Devs Gonna Finish Development?
1badninja
Oklahoma Join Date: 2017-03-19 Member: 229043Members
Oklahoma Join Date: 2017-03-19 Member: 229043Members
So, its clear the game isn't finished and was rushed into release. Aside from it being riddled with bugs and very poorly optimized(Yes, I'm sure devs will get to the bugs and optimization) .. there are parts of the game that are obviously just not finished. Precursor bases for instance.. Those are supposed to belong to an alien race that possesses technology far more advanced than any the human race has ever seen? Sure not very interesting for something that should be the most interesting. No furniture, no props aside from a couple relics.. No music.. bit of atmospheric sounds.. and thats it. Just a big empty place to run through and scan a small handful of mildy interesting things and get out. And whats up with islands? just boring. Walking and running and jumping dont feel like they have any weight. You can scale insanely steep inclines. The islands are completely empty aside from some vegetation, annoying jumping crab things, and even more boring precursor stuff. No resources to find on them, a bit of food if you're playing in survival mode. No music, no atmospheric sounds.. just dead. Even the cave system under mountain island.. is just empty. The most interesting things to find is a bit of the Degasi story.
Anyways, just curious if the devs were planning on working on it anymore now that its "released"?
edit: I'm not raggin on the game. I love this game. Have been playing it in E.A. for a couple years or so now. I just feel there are some pretty blaring issues with it before calling it done that should have gotten some attention before release.
Anyways, just curious if the devs were planning on working on it anymore now that its "released"?
edit: I'm not raggin on the game. I love this game. Have been playing it in E.A. for a couple years or so now. I just feel there are some pretty blaring issues with it before calling it done that should have gotten some attention before release.
Comments
I doubt they will do more with the alien bases, though. We don't know anything about that race, except that they may actually all be dead. It's possible they didn't need furniture. We don't know that they were humanoid. They did leave a lot of tools and research equipment, and even a few robots.
Mountain island has resources under water. On land.. nada. And yea I'm aware floating Island has 3 Degasi bases.. nothing overly interesting. Still its blatantly obvious the game isnt finished in these areas. The game feels less than beta in both precursor bases and on islands.
The precursor bases are meant to feel empty, and abandoned, thats a major point of the precursor backstory, unknown, mysterious, little to no evidence
Mountain island has plenty of basalt shale (durp) (lithium, gold, diamonds) and lithium chunks on dry land. Try exploring the caves.
Perhaps part of your reaction is because you've been playing it for a couple of years (on and off I assume)? So you're quite familiar with what's in the game and it becomes old hat to you. Not the same experience a new player has, or probably you had too back when you first started playing.
If a game has held my interest long enough that I've put a lot of time into it, I'll tend to think of some things as "same old, same old, yeah seen that before" plus "gee, wouldn't it be great if the devs added xyz". I'm sure the devs themselves wanted to add even more stuff, but at some point you gotta stop the scope creep and actually ship the damn thing!
At this point, I feel the game has limited replayability, but then again I got several years of fun out it during the early access period. Sure it could be "better" in various ways, but I definitely got my money's worth out of it. Just my .02 credits.
I haven't finished it yet but an loving it. (Except lack of co-op)
I make @Klinn words my own.
Adding... To me it feels empty, but like it is supposed to be this way. Maybe their furniture and props were telepathic, they are weird aliens after all (I know about the rifle, leave me be). To me they look and feel like temples, like pyramids and such... Large halls and passageways, few props.
Yes agreed exploring the alien bases and the islands feels definately lackluster. But there is already alot of content in the game, even without those 2 things. I just see the islands and alien base storyline as and extra(bonus giveaway) at the moment , a not very interesting one (except of the elevator ride in the aline base
Same counts for some parts of the user interface and the base building aspect, like:
-the scanner room icon clutter/overload.
-the scanner room shows even ressourches you have already collected (how should i find all the data boxes, if the scanner room shows me even databoxes which i have already collected).
-the absolute useless 3D map ontop of the seaglide which does nothing but block your field of view.
-the tablet menus like the blueprint or databank section,which have no different color indicators to find certain things faster in the tablet (its all white text on blue backgrounds).
-the fact that the grid of the foundation squares does not align with the grid of the building that you place ontop of the foundations squares, which leads to the situation that you often cant place buildings in the middle of a foundation square.
-and that you often cant place a building somewhere even when the area seems to be completely free with enough space.
- sometimes if you want to rotate a decoration object like the model of a toycar or a cap, to place it in your base in the right angle, it just starts to rotate through your fast selection belt instead, because both things have the same keycomand (mouse wheel)
Things like that really annoy me. But yes the islands and alienbase feel kind of underwhelming. How cool would it be to build alientech in your own base like the gravity lift elevator thing or adapt the teleporter tech. I also feel like the whole story arc of the Sea Emperor Leviathan feels kind of forced and works even against this feeling of isolation this game creates so well otherwise. It feels to much like they want to push a agenda of species conservation/protection of species here instead of implementing which would make most sense for the setting of the game. The sea emperor part of the story arc really feels like one of those education movies you had to watch at school, where all effort went into educating someone to a specific mindset and not to be entertaining on its own. But thankfully only this small part of the story is like that, the rest of the game is done mostly pretty well.
