Feeling Pretty Bummed...
MadMaxTheMighty
Join Date: 2018-01-23 Member: 235421Members
Join Date: 2018-01-23 Member: 235421Members
Can anyone explain why the decision was made to try and release this game on Xbox?
The more I've been thinking about it, the more I've realized that many of the features that users yearned for were either cut or never developed simply because they wanted to be able to cram this game into the pitiful box that the lackluster platform supports.
First and foremost is a co-op multiplayer mode. They try to claim that it was a fundamental problem in their original design that prevented them from going down that path; however, a small, random group of developers were able to decompile the code and make many of the necessary changes on their own on a part-time basis. When you consider that along with the massive undertaking that it would be to develop the type of multiplayer experience that this game would need to implement in order to maintain cohesion of the underlying story on the Xbox platform, it begins to feel like Microsoft's offering was the true impedance. Doing so on the PC would have been a trivial matter compared to many of the other mechanics developed for this game.
Xbox Live is undeniably powerful. However; if your multiplayer experience does not fit tidily within a small set of scenarios, then you are forced to write a completely custom implementation that meets their very strict set of specifications against their very convoluted API. It is an incredibly onerous task that is prohibitive unless you are a behemoth like Bethesda or Square Enix.
When you look at the desire to develop VR support for this game, the decision becomes even more of a head-scratcher. It is literally the only modern gaming console that does not support VR in any way. Even the Switch can be rigged for it. Had they targeted a console that also supported VR, then I believe that it is a feature that would have received more attention. It certainly would have increased the percentage of the user base that wanted to play with that technology.
Then there is the content that downright received a cut for no apparent reason. Many rumors have circulated (and some have been verified by the UW team) that some of those cuts were made simply because it wasn't going to be feasible for the Xbox release. Terraforming, anyone?
I just don't get it. It doesn't even seem economically justifiable considering that the Xbox is dead last in popularity in today's market and has played second fiddle to the PS4 its entire life. The Switch has nearly tripled the number of sales the Xbox One had in the first year after its release, and is second only to the PS4 in the same time frame. The one and only claim-to-fame that the Xbox has going for it is, multiplayer *sad trombone*... I just don't understand. If they'd truly gone cross-plat, then it would make more sense. If they'd gone with PS4 as the "third wheel" rather than the Xbox, then it would still make more sense. Heck - I'd even throw them a bone if they'd switched
gears and gone with the Switch given the original mobile roots that this game spawned from. This just doesn't seem rational, at all...
TL:DR: Xbox sucks...
The more I've been thinking about it, the more I've realized that many of the features that users yearned for were either cut or never developed simply because they wanted to be able to cram this game into the pitiful box that the lackluster platform supports.
First and foremost is a co-op multiplayer mode. They try to claim that it was a fundamental problem in their original design that prevented them from going down that path; however, a small, random group of developers were able to decompile the code and make many of the necessary changes on their own on a part-time basis. When you consider that along with the massive undertaking that it would be to develop the type of multiplayer experience that this game would need to implement in order to maintain cohesion of the underlying story on the Xbox platform, it begins to feel like Microsoft's offering was the true impedance. Doing so on the PC would have been a trivial matter compared to many of the other mechanics developed for this game.
Xbox Live is undeniably powerful. However; if your multiplayer experience does not fit tidily within a small set of scenarios, then you are forced to write a completely custom implementation that meets their very strict set of specifications against their very convoluted API. It is an incredibly onerous task that is prohibitive unless you are a behemoth like Bethesda or Square Enix.
When you look at the desire to develop VR support for this game, the decision becomes even more of a head-scratcher. It is literally the only modern gaming console that does not support VR in any way. Even the Switch can be rigged for it. Had they targeted a console that also supported VR, then I believe that it is a feature that would have received more attention. It certainly would have increased the percentage of the user base that wanted to play with that technology.
Then there is the content that downright received a cut for no apparent reason. Many rumors have circulated (and some have been verified by the UW team) that some of those cuts were made simply because it wasn't going to be feasible for the Xbox release. Terraforming, anyone?
I just don't get it. It doesn't even seem economically justifiable considering that the Xbox is dead last in popularity in today's market and has played second fiddle to the PS4 its entire life. The Switch has nearly tripled the number of sales the Xbox One had in the first year after its release, and is second only to the PS4 in the same time frame. The one and only claim-to-fame that the Xbox has going for it is, multiplayer *sad trombone*... I just don't understand. If they'd truly gone cross-plat, then it would make more sense. If they'd gone with PS4 as the "third wheel" rather than the Xbox, then it would still make more sense. Heck - I'd even throw them a bone if they'd switched
gears and gone with the Switch given the original mobile roots that this game spawned from. This just doesn't seem rational, at all...TL:DR: Xbox sucks...
