Subnautica was never about fighting and killing the leviathans, thats why there s no weapons in the game. So a final boss type fight would make zero sense
I think it makes sense that "split between loading screens" is not mentioned in any way, since Loading screens where a outcome of technological limitations rather than an intentional structural choice.
Many games actually utilized loading screens to add to the story, those being the first 3 Call of Duties. They usually had some form of written information pertaining to the player's story, with the occasional History Channel video. Call of Duty 4 improved this by simulating the experience of being in a "War Room". So while it might have been technological limitation, many games didn't treat the loading screen just as, well, a loading screen, but also as a break to give more context and improve immersion.
Loading screens also tend to indirectly interrupt the flow go gameplay when the timing is not right. A loading screen has been tolerated for the sake of letting the game load the next segment. But it also serves as a break in momentum the game would need to pick back up. Take Ratchet and Clank as an example, whenever he goes to a planet there is a loading screen. But the player is given a glimpse of the world in a cutscene to set the tone for the level. And usually the action would pick up after the player was given a chance to rest after completing the last planet/level. Either way, loading screens are like bridges. They can be sometimes boring to cross. But for older technological limitations were a necessary evil. Given the book was written in 2015, it is safe to speculate that the writers have considered the possibility of technology becoming powerful enough to lessen load times, if not find ways to make them appear seamless.
I love how Subnautica has subtle level ups, knowledge-wise and physical. Meeting a reaper for the first time, you wouldn’t know that you can evade them by quickly moving to the side (they turn slowly). And later on, you get a stasis rifle, which you can use to kill it. Killing it gives you NOTHING (which I really appreciate) but it feels like a major accomplishment. A “look how far I’ve come” thing
This was a great breakdown of why this game is so damned effective! Personally, while there may not be a physical boss in the cove tree zone, the psychological effect of knowing that there is just a ghost leviathan egg sitting there and there's nothing you can do about it gives me a kind of 'nope' I can't explain. That book sounds fascinating, I'll definitely be looking into it!
This analysis helps highlight what went wrong with Below Zero, narratively. That game also has 3 storylines, but two of them are entirely optional, including the primary reason you are on the planet in the first place.
If you play smart with the teleporters, you don't have to go back and forth. For example, the material hunt for the hatching enzymes can be avoided as the teleporters in the facility go to each material you need.
What is smart about it, four of them are basically bringing you to every resources for the imperor end mission, that's the most easiest thing to figure out...
I actually dislike that. The notion that they make a teleporter that spits you out within sight of the ingredients. That scavenger hunt is one of the final "bosses" of the game, it's meant to test your knowledge of the map. You do get a shortcut to the surface so you don't have to do the lengthy drive up and down several times. My first playthrough I had gotten the message to unlock the Captain's cabin and got the blueprints for the rocket on the way down, so I mixed farming for materials to build the rocket with gathering the things for the enzyme. Now that I'm familiar with the game and kind of played it to death for myself, I find it almost too easy. I've done a Hardcore, baseless, fussy eater run. That is, building no base and living only out of the Cyclops, and eating and drinking nothing but water or food bars found in chests. You can beat the game with only one trip to and from the depths. If you know what you're doing I'd call the game too easy.
Damn. I've heard of baseless runs but not baseless, fussy eater runs, I'm very impressed (and mildly scared 😂) of your skill. I feel like when you know what you're doing every game becomes too easy. Once you've played a game 10, 15, 20 times, it'll just become muscle memory.
one of the things I heard people say on their playthroughs that stuck with me is that the sense of progression in the game is the best part. that first time with each new piece of equipment or vehicle. it changes and opens up your game. that and the endorphine rush of making it to the surface just in time before you die or getting lost in a cave or wreck and the adrenaline spike of panic as claustrophobia is triggered too. The game plays on so many primal fears.
I think there's an argument to be made that the boss of the Safe Shallows is actually oxygen, hunger, and thirst. Once you conquer those here, it's not usually a significant threat and becomes a background pressure - kind of like how boss enemies become regular enemies on later levels, like the Tauros and Capra demons in Dark Souls.
That's an interesting take on the Safe Shallows. I personally didn't feel like hunger and thirst were that big of an issue in the Safe Shallows because you're surrounded with an abundance of fish which provide both. I personally feel like hunger and thirst are a bigger issue when venturing far away from the life pod/habitat as you lose access to a fabricator.
@@exiledhero3791 Oh! Spoilers for the movie Nope: The (possibly alien) entity in the movie Nope (who the protagonist nicknames "Jean Jacket") hides from everyone by controlling the local weather and cloaking themselves in a stationary cloud :D Great movie, incredible movie, it's one of the best movies I've ever seen, I will never watch it again, it was very disturbing :'>
One thing I'd like to add is that those clouds aren't just stationary. If you look at them theough the semi-transparent display of the PDA, the clouds over the islands stay white, but the rest of the scenery is dimmed out under the overlay. That effect REALLY makes them stand out.