And before i forget it, the model for the sea dragon leviathan looks really imersionbreaking too. When i saw this giant mashup of squid and dragon swiming around and spiting fire underwater.... well i think its one of those love it or hate it things.Most of the younger kids will find it really cool and most of the older players will probably think that this is stupid. Dragons have been used in video games in such a inflationary way, that i personaly really cant see any dragons anymore. But this dragon in particular feels kind of off and very unbelivable, even more then the other dragons in games. It just feels like a giant plastic kids toy.
One other very unbelivable thing(which alienated me form the game quite a bit) where the floating islands. Its hard to belive that balloon like creatures which a way way smaller in space then the islands they are holding up, can float those islands.Have they some hidden anti gravity tech stored inside of them or what?
Emotionally, I'm disappointed with 1.0 with seeing all the cool things that the devs talked about during development and never implemented or had to cut way, way back, and how many of the UI/game balance issues and inconsistencies were reported (sometimes for years) on the forums, but the devs never did anything about them (I'm especially annoyed that the UI never had the wonky behavior of some menus exiting with RMB and others with TAB, and others with ESC fixed).
Objectively, I know that game development is hard. Despite all of Subnautica's issues, it's still a very good game and has been received very well which ultimately is the best thing that could happen. The positive feedback (and money from sales) will encourage the devs to continue to develop the game and (hopefully) address some of these issues, and build a great expansion. I'm very excited that proper mod support is near the top of the list for post 1.0 features, since that will open up whole new possibilities for the game and allow mods to (hopefully) fix some of my pet peeves if the devs don't.
The madly-cartwheeling manta rays are funny, though.
Where did you read that they are working on proper mod support?
The last time i have read something about their standpoint towards mod support was on the rock paper shotgun interview this month with the studio director:
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2018/01/22/subnautica-devs-want-to-add-arctic-biome-after-release/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+rockpapershotgun/steam+(Rock,+Paper,+Shotgun:+Steam+RSS)
Where he said the following in regards to modding support:
"We made the game we wanted to make with Subnautica, so it’s less exciting for us to spend a bunch of effort to have the community undo it or to make splintered versions… I love mods, but I don’t see the point"
So why do you think that they have changed their mind in this regard?
I feel you, the pop ups are the most annoying part of the game. I agree with the scanner icons cluttering too and there was a pretty nice suggestion here in the forum, which I hope the devs eventually implement, to deal with it: adding a little transparency to it and making the icons size vary with distance, so far away icons would be nearly dots.
I disagree on the seaglide map, it is great for navigating caves. I usually turn it off, but it has saved me from drowning a couple of times. I play with in a dark screen, using the cinematic filter so my game is really dark and I practically can't see distant objects. With reduced visibility it is really hard to find the exit of large cave systems.
I also don't usually mind the foundation issue, as I only use it to craft exterior growbeds around my base. If required a build a couple of reinforcements, which for a similar recipe provides 7hp against the measly 2hp of the foundation.
From looking more closely, it looks like it's only going to be basic mod support for the time being. Modders are already editing game files to load their mod dlls, it sounds like the mod support will simply be a dll loader.
What I see the devs saying in that statement is that they don't want to spend a lot of time building a really nice mod interface. If you read in the comments on that RPS article, there's a really good comment about their previous game, NS2. It sounds like that game had massive mod support, and it was PITA to keep up and splintered the multiplayer community.
A basic dll loader would be easy to implement, and combined with Unity's general modding friendliness there could still be a lot of mods available to extend the life of the game. Since Subnautica is singleplayer, fragmentation is much less of an issue, and the game would really benefit from mods given the limited replay value the game has with the static map.
Unless I'm missing something?
The only possible fragmentation I see is here on the forums when players compare their experiences in the game (and possibly criticize each other for using mods that "make the game too easy" or otherwise don't live up to the dev's ideal, as if they can speak for the devs). Given that Subnautica doesn't really have in-game challenges for players to share (like KSP does, yet it has TONS of mods) I'm not really sure why the devs brought this up as such a major issue for mod support. Maybe they were having flashbacks to NS2.
That's a very disappointing attitude for a game developer and very shortsighted. Games that have decent mod support tend to stick around generating revenue for years longer than games without.
Agreed. Especially if said game has a relatively small static map with limited replay value...
Hopefully after the devs have recovered from celebrating the release, they'll be able to think more clearly about the future of the game.
Well its the quick short term money they will get from sony vs the money they would get in the long term overall by building a content friendly platform like minecraft,skyrim,fallout or the quake games did .Yes shortsighted describes it pretty acurate.
I mean alone the longevity on twitch and the pure amount of advertisement for their game, they would get out of it, if it had some late game/longterm meta content like a multiplayer mode and modding support(minecraft had for years 10th of thousands of viewers on twitch for example). But beeing singleplayer only and having zero moddingsupport , people will stop speaking about the game and stop careing pretty soon. Does that make it a flop? Of cause not, but they could make so much more money and prestige for their studio and their next game out of it, if they had those elements in it.
They didnt even have to give them out for free, they could just put the modding support and multiplayer into the dlc together with a new biome and sell it for 15-20 dollar and im sure almost everyone would buy it (even people who hesitated buying it now).