If a game's time until you become completely bored of it as about two hours of being semi-entertained, then you're done, that means it's not a very good game. Your acting as though I'm expecting a game I can play forever, and I really don't think that you have more than skimmed anything I have wrote considering your response. Let me sum it up for you:
THE GAMEPLAY IS NOT FUN
THE STORY IS NOT ENGAGING
MAX ENJOYABLE PLAYTIME BEFORE IT BECOMES A CHORE IS ONLY A COUPLE HOURS, IF THAT.
Subnautica is like a book you keep on reading, hoping it will start to get good in the next chapter, or that the ending will redeem it all, but it doesn't. Since I can't take much more than an hour in the game in it's current state without going "nope, bored", I instead watched a full playthrough for the story, and the story was lame. The characters, such as they were, meant nothing to me, and there was nothing to pull me into the world.
This game had tons of potential, but the devs took it and ran in totally the wrong direction.
No, in minecraft you can build actual decent things. I've sunk hundreds of hours into minecraft. Minecraft is great. This is not minecraft. This is nothing at all.
I see a million "disagree"s, and a total of zero valid reasons why I'm wrong.
No, in minecraft you can build actual decent things. I've sunk hundreds of hours into minecraft. Minecraft is great. This is not minecraft. This is nothing at all.
I see a million "disagree"s, and a total of zero valid reasons why I'm wrong.
Well, MInecraft's not Dwarf Fortress, either. Subnautica is what it is. It isn't Dwarf Fortress either.
In Dwarf Fortress, you can build mountainous statues of dwarves hoist steins of beer and spewing out water and lava. And a massive number of other constructive things.
You think the Lava Zones are scary, that's child's play compared to Dwarf Fortress. Dwarf Fortress is the Australia of games: most things are trying to kill you. Then you dig down and find out all those scary things on the surface were just the warm-up act. Then you dig deeper and find it just gets worse by orders of magnitude.
But Subnautica isn't Dwarf Fortress and I don't expect it to be. Nor do I expect it to be Minecraft. The earlier versions tried to be more malleable with the Terraformer but with the detail of the world it was causing problems. This isn't UWE's first game and they decided the best thing for Subnautica was to take it the way they did. I understand and like the game that resulted.
Even after 545 hours in game, I still have an immense amount of fun in Subnautica. Many things could come in future releases or followon games. I find my money I spent to get Early Access was more than worth it.
I don't understand. How can you have fun? There's nothing to do. Nothing at all. I'm serious. Just.. please, someone give me a straight answer, because I feel as though people are playing a different game. Like, zork Vs. world of tanks level of different, I.E nothing in common other than being a program on a computer.
Do you like the gameplay? What gameplay? What do you like about it? What unique thing does it offer?
Do you like the story? Why do you like the story? What makes the story a good story? What makes it special? Does it pull you into the world? How, why?
I really, really, really don't understand why I'm getting so many disagrees for stating what seem to me to be the most self-evident facts possible, because right now all I can think that makes any sense is fanboyisim and a bandwagon effect, and I don't want to think that that is all this community is, so someone PLEASE give me an answer that is not a troll, not an insult, not something completely random and nonsensical, just straight, factual, measurable things that make subnautica not the crap game that it feels like every time I pick it up. I don't want "go away, we hate you", I don't want "It's not your thing, go away, we hate you". I just want to understand or have my only working hypothisis that this community is just awful and are whiteknighting the devs confirmed if nothing else.
Okay Sayerulz, I'll do my best to answer your question, though I can't speak for anyone's experience with the game beyond my own.
How can you have fun? There's nothing to do. Nothing at all. I'm serious.
Do you like the gameplay? What gameplay? What do you like about it? What unique thing does it offer?
* * * * *
I've gotten quite a few hours out of exploration and scanning the various life forms. Just seeing the various biomes and different creatures is entertaining, exploring the different cave systems, alien ruins, and dark places of the world is a somewhat relaxing and fun way to kill an afternoon.
Establishing a base in the shallows was fun the first time, but only took me around 4 hours to finish. Exploring all the various wrecks for different blueprints for base pieces, PRAWN Arms, upgrades etc was fun and took me another 6ish hours. (The lack of a map makes this part of the game far more tedious and annoying than it needs to be though imho and without wiki guides would of taken me 50 or more or frustrated me to the point I'd of given up playing entirely.)
After several updates and a six month break building a new base on a new playthrough in the depths of the ocean (near 800m) was also an entertaining challenge and took me a few more hours.
Hunting down the various PDA's to read more about the Degasi story arc (Though they all seemed like right twats tbh judging by the journal entries,) was a side challenge I found engaging. Following the main storyline was intriguing, but more in a "investigate the mystery" feeling of intrigue rather than any feeling of personal danger/risk. (And with the hope of running into intelligent possibly hostile aliens of some sort, and maybe seeing more of an actual story arise than wound up happening.)
The protagonist felt shallow sure, like a cardboard cutout of a character with no real depth or personality, but I was operating under the vain hope they'd be adding more to him during the development. (At this point it could just as easily be a flat chested female, asexual human clone or plastic robot caricature of a person for all the difference it would make.)
Is the game one that I see people sinking 100's of hours into? Nah, not really. All said and done, (not counting various time wasted hunting for that one missing piece of a crafting fragment and wishing for a map) I've spent about 200ish hours in the game over the various Alpha updates and new game starts, bug hunting/reproducing, etc.
For a new player I'd guess they'd probably get around 30-40 hours of play time exploring the ocean, crafting a base, fiddling with the subs and doing the main storyline before running out of stuff to do, and that's fine. As I've said in other posts, I judge a games value by the hours of entertainment I get per dollar. so for a $14 EA game, (or even $24 or whatever full release) If I get 30+ hours of fun spent in it then I'm satisfied. Sure I love games like Skyrim and Fallout 4 where I can get 200+ hours of fun easy, but for something like this, 20+ hours is about all I expect, and the "fun" I'm expecting here is more one of exploration and discovery, seeing the eye candy of the alien ocean and playing to un-stress after a long day rather than expecting a quality storyline, interesting character, or huge engaging world.
I think it comes down to expectations, if you're expecting something along the lines of a traditional survival/open world game underwater you're going to be severely disappointed. If you're looking to kill 20+ hours exploring an alien ocean and a bit of light crafting/survival, than you'll be happy with Subnautica.