What I love about Subnautica is how the game only guides you to sprcific things that are mostly necessary for progression, and a few convenient tools. The fact that there are some areas with wrecks full of useful stuff that don't have a marker pulling interest toward them and some locations even intimidate the player with warnings of potential threats, is a good thing. It's reverse handholding, it's throwing you into a pool, warning you about the dangers of the deep parts, and leaving the rest up to you. Handholding to the point where every area with anything worth looking at is pointed out on the HUD or map with a marker is bad for the exploration element of open world games, and having areas that are entirely optional for even objective focused players is a good thing. If you need markers leading you to every worthwhile location, you aren't exploring a world, you are ticking off a checklist of predetermined POIs. In Subnautica, some of the best POIs are decided on by the player's intuition rather than what the devs tell you to look for. And Subnautica even goes easy on you for not exploring more than where the game directs you. You don't lose out on being able to beat the game or even getting all the achievements/trophies by skipping some areas, and all you'll find is resources, lore and side-grades to mostly mid-game equipment. It puts the weight of deciding to explore these areas entirely on the player, which is sorely lacking in many modern open world games. There should be locations and secrets that don't draw attention with markers or objectives, that players who are attentive will notice, while those that aren't will miss it without being harshly punished for it. Ignorance of the environment and acting like a drone shouldn't be rewarded as much as thinking freely and exploring of your own free will and intuition. Sure, the things that are required for progression should pull your attention to them, but optional content is called optional for a reason. Unmarked rewards that can be sussed out by attentive players are indicative of a game that respects the player's time and intelligence. Using markers as a lazy way to find all optional rewards is why Ubisoft's open world HUD and map design gets mocked. It's why open worlds are filled with meaningless collectibles that are all the same in everything but name. "Get 100 feathers and 50 flags and 300 data terminals". You can go the whole game without ever seeing a cuddlefish egg, because the game doesn't put a quest marker over them for you, and that's something I want more of. A reward for exploring naturally. Because you choose to check, rather than because the game tells you something is there.
I'm sorry to tell you that your time capsule was most likely deleted, ion batteries are on a list of banned time capsule items bc they're unbalanced in the early game
Wanted to drop another reply because I've figured out how to get Ion batteries through time capsules. If you the battery in a piece of equipment (scanner, flashlight etc.) and then put the equipment in the capsule, it stays. Found a time capsule today with a flashlight and an Ion battery inside it.
Subnautica’s level design is the reason I always come back to it every year, I absolutely love how the game gives you all these optional open ocean biomes like the Sea Treader’s Path or the Mountains for those players who are truly dedicated to learn all there is about the world.
One of the only criticisms i have is, that there isn't any emphasis to build the Neptune Rocket as you go. Most players will get the blueprints but get railed into the main story afterwards and only start the rocket afterwards. Which A: Sends them ginding out all of the materials or B: Sees them having all the materials at hand already and speedrunning the thing. If they put that process into stages as well, this could have been avoided. I tried to build it as i went in my last playthrough and it made the last bits of the game so much more enjoyable.
I personally found building the entire thing in one go very enjoyable. It kind of gave me a sense of closure as you start the game by building equipment and end it by building the Neptune.
I'd like to shout out the Scanner Room and the hud chip. It is a crucial addition for giving players agency when they can't find one missing blueprint or a few more necessary resources.
This also goes to show how the climax of a story doesn't need to be epic, but it needs to FEEL that way. The climax of Subnautica is meeting the Sea Emperor, hatching her babies after going for a brief scavenger hunt that is pretty much laid out for you in the four portals, and then curing yourself and the planet with it. Sure, this climax isn't exactly epic in the typical sense. There is no epic final battle or confrontation. However, it doesn't matter because of how much it FEELS epic. Throughout the entire game, the game has been sprinkling all these hints of the story about the kharaa, the precursor race, and the Sea Emperor. We realize that the world we are trying to survive is hanging on by a thread and that the Sea Emperor has been waiting for centries for someone to help save her babies. And when we finally hatch the babies, it's more than just about curing ourselves so we can leave. We have saved the entire planet, we have allowed the Sea Emperor to finally rest after being imprisoned for so long. There isn't really any action in this climax, and yet it feels more epic than most action games I've ever played.
Completely agree. I think the reveal of the Sea Emperor being imprisoned for so long and that the Kharaa was caused by the Precursors disrupting nature on 4546B was a shocking revelation that adds so much depth and terror to Subnautica world.
I've watched the entire video, and I must say, I'm very happy this has shown up on my fyp. I loved the analytical aspect and how you speak to a viewer. It could be from personal preference, but I felt like you began brushing over details as you went. In hindsight, it's probably because the story try's to pick the pace up alittle more giving less in depth character and personal story and more environmental. I also wanted to say that in the inactive lava zone and the area just before it, you can see multiple reaper skeletons. In my eyes this attempts to tell the player that a bigger threat is nearing. Love the video, hope you make more.
