When balancing goes wrong
zetachron
Germany Join Date: 2014-11-14 Member: 199655Members
Germany Join Date: 2014-11-14 Member: 199655Members
I know that games must offer a balance to support some challenge.
But sometimes the way things get done get awefully wrong only for the sake of balancing.
Here a list of balancing that looks like it went wrong to me (spoilers):
But sometimes the way things get done get awefully wrong only for the sake of balancing.
Here a list of balancing that looks like it went wrong to me (spoilers):
(1) Enter the Sea Dragon:
The Sea Dragon was thought to be the big fear enemy challenging the player, but implemented with 3 design problems.
This could've been fixed:
(2) The long walk to resources:
There is no late game transport strategy in the game that allows to enjoy resource gathering. It's okay to restrict it early in game, but it's no fun forcing the slow Cyclops or Prawn multiple times accross the player map. And only because there is the fear of the resource gathering getting too easy, thus making it incredible tedious. There are 2 seperated Precursor warp nets (PCF hub & QEP-TPG-FI) for the Prawn, probably to avoid a warping around the map with the Prawn "without challenge". Connect them or let the player construct his own warp gates once he visited the PCF.
(3) The Prawn drilling massacre:
We are forced to drill, it's awefully slow, almost nothing is gained from it and you have a hard time finding the remains without a scanner room. Even worse the Precursors joined in to agree to store "drill-only-and-non-handy-ion-crystals" in their bases. Because everyone knows that top researchers like to drill and ion crystals never crumble being drilled.
Is that the artificial balancing reason to use a Prawn inside Precursor sites? Why not simply increase the robot danger inside Precursor sites? And why not get a warp resource extractor arm recipe after getting that warp tech to allow us to directly suck all components from a block into the inventory. Oh, and I forgot that the drill no longer kills creatures in seconds since the devs found this lethal "non-balanced" exploit and turned it blunt. This was the end of the Prawn drilling massacre on poor innocent predators.
(4) I have no ion battery but I must build:
The constructor tool is the only tool that won't accept ion batteries. That would make it too easy to build without recharging. Not that it would make much sense. And why shouldn't we get better building conditions after finding ion tech? Please, why not get that after visiting such a late game area?
(5) Begging for uranite makes me angry:
The nuclear plant got useless now if nothing is done as the new power usage rework will drain them in no time. The solar panels are cheap and provide a very early power access. Solar farms and power lines allow even more. The bioreactor has the advantage of infinite refilling through food farming and being a much cheaper base startup. The thermal plant is extreme expensive, but a very strong infinite power well.
So why do we need the only reactor that is expensive, non-infinite and only medium power? Why not dramatically increase the power and in reverse make it an instable risk to add some spice to the game? Or upgrade the nuclear reactor rods into 5x more powerful ion power rods after gaining ion tech? Of course, alternatively the thermal plants could need Precursor thermal plant tech, making them late game superior power and nuclear power mid game power.
(6) Player, I shrunk the containers:
Tiny containers. Because we should be forced to build armadas of containers, rather than a more expensive mass container. The same counts for the vehicle cargo extensions. I'd love to see a big cargo solution that needs more resources to build. Why should the biggest container be the players pockets? Why not have MK3 containers?
The Sea Dragon was thought to be the big fear enemy challenging the player, but implemented with 3 design problems.
- He guards a bottleneck, preventing a big sub from sneaking around him like a rogue.
- He can outmaneuver any vehicle in his depth, preventing you from playing with him and even less fleeing from him.
- He is surrounded by hordes of prey, thus unable to find the player by normal means.
This could've been fixed:
- a placable sound beacon for leviathans could allow to lure the dragon away from the bottleneck.
- improving flank speed even more while locking the head turns and giving the Cyclops a Seamoth type navigation while in flank speed mode.
- adding a passive nano stealth hull module that turns the Cyclops invisible if not moving and thus plausable for the Dragon to ignore it.