Comments
Subnautica came out better than most (at least there's a "finished" main story and mostly fun game, despite how much they had to cut it back), but it's disappointing to see how much the devs had to cut while simultaneously pushing back deadlines. I know it's not all related to the console, but for a small team porting to another platform and supporting VR is a big task and I do feel that the core game suffered for trying to support more than one platform. IMHO, build a solid core and port/extend the game from there instead of trying to support everything at launch.
I think it'll pay off in the long run, and they might even get some of the dropped features back. (But don't count on it.) I think they're going to need to figure out how to do high performance decompression of terrain on the fly (or, put more work into that) to get it running smoothly, as there is a physical limit to the amount of data a 5400 RPM hard drive that all the low-end, some of the mid-range PCs, and all of the consoles use.
I can't stand playing games that have a major base building component on consoles. I end up spending the majority of my time building bases, and console controls do not give you the fine-grained control of a mouse and keyboard.
I own a PS4 but I only use it for RPG titles. There are generally a whole lot of cinematic cut-scenes in those games so it is nice to be able to chill on the couch while you take them in rather than hunch over your keyboard. However; I return to my station within the PC Master Race for anything and everything else - which is why it kills me that a fantastic addition to this genre will ultimately be tainted by its attempt to be something that it was never meant to be.
They seriously "have no idea" how the rouge developers were able to decompile their code?!? It takes ten to twenty minutes to decompile and deobfuscate .NET code with IL Spy and some solid deobfuscation software. That was one of the driving factors behind Nadella's decision to open source the frameworks and the compiler itself. There was more benefit to opening it up to community contributions than there was in continuing the futile practice of trying to protect their IP. These guys did great work - so I'm taken aback that they would not know how easy that was.
<--- Professional .NET developer for over a decade.
1) They don't "have no idea" how the "rogue developers were able to decompile their code", they have no idea how the "rogue developers" were able to kit together such a functional multiplayer considering Subnautica isn't built for it.
2) RE: PS4: you obviously haven't been keeping tabs on their Trello, and didn't watch the Live Stream. Which is ofc fine, I'll link them for you:
https://trello.com/c/WFjuVBOv/68-start-ps4-port-as-a-test
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/221740820?t=01h46m12s
It really bugs me that I feel like I can't trust the talking heads over at UWE. They seem to peddle a lot of - we'll call it misinformation to be polite - that falls down pretty quickly upon any sort of scrutiny...
The below will probably get me banned, but oh well. At least I went out in a blaze of glory!
I'm not buying it. I've converted some of the source code into a VS solution and have been combing through it. I'm done for tonight, but will probably keep knocking it around tomorrow. The cyclomatic complexity of some of these methods is pretty gruesome, but I am not seeing any sort of design decisions being made here that would fundamentally undermine an attempt to implement some form of state synchronization.
Just a whole lot of grunt work - which is likely why the individual effort fell apart in the first place...
However; the simple fact still remains that coding multiplayer for Xbox Live would absolutely be a limiting factor in their willingness to produce a multiplayer mode. The Xbox sales would suffer considerably if PC supported multiplayer and the console version didn't - and there is no way that they have the staff or the necessary knowledge in-house to write a custom MPM implementation. So very disappointing...
@MadMaxTheMighty : If you feel like helping out (or just perusing / asking questions), the modders hangout is over here, the Modding Emporium (modding loader tool and some mods) is here, and the multiplayer mod is here
Ask the modders like @nesrak1 @suspensionrailway (I know a lot about computers but I don't code {yet}).
I certainly don’t want to say anything negative about the modding community. They are all extremely talented folks doing great work. However, I ROFLMAO when you say a small group of developers “completed” in a short time multiplayer. They have made progress. Amazing progress. But there is still a better than average chance this company will create a brand new game—maybe call it SN 2–before the multiplayer mod is finished, polished and released to the general public.
Just a quick aside about the pro’s and con’s of obfuscating the code.. the developers benefited to a certain extent from *NOT* obfuscating their code. One of the players offered such high quality bug fixes that they hired him.
It looks like they are maybe 200-300 hours away from being done. It is closer than I originally thought (I was under the impression that the effort had died off) - and far closer than your estimation...
@MadMaxTheMighty Any chance you're going to try helping out with the effort? Or mod the game in some other way?
just one thing to say about time estimates:
Mythical Man Month.
This. Also, the last 5% take as much time as the first 95%. Finishing is hard.