Thank you. I'm glad you enjoyed. I did begin to brush over certain details because by the the late mid game and end game, a lot of resources and enemies are re-occurring and as you said, the story is picking up pace. I completely agree, the reaper skeletons are hugely intimidating to find.
I did try/plan to build a base but I didn't have lubricant for a moonpool which was the only module I really needed so it would have been pointless for me.
That is rather smart though, becuase it ensured the player would be directed to exploring other parts of the map and requiring them to backtrack to certain areas for specific materials. Becuase not all components are available in the safe shallows. And despite reaching the end game, you are sometimes still obligated to return to the start of the game for something.
Everyone builds a base in the lost river, everyone. First thing I put in my cyclops, besides lockers, is creepvine clusters for planting in the lost river for my new base.
@@RNGTherapy glaze is a refrece to sucking d!ck but its come to mean anyone who praises a thing basically people who say drake won the beef with Kendrick are "glazing" for drake
@@RNGTherapy glaze is when u like say really good things about a game and show bias in a way like eg. someone into fortnite might glaze a certain player
Okay. I don't think I'm being biased. I just found that Subnautica was really well made and that it followed the points laid out in the book I mentioned so I made a breakdown vid. Thanks for explain 'glaze' though.
@@RNGTherapyidk if this is an unpopular opinion, because it seems like everyone loves the Cyclopes, but going solo in the prawn suit is far safer and easier. The Cyclopes is just bulky and such an easy target for leviathans I don’t understand why people don’t just walk the prawn down
@@Kali-bs7ojwalking down in the prawnsuit is time consuming and takes a lot of water and food. Easier to just take the prawnsuit down with the cyclops.
@Kali-bs7oj That is valid, I personally use the cyclops because I always do a massive harvesting run whenever I to the lost river and lava lakes and harvest everything I can. I also love the asthetic of the cyclops and using it as a base, I also enjoy the cat and mouse game and challenge of taking the cyclops near leviathans and other hostile fauna.
little nitpick but the blood kelp DOES have a wreck-- in the trench. its always hard for me to find but its there! otherwise, i really liked this video
Something I feel wasn't explored enough was that there are some underwater wrecks that almost all players wouldn't dare to find unless they were being intentional with covering all area. The ones I would say fit this criteria is: - One far-south wreck in the grand reef - 3 wrecks in the dunes (though the nortern-most one I find is least likely to be visited - A couple wrecks in the Mountains These wrecks are surrounded by leviathans, and would push players away. So my thought to improve that would be to put some lifepod quests for those biomes. It's possible the devs explored that idea originally but decided against it so that players arent forced into confronting reapers explicitly. But I think it would be cool if the game hinted towards exploring everything the game has to offer. Even if the end of the video notes against this though, i still think there needs to be a way to organically push the player in those directions.
Yeah. That's kind of what I was referring to with the part there being "no organic pull to the Mountain, Dunes and Sea Treader biomes" point. Most people will hear "there are several leviathan class creatures in this region" and immediately leave the dunes and never come back, for a year after I bought the game I thought that that was an out of bounds type warning.
This is truly a beautiful representation of the way the game manages to achieve such a successful story and provide such wonderful experience. I've felt it since the game was just starting to establish it's existence, but it seemed like barely to noone noticed the beauty of the way they present the story. You are not held by the narrator in Subnautica, noone guides and tells you what to do - you are indeed a survivor who got stranded in a wild alien world and it's only up to you and your decisions to decide how and will you survive or not. The game masterly gives hints on what to do by compiling each and one into some form of a situation that awake the curiosity of the player to check their deduction and problem-solving skills in unknown situations. The only time game guided you - was at the start when it said "break limestone". It was the reason I tried to avoid every leak or spoiler when Below Zero was developing - to once again dive into the sense of unknown world and to feel the story and the secrets that hide beneath the wonders of this series. And I felt it, and I will never forget the gorgeousness of this narrative, visualized and told by the player themself. Thank you for this video. Keep up the good work!
Thanks. Glad you enjoyed. I agree. The way the story unravels just a little bit at a time is lovely and really lends itself to giving the player enough time explore, gather and make deductions or even just read the PDAs without taking away from gameplay.
Two things I wish Subnautica had included: 1.) I never felt hurried to cure my disease. Increasing health loss rate as a function of infection level or some other emphasis that I’m getting very ill would have been motivating. 2.) When I first got the cure, for some reason, I misunderstood how easy it was. I had previously collected and stored eggs, not knowing they were just fish tank collectibles. I anticipated that they were going to be a part of medical research. This expectation encouraged me to go searching scientifically for more eggs. I went to non-story places looking around. Eventually, I came to understand that the cure was a simple recipe at the fabricator. I completely overthought the escalation of challenge. Overall I love the game!
Studying the flora and fauna to create the disease would have been a very interesting twist. I feel like having increased health loss would have potentially made the ending too hard but its a nice idea.
As i am alredy a fan of subnautica and i want to learn about game devlopment and programing, i thank you a lot for the level design analyse. Absolutely amasing video also.
