A Critique of Subnautica

in many ways subnautica is what video games are all about there's value found in interactivity outside of mastering mechanics and systems there's value in the difference between watching a character be stranded somewhere after an accident and being that character yourself you are the one that has to take the first plunge take inventory ration supplies adjust and adapt and make decisions and mistakes the experienced offered by subnautica is unique to video games in these ways it's separate from gameplay and narrative and even though subnautica has both of those things it's in this mostly intangible quality that the game shines the question you have to ask yourself is does being isolated on an alien world with its own vibrant ecosystem and rules to learn sound interesting you're going to be scavenging for materials from the large ship that crashed onto the planet you're going to be scanning technology and local wildlife to increase your options and chances of survival it's far more Star Trek than Star Wars there's a little bit of Riddick in there too but it's a lot less gritty you can feel like you've conquered something by the end though if you've missed subnautica until now and are drawn in by what I just said then please play the game before continuing with this video sub table occur has a few major flaws but I think it's safe to say that they will not ruin the experience for most people who are just thinking wow how did I never hear about this game before now while I was just talking a minute ago before everyone else especially those who have already played it we can move past this spoiler warning there is one other thing though this game has some deep-sea spookiness that some people might find unsettling I know I felt that way at first and that was a big part of the appeal for me I think most people get used to it while they play the game but for those who are just watching I'll be showing some sea monsters and dark depths of water so consider yourself warned about that if that's something that bothers you [Music] you are an employee on the starship Aurora that has arrived at an uninhabited star system in order to construct a link back to human occupied space shortly after arriving the starship crashes into the oceanic world that only ever goes by the name four five four six B despite having multiple life pods in just over 150 people on board you are the only survivor of the crash although some people did manage to reach the planet with an intact life pod they all died shortly after that there are no corpses of any of these survivors for you to find anywhere on the planet close to 100% of your time spent with this game will be underwater you will be alone you will be hungry you will be thirsty even though there is water water everywhere you'll have to work to make a drop to drink same goes for avoiding death by drowning or being eaten by predators that are already a threat if you leave the safe starting area you never have to worry about being too cold that you can get too close to lava vents and start to burn or the fire when you go salvaging in the crash light of the Aurora I think this type of game inspires a lot of assumptions and many people and rightfully so my opinion because I have the same assumptions when I first start playing so let me make it clear this close to the spoiler warning that subnautica does in fact have an end goal you're not stuck farting about on this planet until you get bored and stop playing it also has a story there are mysteries to solve on the planet and characters to learn about through audio logs even though your uncharismatic AI is your only companion for the whole game subnautica is also not randomly generated which surprised me more than anything else when I first played there's a handmade structured layout to the world and it's different biomes the only change in each playthrough is that your life pod can land with some variants in the safe shallows at the beginning the opening of this game is also worth examining on many levels because of how early access has morphed it for some people some Nautica is something they've been enjoying for years for others they're beginning with the game was on the official release date in January of 2018 we're turning to the game obviously brings with it a lot of knowledge and the ability to skip through the early parts so effectively that it can be easy to forget what it was like the first time beginning your climb on the crafting tech tree and learn how to efficiently acquire food and water can take several hours not to mention the fear associated with swimming too far away from your life pod I think there's a crucial difference between this and the linear survival elements in something like the Tomb Raider reboot in this game it isn't scripted you really can starve if you mess up subnautica also doesn't have a map and instead you learn to use both UI trackers and the position of the crashed ship arora as points of reference to get around meaning that you get to focus on learning the layout of the ocean around you and not spend time staring at a map plus I think realizing that you can use the crash ship in that way as a cool early game moment at least it was for me once you begin your understanding of these sorts of things you can venture farther out from where you start but you are still limited by how much oxygen you can carry in the tanks you craft and how willing you are to put yourself in danger for instance one of the first areas you're meant to explore is an intimidating-looking creepvine forest with roaming stalkers these enemies are quite small and tame compared to what you'll deal with later but early on you don't know that and might be led to believe you're meant to explore elsewhere first same goes for learning how to spot and use brain coral for a source of oxygen bubbles without going back to the surface this cycle of minute-long gameplay loops would dive in collecting and exploring then going back to the surface for oxygen and time is something that experienced players know how to get through quickly for me it was one of the most interesting parts of the game and was what got me engaged in the first place it's also something I almost forgot about since I already went through it years ago when I first played some Nautica and early access it also made me avoid some of the same stumbles I went through the first time when it came to upgrading my equipment it's not always clear where some items come from especially the notorious cave sulphur that was once called crash fish powder this is harvested from a plant that also houses a manic fish that screams at you before exploding if you can't get away in time these are found in caves where it can be hard to swim away so you're likely to treat their shrieks of some Nautica's version of the jaws theme in the early game and swim out of there as fast as possible I think renaming the powder to have cave in the name was a good choice and will better lead people to eventually finding this but it's a good way to show that getting onto the game's tech tree can take a while for new players but this also serves as a great example of how some nautical we'll feel in its first of three core phases this underwater world feels vast and unfathomable at the beginning the more you venture from your life pod the more the scope of the world expands so does the distance between the ocean floor and your main source of oxygen on the surface each new tool you acquire in this phase and each morsel of understanding about life on this planet feels well-earned that sand sharks will hide to ambush you that stalkers gather up metal and hoard them at their nests that acid mushrooms can be used to make batteries that there are different types of mineral deposits this type of progress and wonder is what the early game is all about while the radio and the life pod does function as a guide to get you swimming to some locations and prompt you into learning and acquiring some technology it's remarkable and commendable to me that subnautica largely lets you figure out most of this on your own whether that's through perceptive ability and observations or meticulously scanning things and reading the data entries for info it feels like you really are survivor trying their best to gain understanding of this alien world that scanner is the key to unlocking access to the mid-game and I anticipate there may be some debate about exactly when you enter that phase for me it's when you build your first seamoth submarine for others it may be proving your understanding of the game by making a shield a diving suit traveling to the crash site of the aurora and repairing the engine so they cease leaking radiation this is likely when you'll spot a Leviathan class creature for the first time lurking in the distance of the crash site more on those cuties later the scanner is essential in expanding your crafting options in so Nautica although the seamoth is not strictly speaking or acquired it's arguably just as important since it's a portable source of oxygen as well as a faster way to zip around the ocean this mid game phase brings with it a different loop than the previous one of diving for resources and tech fragments until your air tanks are depleted instead you can use the seamoth as a mobile anchor point to support excursions much deeper underwater and get back to your base after you're done not only that you can search for things while in the safety of the seamoth itself with its unlimited oxygen combing through wrecks is also far more viable with this portable pocket of air most of these are deep enough that searching through them while also needing to frequently return to the surface isn't a good combination it's easy to get turned around inside a wreck too especially the larger ones and not give yourself enough time to get outside of it and then also reach the surface with the seamoth you can park an air-source right at the entrance and have much more time to scan all of the fragments inside and