(2) The long walk to resources:
There is no late game transport strategy in the game that allows to enjoy resource gathering. It's okay to restrict it early in game, but it's no fun forcing the slow Cyclops or Prawn multiple times accross the player map. And only because there is the fear of the resource gathering getting too easy, thus making it incredible tedious. There are 2 seperated Precursor warp nets (PCF hub & QEP-TPG-FI) for the Prawn, probably to avoid a warping around the map with the Prawn "without challenge". Connect them or let the player construct his own warp gates once he visited the PCF.
(3) The Prawn drilling massacre:
We are forced to drill, it's awefully slow, almost nothing is gained from it and you have a hard time finding the remains without a scanner room. Even worse the Precursors joined in to agree to store "drill-only-and-non-handy-ion-crystals" in their bases. Because everyone knows that top researchers like to drill and ion crystals never crumble being drilled.
Is that the artificial balancing reason to use a Prawn inside Precursor sites? Why not simply increase the robot danger inside Precursor sites? And why not get a warp resource extractor arm recipe after getting that warp tech to allow us to directly suck all components from a block into the inventory. Oh, and I forgot that the drill no longer kills creatures in seconds since the devs found this lethal "non-balanced" exploit and turned it blunt. This was the end of the Prawn drilling massacre on poor innocent predators.
(4) I have no ion battery but I must build:
The constructor tool is the only tool that won't accept ion batteries. That would make it too easy to build without recharging. Not that it would make much sense. And why shouldn't we get better building conditions after finding ion tech? Please, why not get that after visiting such a late game area?
(5) Begging for uranite makes me angry:
The nuclear plant got useless now if nothing is done as the new power usage rework will drain them in no time. The solar panels are cheap and provide a very early power access. Solar farms and power lines allow even more. The bioreactor has the advantage of infinite refilling through food farming and being a much cheaper base startup. The thermal plant is extreme expensive, but a very strong infinite power well.
So why do we need the only reactor that is expensive, non-infinite and only medium power? Why not dramatically increase the power and in reverse make it an instable risk to add some spice to the game? Or upgrade the nuclear reactor rods into 5x more powerful ion power rods after gaining ion tech? Of course, alternatively the thermal plants could need Precursor thermal plant tech, making them late game superior power and nuclear power mid game power.
(6) Player, I shrunk the containers:
Tiny containers. Because we should be forced to build armadas of containers, rather than a more expensive mass container. The same counts for the vehicle cargo extensions. I'd love to see a big cargo solution that needs more resources to build. Why should the biggest container be the players pockets? Why not have MK3 containers?
Comments
Like the OP said, balance is necessary and the player should face some challenge, but right now many game systems feel arbitrary for the sake of "challenge" and "drama" (or in some cases, just a placeholder that never really got replaced).
In addition to the things mentioned in the OP, I also feel that the O2 system needs rework (player has way too much air capacity without tanks, tanks add far too little additional air), material costs for things and the size of items in the inventory often feel completely arbitrary rather than having any relation to the item in question.
The whole hunger, thirst, and day/night cycle feels like it's stuck on fast-forward. I understand that for gameplay they need to be faster than real-time, but what we have now is ridiculous given the time disparity between the rate at which the player can interact with the world (movement, inventory management, etc) and how fast the survival needs and day/night timescale moves.
The whole power system still needs work, I can understand that with solar only the player would need to be careful with managing power, but the rest of the energy systems feel like they've been intentionally nerfed (weak power generation and excessive power usage of things like water filters and vehicles) to add more "challenge". The only exception is the habitat builder, which uses relatively little power but can magically build underwater bases using barely any resources in seconds which is equally immersion breaking in the opposite direction. I would like to see nuclear power rebalanced to be a true end-game power source that provides nearly unlimited power for a seabase (like a real life nuclear reactor would), but it should also be appropriately expensive to build. For base building, maybe we could have a system like space engineers where the fabricator is used to make the components and they are brought a few at a time to the build site. Later on, to speed up base building, we could have a construction module for the seamoth or prawn that could fabricate the base pieces from raw materials like the current constructor does.
To address the resource gathering tedium (this is the single most time-consuming task in the game, especially hunting for somewhat rare bottleneck resources like copper), maybe we could have a mid-late game mining structure that could be built on resource deposits.