* * * * *
I completely get why you feel let down by the "story" and character as it is currently and the lack of characterization, compared to other titles it's pretty shallow and barebones. (Though at least it has one, other survival games like 7 Days to Die doesn't even have any story beyond "don't die.")
It would of been amazing if they added in some voice acting for the protagonist, maybe let you find some NPC survivors you actually gave a damn about and felt motivated to try and save. (Exploring the Aurora would of been the perfect place to add some 10yr old kid you need to look after, and/or a woman seven or so months pregnant, and give players a reason to build a base, develop the protagonist's personality, and resolve the infection in a timely fashion, do anything other than waffle around at their leisure. Making who you found as a survivor on the Aurora wreck random, or a branching storyline of saving one or the other would of also been neat and added to replay value.)
But that's not the direction they went, and in trying to keep some E/G/Kids + rating they chose to leave out the gore, tone down the violence, and scale back the um... Danger? Excitement? Drama? Experience of exploring an alien ocean, and what we're left with is a exploration game with light survival elements and a storyline that got only 1/4th of the budget and attention it deserved.
But for what it is, it's still fun for 20ish (or more) hours, especially for someone playing it through for the first time and not anticipating a Storyline experience on par with Dying Light, Mad Max, Far Cry 3, or other more story driven open world games.
All in all I've more than gotten my money's worth out of the title and have no regrets about backing it during EA, though I do feel once it goes to full 1.0 release there will be many people like you Sayerulz, who go into the game expecting a very different experience than subnautica delivers, and ultimately feeling quite let down; which is pity.
It's pretty obvious that the answer to your questions can be summed up in five SIX words...
This Game Is Not For You.
There's nothing that anybody can say to change your mind at this point, so it's just wasted breath in attempting to do so.
That's OK though, there's plenty of other "fish" out there in the gaming world that you can try, and you will probably enjoy much more so than what Subnautica did for you.
So rather than trolling those of us that like the game as it is, just move on.
I don't like Sports games, but I certainly don't go to those forums and attempt to get players there to try and explain why I don't like them and why they should be change so that I do like them.
That's silly...
So please don't expect the rest of us to do that for you here.
Is the game one that I see people sinking 100's of hours into? Nah, not really.
You really don't want to know how many hours I've spent playing this game, then. (Granted, some of that play time I racked up with the game paused when I went to sleep, but still...)
It's pretty obvious that the answer to your questions can be summed up in five words...
This Game Is Not For You.
There's nothing that anybody can say to change your mind at this point, so it's just wasted breath in attempting to do so.
That's OK though, there's plenty of other "fish" out there in the gaming world that you can try, and you will probably enjoy much more so than what Subnautica did for you.
So rather than trolling those of us that like the game as it is, just move on.
I don't like Sports games, but I certainly don't go to those forums and attempt to get players there to try and explain why I don't like them and why they should be change so that I do like them.
That's silly...
So please don't expect the rest of us to do that for you here.
No, in minecraft you can build actual decent things. I've sunk hundreds of hours into minecraft. Minecraft is great. This is not minecraft. This is nothing at all.
I see a million "disagree"s, and a total of zero valid reasons why I'm wrong.
With mods the game has lasted me for hundreds of hours. The base game didn't. It doesn't have enough for me, to keep going without the amazing support the community gave it.
Reading through the comments, I can see a couple common threads popping up.
Thread A: The ending, the compulsion (or lack thereof) to get to the ending, and the linearity of the game leading to that ending.
Silent protagonists can be tricky to handle. In a game like Half-Life, we were piloting a silent protagonist, but one which clearly had a life: his coworkers interacted with him in ways that implied longstanding relationships, and he was on Earth, for kittens' sakes, so as far as the player was concerned, we're gettin' out of Black Mesa and goin' to Vegas because if I survived that, clearly luck is on my side. On top of that, it was a gaming environment designed to be unfriendly - a broken-down research facility filled with dangerous aliens. Nobody would want to stick around for long. In Subnautica, we have the opposite: we're stuck on a world that's an aquatic paradise - dangerous, sure, but once the carar problem is dealt with, it's a place where a lot of us would like to retire. On top of that, life in Alterra space, based on PDA entries, seems kinda...well, seriously messed up. So the idea of "I wanna go home!" is missing, and the idea of "I wanna be anywhere but HERE!" is seriously missing.
Beyond that, very few games have managed to pull off the "no end state" model, and even those that had eventually relented and put one in. Minecraft was endless for ages until one was added in the form of a deeply philosophical two-sided essay. Some make the ending compulsory either through a countdown timer (which is a weak writing way of getting around a game world that's too thin) or because you simply can't avoid it (scripted gaming, like CoD).
The problem with a truly endless game is that players end up wandering off. Even the most self-motivated players usually need some kind of goal to keep them moving forward. Self-imposed goals are great - build a base here, craft all these things, explore X, Y, and Z - but only last as long as new experiences exist in the game. Once you've seen all there is to see, your ability to generate new goals drops off sharply. Without something to shoot for, you lose focus and eventually find something shinier to get your attention - which would be a different game.
By installing an ending, UWE sidestepped this problem - to a degree. The successful part is the addition of...The Escape Hatch. The Way Out. The Great Egress. Just having the option gives you an unfulfilled goal, and that helps keep players in the game. You go from incremental goals - find survival resources, investigate increasingly-difficult-to-access locations, build bases, upgrade equipment - to and endgame goal. Pretty decent game design theory, but one which hinges on execution. And while the addition of a "win state" goal helps, it also doesn't for a reason that fits in well with...
Thread B: Boredom, perceived lack of content, and boredom again.
A big part of the problem is that there's no driving narrative, but it's also not just "you crashed, escape." A game like Minecraft in its original form worked because there was zero story; you had to make your own. (Like playing with LEGOs.) There was nothing in the game world to even imply a story, so you didn't even attempt to root it out. Then you have heavily-scripted, linear games like CoD that go the extreme other route, giving you a story you cannot ignore and must complete. The middle ground is Fallout, where there's an optionally-ignorable story that has an effect on the game world and enough impact to sustain it, but the world's big enough you can ignore it for a long time.
Subnautica, unfortunately fell between these category buckets and landed in the netherworld. There are story elements like the PDAs and crashed pods, the abandoned seabases, and the enormous wreck of the Aurora, but none of them are ever brought together into a cogent story. The ingredients are there, but they were never cooked into a narrative. As a result, players want to know how the pieces fit together and the story they tell, but they don't, which leaves story-driven players feeling unfulfilled. "I must have missed something!" where, in fact, what they feel they're missing isn't there to be found. So the ending feels misplaced, going straight from Luke farting around on Tatooine to blowing up the Death Star. There's the nagging feeling that something is missing, which means we're missing out.