I've always loved subnautica and only recently really started playing below zero (subnautica's sequel/spin-off/thing), and I had this beautiful moment where I was standing in my sea truck in light blue, clear water and could see a chelicerate swimming above me. I was both terrified to move and make noise and amazed by how beautiful it was.
I remember watching lots of speedruns of this game and it blowing my mind when I found out how you could reliably harvest stalker teeth. All you have to do is find a couple different groups of them, drop 3-4 metal salvage at each group, wait, come back and grab up the stalker teeth that sank to the ocean floor when they were nibbling the metal. I never even knew that was how you get teeth, let alone that you could reliably farm them enough to get a run below 40 minutes.
We probably all hated language and writing class outlines in school, but given how you can't go around without tripping over hundreds of low effort, first draft of a reddit post opinion blogs these days, seeing a guy open a video with a peer review case and a _book citation_ is jarring. Buckle in bub, this is actually an essay.
Thanks. I did a history degree and in history degrees (and other degrees too probably) you automatically get zero marks if you don't cite your sources.
This is a great retrospective into strong elements in game design I hadn’t appreciated or recognized. Thank you to you, and the comments below me for highlighting great areas of interest throughout the game, and how it promotes player development!
i love subnautica! i finished my first playthrough just the other day. i never once intentionally read the PDAs until i had already met the sea emperor, because the map design itself was enough to make me challenge myself to reach the lowest point in the world. i also found collecting all the plantable flora and hatching every egg i found one of my favorite parts so i already had all the ingredients for the enzyme (other than the fungus sample) at my home base by the time i actually needed them. the titanium shortages by the endgame had me exploring the biomes of the map i had mostly avoided till then (the dunes and mountains)
I just explored the Dunes biome properly for the first time 2 days ago and it was terrifying. Even though I wasn't afraid of dying as I'd built up a large supply of materials I still felt an extreme sense of dread when I entered the area.
one thing about the more dangerous biomes (dunes, mountains, crash zone) is that they are a rather smooth transition to the edge of the "playable" world. Looking at the world map, all of these biomes are on the outskirts. Sure you can go there, but the abundant presence of Reapers is a kind, but firm reminder for you to not venture out too deep. Obviously if you eventually do venture out to the edge of the world there is a much stronger enforcement in the form of 3 spooky worms, but it's made clear that venturing into these territories isn't where you should be going unless you're desperate for resources (which all of them except for the crash zone do have in abundance).
Very good analysis! Found myself quite enjoying your breakdown of the story as well, even having completed the game myself a few times over, good work.
Wow! What an incredible video format, please do outer wilds as well. That game is the perfect example of how level design is interlinked with narrative design.
Just a tip - you should overlay text reminding us of what each numbered item was so I don't have to flip back in the video when you refer to one only by number
I think this was a great video! Came up in my recommendeds and reminds me how much I love subnautica, even if I hate the deeper water. I dont know how to explain it, but although I taught swim lessons for 10 years and was a lifeguard for several, and absolutely adore sailing and boating, as well as free diving in shallow oceans, I hate being above or in very deep deep water. Im not talking swimming pool deep, I mean so deep you can't see the bottom, or so deep you only see a very dark blue. I think irl it's the thoughts of "if I went in and just sank, I would drown long before hitting the bottom" "I don't actually know what's directly beneath me" "I hate the void of nothing but microscopic organisms" etc. Even in Subnautica, I can't handle the deeper, darker biomes, it gives me awful chills, goosebumps, and freaks me out like almost nothing else. Even though I still remember the entire map, story, locations of wrecks and leviathons, and have played the game to completion several time, including it being the only Steam game in my library to be 100% complete, it still terrifies me. I know the only thing in the void past the crater rim is the coded ghost leviathons, and yet it's not the leviathons that scare me, it's seeing the blackness and the wall dropping away and nothing out there. I can navigate wrecks in the dark, deal with warpers and reapers and sea dragons easily, hardly anything scares me anymore in the game besides the occasional jump from random animals just spooking me. I still can only swim/drive my seamoth to either island by sticking purely to the surface or right up against the ground, even though I've done it tens if not hundreds of times. I cant look up while in deep biomes, where i only see darkness above me. I'm totally fine when enclosed in caves, like the lost river, but as soon as I'm in that deep dark water, I feel that horror and that feeling of my stomach dropping. Again, I've played this game many times. Seen many playthroughs. Watched all the lore videos, and tons of anaylsis and retrospective videos. And yet I still get that feeling. Ive never felt that way in any other game, save for Raft, which, ironically, is another game I've played for hundreds of hours, and have only not 100% completed since I'm awful at killing screechers and I rarely paint my boat. I'm actively in the middle of playing with my sister, who never finished the story, so she can focus on story while I do the farming and resources. I don't get spooked while on the raft or an island, looking at the water, even when the randomly timed sealife events occur, like whales or turtles swimming by. Its only when I jump or fall in and i see the void, or I swim too far from an island's shallows. It's nowhere near as bad as when I play Subnautica, but it still happens. Another irony is my love of space. I almost studied quantum mechanics or astrophysics in college (switched from stem to art!). Its the same feeling when I think too much about how little we all mean in the grand scheme of the universe, and how no matter what we do, eventually every trace of every speck of Earth life will cease to exist and nothing we create will last all that long in a universal time scale. Even if we manage that, eventually the heat death of the universe means everything will fall apart either into whatever the tiniest bits of existence are, or itll all fall into black holes as they are the only things left in the universe before they radiate away. My whole rambling point is, I enjoyed your video a lot. Made me reminisce on the hours forcing myself to suffer while playing the same story over and over again. (And the handful of hours when I attempted to play below zero, and gave up when i got bored). I think the only thing I would slightly disagree on is what is considered the main storyline. I think you numbered them based on order of appearance in your playthrough, however theres various arguments for which is the most important. I personally would say the Kharaa bacterium is the primary story, since without it, 4546b would be just another planet, and the galaxy would have trillions of precursors (i hate the architect name) still around, and humans would be interacting with them. Then again, the story wouldnt have happened if the aurora didnt have their secret mission to figure out what happened to the torgals/meidah (idr spelling), who were trying to figure out what happened to the degassi, and the mercury was in there too somewhere (cant remember exactly and too tired to refresh my memory), so theoretically they're the primary story. But the primary story could also be the non quest driven one, the story of a lone survivor discovering/rediscovering so much life and helping a pretty much extinct species struggle on, etc etc.