(not to detract from your excellent points)
Copper can be found quite easily if one follows the Sea Treader's around for a few minutes.
Just about every mineral node they stir up is Copper.
What I find somewhat baffling is that storage items that can live in the player's inventory (deployable locker and the carry-all bag) offer the same amount of storage space as they take up, meaning a 4x4 item only has 4x4 storage inside it. This goes against all gaming and real-world logic. "This briefcase is too big to fit in my backpack," said no one ever.
I didn't realize that, thanks for the tip. That still doesn't solve the copper shortage in the early/midgame though since you really need at least a Seamoth (plus upgraded pressure compensator) to have any endurance around the Sea Treaders.
Building a Seamoth with the appropriate upgrades (at minimum) requires a scanner (1 copper), mobile vehicle bay (2 copper), power cell for Seamoth (2 copper), habitat builder (2 copper), moonpool (2 copper), vehicle modification station (4 copper), initial pressure compensator (2 copper), modification station (2 copper), upgraded pressure compensator (2 copper). This is a total of 19 copper ore, which can take a significant amount of time to collect in the Safe Shallows and Kelp Forest since it competes with titanium and lead for drops, which means you'll need to find approximately 60 limestone outcrops depending on how lucky you are.
This ignores anything else you might want to build around the same point in the game that also uses copper such as the flashlight, seaglide, beacons, compass, battery charger, power cell charger, fabricator, etc. However, batteries, power cells and a pressure compensator can be found in the Aurora, which can save a significant amount of copper by eliminating the need to craft the chain of things needed for the initial pressure compensator (moonpool, vehicle modification station), but I think my point still stands regarding copper being a bottleneck in the same way that silver was in the previous version.
Titanium doesn't have this problem since it's readily available from very common and easy to spot scrap metal spawns and fragment scans. Quartz as well since it doesn't compete with other resources for drops and is easy to spot.
For example a kind of "Ore-Compression"-Tech where your picked up Ores and minerals get compressed (stacked) into. But they would only stack inside the Compression module which itself would claim 2x2 or 3x3 spaces inside your inventory. Or if that would be too unbalanced you could limit this compression module to the Seamoth/Prawn internal storage only and make it use the vehicles energy. So it stackes resources that you put inside it. Once you pull them out they would take up their original space again. If you run out of energy while holding stacks, the fill up the remaining storage and any excess amount is spilled out of the storage and to the seafloor whilst also damaging the vehicle slightly to reflect the forceful output.
To improve the resource management once you reached your base with a compression module full of recources, you could introduce "ingots/blocks" for all kinds of stuff. Gold ingot, copper ingot, quartz block and so on...
Each containing 10 normal pieces like the titanium ingot. But with the ability to use those and receive the unused resource units back in their normal form. For example you craft one unit copper wire with one copper ingot in your inventory and receive one copper wire + 8 copper units back from the fabricator (10 the ingot has -2 the copper wire costs).
That would help manage your resources so much more and make gathering trips less tedious because you could gather way more resources per trip. If you don't like to use two different systems for inventory improvement/management, why don't implement a mini-fabricator as an upgrade-slot-module and "just" use the "ingot/block" method right with your gathering vehicle?
Instead of using your upgrade slots in a "full storage module"-set you use just 1-3 storage modules and a mini-fabricator upgrade in another module slot (Depending which other upgrades you may want/need of course). You then swim to your vehicle when your inventory is full and use the mini-fabricator to "melt" down the resources into ingots/blocks/whatever description fits the resource the most and store those in your storage unit. That would improve your gathering efficiency tenfold from a storage point of view.
What do you think about this?
EDIT: To the Drill-Arm. It would really be nice if it would automatically pick up the resources it drills. That way you have a nice quality of life upgrade and a fix to resources clipping into the ground or other objects.
I.e. You choose to craft your scrapmetal into titanium, and a small counter appears to the left, with up/plus and down/minus buttons allowing you to choose how much titanium you want to convert in one go. Additionally, you could show how much energy this would consume, as to prevent frequent blackouts.
