pram.