Glad you enjoyed. I'm a huge fan of space as well and I also get that dread feeling in the low visibility biomes like crash zone, sparse reef and grand reef.
I would love to hear your take on the second game's storyline. Subnautica Below Zero experienced some minor controversy regarding how its outstanding gameplay progression and level design were compromised by the storyline. There was supposedly a different approach to the story the devs attempted, but after some rewriting the game was released. To summarise the story of the final game. Robin arrives on the planet to investigate some events and gather data. While getting ready with gathering basic materials, she receives a strange signal deeper in a nearby ravine. The game takes a different approach to the player being able to explore more areas with oxygen generating plants that makes vechiles less valuable for oxygen and emphasises the need to follow the story while progression take secondary priority. Robin also wanted to learn more about what happened to her sister. A surprise development with Marguirite being alive was side plots that offered lore and some upgrades. But these were undermined by the Architect's insistence on finding artifacts (the alien species responsible for the containment, which is provided by an individual called ALAn). The plot gradually shifts as Robin gets to know more about ALAN, but with the juggling of different plot lines clumsily taking the lead at various parts of the game. The story becomes conflicted between exploration, the game directing the player to follow the story, and the tension ramping from ALAN urging the player to complete the tasks. It seemed like the old plot included more moving parts where Robin was more involved with the research role her sister Sam takes over in the live game. And Sam was originally meant to be a communication link between Robin and Alterra. This dynamic gave a different side plot of Alterra insisting that Robin finds data on a certain type of bacteria, which calls back to the first game and foreshadowing the concerning question on what Alterra would want with it. ALAN's entry in this story is similar, but his personality was initially hostile. But as Robin and ALAN get to know each other more, ALAN began relying on Robin for help and trusting her to not follow through with Alterra's demands. Marguerite was supposedly a secondary plot that detours Robins' first mission and helped shift her focus on getting rid of the bacterium. The ending was similar to the release, but was more unpolished where ALAN would get his body back, and then leave the planet. The older narrative had more branching narratives the player can follow and possibly reach different endings. The final release seemingly delegated these branches into lanes the player could jump to whenever they felt like. Exploration and grinding resources undermine the tension of completing the game. All said and done, as a player who loved the first game. I did like the improvements of the second game in terms of exploring exciting biomes, different technology, and new fauna. But did not appreciate the trade off being the storyline being butchered, the exploration condensed into a smaller area, and the clash of being told to explore one moment, given an objective the next, and then left unsure on where to go to progress the story because of missing a certain trigger or piece of information.
Thanks for the info. I'm not going to read this comment yet as I don't want spoilers for Below Zero, but I'm going to make a note of it so I can review it later.
One trick with the bone sharks, turn off your lights. It attracts them. You mught still get your seamoth bit a few times, but they might not destroy it while your searching wrecks
I'd say that the back and forth at the end isnt necessarily a fault of the game by itself. If you upgrade the Cyclops to the max depth you can have it at the PCF. The PCF also has 4 rooms that very conveniently lead you to 4 of the 5 ingredients for the Hatching enzymes. Even if you dont have a fabricator in the Cyclops, most players likely have built at least a radio inside of it and thus learned that you can build in it. Conveniently, the Fabricator just takes raw material that can all be found in the Lost River. Going back to your lifepod/habitat is not something that the game makes you do. Going back to the surface to hunt for the enzyme items isnt something it does either due to the PCF having portals to all but the Sea Crown, which is in the PCF itself. Im not trying to say that you played the game wrong, but I dont think that this fault is a fault of the game. Its a byproduct of the game's design and your way of playing the game. Neither is wrong for a fault, its just an unfortunate byproduct of a certain combination of things.