I've often wondered why Nuclear Plants don't give off radiation fields when they're in use. I mean, it's an interesting and unique mechanic that only gets used ONCE in the entire game, then never again. Also it could give the Radiation Suit more of a use, instead of being a nuisance until the dark matter drive is repaired. I mean, the PDA tooltip mentions about data corruption from radiation when you first build one, and the data entry for the NP outright states that a Radiation Suit must be worn when exchanging Nuclear Rods... so why isn't this a thing?
Now I know some people might balk at radiation poisoning from a reactor without a suit. But the PDA entry for it states it produces enough power for a small colony, there's absolutely no way Alterra would have something so powerful and compact and it not leak radiation.
I've messed with the Nuclear Plant at times, but honesty it's my least favorite option. Like @zetachron said, the other 3 are basically limitless power with reasonable restrictions - but having to find and store vast amounts of Urananite and Lead to keep it going is just tedious and boring. Can anything be done to make it more useful?
Power usage is in dissaray and they are nerfing it further and further... even while people hated seaglide for years for exact same reason. Logic absent.
Cyclops states it has extensive storage capacity in it's god damn encyclopedia entry. 5 fucking footlockers.... granted they are now capable of storing a diving suit... big improvement, said nobody ever while building double locker walls over them.
The future lacks emp shielding, while a trashy iphone apparently has some magical emp shielding oh and my trash can also has emp shielding, must have been made by dwarfs from magical metal. So much for for those modules, according to lore, being designed to withstand variety of extreme environments.
Some fish that can't even open it's mouth wide enough to bite on a submarine can damage it. Apparently their mouths bypass logic and create singularity event.
We make it all so fabulously dangerous! You are not safe anywhere! Tho we forgot to add means of actually defending. Once I laughed about incessant asking for guns... nobody is laughing now. Btw Reapers hitbox is still only slightly larger then my sock. And all of them still fly thru terrain like they are meant to do that.
Loved the game but now it feels more like a bethesda game without unofficial patching, as in no way in hell I'm touching it. It may look amazing but the feeling of wonder is soon replaced a scowl and later by something akin to a kid staring a plate full of broccoli.
Definitely valid points (I fully agree with all of them), but I would hold off a little on trashing the game just yet. As the devs have said in other threads, even harsh criticism is fine, but to say that you're not going to touch the game anymore because of pre-release balance issues doesn't really make any sense.
The game is still not feature complete and is still in an alpha state with several months of optimization, polishing, and (hopefully) balancing left in the roadmap. Generally balance is one of the very last things that is done in a game since any new feature will likely throw off the balance, so it makes the most sense to do it all at once. As this is an early access game that is actively being played, the devs will do some balancing throughout the whole process so that the game remains somewhat playable, but that balance isn't necessarily indicative of what the final balance will be once everything is in place.
However, I have seen several early access games where the devs felt that the placeholder balance used during early access was "good enough" for release and skipped the final balance pass. This is a real concern, and we do need to continue criticizing the broken aspects of the game and suggest solutions for them, but this should be done with the intent of helping the devs build a better game without trashing the amazing work they have done.
Fair enough, I have my list of grievances with many aspects of the current game direction as well. Hopefully the devs will implement proper mod support with enough hooks to allow for total conversion mods so we can build our own ideal Subnautica experience.
Reactors are shielded (hence the use of lead in its construction). Now they do give off some radiation, (at least, some of them do, that might have improved by now) but unless you've got your living quarters beside them, you're fine. Fabricating Uranium and reactor rods, as well as swapping reactor rods out (and carrying spent rods) should indeed require the rad suit to safely complete.
Awesome, glad to hear that a full balance pass is definitely in the plans.
On the topic of balancing power, here's a few of my thoughts on the subject:
In general, I would prefer that power systems follow their real-world counterparts as much as possible with the same sort of tradeoffs. Try to link energy units to a real-world value (kWh?) and use that to calculate approximate energy usage for components rather than using arbitrary numbers.
I would like the option to selectively toggle power for base components, so I can easily turn off high-drain equipment when not needed.
Rather than having each power source provide storage, I would prefer to have something like craftable power cell banks for seabases. Maybe even two tiers, with an early game version about the size of a Tesla powerwall and a late game high capacity bank with much higher energy density.