The other side of the problem is the difficulty in simulating an aquatic world. The world feels emptier than it should in large part because it has to be. Anybody who's gone snorkeling or diving at a coral reef, lagoon, or other similar environment will tell you the same thing: it's so alive! Big fish, little fish, microfish, and all kinds of plants. Busy, busy, busy. Trying to put all of that in a simulated game world, developing it, then rendering it in the player's machine...you're looking at a nightmare. Developers of games like Fallout can go nuts because their clutter is inanimate and the environment is cooperative; air is empty. In a water environment, though, almost everything is alive, which means animation; everything needs to move realistically in three dimensions, which is AI calculations; and there's a lot more of everything, which pushes resources to the limit. If a realistic world were built, one teeming with life as we might expect, most of the gamer base would be eliminated because they simply couldn't run it (c.f. the Crysis Problem). For people like Markiplier or Jacksepticeye, their videos would look great; for someone with a bargain Best Buy HP craptop, you're dead out of luck - heck, even someone with an upper-middle-range machine would be out of luck or running on ultra-low-quality settings. Accessibility means a wider sales base and a better experience for more people.
So is there a solution? Yes and no. Yes in that the story details could be fleshed out - it's why people have been writing stories here - so that it doesn't feel like there's a missing part, and that could be done without massive investments of resources, especially if it's crowdsourced. Yes in that the ending should remain complete-when-desired rather than a compulsory item. No in that radically increasing the complexity of the world content is infeasible for 75+% of the audience. But yes that by adding more biomes and things to explore the game will feel like a better experience - just like Minecraft, creating the "I'll go check that out, then I'll sleep" situation.
TL;DR - Het toevoegen van meer inhoud op de wereldschaal zou helpen om een meer 'eindeloze game' -vriendelijke instelling te creëren, maar grote zorg moet worden genomen om meer levensvormen en "clutter" -risico's toe te voegen waardoor lage en middelgrote gamers uit Subnautica volledig worden geduwd. De meest effectieve manier om de spelervaring te verbeteren en het einde van het gevoel minder gedwongen te maken, zou de verhalen zijn die door de PDA en milieuaanwijzingen worden voorgesteld.
Oh you didn't lose me there, but just because it looks like Dutch and uses Dutch words doesn't mean........... WHY did you feel the need to massacre my language like that bub
Oh you didn't lose me there, but just because it looks like Dutch and uses Dutch words doesn't mean........... WHY did you feel the need to massacre my language like that bub
Forgive me. It's English syntax auto-translated by Google.
Oh you didn't lose me there, but just because it looks like Dutch and uses Dutch words doesn't mean........... WHY did you feel the need to massacre my language like that bub
Forgive me. It's English syntax auto-translated by Google.
Yeah but Dutch already sounds like someone's trying to strangle a cat with a vacuum cleaner filled with dogs... So why go the extra mile kilometer man
That's the risk of a survival game. Subnautica is a very ambitious game. But the team can do only so much. Either because the game engine is limited. Or their time and team are limited. Would I want more story? Of course. But you can't expect the team to pump stuff out. What I really want them to focus on, is mod support. Figure a super effective system to allow any type of narrative people want to make, in the game possible. From AI control, part building, editing models, adding models, re-balancing. All within it's own mode. So that it doesn't permanently alter the base Survival, Freedom, Hardcore modes. They will have a gold door waiting.
Kouji_SanSr. Hινε UÏкεεÏεг - EUPT DeputyThe NetherlandsJoin Date: 2003-05-13Member: 16271Members, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue
edited September 2017
AFAIK:
"Either because the game engine is limited. Or their time and team are limited." - @Hulkie2345
It's probably a combination of this, I imagine they did spend a lot of time on preparing, tweaking and creating stuff for Unity. Just to get that bastard of a "closed-quarters engine", used mostly for horror games, to work with an open world environment filled with watah...
Thank you, an actual, valid response. This pretty much seems to confirm what I've been saying though: subnautica is a mediocre game at best, and while you can get some fun out of it, there's also a ton of tedium and frustration, and the story is pretty much totally worthless.
No thank you, troll response, summed up as "go away, we hate you".
If you can't even explain what redeeming qualities a game you're ready to rabidly defend and disagree spam anyone who criticizes in any way has, you may want to reflect on what the hell you are doing.
I don't do anything without a rational reason I can easily explain to others. I could tell you what I like and don't like about every game I own.
And if someone bought a sports game, then they didn't put in any sports, but people were still going on about what an incredible sports game it was, then they should dammed well ask why the hell anyone plays it.
It's pretty obvious that the answer to your questions can be summed up in five words...
This Game Is Not For You.
There's nothing that anybody can say to change your mind at this point, so it's just wasted breath in attempting to do so.
That's OK though, there's plenty of other "fish" out there in the gaming world that you can try, and you will probably enjoy much more so than what Subnautica did for you.
So rather than trolling those of us that like the game as it is, just move on.
I don't like Sports games, but I certainly don't go to those forums and attempt to get players there to try and explain why I don't like them and why they should be change so that I do like them.
That's silly...
So please don't expect the rest of us to do that for you here.
< shrug >
That's six words.
Heh...
Glad to see somebody was paying attention.
I stand corrected.... and edited as such. LoL
Thank you, an actual, valid response. This pretty much seems to confirm what I've been saying though: subnautica is a mediocre game at best, and while you can get some fun out of it, there's also a ton of tedium and frustration, and the story is pretty much totally worthless.
No thank you, troll response, summed up as "go away, we hate you".
If you can't even explain what redeeming qualities a game you're ready to rabidly defend and disagree spam anyone who criticizes in any way has, you may want to reflect on what the hell you are doing.
I don't do anything without a rational reason I can easily explain to others. I could tell you what I like and don't like about every game I own.
And if someone bought a sports game, then they didn't put in any sports, but people were still going on about what an incredible sports game it was, then they should dammed well ask why the hell anyone plays it.
You missed the point, we shouldn't have to explain it to you.
That's why you're essentially trolling us.
Do you like the gameplay? What gameplay? What do you like about it? What unique thing does it offer?
Do you like the story? Why do you like the story? What makes the story a good story? What makes it special? Does it pull you into the world? How, why?