I agree, I’m not a real fan of horror or even pure survival games, but I LOVE Subnautica! There’s just something truly unique about it that you don’t get anywhere else. The dev group deserves all of the praise they get. SN Below Zero didn’t seem to capture the same note. The parts were all there, but it just fell flat for a variety of reasons. I am sooooo looking forward to SN2, and I hope they manage to strike gold again. .
It's been a week or two since I touched the game's end myself and there's a different perspective I'd like to offer re: back-and-forth towards the endgame. Thing is, my playstile is wildly unlinear, to the point that I actively avoid anything that resembles a main mission, instead setting my own little objectives and waypoints for exploration and collection. (Or in extreme cases the daily motto is: "let's get hopelessly lost and then try to figure a way out!") Pretty much all story-critical discoveries I made by accident (and hilariously missed some until very late!) when going out "to take a look what's over there". Since that kind of map-wandering is inherently back-and-forth, I also accumulated quite an arsenal of random resources (an hilariously missed some easy stuff!), and to mitigate the commutes I littered various areas with stashes and little outposts. As a result there was very little extra work I had to do to accumulate the rocket materials :D
In Subnautica, I dont think of biomes as the actual levels. I think of radio distress calls as levels. With each mission objective you are essentially leveling up and being asked to explore more treacherous waters and fulfill more difficult tasks. The biomes themselves dont really gate your progression because you are still gonna have to go to the life pods to get data boxes for information and recipe unlocks.
That's an interesting way to look at it. I personally feel like the levels do gate a little bit as you don't have the means to travel far / well in the Grand Reef, Blood Kelp Zone, Lost River and Lava Zones without getting the necessary tech.
did yk that all wrecks have random fragments? its a loot pool and changes for everybody, nobodys wreck loot will be the same except for atleast 1 average item. For example, some of the floating island wrecks have a guaranteed certain prawnsuit arm that is random. Only certain places in the Aurora have the same fragments. all other base/precursor structures are the same tho (PS: thanks for this amazing vid bro ur so UNDERRATED
Thanks. Glad you enjoyed watching. Yes. I did know that there is a loot pool for fragments and that it changes from playthrough to playthrough. I just focused on what I found in each wreck rather than read off the wiki.
i'm not sure if i'm the outlier but my radio messages were delayed by quite a bit and compressed into a very short time, when i had already found some of the stuff. maybe because i made the repair tool late, because the "boss" of safe shallows was finding the damn crashfish
I typically find the same thing. I get the first 3 to 4 very slowly and then the last few all within a short time frame. Not exactly sure why but it seems to keep happening for me.
I'd really like to see a video like this but for Below Zero. Because while I dont like BZ as much as SN1, I am now very curious if it still holds up to the "level design" that SN1 does. And if it doesnt, I am curious to see where it breaks. Because I can remember 2 moments where the storylines didnt mix well, and 1 moment where I had no direction and no incentive to explore a specific location. And I cant extract my bias from BZ. But I am really curious if its level design is still good, or if the story and nudging is still well made or not. Or if its the complete opposite and the level design and story is worse than I think it is.
@@RNGTherapy Happy to hear youre considering it! I found this video quite interesting, considering I got 600+ hours in Subnautica and I never thought of Subnautica as having levels before, and this video made me realise just how well made this game is from a new perspective.
Imagine contrasting this to the second game, below zero, where some people criticize the stories both at the same time set you on rails but also muddle the progression too and hinder proper atmosphere in some cases, among other problems
not to nitpick on how u played or anything but at the end where you gather all the resources for the hatching enzymes there is portals in the sea emerors facility that lead you to the locations of each of them (also you didnt mention the blood kelp trench or the craig field)
Yeah. I forgot about the teleporters until the end but didn't bring it up as that was my mistake. I didn't mention the blood kelp trench as I focused on the larger northern blood kelp area and the crag field as it has the unmarked life pod but I never found it so didn't want to waste 5 minutes talking about how I searched the sparse reef thinking it was there.
Yes, I became aware of the Blood Kelp Trench Wreck towards the end of making the video but as I never visited the trench I didn't feel the need to add it in.
@RNGTherapy that's one of the best features with this great game design. You have multiple ways to accomplish goals and you don't need to visit every wreck. Rarely are you bottlenecked into one course to advance.
you could make a video on the sequel, subnautica below zero, which is also a good game but a lot of people say that it feels small and not lonely like the first one
Yeah. From what I've heard the map is smaller and they made the character movements slower but I don't know enough. I'll consider making a Subnautica Below Zero vid.
@@RNGTherapyThree things I want to let you know about Sub Zero. First, it was intended to be a DLC but wound up being made into its own game. Second, the story has a lot of issues in terms of flow and dismissing existing lore (no spoilers). Third, you have a talking protagonist instead of silent protagonist.
I'm already liking this video a lot more than that UpIsNotJump video, can that guy really not see the point in being given the freedom to explore in any direction you want from the very beginning?