Solar right now is a bit OP in the sense that it works down to 200m. In reality, water absorbs the light wavelengths primarily for solar power quite effectively, to the point that a specially designed underwater solar panel at just 9m only produces 7 watts per square meter, but a readily available commercial solar panel could easily produce 200 watts per square meter (newatlas.com/underwater-solar-cells/22896/). My suggestion would be to make solar panels only effective at the surface or in very shallow water (for the sake of gameplay, maybe down to 50m at most so they'll work pretty much anywhere in the safe shallows and similar locations).
It also feels like we're missing a reliable power source that doesn't require a multipurpose room. For small seabases with just corridors, the only power options are solar or thermal. I would like to see a third option that is functional regardless of where the base is located. Maybe some sort of generator or fuel cell (or even just the ability to use power cells) that doesn't necessarily provide full power independence, but at least lets me turn the lights and O2 production on without having to string a ton of power transmitters.
Bioreactors are a neat idea, and as long as the cost and output values are balanced appropriately relative to everything else they work as a reliable mid-game power source. Their current role as a reliable power source with modest output seems appropriate, although I wouldn't mind an unlockable upgraded version that could produce energy at a faster rate as well.
Nuclear reactors need a lot of love. The biggest problem I see is that they run through fuel way too fast to be worth the hassle. In real life, reactors only need to be refuelled every decade or so. I would like to see them rebalanced as an end-game power source that is functionally similar to a thermal vent in that it provides steady, unlimited power (although I would also be ok with having to refuel it very infrequently as well, no more than every one year of game time). To balance this, they could be very expensive to craft and require a LOT of uranite (in reality, less than 1% of uranium is the U-235 isotope suitable for reactors).
Thermal generators are a great idea, but the way they work now doesn't make any sense. Just being in a hot place doesn't mean you can generate energy, to actually generate energy a thermal gradient is required so that the heat is flowing from the heat source to a sink. In simple terms, maybe thermal generators could require an unoccupied thermal vent to be placed, and could "snap" to the selected vent rather than players just spamming a ton of generators around a hotspot (or wherever they please in the lava zones).
Energy usage is all over the place in terms of being internally consistent, much less realistic. The fabricator uses 10 energy (half a battery) per item, regardless of what it is (different items should probably have different energy costs, it makes no sense that cooking a fish requires the same amount of energy as forging advanced metal alloys). The habitat builder can build a sizeable seabase on one battery charge, with even just one corridor section being much larger than what the fabricator produces.
Oxygen production is free as long as there's power, but water filtration and external floodlights use ridiculous amounts of energy. In reality, it should be the other way around. Creating oxygen from seawater requires electrolysis, which takes a lot of energy. In fact, it's approximately the same amount that would be gained back if you burned the hydrogen and oxygen, which is commonly used as rocket fuel so there's a LOT of energy there. A bright floodlight (like would be necessary underwater) would need a decent amount of power, but no more than a few hundred watts for a really bright light (I'm assuming that all lights in the future are LEDs and not inefficient halogens). Reverse osmosis water purifiers are actually reasonably efficient and a commercial unit that can purify 150 gallons per day only uses 0.65 kW (multiply by 24 to get the energy usage for a full day). You wouldn't get the salt from them however (they don't boil the water completely).
The vehicle energy systems are all over the place as well. Sonar and lights should use a negligible amount of energy (10 units per sonar pulse is insane). Movement would require a lot of energy, but nowhere near as much as it does now. As mentioned in the above paragraph, oxygen generation would require a lot of energy. Maybe subs could have very large O2 tanks, with the oxygen generator being a system that is only turned on when needed to refill the tank. Otherwise subs could have their oxygen refilled at the surface or in bases.
That ended up being a little longer than I planned, but hopefully there's some useful suggestions in there for balancing the energy systems.
Balance is achieved when everything feels believable and is an equally useful option. Real life is not remotely balanced, and is an extremely bad metric to draw compelling game play from.
With that said, power does need an overhaul and there is a long way to go before verisimilitude is achieved. Just pls don't conflate that with "realism", kay?
