Subnautica - Undah Dah Sea (you die)

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For me, the fun of the story was discovering it from nothing in the first game. You had ended up in this alien place by accident and you HAD to solve the mystery in order to get off the planet, you are shown (*not* told) early on that there is no hope of external rescue. The sense of being completely alone and at sea (no pun intended) was a huge part of the game. The voiceless and nameless PC added to the sense of solitude and being a (I'm so sorry) fish out of water. The PC is *you.*

Having a fully voiced PC, who never sounds scared or overwhelmed, just kills all of that, to say nothing of the NPC buddy who you converse with throughout the game and the nonstop fucking voice logs. It's all far too comforting and human. I don't really care about the race or sexuality of the protagonist or any other character, it's the endless talk-talk-talk of BZ that undercut the entire tone of the game.

(I'll also admit that I just don't like ice worlds. I don't like them in Mario, I didn't like them in Ecco the Dolphin, I didn't like it in Dredge. Can't explain exactly why, something about them is uninteresting to me.)

IMO the best thing to do would be the move away entirely from the whole blight/discount Forerunners/discount Alien sci-fi corporate malfeasance shit and have the next game be an entirely new planet and an entirely new story, but the developers seem pretty enamored with what they've written already so I very much doubt that's where they're going.
 
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I am scared shitless of deep bodies of water, especially the ocean, so Subnautica was an experience to say the least.

The game was really good at easing you in, the whole gameplay loop naturally leading you from one thing to another and pushing you to venture farther and dive deeper. You start out with nothing and have to craft a knife for yourself, then you hunt the local fishes for food and water, mine nearby minerals to make a few upgrades to your ger.

Suddenly the ship's reactor is going critical and you need to scramble and travel further to find necessary resources to protect yourself from the radiation, etc. And it's all done seamlessly, the game isn't holding your hand or telling you where to go, one task naturally blends into another and soon enough you're going into the deep dark.

And the sound design was spectacular, so many creepy and terrifying animals sounds, hearing your submarine creak as you pushed it deeper and deeper, the alarm blaring and blending in with the music as a reaper came after you.

As I said before, I don't think the devs have it in them to replicate the experience because they seem fundamentally unable to grasp what people liked about the game, or simply don't want to give people what they want.
 
A Sentient Cloud said:
have the next game be an entirely new planet and an entirely new story, but the developers seem pretty enamored with what they've written already so I very much doubt that's where they're going.
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Yeah...about that...

That's exactly what they're doing. Subnautica 2 is supposed to be on a completely different planet.

Unfortunately without the creative team behind the original Subnautica, they have zero idea how to design a compelling new aquatic planet, so it looks like the uninspired, same-ish garbage in the previews. I can only imagine how lackluster the sounds will be.
 
Echo_Doge said:
Yeah, it had some pretty interesting stuff. Where an Alterra exec was ACTUALLY smuggling samples of the Khaara Bacteria off the planet and onto his ship, with a plan to infect colonies and only sell them the cure if they basically allow themselves to be acquired by Alterra.

Your character found out about this and was "Accidentally" dropped into the arctic to die. And the end goal was to blow up the execs ship before it could leave the planet with the Khaara samples. Supposedly that would lead to the bacteria being spread to multiple colonies by scavenger vessels that clean up the debris and mutating into the Khaara from Natural Selection.

For inexplicable reasons, they decided to bastardize that plot into what became the Terrorist Sister B-Plot. And instead pushed the shitty "Last of the Precursors" scavenger-hunt plot with Al-An as the main one.

And they even bastardized THAT. Originally, Al-An was supposed to be a stranded Precursor AI able to talk, give background on the Precursors, and provide commentary, but your main character was supposed to stay silent. Now she never shuts the fuck up, Al-An is a full-fledged Precursor scientist responsible for the outbreak, and you run off to the Precursor Homeworld to basically excuse his horrific crimes via Sassy Black Girl Magic.

The ending was originally "You blew up a fucking Alterra ship. They know it was you and they'll be hunting for you." But Al-An offers you sanctuary with his people if you can rebuild his body and help power a phase gate to get the two of you off-world.

Made a lot more since than the current shitty ending.
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Is it any wonder that this sound so similar to what Hollywood does nowadays?
I could excuse game format changing because they wanted to try something new (for the series), but not rewriting your plot into oblivion. These people are for some reason allergic to good storytelling.
 
Astro Galactic Megalul said:
Is it any wonder that this sound so similar to what Hollywood does nowadays?
I could excuse game format changing because they wanted to try something new (for the series), but not rewriting your plot into oblivion. These people are for some reason allergic to good storytelling.
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That's because they fell backwards into a good game with the first Subnautica. I could bet you good money they had planned to make the first game a "deep narrative experience" and ended up never doing it because the Markiplier crowd showed up and were the only people giving them Early Access money. And this crowd wanted a spooky underwater survival game, so that's what UW ended up making. And once Subnautica turned into a huge success, their heads ballooned and they thought what people really wanted was their original concept for the game, not what it actually came to be.
 
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Ghostse said:
In the middle of this, when Subnautica released, when Flavra made some libtard rant about "there being no guns in Subnautica because guns are evil". (which I get why they did it from a gameplay perspective but it made zero sense for you to not be able to build a rail gun when all the components are there and a big fucking thing that needs killing was swimming around)
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That especially makes no sense because Alterra is the company supplying the marines with weapons, so why wouldn't a replicator in a life pod that detects dangerous creatures in its vicinity be unlocked to produce those weapons? The reason the devs gave for restricting weapon replication was some mass shooting on a space station but the devices you're carrying clearly recognize you're on a foreign planet with no detectable human life around so that excuse also makes no sense.
 