properly get through all the doors and vents into deeper rooms this change may seem minor but it demonstrates one of the best design choices in subnautica how new tools and upgrades are handled in other games especially in the survival genre new tools are often better versions of what you are already using an example being star D values based tools to copper versions than steel gold and so on this type of progression isn't inherently flawed and star D Valley does have many more things that adds in addition to the system but subnautica largely ignores this type of progression and favours something that is far more interesting scanning and crafting things in subnautica is like a snowball rolling through a trail left by Batman scooping up everything from his utility belt along the way almost everything you acquire in this mid game portion is worth making and testing out whether it simply opens new paths like the laser cutter or makes it much easier to find resources in the world like the scanner room whether it's a stasis rifle that allows you to have a reliable way of protecting yourself from any threat or a huge submarine that acts as a mobile base that you can take with you as a center of operations a vehicle so big that it requires use of a multiple camera system to safely pilot even some tools that aren't useful in the normal version of the game can become vital I never felt any need to use the air bladder or Pathfinder tool but I know for certain they would have always been in my inventory if I was playing on the permadeath mode since it's so easy to get confused when navigating some caves and wrecks I wouldn't want to risk death by not bringing this tool the prong suit is the clearest example of how new technology changes how so Nautica place this is a heavy reinforced mech outfit that has you stomping along the ocean floor rather than swimming everywhere this mini Jaeger goes even further with this idea with arm upgrades allow you to drill large resource nodes for crafting materials and a surprisingly flexible grappling hook when paired with the upgraded hovering thrusters this can make the prawn have one of the most creative and enjoyable movement systems that I played in recent years it goes to show you how even a small bit of interactivity added to the basic act of moving around can go a long way to increase player engage this technology also interacts with each other and other gameplay systems some of these are about making your life easier that early game struggle for food and water can be conquered with fish tanks water filtration machines and grow beds you can forget about it later on in the game your base can house battery and power cell charging stations for all of your tools and vehicles the seamoth and prawn soup can also dock inside the large Cyclops submarine that you can build which even though it may be such a little thing when you really think about it was simply stunning to me the first time I saw it for the sake of being thorough I want to point out that not every upgrade is a major development on how you play subnautica there are better versions of your diving suit that simply make you more resilient although there is also a set that reclaims some water for you to drink and flippers that can charge the batteries on whatever tool you're currently using some other modifications are purely there to limit how deep you can dive until you craft the upgrade to unlock access to proceed but for me these were in the minority when I look back at my time spent going through subnautica z' mid game which unfortunately brings us to the end game and some of those major flaws I mentioned at the beginning of the video so far everything here has been positively glowing and I hate to risk diminishing just how good I think the first two-thirds of this game really are but here I go critiquing again here are the four main issues I have with some melodica performance and early access inventory management the end game and the story early access can be a tool a shield or a stain and subnautica x' case it's been all three there's no doubt in my mind that some Nautica benefited from each early access update acting as a mini relaunch of the game to draw more interest and convince more people to purchase it early it also allowed for this content and much of what came before to be acceptable despite how unrefined it was early access and beta versions of games often caused players to become cheerleaders and deflect criticism on discussion forums if you've ever taken part in any conversation about an early access game you must have seen such comments often sounding like they're all written from the same person who just goes from early access game to early access game about how you should remember it's just a beta or this is what early access means remember that and that the issues being brought up will surely be addressed for the full release in my experience they almost always are not some Nautica on for that leaf it's that model for me there is no possible way that the dev team at unknown world's entertainment can be happy with the current state of some Nauticus performance we're talking problem areas in the game that regularly and reliably caused the first s and frames per second to vanish the game stutters more than my youngest son when he's trying to learn new words and has more pop up than his favorite books these were all huge documented issues during early access and it's more than a shame that they weren't fixed I can't even tell if the game was improved at all even though I suspect some progress was made since I upgraded my PC since first playing early access and further obliterate the shockingly low recommended specs listed on Steam I can't imagine how poorly the game must run if you only have the recommended hardware never mind what's listed under the minimum requirements subnautica is a very very pretty game as long as you remain underwater when you're on land especially high up on a mountain and looking at the ocean stretching all around you things can seriously look close to the PlayStation 2 era and I really do not think that's an exaggeration what's worse is that the controls also shift the bed when you're on land and never feels comfortable like your character is walking on huge inflated water balloon feet it's also where the game's lighting looks awful where bugs happen with getting stuck in the floor or your vehicles clipping right through it and becoming permanently inaccessible and where the game's performance takes multiple hits even in the alien bases you can find underwater which are enclosed interior spaces the game never feels comfortable when you're out of the ocean to balance this criticism the game feels fantastic when you're swimming or piloting a seamoth from biome to biome there's a good sense of momentum to both your character and the vehicles you get into not to mention how fantastic the sound design is surrounding you with both the quiet and booming noises of the alien ocean things will crackle and growl nearby while larger creatures will drone from over a hundred meters away this isn't my area of expertise so I won't talk about it much more but I do think that the sound design in subnautica might have been the best part of the game's atmosphere for me on the visual side there was never a point when I thought I was simply floating in the air instead of actually in some water there's always multiple sources of visual confirmation they you're in the ocean air bubbles distortions left in the wake of creatures around you the changing light levels is you descend farther from the ocean surface and how your tools react to the water as you use them it was surprising to notice how good the surface of the ocean looks when you're underneath it or swimming with your head above the water in comparison to how awful it looks when seen from high up this authentic feeling of being underwater is also present in the game's controls and how you'll process all the information around you this is where the visual and sound design come together in a great way that I suspect also results in a source of fear and anxiety when people play at least that's how it worked for me near constantly swimming means that you're not stuck on one horizontal level there's no reference point to anchor you since hostile creatures also have this freedom to move through the environment this means there are so many more angles to consider and keep track of while you're playing it was sharp drops and cliff faces that got to me the most when I first played since even though I had one solid wall that I could confirm was safe there was this whole void of ocean at my back and below me that could have any kind of monster waiting to sneak up on me the darker and deeper you go the worse this can get I wouldn't call this a sensory overload maybe a spike in paranoia would be best even early on you'll feel this in the creep vine biome and the deeper sand one shortly after stalkers and sand sharks are a constant danger and will be in the back of your mind perhaps even more so after you learned that sand sharks bury themselves in the ocean floor to ambush prey or if you're suddenly caught in a shadow when something big passes above you then when you start seeing your first huge leviathans that can be far more sneaky quick and quiet than you might expect you'll be worried about losing track of one that might be in the area leaving your seamoth for a few seconds in a biome you're not fully comfortable with yet might become a stressful pulse of a moment the lack of a proper combat system is a big contributor for that feeling but there's much about it that's uncertain both in developer intentions and were their current implementations it's divided from that the only true weapon in subnautica is a knife the guns you can use our version of half-life 2's gravity gun and a stasis rifle that freezes enemies in place in a bubble the prongs you can also use its different arms as weapons but these are not their primary purpose fighting in this game has a