...because it was on sale and looked interesting. My mistake. The odd thing is, I enjoy atmospheric exploration. There's a good game buried in there somewhere, I'm sure. But the "prefab compartments" base-building is crap, especially when a good chunk of the game is hunting down and scanning the "fragments" to unlock pretty much anything useful. The inventory / resource management is a pain in the tail - realistic perhaps, but certainly not fun to deal with (nothing stacks, every piece of ore, glass, coral, etc takes up space in your very limited inventory). Half the stuff in the game is trying to murder you, and they give you a pocket knife. At the very least, give me a bloody harpoon, dammit! Frankly, it feels like a much prettier version of a Win'98 screen-saver I had. Gorgeous underwater environments, but there was fluff-all to do with it except swim around and look. While I acknowledge there's a story in Subnautica, I can't say I was ever compelled to care. I've never played NMS, but from reading the reviews, I can't help thinking there's an unpleasant similarity here. I want to like the game, but I'd rather just have the vibrant undersea environments in Empyrion. Maybe I'll make an ocean planet to call home.
I bought it a while ago and it was way better. We had basic blueprints already and didnt have to run all over the map for em - which really feels artificial and a way to stretch playtime. And the not available item stacking is annoying but at least this point is part of the lone survivor thing who cant carry endless weight. The game looks still gorgeous and i like exploring the sea. But yea i think they listened a bit too much to the hey we need sea monsters and torpedos faction. The prefabed bases limit your building fun but it never was a blockbuilder and you still can build interesting stuff eg see sky bridges to aurora and stuff like that. It just contains the few elements you have and the res hauling is like ugh... The vehicles are quite nice but such a small cuntruction bay can produce a cyclops?! with such low res needed? - Some things really need work. The story... hmm i never cared either. I'd rather see more environment interaction like outdoor farms. We also had the ability to dig sand and shape terrain which has been removed. I didnt try the new terraforming yet but it certainly gave away a litte freedom you had. You made a valid critique but NMS - not really just because they didnt advertise the **** out of the game. But of course a danger is there you get an eye candy with way to less to do and the game hungers for a multiplayer and mod support which is also not there. But still for ~10 bucks this sale its still worth the money - for the unusual under water setting alone. But i agree not fully satisfying.
To each their own I guess. My brother and I enjoyed Subnautica for what it presents, and the more 'prefab' building is both a blessing and a curse. Its cool because you get a lot of things that actually look like underwater parts and buildings. Instead of 'block hell' (I am NOT a minecraft fan at all, never will be). But its a curse, because with prefab everything, there is no way to piece together all the smaller parts they use in those prefabs. Like, if they broke down all the rings, and glass, and panels, and just let you construct really long curving tubes the lengths and angles YOU wanted... instead of picking from 4... As for the dangers. I like it. Sure I got a knife... ok. But, it adds to making the exploration a bit more scarier to do. I don't need full on assault weapons, although my brother would disagree lol cause he gets eaten a lot Its a nice small exploration game. Its early access... and seems to keep growing over time. Although VERY SLOWLY, and their patches to fix things are spaced so far apart, I tend to forget about the game entirely. Even for little things that really need a fix NOW damnit... they just hold off till their monthly payload drop. Drives me insane. And their forums are complete ****. It needs co-op. But they have expressed "that will _never_ happen". So my brother n I just play it over voice chat, describing what happens, and what we build n do and share screenshots. However we put it on the shelf till a few more updates come down, and things get fixed/added. Decent game, but not worth that big price tag normally. Maybe later it will be, if they keep building on it. But if it goes abandonware-early-access... def not.
There are some serious ideological flaws in subnautica. The developers of the game literally stated he didn't want to put any kind of guns in it because of the Sandy Hook shooting. But then they put in knives and harpoons and stuff. Toolish weapons but not really good enough to deal with some of the bigger things that try to eat you. I didn't like how the game didn't have a procedural environment either. Every play thru is the same. This game always has that weird clunky feeling of being a console/pc game hybrid. Like GTA, or Saints Row or any of those games. The movement just doesn't feel right. The control response to avatar response just isn't the same as on a pc game. Maybe I'm crazy. I don't care that game devs can reach a wider market whoring to consoles. The hybrid games are inferior to true pc games. Always have been and probably always will be. After playing Empyrion the building system in subnautica is frankly total crap. You have almost zero ability to customize things. You can spend all day designing a base in Empyrion, but there just isn't enough there to work with in subnautica. The environment in subnautica is awesome though. That is one thing I did like about it. I felt like I could actually taste the salt water and feel the salt on my skin after awhile. Especially when my character would get dry going into his base or into the pod or on land. I actually sort of had like a sushi/california roll kind of taste in my head when I would eat the fish you make... After hours of playing it ( I did get in like 20 or so before it frustrated me away) I went to sleep and had that wavey feeling that you get from swimming in the ocean a lot. Your body will still sort of remember the way the waves bounce you around when it's still and subnautica's environment is so good it triggered that reaction. If we could get subnautica's environemnt into Empyrion I would never leave it. That'd be the rest of my life. Speaking of that it really helped that in subnautica you can make your environment air tight. I also liked the scan tool and the details about the critters and stuff. That is another nice touch that helps immerse me in a game. I actually read all that stuff. I gotta agree with Kieve. Somewhere in subnautica is the potential for a really awesome game. But the people in charge there are working hard to make sure it never emerges.