That one item in the Precursor facility where the PDA entry talks glibly about a small device having enough energy to destroy a planet or even part of a solar system. That's a lot more energy that anything else @gamer1000k talked about. By dozens of orders of magnitude.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_binding_energy
tl;dr version: To destroy the Earth, ie. give all of Earth's matter enough energy to separate completely, would need over a week's energy output of the Sun. All of it for more than one week.
Even using complete mass-to-energy conversion, that's a lot of mass. About 2.8 million million tons of matter converted to energy.
When I see such things put into games casually (and damn films too), it just hurts.
I totally agree with the idea that a perfectly balanced game should have a collection of believable and equally useful options, but IMHO it's hardly believable when a game that's supposedly based on semi-realistic technology blatantly ignores how things work in reality.
Real-life systems are a great starting point, and if for gameplay reasons something needs to be changed, I would prefer that it be done in a believable way. Nuclear power is too OP for the game world? Don't include it. Use a different type of power plant that falls into the desired range rather than nerfing a so-called nuclear device into oblivion (that's a pet peeve of mine in RTS games, "nukes" that are much weaker than real-life conventional bombs).
I do get your point, and understand that this is a sci-fi game with its own rules, but I would like to see at least some acknowledgement of real physics.
What I am saying isn't important is actual realism, like "the power output of a solar panel should match the kWh output of a real solar panel and energy usage should match the real energy usage of such and such a device". People often get fixated on things being "realistic", but that level of simulationism results in poor game play in anything that isn't designed to be an exceptionally realistic simulation of reality as it's basic premise.
tl;dr: What matters is the perception of realism, not actual realism.
Totally agree, and I see why my earlier comment got you going. The reason I mentioned kWh is that when a game system has a real-life analogue, then the easiest way to make it believable is to start with how it works in real life and go from there rather than picking arbitrary values and trying to balance it later.
Not that I even disagree, it is easier to use our own real life tangible system as starting point. But I'm still sticking to fun before realistic and it has to fit in it's own world. In that word energizer battery is used to conjure buildings our system at this point doesn't belong there it would do nothing but complicate things. What @MaxAstro said basically. Realistic and believable in it's own settings are two different things.
Atm power is all over the place. Huge things eat 10 points per second then a spotlight eats 5 per second.... then sub eats 1 per 38ish(u know what... lets just go with examples and not real numbers) the system doesn't fit it's own setting that is the problem. Nuclear generator producing too little compared to our own setting is utterly irrelevant and can be explained even by me from my couch by tossing out something like... reactor is designed for multiple envoroments, safety measures to prevent melt downs blah blah blah at the end of the day it's not efficient. I mean hell... our own nuclear reactors have efficiency that is a joke. If we compared maximum possible energy "extracted/converted" then something like Hoover Dam is more efficient then a Nuclear PP. Realism can go burn in hell, -> I WANT TO BELIEVE <- pun intended.
I totally agree with the fun before realism (especially in a sci-fi setting), and I'm not advocating for putting kWh units on power in the game, I'm simply stating that if a game has something that is supposed to represent a real life object or concept, then it should behave similarly in order for it to be believable. Back to the nuclear power example, I never said it was efficient (for all I know it could be a giant RTG), merely that all real-life reactors that use uranium have refueling intervals measured in years, if not decades, so putting a "nuclear" reactor in a game that needs to be refuelled daily is hugely immersion breaking. If the devs want to call it a nuclear reactor, then make it behave similarly to a real-life reactor, otherwise come up with some other sci-fi power generation with its own rules that fit the game.
Usually I get my copper by gathering all limestones, which are almost everywhere. The only component not needed early is the lead, but I use a container to store it away for later building the reactor rods. Otherwise you could put them into the waste bin.
By the time I get to arrive at the Sea Treader's Path, I usually don't have much copper problems anymore. Though lately the copper requirements have risen incredibly with 2 copper and gold for a CPU instead the silver. Now I'm hoarding piles of silver instead piles of gold. But I think the devs will polish tech more.
I'd rather consider the player inventory as a sort of TARDIS. When will the next game come out to feature inventory helpers to relieve you of TARDIS inventory, allowing you to battle hordes of enemies while carrying a mountain of trash with you?