lot in common with Skyrim especially with the knife and drill arm you we'll get close to enemies and hit them with no real sense of feedback as if you're not even hitting them at all there's no substantial way to dodge attacks other than simply moving your character away when you think an enemy might lash at you what key bit of information that subnautica does lack is a health bar which might make you question whether something is killable at all I felt this way when attacking the bigger Leviathan creatures with my knife and the prawn suit the conclusion that I've come to is that you're not meant to fight anything in this game this is supported by two important pieces of evidence that you're never rewarded with any sort of resource when defeating an enemy and that most weapons you get are about distracting or pacifying the bigger creatures so that you can scurry away to safety the only time you're ever given something for landing a hit is when you use the upgraded heat blade to cook a fish instantly so that you can consume it without taking it back to your fabricator for processing however you actually can kill these big sea monsters it just takes a long long time so long that you may question your commitment several times over as you go through a cycle of hopping out of your prawn suit using the stasis rifle to hold the Leviathan in place and then going back in to deal some damage the alternative is to use the grapple hook to stay tethered to the monster while hoping you drift close enough for the drill to connect in my experience this takes much longer since the game doesn't react well to you doing this the grapple hook never looks like it latches on properly you don't reel all the way in and the Leviathan often drifts out of range the question I keep asking myself is whether or not it was the right decision to make these monsters mortal on the one fin it might have been better to commit to the idea that you are no match for them and have to run away their threats you have to manage and keep track of while you're exploring whatever biome that they're occupying on the other fin the option to commit to bringing them down is one that I found myself using more than once especially in the Lost River biome where a ghost Leviathan often engages in annoying hit-and-run tactics on your prawn I decided to kill it so it wouldn't bother me anymore yet while doing this and going through it again closer to the surface later I couldn't ignore the feeling that the game was letting me do this with the budging reluctance a feeling of okay fine you can do this but you're going to be here for over 10 minutes bored out of your mind as punishment for being so stubborn this question becomes a far reaching one at this point and leaves the scope of just Nautica is making something tedious as a way to dissuade players from doing something a valid piece of game design for me I wish that combat had been made more interesting with the prawn suit so that fighting these monsters could have been a difficult struggle instead of a boring one but I think that's dodging the question I can't ignore how bad fighting knees felt while I also can't ignore that I think it's cool that the monsters are killable after all yet if I take a step back from that and my own bias I have to conclude that it doesn't fit with the rest of the game these monsters should be threats that are beyond the lone survivor scraping his way up the tech tree if the game had more moments incorporating combat before this I think I would feel differently but it doesn't having said that the prawn does Mark another abrupt change in the tone of the game when you first construct the suit your stoic AI helper informs you that most users get extensive training to overcome the feeling of overwhelming power that it can bring you essentially to avoid becoming complacent since it's a false sense of invincibility well that turned out to be a lie nothing scared me anymore after acquiring this thing there's a ton of armor and not even ghosts of I then had steel much damage to it even then it's easy to hop out and repair the suit wherever you are and most importantly for me it changes your perspective of the world so that you can treat it more like a traditional FPS game now that there's a pre-shave all gravity since the suit is so heavy this again comes back to developer intentions it wasn't clear to me so much later on whether the game was trying to purposefully be a scary experience while the big leviathans and sharks can look intimidating from a distance they're not that vicious looking when up close the reef backs are also passive to you as another lesson than not everything that might appear to be a threat is meant to be frightening even though I guess most newcomers will initially avoid them there are many discussion points that could be made around how much the game is scary because of common phobias the unknown the deep-sea sharks and not because subnautica wasn't meant to instill fear in all players when I was streaming the game I asked viewers what they found more unsettling being under the ocean with a lot of dark water stretching in all directions or traveling at the surface and unable to see what was below us the result wasn't firmly in favor of either option even though many claims strongly that one was way worse than the other which told me that there are some strong sources of fear being tapped into by the game for me it's being on the surface and unable to see what could be lurking just underneath I think there's a fear that something might emerge from below all of a sudden and snap asunder the water even though this never happened throughout many playthroughs of the game it was still something in the back of my mind whenever I was on the ocean surface the point that confirmed the developer's intentions for me was the mood upon arriving at the endgame while there is more than one way into the subterranean caverns below most of subnautica swirled the Lost River is the easiest entrance to find since you're sent there via a distress beacon signal on your radio not only is this area far more alien and disturbing visually than any other it also comes with a sharp clang of oppressive music possibly the most intense the music gets anywhere in the game with a beating like tension in a heart after its sudden introduction there are many things that want to kill you down here including that ghost Leviathan that we saw earlier whether or not the game was originally meant to be scary isn't something I can tell for sure but it's clear that by the time development entered into this end game portion that they had embraced that part of it it's a shame and possibly a mistake then that the final big monster is one of the goofier looking ones it wasn't helped by how buggy it was to both into vanishing suddenly into nowhere clipping through walls and being able to shoot its fireballs into alien bases and pass through the structure like it was more water but the other problem is that this change in tone also coincides with the time you need the prawn suit to continue which never stopped feeling like an invincible set of armor for me that Herald at the beginning of conquering this planet in fact the only time I ever lost a prawn suit was when I stupidly believed the temperature sensor reading when standing in a hot spot and not realizing that the suit was taking damage which is where we have to loop back around to early access is that tiny lack of Polish something that ruins subnautica no but this will be a death from a thousand cut situation for quite a few players who would otherwise enjoy this game because I don't think it's fair to say that subnautica was ready for release something that bothered me about the end game was the amount of travelling required in the final scavenger hunts we'll talk about that soon but the simple solution of adding a faster vehicle isn't an option because of how poorly the game performs even the seamoth can be too much for the game and even though I still love how fun it can be to choose your grapple points and sling yourself through the ocean it's even worse when you get to speed with the prawn the game struggle so much with the simple act of moving through the world that it makes me wonder if this brilliant sling system was an accident and that it was only meant to be a way to climb out of the depths the teleporters you unlock later suffer in the same way they take quite a while to load and cause the game to lag both upon entering and exiting I won't repeat what I did in the Haab video here because that was excessive for that video instead I'll briefly mentioned fish swimming through the walls of your bases if they're made of nothing your tools acting as though they're underwater when they're not your character falling through the floor and the game thinking you're still inside so you can run along the seabed like the water has been replaced with air the fish ones did the same thing and escaped containment to float about my base combined with the framerate dips subnautica clearly needed a few more months of refinement before release this is where early access became a stain if this was a newly launched game then some problems could be excused and patched later however since these issues have been around for years it says something else to me that they're never going to be solved that this is simply the level or lack of polish the game is going to receive and a barrier of entry that every player will have to accept in order to enjoy subnautica and some certainly will be able to do that I know I have for the most part but that doesn't mean that that's the proper response this is more than meeting the game halfway it's overlooking flaws in order to have what I consider to be a unique experience that no other game currently provides at this level whether or not you should do the same isn't for me to say but I think rejecting this level of quality would be more than understandable and it's probably the right call what I can't excuse is the popin problem this isn't just