Subnautica: Sleeping with the fishes

[Cordeos]

I just picked this game up yesterday and wow it has really pulled me in. It feels like early minecraft, when you are all alone in a crappy little hole in the ground trying to survive in a hostile and confusing environment. I prefer freedom mode (no hunger or thirst.) because its hard enough to collect resources, not drown or get eaten without having to eat and drink all the time. 

 

They have done an amazing job making the world, its really pretty and well designed. I love the vibrant sea life just swimming around doing whatever. The music feels wonderfully thematic. The ability to dock the little sub in the bigger sub and the moonpool is so awesome. I am really excited to see how the game progresses. I cannot wait to build both subs in my game and explore the deepest depths.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ID2C0i9TliE

[Dewar]

I've got my eye on this but, with all the survival games in various stages of early access, I'm holding off for now.

[jennegatron]

This was at Day of the Devs in SF last November and looked like a joy.

[prettyunsmart]

1. This looks great.

2. I will probably hold off until release as I already have too many early access survival games.

3. I wonder if this would actually be relaxing to play as I have a pretty serious fear of drowning (since I don't know how to swim in real life).

[Cordeos]

  On 8/19/2015 at 11:32 AM, prettyunsmart said:

1. This looks great.

2. I will probably hold off until release as I already have too many early access survival games.

3. I wonder if this would actually be relaxing to play as I have a pretty serious fear of drowning (since I don't know how to swim in real life).

It is relaxing sometimes, like when I'm cruising around in my big sub. When you are diving though, its pretty freaky, especial in some of the deeper biomes at night. There is always the threat of a predator coming to eat you. There is a nice computer voice reminding you of how much time before you run out of oxygen.

[Mawd]

While I feel pretty obliged to play this because reasons (Aqua Gorges! <3 or riot..) Like many other games I'm not sure if I'll play this once bought; so I'm just going to enjoy watching UWE's progress on the forums.

[plasticflesh]

I grabbed Subnautica recently. I tried the survival modes for a few minutes, but really I just wanted to build a labyrinthian underwater base. So I went into creative mode and started making underwater bases.  Abstractly rebuilding seafloor sprawls akin to SOMA or The Abyss is pretty satisfying in and of itself. The building mechanics has some interesting quirks to it, which is to be expected; so learning them in creative mode seems worth while before trying to invest in the survivial toil.

[Cordeos]

  On 9/7/2016 at 10:04 PM, plasticflesh said:

I grabbed Subnautica recently. I tried the survival modes for a few minutes, but really I just wanted to build a labyrinthian underwater base. So I went into creative mode and started making underwater bases.  Abstractly rebuilding seafloor sprawls akin to SOMA or The Abyss is pretty satisfying in and of itself. The building mechanics has some interesting quirks to it, which is to be expected; so learning them in creative mode seems worth while before trying to invest in the survivial toil.

in survival I'm pretty sure you get back 100% of your resources if you deconstruct something, but its still good to learn in creative.

 

I haven't played in a while, I love the game, but want to wait until my saves don't get deleted anymore to start again.

[Ben X]

better than No Man's Sky lol

[osmosisch]

Are you doing one of your "things" again Ben

[Ben X]

Yes, but I'm done now.

[Twig]

don't worry i got the "thing" and i laughed!!!

[osmosisch]

Same

[Dewar]

When's the last time they did a save reset? I got a fair way into building a base about 6 months ago and I loved it.

[Cordeos]

  On 9/12/2016 at 5:04 PM, Dewar said:

When's the last time they did a save reset? I got a fair way into building a base about 6 months ago and I loved it.

Not sure, I haven't played in quite some time apart from an attempt to get the Rift VR to work on the Vive. I will probably wait for 1.0 to come out at this point.

[Deadpan]

They haven't reset saves at all since I started playing ca. half a year ago. After a big update happens you just get a warning that if you upgrade an old save you might not see all the new stuff until you start fresh with the new terrain data, and if you built anything inside the chunks of the world that they messed around with it might be destroyed.

[Bjorn]

I started to play this recently, and this game is my jam in so many ways.  It's stunningly beautiful, like easily just one of the prettiest first person games I've ever played.  It manages to mostly be relaxing, punctuated by moments of stress, fear and anxiety, ala Don't Starve, which is pretty much exactly what I want out of a survival game.  I don't want to have to worry about dying at every moment in a game, but I also don't want a game that feels like it has no risk at all to it. 

 

Discovery is so good in this too.  Like, it captures the awe of discovering something alien in a way that Mass Effect only wishes it could.  There was a moment walking through an alien structure where I was reminded at how poorly ME: Andromeda managed to handle those same moments. 

[Salacious Snake]

This game seems cool, but I think I’d be too scared to play it. Being deep underwater with weird critters lurking about is right in the terror zone for me. 