I just like the fact that it's an entire hand crafted open world that takes place 99% under water, has no compulsory objectives, and hosts an array of interesting base building mechanics. I play it for the visuals, the audio, the scale, the feeling of being in dangerous waters but being protected by a big fat submarine, the ability to visualize survival scenarios using the game, and for the fact that I have severe thallasophobia and playing the game is honestly really therapeutic and helps me lessen my terror of open water.
I took a vacation to the beach a few years before playing subnautica and I wouldn't go into the water at all, just being on the beach made me constantly nervous, and I took another vacation to the beach a few months ago after playing subnautica for 2-3 years, and I was able to coax myself into wading out chest-deep. But eventually my focus broke and my mind flooded with thoughts of shit being in the water and I hauled ass to the shore. Ever since playing subnautica, I've been able to overcome some of my tremendous fear of open water. I'm no where near the point where I could swim out into the ocean, or even a river or lake, but the game has conditioned me enough to be able to tolerate looking at pictures of open ocean without having a panic attack.
I love horror games (and what you may call a 'survival' game, I call a 'horror game wearing a survival game costume). I love the tension, I love the exploration, I love the lavish beauty of the world and the harsh fear that moving around it brings me. I enjoy exploration and building, and this game allows me the chance for both, while also allowing for the potential of *not* finishing it, and simply indulging in building and crafting.
I don't view it as Minecraft. I view it as Subnautica. I don't compare it to Minecraft, nor do I compare it to Fallout of *any* iteration. It's neither of these things. It's Subnautica. It is like nothing I have played before, and that makes me happy. It has its niche, and I take a lot of joy in playing with that niche in a wide variety of ways.
Will I potentially get bored of it? Almost definitely. I get bored of almost *any* game that I play nearly nonstop, though. I have still put *checks* 140 hours into it, without a single AddOn or mod. And I came into it *way* later than a lot of the people here, so I have to assume a lot of them have put even more time into it.
You say, "And if someone bought a sports game, then they didn't put in any sports, but people were still going on about what an incredible sports game it was, then they should dammed well ask why the hell anyone plays it."
Yes. But if you buy a golf game looking to play football, and you think it sucks, those people who go on about it being an amazing sports game are still not wrong. Because golf is still a 'sports game'. It's just not the sports game *you* wanted to play.
If I purchased a sports game and found out that it wasn't the sport I thought it was, I wouldn't spend time explaining to people that they were wrong and I was right. I would simply get a game that fits the type of sports game that I was looking to play.
Subnautica isn't the type of (I don't know what game you were looking for here) game that you were looking to play. So spending the energy saying how bad it is will not do anything near as much as putting the game down and picking up a game that *does* suit your play style a bit more, while those people who enjoy it don't need to justify to you. Because no matter what, their justification will not make any difference: you think the game is bad, and you are already proving in your answers that you're not looking for the reason people think it's good. You're looking for people to agree with you and immediately dismissing any answers that do not match your view of the game.
Yup. It turns out that was @sayerulz who said that. I'm mean do you really think I'd make my points using rhetorical questions? I mean @Fluffers, really?
I don't understand. How can you have fun? There's nothing to do. Nothing at all. I'm serious. Just.. please, someone give me a straight answer, because I feel as though people are playing a different game. Like, zork Vs. world of tanks level of different, I.E nothing in common other than being a program on a computer.
Do you like the gameplay? What gameplay? What do you like about it? What unique thing does it offer?
Do you like the story? Why do you like the story? What makes the story a good story? What makes it special? Does it pull you into the world? How, why?
You missed the point, we shouldn't have to explain it to you.
That's why you're essentially trolling us.
So, by this logic, if someones car is broken down by the side of the road, and they ask you "hey, can you help me out with this?", then the correct response is "Go away troll! I don't have to help you! Get reked!"
You could just not answer my question, but you instead decide to respond with an obnoxious and ill-informed post basically telling me to fuck off.
I have severe thallasophobia and playing the game is honestly really therapeutic and helps me lessen my terror of open water.
This is a fair reason, and completely valid for you. I wish you luck with that. Unfortunately, (or probably very fortunately for my life in general) water doesn't really scare me, nor does it affect most people the way it does you I imagine. So that's not really a good model for a game. I'm glad to hear you at least can have fun with it though.
Yes. But if you buy a golf game looking to play football, and you think it sucks, those people who go on about it being an amazing sports game are still not wrong. Because golf is still a 'sports game'. It's just not the sports game *you* wanted to play.
When I purchased this game, it was advertised as an "open world, underwater survival/exploration game". So if it does not meet those criteria in a way that competes with other, similarly priced games with these factors, then you might imagine that I would not be pleased. So breakdown of how those points are fufilled:
Open world: The world has been being made increasingly closed of late, with the filling in of various ILZ entrances. However, it is still basically open world. The issue I have is with the quality of said world. There are a substantial number of well-crafted locations. But what there isn't is compelling reasons to visit them. In fallout, for instance (and yes, I'm going to compare it to fallout, because comparing things is how humans process information), most locations contain something unique, often unique items, which would not fit all that well in subnautica. But the other thing you often find is information. Notes, terminals, holotapes. Pieces of data that you can read. They can just be interesting little stories, or they can have a bearing on the current world, such as a note revealing the location of a nearby cache of supplies. This sort of thing already exists in the form of the degasi logs, however there simply aren't enough of them to fill the world. In fallout, you stumble upon these things constantly. This makes the world feel alive. In subnautica, you have to search and search and search to find the degasi logs. Mostly, things like wrecks are just containers with some random loot. That makes the world feel empty. Basically, while the world is open, it isn't interactable and it doesn't immerse you they way an open world game should.
Underwater: Yes.
Survival: This is probably the biggest issue. This is not a survival game. In a survival game, surviving must be difficult, just as the main objective of any game must be. Surviving in subnautica takes practically no effort. Enemies can be ignored 99% of the time, and offer no challenge. Food and water rapidly become non-issues. Threats like depth and radiation just require an item to basically be removed from the game, and so while they do provide progression, crucial to any survival game, they don't provide a challenge.
You're looking for people to agree with you and immediately dismissing any answers that do not match your view of the game.
This would be a much more compelling argument if you could show me where I got an actual answer and dismissed it without a reason, or a reason that you can actually refute.