annoying it actively damages the game in both subtle and obvious ways it goes against the core design of it in many ways - I think it's crucial to demonstrate how bad this problem is before we dig into it the fungal forest biome is where I saw the most problems with parts of the mushrooms sometimes not loading in even when you're right next to them I've read about other people having issues with sections of caves not having their walls loading correctly which unfortunately would be difficult to properly tell for sure if you're not familiar with every part of the game consider how these floaters look a bit odd but not entirely out of place in the water here it's not until you know that they're meant to be attached to big boulders in the water that have for some reason fail to load in this that you know that something is wrong it's also important to point out that this isn't just a visual bug these boulders aren't here because they didn't load it in time you can swim through them even though the floaters are still somehow attached to them I saw some creature snap in and out of existence terrain will deform and then morph back into its proper shape if you move through the world too quickly often with a lot of drop frames these issues were in the game when I first played it two years ago and they're still present after the game's launch but worst of all is how this problem affects the islands in the game although this can cause issues with the ones floating underwater it's the two above the ocean that I'm speaking about the first is a mountainous island that juts out of the water near the Aurora crash site the other is a much larger island that has kept buoyant by massive versions of those floaters we just saw the island doesn't Bob or move around though it's a cool concept but it acts like a standard island and that's fine neither of these are visible until you get close to them there's somewhat marked by mist in the distance that is difficult to notice as an indicator until you've already found them and know what you're looking for the islands just appear as you travel toward them when you cross some arbitrary threshold now this could be excused as a technical limitation I don't think that's the case because the Aurora is always visible in the distance and these islands should have been the same I can also prove that something isn't functioning properly here because you can see the islands much earlier if you look through the water as you Bob on the surface this is easy to see since you'll likely be on the ocean surface on your way there anyway and we'll see these flashes of the island being visible like it's cutting through a filter blocking the island while the air is vacant in front of you when you're completely out of the water something is definitely not right here the reason why this in particular is so bad is because of what we mentioned earlier subnautica doesn't have a map the game is all about adapting to this foreign world and remembering important landmarks and deciding which area would be the next best place to go because your information is limited you're often going by only what you can see and hear and basing your decisions off of that the island should be part of that point of reference or recognizing where you are and where you should be going you are eventually sent to both of these places via radio transmissions but until then the only way you can find these islands is by stumbling on them accidentally while blindly exploring admittedly some people might enjoy the surprise of discovering this dry land hours into the game instead of immediately seeing it on the horizon when they first climb out of a life pod and swimming directly for it but I think this goes against the practical mostly realistic goal of the game has it's something the game often meets at with conflict and compromise especially for the next thing on our list some Nautica's inventory management as more and more games include RPG elements inventory systems and crafting the more it becomes apparent how thoughtless much of it is thrown together a bad sign is one you can measure the amount of inventory juggling and menu staring you do throughout a playthrough in hours instead of minutes there's so much of it in subnautica that you'll spend most of your time out of the water doing this sort of stuff there's a battle between realism and accessibility over how much a character can carry in every game with an inventory system I think there's a good compromise in subnautica but that your submarines and next suit should have been able to carry far more as the game progresses this becomes a bigger problem on your character since more of your inventory space is taken up by tools some of which use more than one inventory slot a good solution would have been tech jumps that combine some of these tools together the repair tool and laser cutter immediately come to mind is a good candidate for that same for the sea glide and the scanner more hotkey slots would have also helped since there's this constant fiddling with equipping these items when the situation calls for it and then I'm equipping them to have another one for later preferably equipment on these keys would also not take up any inventory space this may not be realistic but that quality was already lost when a chunk of titanium or copper ore weighs the same amount as a fish or a plant seed and also takes up the same amount of space in the invisible pockets of your diving suit like I said though this is a mostly acceptable system even if it can be a little annoying the biggest issue is found within your base this is not a problem unique to subnautica and I think it's important to make that clear it appears as though many developers think that a bunch of storage chests and an inventory switch UI is all that's expected it's basic it works that's all you need not only could this be dramatically improved to prevent downtime and boredom it's already being done better and a handful of other games out there I can understand why resources don't stack within the players personal inventory but I don't see the need for that to continue when you're sorting through your storage lockers it adds an unnecessary amount of micromanagement and demands multiple storage to keep up with everything that you find going further than that there's a staggering amount of time devoted to checking blueprints with drawing the right resources making the item you want and then putting everything back again this is likely after you spent a good chunk of time organizing everything after realizing you've been dumping stuff into lockers randomly and are living in chaos after your first few hours solutions that already exist in other games are the auto deposit feature in terraria which automatically adds items in your inventory into stacks that exist in chests nearby so titanium ore would automatically go into the titanium Locker and so on for every other type of item that you regularly find multiples of Dragon Quest builders does this even better by automatically stacking things for you when your personal inventory is full this would be too much of a compromise for the realism goal in subnautica in my opinion but while you're in your base in that game items can be automatically used from that central storage without having to constantly withdraw them your base in subnautica could do the same thing the fabricator could have access to any nearby storage lockers with resource amounts displayed so you don't have to constantly go rummaging for the right set of stuff cooking fish directly from your aquariums could be a good addition to I know these are such small simple additions and yet I truly think that if I was to score the game out of 10 this would have improved so much that it would be worth a whole points so put this into perspective even the recently maligned Metal Gear survived does this better scavenge items are automatically placed into your bases stores when you return from an excursion and you can craft things directly from that collection very little fuss much less downtime way worse UI in menu navigation though so Nautica does that far better with its mess in menus these inventory stumbles become more glaring as the game goes on and you are tasked with gathering the same resources again and again and crafting the same base components again and again the end game is where this hits its lowest point since you're not crafting anything new or interesting after you begin descending into the depths with your prawn soup the best you'll find is a better version of batteries and power cells which are quality of life updates that come far too late to matter when you unlock these you're already close to finished it's worth acknowledging that most games like subnautica don't even have an end game so in a way it's excusable that it's not the most exciting part of the experience however for me this was the biggest letdown I felt while playing this could have been some Nauticus capstone that brought the whole game together something that could have been doubly potent if it was saved for the full release as an ending for both returning players and fans have followed the game throughout all of early access as the game is now even after a two-year gap I still couldn't stop myself from thinking that was it when I was finished so let me explain in the final two tasks in subnautica our scavenger hunts the first has you arrive at a deep-sea research base where you find a captive Leviathan who wants you to collect plant samples to create enzymes that will cause its eggs to hatch this is important for story reasons that will speak about shortly all you need to know for now is that you can't leave the planet until you do this there are many teleport gates in this research base that each lead to a biome that contains one of these plants which means you have to go through tedious laggy framerate destroying transitions over and over again with no real engagement get the samples make the enzymes you're done the second scavenger hunt has