I think his criticism was more from a point of having a well structured narrative rather than criticising exploration. In FO3 you can straight up skip the first 1/3rd of the story by going straight to vault 112.
@@RNGTherapy Yeah but that criticism is invalid when he ignores Fallout New Vegas having the same issue. You can either blitz past the Deathclaws (what I do) or walk the long path ignoring the story and just go straight to Benny. Funny thing, the first time I ever played New Vegas I went straight to Benny and had no idea all that other stuff existed.
sadly your time capsule wont give the players those batteries, its in one of the list of banned objects for the capsules, if it does get approved, theyll see your message tho :) good video, i love it and ive shared it with my friends
Yeah. I found out a couple days ago. you can get Ion batteries into time capsules by putting them in equipment like scanner, flash light, etc which I discovered yesterday when replaying.
Wanted to drop another reply because I've figured out how to get Ion batteries through time capsules. If you the battery in a piece of equipment (scanner, flashlight etc.) and then put the equipment in the capsule, it stays. Found a time capsule today with a flashlight and an Ion battery inside it.
I just found seaglide parts after almost all lfepods and now i know i should've found it at first lifepod... i would not survive real shipwreck i guess
Despite exploring most the wrecks I missed some really important bits as well, I didn't get a laser cutter for way too long and I never found the reinforced dive suit so I'm no expert myself.
I've played both games. Mechanically, FO:NV beats FO:3 by a country mile. Atmospherically and gameplay wise, FO:3 wins by a light year. Exploration is SO much more interesting in FO:3. New Vegas doesn't have anything like the Metros or Arefu. New Vegas really is not terribly fun to explore at all, and I GREW UP IN THE MOJAVE. I think the better game overall is FO:3. I will make concessions that NV had better crafting, better weapons, better RPG systems, better levelling, and better writing than FO:3, but overall I actually enjoyed FO:3 as a game more than I did FO:NV, and New Vegas was my introduction to the series. Initially, I actually dropped FO:3 due to the lack of ironsights, but I picked it back up a year or so later and eventually finished it, and came to the ultimate conclusion that it was overall more enjoyable to me than FO:NV.
I agree. I prefer FO3 story wise, but map, mechanics, writing and levelling wise FONV wins. I quite liked the exploration of both tbh, both had great vibes and was just pleasant to walk around in, which is a odd thing to say about a nuclear wasteland.
if subnautica had perfect level design you wouldnt be able to get your prawn suit stuck in the floor because of poor level design. though overall the map is pretty well done other than lack of foresight on that bit. wish i knew programming so i could understand why its such a hard fix. seems to me like they just have 2 physical layers in the areas. a solid cube of a foundation then the graphical polished surface which is stacked on top. when you portal away and leave your prawn suit behind the graphical layer despawns/renders so on return your prawn has gotten stuck between layers. ok so allow the prawn suit feet to noclip or something i dunno. or have an unstuck button for the thing
I've only ever had my prawn suit get stuck in the ground after going through a teleporter but I figured that was because of the teleporter rather than the prawn suit.
I get the strong impression that you read a book, got your mind blown, and now everything has to follow that. Like, when you complained about one area not having a lead to it made it seem like you don't want an open world game, but a semi-linear game with the illusion of an open world. Final Fantasy VII Rebirth and Baldur's Gate 3 are like that (and they're great games). Also makes sense why you'd like F:NV over F3, since the latter has vast regions you have to actually explore on your own, rather than being led by the nose through quests and stuff like in the former.
Not everything has to follow that. There are always exceptions. I addressed the whole "not having a lead" when I said I spoke to friend who reminded me that the story isn't supposed to lead you everywhere, and that the points between radio messages should be used to just explore freely. The games you've mentioned are good picks. I've never played Final Fantasy but I have played Baldurs Gate 3 and its currently my favourite game. The point is, I picked up a book about game writing and wanted to see if games held up to what it was saying so I selected a game I haven't played for many years to test this and as Subnautica isn't a story focused game, it was never going to fit perfectly but it fits very very well considering that point.
@@RNGTherapy BOCTAOE always applies. I wouldn't use the word "exceptions" though, since I don't think there are so few games in that category that they aren't the majority. I also don't think Subnautica fits _that_ well, though it hits a lot of points. Like there aren't really any bosses. A boss is a final challenge, or the climax of the level, most of the time. The enemies there are just that, enemies, without any structure to how they appear. The areas don't follow the "goal, complication, resolution" pattern. Getting into the action isn't relevant after the intro, since you never leave the action except for the breaks you take on your own. There is a steady progression both in equipment/resources and in story, though, since those logs are scattered all over. But they're more like puzzle pieces of a greater story than anything level-based (and for that type of story, Outer Wilds is great). And that's kind of my point. There are some things that match that guideline, and some things that don't. But it doesn't make the game any worse. I don't think it would be much different from a game actually based on levels. As a writer, I've seen so many different takes on things like these, and in the end, you have to find a way that suits your story. It's the same for games. (As a minor thing, I wouldn't equate levels with chapters. Scenes are a better fit (or pairs of scenes, if you follow a popular guideline), since they have a similar structure to the second point of your book's key features. Chapters don't have a set definition, and while they can fit, you can have chapters consisting of a single sentence or dozens of scenes.) The part where you addressed not having a lead is what made me think of the Fallout 3 vs NV comparison. It's also why I prefer 3, since I want to explore on my own rather than follow some predetermined plot line. It's kind of the point of having an open world, to explore what you want to explore, and not be led so much by the plot. Also why I don't like the Ubistandard open world games, with tons of quest markers to point you in all directions, and why I don't follow the often-repeated "make worlds denser" mantra you hear so often. I like some emptiness between locations or events.