I love horror games (and what you may call a 'survival' game, I call a 'horror game wearing a survival game costume). I love the tension, I love the exploration, I love the lavish beauty of the world and the harsh fear that moving around it brings me. I enjoy exploration and building, and this game allows me the chance for both, while also allowing for the potential of *not* finishing it, and simply indulging in building and crafting.
This is pretty valid, but I'm curious as to what makes it tense? There aren't any sort of jumpscares or... well any threats at all really. I'm also not sure why you think a survival game is just a type of horror game, because they are totally different, with the overlap of "survival horror". Most horror games do not have survival elements, and most survival games do not have horror elements.
You missed the point, we shouldn't have to explain it to you.
That's why you're essentially trolling us.
So, by this logic, if someones car is broken down by the side of the road, and they ask you "hey, can you help me out with this?", then the correct response is "Go away troll! I don't have to help you! Get reked!"
You could just not answer my question, but you instead decide to respond with an obnoxious and ill-informed post basically telling me to fuck off.
I have severe thallasophobia and playing the game is honestly really therapeutic and helps me lessen my terror of open water.
This is a fair reason, and completely valid for you. I wish you luck with that. Unfortunately, (or probably very fortunately for my life in general) water doesn't really scare me, nor does it affect most people the way it does you I imagine. So that's not really a good model for a game. I'm glad to hear you at least can have fun with it though.
Yes. But if you buy a golf game looking to play football, and you think it sucks, those people who go on about it being an amazing sports game are still not wrong. Because golf is still a 'sports game'. It's just not the sports game *you* wanted to play.
When I purchased this game, it was advertised as an "open world, underwater survival/exploration game". So if it does not meet those criteria in a way that competes with other, similarly priced games with these factors, then you might imagine that I would not be pleased. So breakdown of how those points are fufilled:
Open world: The world has been being made increasingly closed of late, with the filling in of various ILZ entrances. However, it is still basically open world. The issue I have is with the quality of said world. There are a substantial number of well-crafted locations. But what there isn't is compelling reasons to visit them. In fallout, for instance (and yes, I'm going to compare it to fallout, because comparing things is how humans process information), most locations contain something unique, often unique items, which would not fit all that well in subnautica. But the other thing you often find is information. Notes, terminals, holotapes. Pieces of data that you can read. They can just be interesting little stories, or they can have a bearing on the current world, such as a note revealing the location of a nearby cache of supplies. This sort of thing already exists in the form of the degasi logs, however there simply aren't enough of them to fill the world. In fallout, you stumble upon these things constantly. This makes the world feel alive. In subnautica, you have to search and search and search to find the degasi logs. Mostly, things like wrecks are just containers with some random loot. That makes the world feel empty. Basically, while the world is open, it isn't interactable and it doesn't immerse you they way an open world game should.
Underwater: Yes.
Survival: This is probably the biggest issue. This is not a survival game. In a survival game, surviving must be difficult, just as the main objective of any game must be. Surviving in subnautica takes practically no effort. Enemies can be ignored 99% of the time, and offer no challenge. Food and water rapidly become non-issues. Threats like depth and radiation just require an item to basically be removed from the game, and so while they do provide progression, crucial to any survival game, they don't provide a challenge.
You're looking for people to agree with you and immediately dismissing any answers that do not match your view of the game.
This would be a much more compelling argument if you could show me where I got an actual answer and dismissed it without a reason, or a reason that you can actually refute.
I love horror games (and what you may call a 'survival' game, I call a 'horror game wearing a survival game costume). I love the tension, I love the exploration, I love the lavish beauty of the world and the harsh fear that moving around it brings me. I enjoy exploration and building, and this game allows me the chance for both, while also allowing for the potential of *not* finishing it, and simply indulging in building and crafting.
This is pretty valid, but I'm curious as to what makes it tense? There aren't any sort of jumpscares or... well any threats at all really. I'm also not sure why you think a survival game is just a type of horror game, because they are totally different, with the overlap of "survival horror". Most horror games do not have survival elements, and most survival games do not have horror elements.
You can of course interpret my comments in any way you wish, but you keep demanding that we should explain why we think the game is enjoyable, while at the same time essentially telling us we're full of crap when we do.
If that's not trolling, then I don't know what is.
The thread is yours, so do as you will, but I guess at this point I'm done wasting my breath.
My biggest problem with the story is how it feels like it wants to be nonlinear but a lot of it isn't. A lot of data downloads assume that every player has found the QEP before any of the other Bases/Caches/Vents, but it's not too hard for players to sequence break and skip it entirely, messing up things with the story and progression of data downloads. The only bases players actually need to visit in the right order are the Thermal Plant and Primary Containment Facility. The QEP and DRF are completely optional.
Luckily there have been some changes to make the downloads less linear, and there will hopefully be more.
Comments
THE GAMEPLAY IS NOT FUN
THE STORY IS NOT ENGAGING
MAX ENJOYABLE PLAYTIME BEFORE IT BECOMES A CHORE IS ONLY A COUPLE HOURS, IF THAT.
Subnautica is like a book you keep on reading, hoping it will start to get good in the next chapter, or that the ending will redeem it all, but it doesn't. Since I can't take much more than an hour in the game in it's current state without going "nope, bored", I instead watched a full playthrough for the story, and the story was lame. The characters, such as they were, meant nothing to me, and there was nothing to pull me into the world.
This game had tons of potential, but the devs took it and ran in totally the wrong direction.
I see a million "disagree"s, and a total of zero valid reasons why I'm wrong.
Well, MInecraft's not Dwarf Fortress, either. Subnautica is what it is. It isn't Dwarf Fortress either.
In Dwarf Fortress, you can build mountainous statues of dwarves hoist steins of beer and spewing out water and lava. And a massive number of other constructive things.
You think the Lava Zones are scary, that's child's play compared to Dwarf Fortress. Dwarf Fortress is the Australia of games: most things are trying to kill you. Then you dig down and find out all those scary things on the surface were just the warm-up act. Then you dig deeper and find it just gets worse by orders of magnitude.
There's fun. And then there's Dwarf Fortress "fun".
But Subnautica isn't Dwarf Fortress and I don't expect it to be. Nor do I expect it to be Minecraft. The earlier versions tried to be more malleable with the Terraformer but with the detail of the world it was causing problems. This isn't UWE's first game and they decided the best thing for Subnautica was to take it the way they did. I understand and like the game that resulted.
Even after 545 hours in game, I still have an immense amount of fun in Subnautica. Many things could come in future releases or followon games. I find my money I spent to get Early Access was more than worth it.