you go all the way back to the Aurora through the same wreckage you searched earlier and to the captains quarters with a passcode that's eventually transmitted to you on the radio and begin construction of a launchpad and rocket to leave the planet this one has some qualities that I can understand people enjoying for one it's a cool moment to finally build something that will get you back into space the launchpad and rocket are also impressively large the scale of it doesn't feel off and you even get to climb into the command module and trigger the launch yourself there's nothing new that you make for this rocket that you haven't seen already but even that could be twisted into a good thing for some people it's a farewell tour as you swim around and make your final wiring kit your final copper wire or gather your last bit of titanium you get to sink into routine one last time see the world and say goodbye for me it was a chore you have to make multiple plasteel ingot for this rocket which means more of the same metal salvage even collectin since the opening of the game not only that but it feels like this Launchpad could have been constructed at any point of progression at subnautica the game was never building to this it's just hey we exhausted all the content we wanted dad so just throw in that rocket launch with the radio transmission and let the player leave now just because enough in-game time is asked the real motivation behind the disappointment I felt was how I expected to have to explore more of the planet there were at least two biomes that I barely ventured into and I left before the game gave me any reason to stay not only that but there's little to do or find there if you do decide to explore on your own for your own reasons quite a bit of work went into these places so allow me to demonstrate why I think this was a missed opportunity the early game mid game and endgame of SU Nautica can be seen as stages of survival that the player goes through the early game would of course be the struggle when food and water can be difficult to acquire the mid game is when you solve quite a few problems and are beginning to explore and understand much of the environment that you've been plopped into then the endgame would be fully conquering that environment harvesting its resources and using that mastery to escape this last one doesn't happen you just craft more things in the second stage instead look at this rocket construction from another way it doesn't make sense that it takes so few resources to build this thing one single lump of metal for each part of the rocket one coil of copper wire connects this whole elevator tower don't get me wrong demanding more resources would add to the tedium and would be a bad thing but what if this was something you couldn't craft through conventional methods what if it required more substantial resource harvesting from the planet each biome could have been a part of this narrative to free yourself from for five or six be lets say one biome had a gigantic gold deposit that you would need to build a mining base around in order to supply a rocket construction you could have needed to build a drone base that launches more of these little flying guys you have here to deconstruct enough of the Aurora as a source of titanium a special type of material for the launch pad could have needed another base in the mushroom forest and there could have been special tasks and problems needed to overcome in the establishment of these habitats in each biome not unlike what the aliens went through when they built their base on the planet before you arrived the sea traders are the best example these are interesting creatures that I found in a remote biome and guessed I would have to return at some point for some special resource that only they can provide and this never happened they even poop out a special potent type of biofuel but this is never required these are curious creatures and could have had an interesting interaction within the game just like the stalker is collecting the metal for their nests and losing their teeth as they do so which you can pick up to craft some essential materials needed to climb the tech tree it feels like this idea of creatures interacting with their environment and having a lesson for you to learn was only done at the beginning and that's a real shame in my opinion let's say you need to set up a drone base in this biome to collect a large quantity of see try to poop in order to create fuel for your rockets unfortunately there's a Reaper Leviathan in the area that's preventing them from grazing and a bountiful part of the biome so their biofuel production is low you could be tasked with setting up a repulsion system that sends the Reaper to a different part of the map or you could try to kill it or lure some reef backs into the area to scare it off or maybe that causes another part of the biome to grow more plant matter for the sea traders to eat with that problem solved you have part of the rocket construction finished and far more importantly you had to become familiar with this biome and the type of flora and fauna that existed here you explore the area gain understanding has something close to a story that's tied to this part of the planet that you'll remember then use that understanding to get a result that you want to finish the game I don't think the suggestion is particularly good but I think the idea is sound and it's a fair way of communicating how each area could have been used I'm sure there are great creative ways that both of the mushroom biomes could have been explored instead of being places you only visit once and then never go back to because there's no reason to same for the volcanic region that I barely felt the need to explore either and the reef acts that end up being floating decorations more than anything else as the game goes on what I like about this idea of having to commit to understanding more of the planet is that you get to appreciate more of the work that already went into it having to build a scanner room in each biome to form a map is a final bit of tech could've been interesting as well as one of the biggest points to prove how much you've become a veteran survivor of this planet when that glaring limitation from other games is finally granted to you likely after you don't even need it anymore but you get to feel how far you've come without something like this or something equally substantial at the end the final stage of subnautica fails to live up to how good the first 2/3 were before that that's both a compliment and criticism rolled into one it makes me wonder how much of that is the stain left by early access I expected there to be more at the and I didn't expect to be bored and maybe expectations are the problem the story suffers in the same way and I'm hesitant to criticize it for the same reasons most games like subnautica don't bother with a story ultimately I've decided it's worth some time discussing since it's a large part of the game and clearly had a fair bit of work put into it by unknown world's entertainment but I feel like this could come across as criticizing the bland cherry on a slice of cake that you could just flick off the two biggest problems I have with subnautica story are an overabundance of coincidences to make it work and that much of it doesn't make any sense this starts right at the beginning with the Aurora arriving at four or five or six be spacefaring aliens were once on this planet a precursor race that was spread quite far throughout the galaxy their base on this planet was founded to conduct research on something called the Cora bacterium which is sweeping through all of the aliens occupied worlds and causing them all to die by the time we arrived it's presumed that this precursor race is now extinct there should be a galaxy full of worlds that are functionally advanced graveyards although there are no bodies left behind on 454 6b this planet is one of them it's never made clear exactly what this race was like other than that they had some sort of telepathic ability and technology far beyond that of humans in this story Cara bacterium was not discovered on for 546 B it was brought here by the aliens since it was judged to be one of many potential sites to find a naturally occurring cure in alien environments at some point the bacterium was accidentally released from containment and spread throughout the world wiping out almost all of the population of fish plant life leviathans and everything else that once lived on the planet this included the precursor aliens themselves as part of a contingency the planet was placed under quarantine so that the bacterium had no chance of getting off world this quarantine status comes in the form of a huge cannon on this island that shoots down anything that tries to land on for 546 B all of the alien technology is self-sufficient and kept in good repair by I assume these small spider bots that are replicated somewhere in each base there's also a renewable power source that's manufactured from a thermal plant deep in the ocean this also powers the cannon the cannon that shot down the Aurora when they came to close if you're a fan of science fiction then you can see that there's already a lot that's wrong with this but let's ignore for now the first of many gigantic coincidences is that the Aurora just so happens to approach the planet from the right angle at the right point of the planets rotation to come under fire from the cannon that is above the aliens research base we can assume that with their level of technology that this weapon is capable of hitting a target in orbit anywhere around the planet but the Aurora is poised in a perfect position that it actually lands after being destroyed in high orbit right next to the cannon that shot it down on the only patch of planet that still has any life on it there are other far larger islands on the planet that you can see on the surface during the ending so it isn't as though this was the only raised part