TALES FROM THE VOID AND SUBNAUTICA PC

And if you still happen to overlook it? Well, just look at your map screen and remember to come back - oh, right. You begin internalizing navigation strategies like, 'ok there's that pointy reef and the round hill so I should turn left and keep swimming until I bump into another wall, then swim over until I can see the kelp forest, then swim down into the caves at the bottom.'Īs fun and mysterious it is, this darkness and heavy use of fog also means it's easy to get lost and miss important landmarks or key locations - so in terms of level design, the designers usually have to place the key ' wrecks' (broken parts of a crashed ship, with explorable interiors) in the middle of each biome, and then just pray you see it. Caves become mini-bosses deep trenches become mega-bosses.Īnd when the sun sets, the world turns pitch-black and you must resort to feeling the topology of the landscape. This omission helps exploration feel genuinely dangerous and confusing, and also lets the devs sidestep the problem of legibly mapping a huge 3D terrain for player UI, but this decision has further repercussions for navigation and level design. Subnautica ends up being even more cruel than The Long Dark, and never provides you with any in-game world map nor any mapping mechanisms. Navigation becomes its own form of combat that threatens to kill you. Maybe that's just the curse of stealth games? After the initial shock of a weird creature encounter wears off, every hostile monster becomes a nuisance instead of a perpetually engaging design element. Now, take all these factors, and then also let the player basically fly around and change their height at will. This height-bias is exacerbated by console-fication in first person design, which discourages verticality because quick and accurate up-down looks are more difficult to perform with gamepads. Stealth games also tend to tune their AI to be easily fooled by height differences in dedicated sneaking games like Dishonored, walking along a ceiling pipe suspended above a guard makes you practically undetectable. Like most other games, the best tactic is to do what speedrunners do: just move past your enemy and ignore them, and you can easily leave their 'aggro' radius before they catch up to you.

Because there's so much repeated traversal across the world and no practical way to disable the strongest enemies, you have to be able to sneak past most of them without much trouble. Without combat, Subnautica ends up feeling like a watered-down (hahaha) stealth game.

TALES FROM THE VOID AND SUBNAUTICA PC

PC Gamer already did a nice roundtable about Subnautica's early climactic story moment, so instead I want to focus on Subnautica's most interesting systemic feature: its depth-based 3D level design, and implications on the rest of the game. The design lead has also talked about their no-gun philosophy.) But the smoking gun of authorial intent is in the credits: a dedication to the families of Newtown, Connecticut. (Why? Well, there's a few story threads about how use of force cannot get you what you want, as well as a faint anti-capitalist / anti-colonialist message. but most importantly, unlike The Long Dark's focus on hunting, killing creatures in Subnautica *never* yields any reward or drops - even when the game confusingly asks you to collect shark teeth but killing sharks never yields any shark teeth.

The few lethal weapons are either cumbersome and annoying to maintain (poison gas torpedoes must be crafted and loaded) or practical but anti-juicy (your knife). Much like the other first person indie survival game The Long Dark, Subnautica features no combat, no world map, and essentially no NPCs or quests to complete for anyone. In it, you have to forage for food, manage your oxygen when diving into caves and deep sea trenches, and collect resources to build your own underwater base(s) and submarine(s) to find out What Really Happened Here. Subnautica is a long open world survival game set in a vast deep ocean. This post spoils the core gameplay and player progression in Subnautica, but not the specific story nor scripted plot events.

Tales from the void and subnautica