Do you like the gameplay? What gameplay? What do you like about it? What unique thing does it offer?
Do you like the story? Why do you like the story? What makes the story a good story? What makes it special? Does it pull you into the world? How, why?
I really, really, really don't understand why I'm getting so many disagrees for stating what seem to me to be the most self-evident facts possible, because right now all I can think that makes any sense is fanboyisim and a bandwagon effect, and I don't want to think that that is all this community is, so someone PLEASE give me an answer that is not a troll, not an insult, not something completely random and nonsensical, just straight, factual, measurable things that make subnautica not the crap game that it feels like every time I pick it up. I don't want "go away, we hate you", I don't want "It's not your thing, go away, we hate you". I just want to understand or have my only working hypothisis that this community is just awful and are whiteknighting the devs confirmed if nothing else.
* * * * *
I've gotten quite a few hours out of exploration and scanning the various life forms. Just seeing the various biomes and different creatures is entertaining, exploring the different cave systems, alien ruins, and dark places of the world is a somewhat relaxing and fun way to kill an afternoon.
Establishing a base in the shallows was fun the first time, but only took me around 4 hours to finish. Exploring all the various wrecks for different blueprints for base pieces, PRAWN Arms, upgrades etc was fun and took me another 6ish hours. (The lack of a map makes this part of the game far more tedious and annoying than it needs to be though imho and without wiki guides would of taken me 50 or more or frustrated me to the point I'd of given up playing entirely.)
After several updates and a six month break building a new base on a new playthrough in the depths of the ocean (near 800m) was also an entertaining challenge and took me a few more hours.
Hunting down the various PDA's to read more about the Degasi story arc (Though they all seemed like right twats tbh judging by the journal entries,) was a side challenge I found engaging. Following the main storyline was intriguing, but more in a "investigate the mystery" feeling of intrigue rather than any feeling of personal danger/risk. (And with the hope of running into intelligent possibly hostile aliens of some sort, and maybe seeing more of an actual story arise than wound up happening.)
The protagonist felt shallow sure, like a cardboard cutout of a character with no real depth or personality, but I was operating under the vain hope they'd be adding more to him during the development. (At this point it could just as easily be a flat chested female, asexual human clone or plastic robot caricature of a person for all the difference it would make.)
Is the game one that I see people sinking 100's of hours into? Nah, not really. All said and done, (not counting various time wasted hunting for that one missing piece of a crafting fragment and wishing for a map) I've spent about 200ish hours in the game over the various Alpha updates and new game starts, bug hunting/reproducing, etc.
For a new player I'd guess they'd probably get around 30-40 hours of play time exploring the ocean, crafting a base, fiddling with the subs and doing the main storyline before running out of stuff to do, and that's fine. As I've said in other posts, I judge a games value by the hours of entertainment I get per dollar. so for a $14 EA game, (or even $24 or whatever full release) If I get 30+ hours of fun spent in it then I'm satisfied. Sure I love games like Skyrim and Fallout 4 where I can get 200+ hours of fun easy, but for something like this, 20+ hours is about all I expect, and the "fun" I'm expecting here is more one of exploration and discovery, seeing the eye candy of the alien ocean and playing to un-stress after a long day rather than expecting a quality storyline, interesting character, or huge engaging world.
I think it comes down to expectations, if you're expecting something along the lines of a traditional survival/open world game underwater you're going to be severely disappointed. If you're looking to kill 20+ hours exploring an alien ocean and a bit of light crafting/survival, than you'll be happy with Subnautica.
* * * * *
I completely get why you feel let down by the "story" and character as it is currently and the lack of characterization, compared to other titles it's pretty shallow and barebones. (Though at least it has one, other survival games like 7 Days to Die doesn't even have any story beyond "don't die.")
It would of been amazing if they added in some voice acting for the protagonist, maybe let you find some NPC survivors you actually gave a damn about and felt motivated to try and save. (Exploring the Aurora would of been the perfect place to add some 10yr old kid you need to look after, and/or a woman seven or so months pregnant, and give players a reason to build a base, develop the protagonist's personality, and resolve the infection in a timely fashion, do anything other than waffle around at their leisure. Making who you found as a survivor on the Aurora wreck random, or a branching storyline of saving one or the other would of also been neat and added to replay value.)
But that's not the direction they went, and in trying to keep some E/G/Kids + rating they chose to leave out the gore, tone down the violence, and scale back the um... Danger? Excitement? Drama? Experience of exploring an alien ocean, and what we're left with is a exploration game with light survival elements and a storyline that got only 1/4th of the budget and attention it deserved.
But for what it is, it's still fun for 20ish (or more) hours, especially for someone playing it through for the first time and not anticipating a Storyline experience on par with Dying Light, Mad Max, Far Cry 3, or other more story driven open world games.
All in all I've more than gotten my money's worth out of the title and have no regrets about backing it during EA, though I do feel once it goes to full 1.0 release there will be many people like you Sayerulz, who go into the game expecting a very different experience than subnautica delivers, and ultimately feeling quite let down; which is pity.
This Game Is Not For You.
There's nothing that anybody can say to change your mind at this point, so it's just wasted breath in attempting to do so.
That's OK though, there's plenty of other "fish" out there in the gaming world that you can try, and you will probably enjoy much more so than what Subnautica did for you.
So rather than trolling those of us that like the game as it is, just move on.
I don't like Sports games, but I certainly don't go to those forums and attempt to get players there to try and explain why I don't like them and why they should be change so that I do like them.
That's silly...
So please don't expect the rest of us to do that for you here.
< shrug >
You really don't want to know how many hours I've spent playing this game, then. (Granted, some of that play time I racked up with the game paused when I went to sleep, but still...)
That's six words.
With mods the game has lasted me for hundreds of hours. The base game didn't. It doesn't have enough for me, to keep going without the amazing support the community gave it.
Thread A: The ending, the compulsion (or lack thereof) to get to the ending, and the linearity of the game leading to that ending.
Silent protagonists can be tricky to handle. In a game like Half-Life, we were piloting a silent protagonist, but one which clearly had a life: his coworkers interacted with him in ways that implied longstanding relationships, and he was on Earth, for kittens' sakes, so as far as the player was concerned, we're gettin' out of Black Mesa and goin' to Vegas because if I survived that, clearly luck is on my side. On top of that, it was a gaming environment designed to be unfriendly - a broken-down research facility filled with dangerous aliens. Nobody would want to stick around for long. In Subnautica, we have the opposite: we're stuck on a world that's an aquatic paradise - dangerous, sure, but once the carar problem is dealt with, it's a place where a lot of us would like to retire. On top of that, life in Alterra space, based on PDA entries, seems kinda...well, seriously messed up. So the idea of "I wanna go home!" is missing, and the idea of "I wanna be anywhere but HERE!" is seriously missing.
