Subnautica

[Psion]

http://store.steampowered.com/app/264710/

Wow, how did no one mention this game yet? 93% positive reviews out of 2000, minecraft style game, underwater, survival focus, etc. . .

I've only gotten to play a couple hours so far (curse you, work and finals!) But what I've tried so far was very impressive. The controls took a slight adjusting to, but were intuitive after a few minutes. The UI was easy to use, and the aesthetics were amazing, like I had fallen into a giant aquarium and I was the plastic scuba diver. ...Full of man-eating alien fish.

what are other peoples impressions of this game? I'll post some pictures late tonight once I'm off work.

[abzu93]

It doesn't seem to me to be so much of a survival game than as a sightseeing game with a few survival elements. I would wait until purchasing at this early stage in order to see if development will take it in a direction you want to go.

[Psion]

Well, I won't deny the sightseeing part, as the world is handcrafted and gorgeous, but I did die once in the 2 hours I played, due to a stalker fish sneaking behind me, then proceeding to rawr when he was right behind. I turned just in time to see my impending doom. XD

I also came very close before that, as a pack of bleeders popped out of some seaweed I was harvesting. thankfully said seaweed was used for making health kits, so I was able to patch up at base, more bleeders chasing behind lol.

oh, and a small cave had a couple of exploding fish that nearly got me. And while I didn't go down to the depths, I saw a very large fish bellowing down there. I took one look, went "NOPE", and high tailed it out before he saw me. Then there was the time I got turned around and came to close to the radioactive area, barely swimming out in time.

So I think they're definitely focusing on survival. Food and water are something that depletes fairly quickly, almost as fast as in BTW. Overall, I'd say the difficulty is easier than BTW, but harder than vanilla minecraft for sure. This is just an early impression from a guy too scared to go down even 50 meters, though. XD

[FlowerChild]

I caved to temptation (survival game + creative elements + I'm a sucker for underwater games) this past weekend and picked this up.

My quick rundown:

-I'd say at present there's about 10 hours of solid gameplay in it, and I put in maybe 15 total building and playing around with pretty much everything that's currently available (with the exception of the gravity gun and terraformer tool which didn't really speak to me).

-As Psion said, it's absolutely gorgeous.

-The sense of scale in some of the elements is quite awe inspiring. Your crashed ship for example is a real behemoth, even if the level design of the interior is unfortunately linear at present. The exterior though is quite worthy of a few "holy shit" moments.

-I get the impression that survival gameplay is definitely a focus here. There's not a whole lot to it at present, with just the occasional need to hunt a fish or collect a few resources to eat or drink pure water, BUT it's an element that's ever present enough that I get the impression the devs are thinking in that direction, and there's also enough of a progression to what you can build that it indicates to me that having a meaningful progression is a concern to them as well. It's definitely not the complete absence of such elements that you see with Space Engineers or what have you. What you can access in the world for example (how deep you can go, if you can approach your crashed ship, etc.) are largely determined by what you have managed to craft so far, and collecting the resources to craft those items is non-trivial.

-Definitely some panic moments in there. I died maybe 2-3 times due to running into stuff I hadn't seen before and getting killed by it. Death can also carry a significant punch as you lose whatever new resources you were carrying at the time, and while I'm not entirely certain if you can recover them by returning to the same location (never managed to find them again on death), given the size of the ocean here, and given whatever killed you is likely still around, that's a non-trivial task in most cases.

-I'm a little concerned about how some of the creative elements interact. For example, you can build an underwater base in pieces, but later on you can build a gigantic submarine (it really is impressive) which is basically one huge prefab and acts as a mobile base, making any work you put into a stationary one largely obsolete while not having half the creative potential of the base building (you can place various objects in the sub but its overall structure is preset). So, there seems to be some undermining of the game's own systems going on there that I'm not entirely comfortable with.

So overall, I wouldn't say there's enough there where I would outright recommend it to anyone, and I still have some lingering concerns about the design direction, but there's definitely a lot of potential there if they keep up with their current development trends.

On this one point in the OP above though:

minecraft style game

I really don't know if I would go that far. The building isn't really freeform to the extent that Minecraft is, with the stuff in Subnautica largely revolving around assembling prefabs in a limited number of configurations. Yes, you can destroy the terrain, but that's primarily an aesthetic thing, and isn't exactly integrated with the building system.

Not saying that's bad, as it works fairly well for this game, but it really isn't at the level of working with blocks as atomic units the way MC is, and I'm really not certain I'd consider it to be in the same genre as a result.

[Psion]

ah, i think there's the terraformer which lets you rebuild the terrain as well as tear it down, but it requires a special part to research, similar to the seamoth. I've yet to try that out myself though

And they plan on expanding the seabases from their dev posts, there's already glass/larger corridors/actual rooms in the works to expand on it, as well as decorative elements. I've also heard things about things like aquariums to possibly put species inside, that sort of thing.

My main worry so far is that because quartz doesn't respawn, it's all too easy to run out of glass for sea bases and the like, but they seem to be working on that issue too. Mainly by possibly having a large central handcrafted area then blending it somehow with randomly generated terrain outside that, but they seem to be debating that still. I do like the looks of their posts though... they seem to have a good idea of what they want as far as goals.

I think it's definitely a promising game for actual vanilla gameplay, much more so than some of the other recent ones i've checked out. (space engineers, stranded deep, etc... ~_~ )

[FlowerChild]

ah, i think there's the terraformer which lets you rebuild the terrain as well as tear it down, but it requires a special part to research, similar to the seamoth. I've yet to try that out myself though

Yes, I realize, but that still doesn't integrate with the construction/base-building options, which is what I'm getting at: the systems in a game like Minecraft (or 7 Days, or Space Engineers) are largely unified to use voxels, whereas here the terrain is comprised of them, but building anything else is essentially a big exception case which is treated as another system.

To give you an example of what I mean, you can not take a pre-existing cave, or dig one out (you can dig one out), add an airlock door to it, pressurize it somehow, and turn that into your base, because the terrain and every other "natural" thing in the environment is working on a completely different system than the stuff you build, which is made up of prefab 3D models.

A more Minecraftey system would have them all operating on the same fundamental building blocks, and thus the systems would be able to interact with each other at a deeper level other than just collisions. The 3D models look better, sure, but ultimately limit the kind of interactions the player can expect.

And they plan on expanding the seabases from their dev posts, there's already glass/larger corridors/actual rooms in the works to expand on it, as well as decorative elements. I've also heard things about things like aquariums to possibly put species inside, that sort of thing.

That still leaves the disconnect between things you essentially build yourself out of parts, and big prefabs like the sub that you really have very little control over in terms of how you put them together.

My main worry so far is that because quartz doesn't respawn

It's really not a concern in practice: building everything in the game I still wasn't anywhere close to exhausting that within the environment.

Sure, it's something to be resolved in the future, but really no big deal at present anyways.