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Echo_Doge said:
Yeah...about that...

That's exactly what they're doing. Subnautica 2 is supposed to be on a completely different planet.

Unfortunately without the creative team behind the original Subnautica, they have zero idea how to design a compelling new aquatic planet, so it looks like the uninspired, same-ish garbage in the previews. I can only imagine how lackluster the sounds will be.
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I just never want to hear the word "Alterra" again. The Weyland-Yutani shit is far and away the least interesting part of this series for me. Give me a big scary open ocean full of big scary alien marine animals and keep the human drama out of it.
 
The Evil Midnight Bomber said:
The reason the devs gave for restricting weapon replication was some mass shooting on a space station but the devices you're carrying clearly recognize you're on a foreign planet with no detectable human life around so that excuse also makes no sense.
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The really funny part is that the whole "guns bad" dev bullshit backfires spectacularly on them, since it now forces me to gas and punch the wildlife to death with my mech, instead of just killing them in a more humane way by shooting them.

A Sentient Cloud said:
I just never want to hear the word "Alterra" again. The Weyland-Yutani shit is far and away the least interesting part of this series for me. Give me a big scary open ocean full of big scary alien marine animals and keep the human drama out of it.
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The shitlib devs, like all their ilk, are utterly incapable of realizing the sheer hypocrisy of preaching at the proles about the evils of corporations while raking in millions from a bigass publisher and enjoying the full benefits of being corpo rats.
 
The Evil Midnight Bomber said:
That especially makes no sense because Alterra is the company supplying the marines with weapons, so why wouldn't a replicator in a life pod that detects dangerous creatures in its vicinity be unlocked to produce those weapons? The reason the devs gave for restricting weapon replication was some mass shooting on a space station but the devices you're carrying clearly recognize you're on a foreign planet with no detectable human life around so that excuse also makes no sense.
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I think that said shooting was uprising against the corporation, but I could be wrong. That's how I remember it, anyway.
So le evil corporation restricted gun ownership to make sure its employees/slaves don't become a problem whenever they're dissatisfied with something... Which is hilariously ironic as a premise written by anti-gun libtards.
 
Astro Galactic Megalul said:
I think that said shooting was uprising against the corporation, but I could be wrong. That's how I remember it, anyway.
So le evil corporation restricted gun ownership to make sure its employees/slaves don't become a problem whenever they're dissatisfied with something... Which is hilariously ironic as a premise written by anti-gun libtards.
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The stated explanation in-game is this:
Weapons were removed from standard survival blueprints following the massacre on Obraxis Prime. The knife remains the only exception.
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Presumably, there was another survival situation where one guy fabricated a gun and killed everybody else in his party.
 
Lazy Drei said:
IIRC they also told the composer of Subnautica, Simon Chylinski to get bent because he made some Xitter jokes about diversity bullshit years before.
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BadTanMan said:
Consider the following:
He fired their previous audio engineer for "bigoted" opinions, I believe just before the 1.0 release.
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Single biggest reason I think BZ fell short and 2 will be no different. The soundtrack carried the atmosphere of 1.

I dont remember a single track from BZ. Whoever they have now is completely unremarkable.
 
Sucks that subnautica 2 is going through this controversy cause subnautica co-op with friends does sound like a good time
 
regalterry said:
The really funny part is that the whole "guns bad" dev bullshit backfires spectacularly on them, since it now forces me to gas and punch the wildlife to death with my mech, instead of just killing them in a more humane way by shooting them.
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You can't have guns, but we will allow you to load a living creature into a Gravity Gun knock-off and fire them as explosive ammunition. Such a humane and non-lethal solution!

Corn Flakes said:
The stated explanation in-game is this:
Presumably, there was another survival situation where one guy fabricated a gun and killed everybody else in his party.
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The line is an obvious reference to the Sandy Hook shooting, which is their reasoning for why the game lacks any kind of lethal weaponry, because lefties see guns not as tools for survival or defense, but exclusively for committing crimes.

Now, I personally wouldn't mind the choice to omit guns from a game-design perspective, since the underwater environment the game takes place in would make conventional small arms effectively useless, but it's the fact that they used it as a chance to virtue signal "Mmmm le guns bad, mkay?" that I think is retarded.
 
I don't know, I'm down to sperg about the tankies as much as the next gal but I think they just didn't want you to be armed to enhance the feeling of helplessness, and "some guy went crazy once and cost us our valuable human cattle" is the easiest in-universe explanation as to why you can't carpet-bomb the sea monsters from the jump.
 
Derped223 said:
Sucks that subnautica 2 is going through this controversy cause subnautica co-op with friends does sound like a good time
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On the one hand, coop makes almost anything fun.

On the other hand, half the fun of the OG Subnautica was the solitude and being able to fuck around on your own time. I remember spending an hour exploring the purple mushroom caves by hand (swimming fin?), because my Seamoth didn't have any depth modules yet so it was parked at 200m.
 
I'm praying they go back to a silent protagonist for 2. If they don't then I won't even bother with this one. That, the lame new vehicles, and the worse soundtrack all stopped me from really getting into BZ and I'm not gonna fall for it again if 2's just more of the same.
 
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