Beyond that, very few games have managed to pull off the "no end state" model, and even those that had eventually relented and put one in. Minecraft was endless for ages until one was added in the form of a deeply philosophical two-sided essay. Some make the ending compulsory either through a countdown timer (which is a weak writing way of getting around a game world that's too thin) or because you simply can't avoid it (scripted gaming, like CoD).
The problem with a truly endless game is that players end up wandering off. Even the most self-motivated players usually need some kind of goal to keep them moving forward. Self-imposed goals are great - build a base here, craft all these things, explore X, Y, and Z - but only last as long as new experiences exist in the game. Once you've seen all there is to see, your ability to generate new goals drops off sharply. Without something to shoot for, you lose focus and eventually find something shinier to get your attention - which would be a different game.
By installing an ending, UWE sidestepped this problem - to a degree. The successful part is the addition of...The Escape Hatch. The Way Out. The Great Egress. Just having the option gives you an unfulfilled goal, and that helps keep players in the game. You go from incremental goals - find survival resources, investigate increasingly-difficult-to-access locations, build bases, upgrade equipment - to and endgame goal. Pretty decent game design theory, but one which hinges on execution. And while the addition of a "win state" goal helps, it also doesn't for a reason that fits in well with...
Thread B: Boredom, perceived lack of content, and boredom again.
A big part of the problem is that there's no driving narrative, but it's also not just "you crashed, escape." A game like Minecraft in its original form worked because there was zero story; you had to make your own. (Like playing with LEGOs.) There was nothing in the game world to even imply a story, so you didn't even attempt to root it out. Then you have heavily-scripted, linear games like CoD that go the extreme other route, giving you a story you cannot ignore and must complete. The middle ground is Fallout, where there's an optionally-ignorable story that has an effect on the game world and enough impact to sustain it, but the world's big enough you can ignore it for a long time.
Subnautica, unfortunately fell between these category buckets and landed in the netherworld. There are story elements like the PDAs and crashed pods, the abandoned seabases, and the enormous wreck of the Aurora, but none of them are ever brought together into a cogent story. The ingredients are there, but they were never cooked into a narrative. As a result, players want to know how the pieces fit together and the story they tell, but they don't, which leaves story-driven players feeling unfulfilled. "I must have missed something!" where, in fact, what they feel they're missing isn't there to be found. So the ending feels misplaced, going straight from Luke farting around on Tatooine to blowing up the Death Star. There's the nagging feeling that something is missing, which means we're missing out.
The other side of the problem is the difficulty in simulating an aquatic world. The world feels emptier than it should in large part because it has to be. Anybody who's gone snorkeling or diving at a coral reef, lagoon, or other similar environment will tell you the same thing: it's so alive! Big fish, little fish, microfish, and all kinds of plants. Busy, busy, busy. Trying to put all of that in a simulated game world, developing it, then rendering it in the player's machine...you're looking at a nightmare. Developers of games like Fallout can go nuts because their clutter is inanimate and the environment is cooperative; air is empty. In a water environment, though, almost everything is alive, which means animation; everything needs to move realistically in three dimensions, which is AI calculations; and there's a lot more of everything, which pushes resources to the limit. If a realistic world were built, one teeming with life as we might expect, most of the gamer base would be eliminated because they simply couldn't run it (c.f. the Crysis Problem). For people like Markiplier or Jacksepticeye, their videos would look great; for someone with a bargain Best Buy HP craptop, you're dead out of luck - heck, even someone with an upper-middle-range machine would be out of luck or running on ultra-low-quality settings. Accessibility means a wider sales base and a better experience for more people.
So is there a solution? Yes and no. Yes in that the story details could be fleshed out - it's why people have been writing stories here - so that it doesn't feel like there's a missing part, and that could be done without massive investments of resources, especially if it's crowdsourced. Yes in that the ending should remain complete-when-desired rather than a compulsory item. No in that radically increasing the complexity of the world content is infeasible for 75+% of the audience. But yes that by adding more biomes and things to explore the game will feel like a better experience - just like Minecraft, creating the "I'll go check that out, then I'll sleep" situation.
TL;DR - Het toevoegen van meer inhoud op de wereldschaal zou helpen om een meer 'eindeloze game' -vriendelijke instelling te creëren, maar grote zorg moet worden genomen om meer levensvormen en "clutter" -risico's toe te voegen waardoor lage en middelgrote gamers uit Subnautica volledig worden geduwd. De meest effectieve manier om de spelervaring te verbeteren en het einde van het gevoel minder gedwongen te maken, zou de verhalen zijn die door de PDA en milieuaanwijzingen worden voorgesteld.
Not @Kouji_San, though, I bet.
Oh you didn't lose me there, but just because it looks like Dutch and uses Dutch words doesn't mean........... WHY did you feel the need to massacre my language like that bub
Forgive me. It's English syntax auto-translated by Google.
Yeah but Dutch already sounds like someone's trying to strangle a cat with a vacuum cleaner filled with dogs... So why go the extra mile kilometer man
Man, that's poetry right there.
"Either because the game engine is limited. Or their time and team are limited." - @Hulkie2345
It's probably a combination of this, I imagine they did spend a lot of time on preparing, tweaking and creating stuff for Unity. Just to get that bastard of a "closed-quarters engine", used mostly for horror games, to work with an open world environment filled with watah...
Thank you, an actual, valid response. This pretty much seems to confirm what I've been saying though: subnautica is a mediocre game at best, and while you can get some fun out of it, there's also a ton of tedium and frustration, and the story is pretty much totally worthless.
No thank you, troll response, summed up as "go away, we hate you".
If you can't even explain what redeeming qualities a game you're ready to rabidly defend and disagree spam anyone who criticizes in any way has, you may want to reflect on what the hell you are doing.
I don't do anything without a rational reason I can easily explain to others. I could tell you what I like and don't like about every game I own.
And if someone bought a sports game, then they didn't put in any sports, but people were still going on about what an incredible sports game it was, then they should dammed well ask why the hell anyone plays it.
Heh...