of the ocean that they could have been drawn to now before this is dismissed is way too nitpicky and I'm afraid you've already jumped to that conclusion and are rolling your eyes right out of your heads right now please understand that this is only so egregious because it's only stage one of the coincidence spiral in this story because the Aurora is not the first human ship to explore this planet another vessel called the de gauzy arrived a few years prior this ship was much smaller than the Aurora and somehow also approached the planet from the same direction in the same hemisphere from the same exact coordinates was also shot down and while spiraling from orbit to the surface also managed to land very close to that same cannon and on this tiny patch of life on the planet because remember the rest of the world is barren because of the spread of the bacterium this method of keeping the planet under quarantine also makes little sense first of all the aliens are shown to have been very well traveled they once visited earth in the past and even our relatively primitive technology is able to translate much of their data logs and yet there's no warning that's being broadcast no usage of the satellite network that must be in place to feed information to aim the cannon on the surface no big do not try to land a message that would have been very easy to make while also constructing a giant death energy cannon and failing all of that surely it would make so much more sense to have the cannon shoot ships when they're trying to leave not when they're trying to land or that the aurora would have sent down some probe or shuttle team that also would have gotten shot him down before risking their big capital ship on an unknown world if the answer is that they were in high orbit while preparing to do that when they were shot down then the problem returns to how astronomically unlikely it is that they would so happen to crash right next to the cannon on the surface humans are not immune to the carrier bacterium so you are quickly infected upon arrival you don't learn exactly what that means until you visit one of the alien bases if you get to the cannon on the island a terminal takes a blood sample and you're informed that you must be cured if you want to deactivate the cannon and leave the planet when I first got here my interest immediately spiked things weren't so simple there was more to the story all of a sudden the sickness can never kill you since the game gives you ample time to get everything done but I was really curious to see how I asked Aven geing survivor would tech inferior to this alien race could somehow finish what they started and save myself when they were all wiped out here's a spoiler the answer to that question isn't very satisfying the next coincidence is that this is somehow the first precursor base has ever been discovered by humans in this story humans are so spread out that they've actually colonized another galaxy there's a line about someone coming from the far side of Andromeda yet this precursor race which numbered it's confirmed death counts at over 143 billion at the early stages of the kara bacterium's outbreak hadn't been discovered until now despite having visited our solar system far in the past these aren't aliens that just so happen to start on the opposite side of the Milky Way and we're only now reaching their old territory even accepting that think of all those lost world still teeming with the car infection waiting to be found and it just so happens that the first one humans find also has the means to develop a cure on it so let's talk about that cure and how it works or how it doesn't work there was a Leviathan life-form called the C Emperor on for 546 be that produced something called enzyme 42 that fights back against Cara it's important to note that this has to be unique to this particular C Emperor specimen and not the whole species because there were other C Emperor's on the planet and they weren't capable of stopping the spread of Karo one accidentally released while this see emperor produces some of the curing enzyme it's not enough for some reason the precursor aliens needed more so they held it in captivity and tried to force it to breed so the evolutionary mutation would pass on and produce a refined version of enzyme 42 and also more of it holy [ __ ] that was a mouthful here's where things start to lose any semblance of sense the reason that there's still life on this tiny outcrop of the planet is that the aliens had to set up a complex fish tank filtration system to keep their captive sea emperor alive and well this meant water pumped from the surface to replenish oxygen levels below much of this story is told through data logs and inferring things from the incomplete information given to you so I actually have no idea why it was necessary for the cm per to be held so deep below the surface maybe it was some precaution to prevent the car from spreading quickly if it broke containment something that happened anyway the extensive filtration system allowed a species of fish called peepers to come and go through the safe Network away from predators by traveling this network to and from the surface they were able to enter the sea emperor's habitat and then return back to the ocean by doing this they would consume some of the enzyme 42 released by the sea emperor and then spread it through the ocean above this was apparently enough of the enzyme to keep the local population alive creatures that did succumb to the bacterium were picked off and killed by the war pers robotic servants created by the precursor aliens that still function almost a thousand years later so the enzyme in its current state is enough to stabilize the population currently in the game but apparently not enough for you or to be harvested and replicated by the crazy super advanced aliens that were here before you can actually see and catch one of the glowing papers that are spreading the enzyme at any point in the game at best you could rationalize this as being a method of controlling keira symptoms in the population but not enough to cure it that seems really contrived considering life has managed to continue for centuries but hey it's an answer I guess unfortunately it calls into question why the precursor aliens are dead the low potency version of the enzyme wasn't enough to block the infection for more sitting in the aliens but can somehow keep multiple leviathans alive after being spread so thinly by these mercy fish the captive sea emperor will contact you telepathically a few times throughout the game but it considers you more of a curiosity than a tool until you get close to its prison it asks you to open a warp gate back to the surface for its young to use after hatching its eggs which requires you to collect those plant samples in the scavenger hunt that we went through earlier to create a different set of enzymes to cause them to hatch these young sea Emperor's produce a much more potent version of enzyme 42 immediately which you can use to cure yourself they then swim through the warp gate and release more of the enzymes into the ocean which will presumably wipe out the khara and allow for five or six speed to recover life will spread across the whole planet again as long as the refer Leviathan doesn't eat all of these sea Emperor's while they're young so why couldn't the precursor aliens do that a thousand years ago well the CM / itself offers two bits of conflicting information the first is that it was incapable of communicating with them as it can with you maybe it was because the aliens were also telepathic and were therefore sealed to its attempts or something but the next time it's brought up it sounds more like the sea ampere didn't want to give over the hatching enzyme and not that it couldn't this brings up many questions that I fear have no answer the aliens attempted to forcibly remove a sea Emperor from one of the eggs and failed to keep it alive is the Emperor biology so complex that they weren't able to figure out how to make it hatch or did they simply run out of time after the car broke containment like we just went through why didn't they use the low potency version of enzyme 42 to keep themselves alive indefinitely while not cured to continue the research and most importantly for me is it an intentionally cruel joke that if they had simply left the sea Emperor to roam free in the ocean that its young would have hatched and created this refined enzyme 42 naturally so that they do themselves when capturing this specimen but then that brings up the largest coincidence of all the whole species itself couldn't have been producing this enzyme because this wasn't the only sea Emperor so this specific sea Emperor just so happened to hatch and evolve the means to produce this enzyme around the same time that the aliens reached the planet since it had no young that we're producing yet and the whole planet did indeed go through an extinction event after the Caribbean to spread that some never tell the odds timing on that to work there this doesn't make any sense but plot holes and contrivances can sometimes be acceptable if it allows for something worthwhile unfortunately for subnautica it's still a letdown meeting the big psychic alien was an interesting moment but then everything is over so quickly and leads to a simple gathering of plants then you can deactivate the cannon with a blood sample because apparently if one subject is free of infection then the whole planet must be okay it makes me wonder if putting one of the enzyme carrier peepers to the Machine would have also turned the weapon off here's what could have filled these plot holes while also using currently existing information in the game there's an alien data log about a member of the species that arrived on the planet to do research succumb to the infection and was placed into some sort of stasis there's a line about how it's in storage and only it's corporeal body has been discarded this alien could have been inhabiting