 

But weirdly, that kinda makes me want to play it.

[Bjorn]

  On 3/10/2018 at 3:56 AM, Salacious Snake said:

This game seems cool, but I think I’d be too scared to play it. Being deep underwater with weird critters lurking about is right in the terror zone for me. 

 

But weirdly, that kinda makes me want to play it.

 

"The Blood Kelp Zone: This ecological biome matches 7 of the 9 preconditions for stimulating terror in humans."

(If you click through the link, you can listen to the dispassionate computer voice read that to you). 

 

When it comes to the terror elements, I have generally found them manageable.  You can almost always hear something bad before you see it, so you know when you've crossed over into something's turf.  As long as you save frequently (and aren't playing on permadeath mode.....fuck that in this game), the monsters are really only as threatening as monsters in the runaway style horror games, where the initial shock of finding them gets you, but after that they're just something to be managed and approached. 

[Salacious Snake]

Yeah, I'm scared of, like, regular fish.

[Deadpan]

The horror aspect of Subnautica is particularly fascinating to me: it's not scary because it forces you to walk through a hallway with monsters, but has sort of a natural push and pull (or ebb and flow, haha) of encouraging you to push out as far as you dare. You can settle in the coral shallows and just build a nice life for yourself, but if you want to go explore and see more of the world then you'll eventually go deeper. Then you run into some weird new fish and you race back to the comfort of your home.

 

It's a weirdly relaxing cycle. The feeling of shelter I get from a tiny base in Subnautica is unlike any other virtual abode I built in the past.

[Bjorn]

  On 3/13/2018 at 11:09 AM, Deadpan said:

The horror aspect of Subnautica is particularly fascinating to me: it's not scary because it forces you to walk through a hallway with monsters, but has sort of a natural push and pull (or ebb and flow, haha) of encouraging you to push out as far as you dare. You can settle in the coral shallows and just build a nice life for yourself, but if you want to go explore and see more of the world then you'll eventually go deeper. Then you run into some weird new fish and you race back to the comfort of your home.

 

It's a weirdly relaxing cycle. The feeling of shelter I get from a tiny base in Subnautica is unlike any other virtual abode I built in the past.

 

LoL at "tiny base" I manage to build an extra room or two on most trips back, so I now have a somewhat sprawling multi-story main compound.  I've burned a couple of hours just scavenging quartz so the whole thing can be glass walled barring one tower of rooms that dedicated to reinforcements  so it doesn't spring a link.

 

But yeah, I completely agree with that.  And it's especially true when I've built small scout bases (entirely for scanner rooms to speed up finding the rarer resources) in particularly inhospitable areas of the game. 

 

The sea creatures in this feel more alien and threatening than the alien monsters from many other games, despite often also feeling like many of them could be oddities from our own seas.  The use of color and sound and bioluminescence all contribute to that feeling of other-worldliness. 

[Bjorn]

If I have a complaint about this game so far (and at this point, I'm pretty deep in and its my only complaint), it's that I'm starting to get a little lost on what to do.   I'm slowly tracking down the last few upgrades to gear that I want before I dive deep, but some of the cave systems I've found seem pretty confusing, and there's not a good way to map them.  Which, the lack of a map is both a blessing and a curse it seems. 

 

I took the Cyclops out for its first long venture, and it feels like it's mostly too much of a pain in the ass?  Slow, cumbersome, surprisingly weak if attacked.  I mean, a mobile food source and storage is nice, but the sea moth generally gets the job done, and the extra faffing about I did with the cyclops on running back and forth probably ate up about a round trip to the main base. 

[tripptrap]

Been playing this game for about a week, and really enjoying it so far. Like others have mentioned, the horror/suspense elements of the game have been the most surprising and fascinating to me. I don't play many survival games so I don't know how common this approach is, but I am definitely overcome with a sense of fear anytime I travel to unfamiliar areas. I'm at a point in the game where I rarely have to worry about food, water, or oxygen, so the fear I experience is purely based on not knowing what lies ahead of me.

 

I had a particularly unsettling experience early on. I decided that I would try to swim out to a relatively distant landmark. By the time I arrived, night had fallen, and I had not yet constructed a flashlight, so I was swimming blind. As I was attempting to explore the area, I got stuck in some geometry. I attempted to free myself for a good 20-30 seconds, and during that time I didn't notice that the music had changed to a much more aggressive track. I finally noticed the music when I managed to free myself, and only had a few seconds to frantically look around before a massive creature appeared in front of me and killed me in one blow. I still don't know exactly where I ended up when I got out of the geometry glitch, so I get pretty terrified anytime I'm within a few hundred meters of the area I swam out to. Knowing that creatures like that exist in the game (and also NOT knowing precisely where I encountered them) makes exploring new areas genuinely terrifying.