Glad to see somebody was paying attention.
I stand corrected.... and edited as such. LoL
You missed the point, we shouldn't have to explain it to you.
That's why you're essentially trolling us.
I just like the fact that it's an entire hand crafted open world that takes place 99% under water, has no compulsory objectives, and hosts an array of interesting base building mechanics. I play it for the visuals, the audio, the scale, the feeling of being in dangerous waters but being protected by a big fat submarine, the ability to visualize survival scenarios using the game, and for the fact that I have severe thallasophobia and playing the game is honestly really therapeutic and helps me lessen my terror of open water.
I took a vacation to the beach a few years before playing subnautica and I wouldn't go into the water at all, just being on the beach made me constantly nervous, and I took another vacation to the beach a few months ago after playing subnautica for 2-3 years, and I was able to coax myself into wading out chest-deep. But eventually my focus broke and my mind flooded with thoughts of shit being in the water and I hauled ass to the shore. Ever since playing subnautica, I've been able to overcome some of my tremendous fear of open water. I'm no where near the point where I could swim out into the ocean, or even a river or lake, but the game has conditioned me enough to be able to tolerate looking at pictures of open ocean without having a panic attack.
Your pseudo-intellectuality is painful. You sound like a robot trying to understand why humans enjoy sunsets or kisses.
"Scan complete - Analysis: There is no logic in this video game. Entertainment subroutines not engaged. Disregarded as inferior product." - Sayerulz
I love horror games (and what you may call a 'survival' game, I call a 'horror game wearing a survival game costume). I love the tension, I love the exploration, I love the lavish beauty of the world and the harsh fear that moving around it brings me. I enjoy exploration and building, and this game allows me the chance for both, while also allowing for the potential of *not* finishing it, and simply indulging in building and crafting.
I don't view it as Minecraft. I view it as Subnautica. I don't compare it to Minecraft, nor do I compare it to Fallout of *any* iteration. It's neither of these things. It's Subnautica. It is like nothing I have played before, and that makes me happy. It has its niche, and I take a lot of joy in playing with that niche in a wide variety of ways.
Will I potentially get bored of it? Almost definitely. I get bored of almost *any* game that I play nearly nonstop, though. I have still put *checks* 140 hours into it, without a single AddOn or mod. And I came into it *way* later than a lot of the people here, so I have to assume a lot of them have put even more time into it.
You say, "And if someone bought a sports game, then they didn't put in any sports, but people were still going on about what an incredible sports game it was, then they should dammed well ask why the hell anyone plays it."
Yes. But if you buy a golf game looking to play football, and you think it sucks, those people who go on about it being an amazing sports game are still not wrong. Because golf is still a 'sports game'. It's just not the sports game *you* wanted to play.
If I purchased a sports game and found out that it wasn't the sport I thought it was, I wouldn't spend time explaining to people that they were wrong and I was right. I would simply get a game that fits the type of sports game that I was looking to play.
Subnautica isn't the type of (I don't know what game you were looking for here) game that you were looking to play. So spending the energy saying how bad it is will not do anything near as much as putting the game down and picking up a game that *does* suit your play style a bit more, while those people who enjoy it don't need to justify to you. Because no matter what, their justification will not make any difference: you think the game is bad, and you are already proving in your answers that you're not looking for the reason people think it's good. You're looking for people to agree with you and immediately dismissing any answers that do not match your view of the game.
@Fluffers I'm pretty sure I didn't say anything of the sort. Please take care with your use of "quotes" friend.
So, by this logic, if someones car is broken down by the side of the road, and they ask you "hey, can you help me out with this?", then the correct response is "Go away troll! I don't have to help you! Get reked!"
You could just not answer my question, but you instead decide to respond with an obnoxious and ill-informed post basically telling me to fuck off.
This is a fair reason, and completely valid for you. I wish you luck with that. Unfortunately, (or probably very fortunately for my life in general) water doesn't really scare me, nor does it affect most people the way it does you I imagine. So that's not really a good model for a game. I'm glad to hear you at least can have fun with it though.
When I purchased this game, it was advertised as an "open world, underwater survival/exploration game". So if it does not meet those criteria in a way that competes with other, similarly priced games with these factors, then you might imagine that I would not be pleased. So breakdown of how those points are fufilled:
Open world: The world has been being made increasingly closed of late, with the filling in of various ILZ entrances. However, it is still basically open world. The issue I have is with the quality of said world. There are a substantial number of well-crafted locations. But what there isn't is compelling reasons to visit them. In fallout, for instance (and yes, I'm going to compare it to fallout, because comparing things is how humans process information), most locations contain something unique, often unique items, which would not fit all that well in subnautica. But the other thing you often find is information. Notes, terminals, holotapes. Pieces of data that you can read. They can just be interesting little stories, or they can have a bearing on the current world, such as a note revealing the location of a nearby cache of supplies. This sort of thing already exists in the form of the degasi logs, however there simply aren't enough of them to fill the world. In fallout, you stumble upon these things constantly. This makes the world feel alive. In subnautica, you have to search and search and search to find the degasi logs. Mostly, things like wrecks are just containers with some random loot. That makes the world feel empty. Basically, while the world is open, it isn't interactable and it doesn't immerse you they way an open world game should.
Underwater: Yes.
Survival: This is probably the biggest issue. This is not a survival game. In a survival game, surviving must be difficult, just as the main objective of any game must be. Surviving in subnautica takes practically no effort. Enemies can be ignored 99% of the time, and offer no challenge. Food and water rapidly become non-issues. Threats like depth and radiation just require an item to basically be removed from the game, and so while they do provide progression, crucial to any survival game, they don't provide a challenge.
Exploration: see "open world".
This would be a much more compelling argument if you could show me where I got an actual answer and dismissed it without a reason, or a reason that you can actually refute.
This is pretty valid, but I'm curious as to what makes it tense? There aren't any sort of jumpscares or... well any threats at all really. I'm also not sure why you think a survival game is just a type of horror game, because they are totally different, with the overlap of "survival horror". Most horror games do not have survival elements, and most survival games do not have horror elements.
You can of course interpret my comments in any way you wish, but you keep demanding that we should explain why we think the game is enjoyable, while at the same time essentially telling us we're full of crap when we do.
If that's not trolling, then I don't know what is.
The thread is yours, so do as you will, but I guess at this point I'm done wasting my breath.
Luckily there have been some changes to make the downloads less linear, and there will hopefully be more.