Knives are ok since they were a kind of tool. But as you've said all the torpedos and stuff it feels half baken. And if it were that important to avoid weapons then i would implement stealth elements/decoys. Ways of catching and researching or even taming certain creatures. There are interesting non leathal ways marine biologists use but almost nothing like that is implemented. Yep! I didnt remember if they started with xbox at the same time or added it later on. But especially the building part is made for controler ond the pre fabed elements also support this way of using the ui. One can see it in Fallout 4 too. People still try to build crazy stuff like mega bases but thats rather a sign for the devs that there is something missing. Since they currently push the storyline i fear it will end like with a lot of games. They get the finished tag and will be flushed out.
ehm ... they added torpedos and harpoons?! I've been a big fan of the coexistence-idea of the game they had orgininally. You're an engineer, no weapons, etc. ... did they drop all that? I think they are doing a great job NOT pushing multiplayer and procedural world generation. Everyone does this. And - most people here will probably hate me for this - Empyrion is no exception to this day. It may end up like many other games in "sandbox hell", never being a real game at all. Just a pvp sandbox, which I would find very disappointing. So ... creating a hand crafted, story-driven single player game with building elements - and that's what Subnautica is - seems like a nice idea, while everyone else is doing the sandbox stuff. Don't expect the game to be as diverse concerning building as empyrion or space engineers. They never intended it to be this way. I would never compare them, too. And so I'm quite excited about the Subnautica launch in 1-2 months. It's a lovely game and I enjoyed the alpha version a lot, then quit playing 7-8 months ago to not get spoiled even more than I have been already.
They definitely added torpedos. My memory about the harpoons is to hazy to rely on. I don't remember anything in subnautica saying you were an engineer. Maybe I missed it. As for co-existence it can sometimes be impossible to co-exist peacefully and still survive. On that day it is best to be armed to the teeth with anything you can muster or your adventure in survival will come to an end. Or a respawn point.. Either way you can't have survival without weapons. Limiting them based on some kind of arbitrary ideology and then making a survival oriented game is kind of obtuse thinking.
Ok thanks. Just looked it up. It's some kind of stun-torpedo. I think I remeber the engineer from some kind of story document in early development. It's SciFi - so the devs should use their imagination to give you technology which allows you to co-exist without killing other beings. I think it's a nice thought experiment and refreshingly different to the usual survival/shooter stuff we already have a lot of in gaming.
You can also breed certain larger creatures, which when released nearby you outside the habitat, they defend you from bad things to some extent.
Except you kill and eat stuff all the time in that game. So it's not the killing that disturbed the developer of the game. It is simply guns that disturb him. Thus it is more about politics and less about morality or co-existence.
I like a few aspect of Subnautica. It has been on my wishlist for ages, but after getting it on the sale I feel let down. There seems to only be one map, and being pinned into a small seamount and unable to really see much of the game biomes at all until you build all the painstakingly hard to piece together things needed made the game a drag. Gave up too soon I suspect, but there you have it. I liked the arwork and style of graphics, the environment too. Liked the danger aspect. Did not like the pedantic crafting, I should rather just play it in the easy or creative mode, but that would not allow or force me to really explore properly.
Personally I think having to research and locate wreckage and scan stuff to gain the ability to build those things... added to the longevity of the game. Without it, the game would have just been Creative Mode with Creatures. Very boring, and over very fast. I mean, at least in that game, you don't learn how to make a Warp Core just from digging dirt all day
lol. That might be right. But someone (the AI?) says one time (analogous) "yes, we know, it's barbaric and disgusting, but you need to eat those fish to survive. You can do it!" So they seem to have noticed the problem by themselves. I don't care about guns & gun politics. But I'm happy about every game that tries to go without them.
I've been rather enamored with Subnautica, personally. Yes, it "only" has one map, but it's hand crafted. The quality and sensibility makes it feel far more real than anything I've ever seen procedural generation spit out. No guns? I'm not miffed. There are pretty scary moments in the game that actually enhance it, I think. And personally I'd rather leave the world, beautiful as it is, as untouched as possible. Yeah, I eat the fish, but that's survival. I'm not killing things I don't use the resources for. There ARE defensive tools - the stasis rifle and repulsion cannon. More than enough for me to to give a good ol' gravity gun kick to a pesky shark. He needs to eat too, just as long as it's not me. I'm happy the game is not another shoot-em-up. And as others have expressed, it was never intended to be a bock builder. I'm quite happy with the construction system in that game. If I'm wiped out from work and just need to unwind, I frequently don't have the creativity to build what I need next in Empyrion (or the brain power needed to plan my next Kerbal Space Program mission). In Subnautica I find I can build for function and not really worry about it looking good, and not have it also be an eyesore. That is often an issue for me in Empyrion... I also find the crafting in general far more satisfying for the variety of ingredients, and learning where to find them. Fragments... yeah the hunt can be annoying for a while, but I for one feel it's a good deal better than our current tech tree in Empyrion. It gives me a sense of progression. "I didn't know this existed, but I found pieces in a wreck I really had to work to reach. Awesome!" Second time around you kinda know where the essentials are, I try not to make a beeline for anything in particular just to keep our feeling real... To each their own. It's not Empyrion and it wasn't meant to be. I happen to like both. And I also hope Empyrion one day has at least as much story as Subnautica. I've had a very hard time moving past the "dominating the starter planet" stage of Empyrion because I don't really care... I build CVs because I enjoy that, but I almost never fly any of them.