Subnautica could give the player a carrier drone. Or punish movement incredibly for everything that's not in the paperdoll, but add a toolbelt with 5 slots to the paperdoll to allow swift movement as long as the tools are equipped and not carried.
@ThePassionateGamer
It's probably easier to rescale and polish container sizes than to program an ore compression. Although a generic system with ore-"pure item"-ingot and a converter for ingots->"pure items" would've been better. Right now I fear the devs would need too much time for this.
@Tarkannen
Thanks for adding another missing part to the nuclear plant: The use of the rad suit.
(others would be: nuclear accidents, creature attacks cutting bases from power lines, bioreactors unable to work above 70 degrees heat,etc.)
of course all possibilities unused ...
It's mainly immersion-breaking things or inconsistency that annoys me and not being not realistic enough. Games can't be real and only use comic versions of reality. But for example the builder tool as the only one not using ion batteries is inconsistant for the sake of balance. The consistency was sacrificed, because the devs wanted to make it harder for the players to build.
Another thing that is annoying most, is the complicated usage issue or usage being awefully to handle. Like the drilling that isn't fluent gameplay. Even if you have managed to have only one drillarm and the other a normal pickup arm and are equipped with a scanner HUD chip and a scanner room near that is tuned to the resource you drill, so you can easily see and pick up the results, there is still the bad and boring drilling time for usually far less than a dozen ore pieces. Add to this the fact, that you need a long walk to your ore pile even if you see its direction on the HUD and than another long walk to the next and piles of the same ore type aren't too much clustered, then it's a pain to do it. And gaming shouldn't be a pain. If you compare drilling directly with getting the same through ore stones, then you realize that it's faster to gather ore with the Seamoth and knocking ore from stones, than drilling with the Prawn. Because usually stones are far more visible and with higher cluster density than ore piles that are much too meager and take too long to drill and pick up. So I think the drilling usage has to be more polished.
The nuclear reactor is something I mainly consider an unused opportunity and badly to use considering it against the other power sources. Being not so much immersive (no radiation or that you expect nuclear power to last long and be powerful) is only secondary to me.
So I think the main factor for a good game is usability first and immersion/consistency second. Balancing should never try to make things less usable or break immersion/consistency, but rather go in harmony with usage and immersion/consistency. I hope the development soon gets to a point, where the devs can concentrate more on polishing and listen to the community a bit more. It looks like that will soon happen. And I also hope the devs might try to adjust their balancing more to usability, immersion and consitency and not so much against it.
(1) Breeding and farming:
Too fast for some (marblemelons grow in no time) and there is no oxygen or other resources like water needed to grow. It's strange to see plants grow in an airless base. Maybe for plants to grow in air environments, a base should need a water filtration machine running together with drawing some power for the plants O2 usage.
(2) Vehicles air usage:
Is it really so bad to limit air in vehicles if they could refill at surface, moonpools or a sub at most times?
A capacity of a few 1000s O2 in a small vehicle or O2 usage drawing from vehicle power could limit the vehicle range a bit more immersive. Although O2 drawing power would be the best and most easy solution if the power system is already being reworked. And be even usable for the Cyclops.
The nuclear reactor is a great example of something that is lacking in verisimilitude. The game describes is as the ultimate power source, capable of powering an entire colony by itself... and the game mechanics don't support that description at all.
Personally I like how drilling works right now for the most part, because it completes the exosuit's role as the ultimate mining rig. I like the feeling of power of sitting there slowly tearing apart those resource nodes that have been laughing at you all game, and watching them break apart piece by piece.
I'm not sure how I feel about O2 limits on vehicles. I think a lot of the range limits on vehicles are already accomplished by the various depth limits, and I think an O2 limit on the PRAWN in particular is a bad choice for the late game. Also the cyclops doesn't need something that drains its power passively unless we get the ability to attach power generators to it of some kind.
I do think that the Mk3 pressure module should be harder to make, as in require a different set of resources rather than just more resources. Currently, once you get the mod station, it's just "farm until you can get the Mk2... then why stop there, immediately upgrade to the Mk3 since it takes all the same resources".