the computer systems in all of the alien bases and looking after the other aliens that went into similar stasis after Kara broke containment waiting to be cured this lone conscious alien has lost control of the warp robots and seized incoming ships as opportunities to acquire helpers to do its bidding to finish the research for a cure so when a ship approaches and emits both a damaged and tractor beam effect on anything in orbit this explains why the ships crash but also why they're drawn down to the same part of the planet you're then infected and enlisted at the same time since you have no choice but to go along with it since how could you possibly care the Kara on your own when advanced aliens failed guided by this alien you finished the research preferably something that doesn't involve a coincidental magical space like a quail enzyme and perhaps look for any opportunities you can to fight back against the precursors that caused you to crash maybe there could be some moral dilemma that they have a sympathetic backstory but they're not going to be the kindest of neighbors to humanity if they're revived there's some potential there I think the reason why there's still life on the planet is that a tiny percent of the species mutated immunity to it as is common with most outbreaks of this type and enough survives to repopulate the planet after the outbreak a thousand years ago there's no real story need for only this part of the planet to have life on it and some sort of boundary to keep the player in this area could have been enforced with the precursor aliens honestly the way the sea bed sharply drops to a lifeless void right now at the edge of the play area it doesn't make much sense in the current version of the game so something else couldn't be any worse because you're being guided by the alien the tasks could be more complex they could also be explored in the crew logs of the dig a/c survivors since they would have been tasked with helping the same alien right now their story doesn't make much sense either but for completely different reasons the structured narrative moments in subnautica are most interesting when you're finding audio logs and then looking around the environment where you found them for details that support what you just read and/or listen to discovering what happens to the survivors in every life pod range from darkly funny to just plain tragic I do think it was a bit of a stretch in too harsh unlucky coincidence that yours was the only life pod to land somewhere safe on the planet but it's also true much of the atmosphere would have been ruined if there were other survivors I'm not entirely convinced that was the correct decision long term and that may be something interesting could it be made with establishing a second base with another survivor toward the end game but having many survivors at the start would have brought the game down in my opinion some nominees writing is also at its best in these parts likely because the writers were safe to be as creative as they wanted since it's separate from the larger tasks a narrative on the planet with the aliens and the infection learning about what society is like in this fictional universe and especially the brutally pragmatic outlook of corporations like Altera and how that trickled down into the minds of their staff was a lot more compelling than I was expecting at first I thought reading all these entries would be a chore that wasn't the case the entry about what could be learned from a hive mind discovered on an alien planet was in particular quite a good story and the Aurora wreck had a few data pads like this The Dig assi survivors are more intertwined with the alien stuff entered therefore it brought down a bit there were three people on the planet before you and they were all dead by the time you arrived they managed to create three bases on the larger floating island in the area then for reasons that do not make sense and that you never see evidence of yourself they decided to create an underwater base in a hostile environment and then to go even deeper and make their third home in an even more dangerous location their reasons for doing so which by the way this decision ends up killing them are to escape the weather on the ocean surface and because they didn't have enough food and building materials on the island well from listening to the logs it was clear that at least one of these survivors was capable of exploring the ocean and bringing back supplies she was able to kill sea monsters with just a dagger she could have brought back what little titanium and copper was needed to make life on the island comfortable but it's the weather and lack of food that are pushed as the big motivations here's where the rules for the player and the world that they see can become a totally separate thing from what NPC see there's never any weather on for 546 B when you're there this could be explained away as being a seasonal thing but there's never a single drop of rain ever period the de Ghazi survivors were under a constant downpour and while safely inside the same water tight bases that you can construct that can withstand the intense pressures several hundreds of metres underwater decided that moving to a cavern infested with carnivorous rampaging mushroom snakes was a better and safer idea because of wind and rain but what about the food the food and grow beds that were growing outside maybe that's why they had to leave because the wind and rain were destroying them well those can easily be placed inside just like you can with the same version of the grow beds that you actually scan and learn how to build from what they left behind food that grows so quickly that you can stand there and literally watch it become taller in real time and reach maturity in less than a day even hand-waving that away there are fish everywhere in the ocean around the safer island home fish that they must have ended up eating anyway when they went underwater because there's no outside dry land for these grow beds now it could be seen that these were excuses and lies they told each other because they were being drawn deeper into the ocean by the sea emperor pressing its will on them to help free its young from captivity but this never really happens to you until you've already decided you have to find a cure for the Cara so the de Ghazi survivor is potentially one of the most interesting stories on the planet end up being a letdown they build a few bases they squabble their story started strong and goes nowhere they all died for stupid reasons this could have been an alternative to the alien stuff one of the survivors in the game had a background in biology and could have been researching a cure for some sort of disease that only humans are susceptible to on this planet it is a foreign world after all and no matter what precautions are taken by spacefaring race they couldn't cover everything he needed materials from deeper in the planet to create the cure and so you follow in the trail left behind by them learn that they were too slow but you fall their notes and finish the work that they started to survive this way there are no precursor aliens that make no sense and you still have the disease to make things more threatening and desperate on top of being stranded the only thing you'd lose is the wonder you feel upon first finding an alien base an issue I like to close on is that even if you did fix all the plot holes around the aliens they're still not utilized in any truly compelling way in terms of gameplay you get to scan all of these curious altars with neat looking objects inside every time I did this I thought it might unlock some new technology or allow some crazy new gameplay options in the same way that the mid game had been full of building on what came before and progressing into new tools and quality of life improvements this never happens outside of those batteries we looked at earlier no teleport rooms you can build a linker basis no short-range teleport to use outside or any number of far creative twists on what far advanced alien technology could provide I don't think I'm creative enough to get there I wouldn't have thought up the prawn suit on my own but I can still see how the endgame in the alien tech is a missed opportunity however maybe that wasn't the issue maybe creativity wasn't the problem maybe a few of the devs that unknown world's entertainment knew this all too well because maybe it comes back to how the game can barely chug along at its current level of performance with what content is already there the bugs visual glitches how moving quickly through the prawn and going through the teleport gates makes the game feel like it's caught up in one of those torrential rainstorms that you never get to see the frame rate plummets and the game clings on barely avoiding a crash if that's true then I wonder just how much was lost too due to poor optimization that would be much more upsetting than poor performance getting in the way of what's already here it would mean the game couldn't be properly realized or properly finished in a totally different way that's far more importance and is that actually what's happened here with the amount of creativity shown in the early and mid game in subnautica and how many of the performance problems have been around for over two years I think it's a possibility especially since those performance problems are large enough to bring an imagined score down by two whole points and eight out of ten knocked down to a six out of ten for example it's strange to look back and realize that while subnautica having an actual ending makes it so rare among survival games it might be better if you don't play that far then again it's still the best parts of it that stick out when I think back to my time spent with the game whether it's a pity that I can't do that for the whole experience or something that speaks to how strong the best parts of subnautica really are I can't say as always thank you for watching [Music]