It really is well done. There is some code that I don't really like - very procedural - but I'm also a code snob so take those gripes from me with a grain of salt.
The decision not to develop a multiplayer mode was made well before we decided to look into an Xbox version and was not linked to that. Sometimes community explanations for why we don't have multiplayer can overstate the case a little - it's not that it's impossible or that there's some fundamental design issue. Primarily it's that with the way we built the world streaming, doing multiplayer properly would have been a serious and lengthy undertaking, which would mean a lot less programmer time on aspects of the single player game that we felt were important. We made the choice to have a more polished and rich single player experience instead of a multiplayer game with fewer features and almost certainly worse performance.
The work the multiplayer mod team has done is undeniably impressive, but it's not a question of whether or not it's possible to do it at all. Our last game was a multiplayer game built completely from scratch; we know how to do it. Instead it's about the amount of work it would have taken, as Morph_Guy has said, to get it to a release-worthy state. That would have meant spending much longer in development or sacrificing more of what you see in the game today. We made a decision that we didn't want to do either of those things.
As for sacrificing features for the sake of the Xbox, I can't think of any instance where we did that either. The fact is that a lot of our players have relatively low-end systems and we always wanted to be able to support that. Xbox or not, we would always have had to make changes to the game in order to make it run well on PCs of roughly equivalent power. Making an Xbox version certainly helped us focus our efforts on performance, but it wasn't the deciding factor. Terraforming is actually a good example here: it was cut because it performed poorly, made save game files massive, and had real game design issues. It's much more difficult to gate the player's progress through the environment if they have a magic tool that can just drill straight down through the world.
Since Xbox offers an early access equivalent, it was a way for us to dip our toe into the console market in a way that worked with our development process. Having reached this point a PS4 version is pretty likely, but that wouldn't have happened without being able to test our assumptions in early access on the Xbox.
A final note: the original concept for Subnautica was a small game that would take about eighteen months to make and be playable on the iPad. We haven't compromised our initial vision for the sake of the Xbox at all. To the contrary, thanks to the feedback and support from our PC early access players, we've ended up with a much richer and more complete game.
Altho that might be true, and this might be a big pinch of "hind sight". I see allot of streamers looking at Subnautica going like... ooh nice, and then dump it and walk away with Sea of Thieves. Subnautica screams for a 2 or 3 man co-op, and it's missing literally the boat with this timed beta release of previous mentioned title.
In the back of my head I go "ah well, there can always be a Subnautica 2" but by then the magic is gone and i suspect the hype will be over. On the other side, I also realise that the current Subnautica might not have enough content to warrant an extensive coop/multiplayer mode.
In the end, it leaves me with this brackish water taste. Subnautica is good, a simple co-op will be severely missed.. but in the end I know it could not warrant to cost/time to implement for the scope of the project.
I'm interested tho, any plans to give this game a followup in terms of similar game play? (that might include co-op?)
When Factorio decided to add multiplayer, it took them a year and a half of no real new features to get it working acceptably. So yes, multiplayer in Subnautica would have totally been possible: Just pick your favorite year and a half of added features and remove them from the game.
Don't get me wrong, I would love multiplayer in Subnautica, and I love multiplayer in Factorio. But it's hard to argue that Factorio wouldn't be a whole lot closer to finished right now if they hadn't gone the multiplayer route, and I totally believe the Subnautica devs when they say no multiplayer was a decision made based on what a time sink it would be.
It's cool. I'm sure that you didn't read the entire thread, but I eventually realized that I'd made a knee jerk reaction. I didn't know that Subnautica was built on Unity3D. After learning that, it became pretty apparent why Xbox was the first console to get an RC build.
I'm going to contribute to the Mp mod. I got hooked up with the team and am going to try and commit my first feature this weekend. Figured it is better to try and get what I want rather than sit around and pout that I didn't get it =P
Thanks for dropping by though, and I get that you at least needed to respond for the sake of posterity if nothing else.
I hope that y'all enjoyed your retreat. Looking forward to a possible expansion!
Seriously the devs bringing this game to consoles is one of the greatest gaming things I've ever experienced.
The game is incredibly unique, and the more people who get to play it the better.
This. I mostly game on PC. But if a game is good, you want as many people to enjoy it as possible, and you want the developer to make more money. In this instance it was win-win.
This x2.
I also mostly play my games on PC, though there's a few rare cases (Console exclusives e.g.). When I saw Subnautica pop onto the Xbox, I bought it up quickly despite already having the PC version run mostly a'right on my aging laptop. So nice I bought it twice.
If I had a PS4 I'd buy it a third time, I admit xD