Channel: Joseph Anderson

Views: 1,978,467

Keywords: subnautica, video game, video games, horror, survival, early access, steam, stream, scary, spooky, monsters, crafting, stranded, game, review, critique, criticism, story, analysis, commentary, 2017, 2018, negative, disappointing, masterpiece, goty, interesting

Id: DLsPoJWO-e8

Length: 60min 0sec (3600 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 17 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/chlettn]

I'd agree with most of his observations - although spoiler.

His critisism of the endgame and inventory system is spot on, and the game still has a lot of bugs; I did find the pop-in distracting on my rather old computer, but not quite as bad as he seems to view it.

[u/TheCuriousPyro]

So some story stuff I want to talk about that he didn't really realize.

Spoiler

Can't really blame Joseph for not looking into it, though. You'd expect Subnautica to be a standalone game.

[u/Wilsonian81]

I got this in a humble bundle months ago, and finally got around to installing it a couple weeks ago. Despite its issues (and there are more than a few) I was surprised at how great this game is. I was caught off guard by how deep (no pun intended) it is. I’ve dropped about 40 hours in the last 2 weeks. That may not seem like a lot, but I’m a stay-at-home dad of two kids, so that’s basically all my personal free time.

[u/King-Achelexus]

Now there's a game I'll probably never play due to my irrational fear of underwater areas in video games. Even FF7's harmless submarine sections used to terrify me.

[u/DimlightHero]

He makes a few valid points, the pop-in can be very very jarring and should not be present in a full release to the extent that it is.

But TBH the story criticisms really didn't bother me as much. Through one of the data logs on the Aurora you learn that the ship had a secondary mission to search for the Degassi ship. It makes sense that they'd try to land roughly in the spot where that ship disappeared. And moreover I don't see Joseph's alternative story as any better than the current story is. Subnautica+Prey-Spoilers

I do agree though that the inventory is really clumsy. Making the laser cutter a separately crafted attachment of the repair tool sounds like a very sensible improvement for the current tool juggle. Same thing could go for the pathfinder tool and the Flashlight. But as appealing it sound for held tools not take up an inventory slot there is a point to that I feel. Right now at the start of every expedition you go though your base loading up on whatever you think you'll need. If the seaglide no longer took up all those slots there wouldn't be any point in leaving it at home on occasion.

[u/Epistaxis]

I'm surprised he spent so much time complaining about the "combat". I thought it was pretty clear that this wasn't a combat game in the first place, what with the lack of weapons or any reinforcing feedback for attacking the fauna. I never even seriously tried to kill anything in the entire game except small fish I wanted to eat, and even that barbaric practice ended pretty early on.

Maybe there shouldn't have been a knife so no one would be confused.

[u/pinkstahli]

I think it’s really hard for people to acknowledge that some people think of games very differently than other people, and Joseph definitely thinks about them in a way that if very far removed from the average redditor and YouTube user. So very often, this exact same comments section happens over again.

[u/Mr_Ivysaur]

I don't want to see the video because of spoilers, so what is the verdict of it? Joseph is all hardcore into deep mechanics, so Subnautica fit his tastes?

[u/[deleted]]

[removed]