@AnotherDuck. Again, I think you've made some really excellent points. No there aren't really any bosses (especially when put like that). At the time of writing I was viewing them through the lens of "a danger that needs to be overcome or avoided", although I will freely admit that this also doesn't fit well. I agree that logs are more puzzle piece than level based but I still think that that is important as it helps make Alterra, The Degasi and the Subnautica universe feel well fleshed out and grounded (which is something I really like but is not necessarily important for gameplay), but Outer Wilds is great for that I completely agree. That's why I completely agree with what you said about some things that match and don't match but it doesn't make the game any worse. I also completely agree that you have to find a way that suits your story/game. There will always be stories/games that defy conventional categorisation and that doesn't diminish them. I understand what you're saying about emptiness between locations but from a gameplay perspective it isn't necessarily good to have emptiness as it invites the risk of boredom/being boring. I feel like Witcher 3 had a good balance of denseness and open space/emptiness with the player always being five minutes away from something.
@@RNGTherapy The enemies certainly are a danger, but they're more about the "complication" part, as they're often what bring up the tension in any particular area. Without them it'd just be a scavenger hunt (which would make the game more of a cozy game than a survival game with horror elements). I think the way the reapers are designed is a perfect example of that. As a boss, they would need to be defeated, and would try to kill you in turn. But they're not meant to kill you. They're meant to hurt you so you get afraid of them. This is because once you actually die, the tension drops significantly, while if you flee, it's still there. So they're designed to _almost_ kill you. The most boss-like is probably the final challenge of collecting all different samples for the recipe. It challenges your exploration knowledge, which is the main challenge of the game, IMO. It's helped a lot if you've unlocked the portal system, since all or almost all of them (the one you find there excluded) are accessible close to the portals, and that's something you need to explore on your own to find out. The emptiness really depends on the type of player. I know a lot of players, especially younger players, want things to happen all the time, with small or no breaks between, but for me it enhances the stuff that's there. Ebb and flow is more satisfying than a constant stream.
I've always loved subnautica and only recently really started playing below zero (subnautica's sequel/spin-off/thing), and I had this beautiful moment where I was standing in my sea truck in light blue, clear water and could see a chelicerate swimming above me. I was both terrified to move and make noise and amazed by how beautiful it was.
I love how the final boss isn’t an enemy, but an ally, and the boss fight with her isn’t combat, but a scavenger hunt.
Yup
Subnautica was never about fighting and killing the leviathans, thats why there s no weapons in the game. So a final boss type fight would make zero sense
@ You misunderstand my point. I mean it’s not even an enemy like the other bosses in the game.
@@mariosbardis4831 have you seen my prawn with a grappler, drill and a dream
@countrycoffeecup7772but… they’re not bosses? That’s the point?
I think it makes sense that "split between loading screens" is not mentioned in any way, since Loading screens where a outcome of technological limitations rather than an intentional structural choice.
That's true. I hadn't thought of it like that. I think I imagined truly separated spaces when I first started this project.
Many games actually utilized loading screens to add to the story, those being the first 3 Call of Duties. They usually had some form of written information pertaining to the player's story, with the occasional History Channel video. Call of Duty 4 improved this by simulating the experience of being in a "War Room". So while it might have been technological limitation, many games didn't treat the loading screen just as, well, a loading screen, but also as a break to give more context and improve immersion.
Loading screens also tend to indirectly interrupt the flow go gameplay when the timing is not right.
A loading screen has been tolerated for the sake of letting the game load the next segment. But it also serves as a break in momentum the game would need to pick back up.
Take Ratchet and Clank as an example, whenever he goes to a planet there is a loading screen. But the player is given a glimpse of the world in a cutscene to set the tone for the level. And usually the action would pick up after the player was given a chance to rest after completing the last planet/level.
Either way, loading screens are like bridges. They can be sometimes boring to cross. But for older technological limitations were a necessary evil.
Given the book was written in 2015, it is safe to speculate that the writers have considered the possibility of technology becoming powerful enough to lessen load times, if not find ways to make them appear seamless.
I love how Subnautica has subtle level ups, knowledge-wise and physical. Meeting a reaper for the first time, you wouldn’t know that you can evade them by quickly moving to the side (they turn slowly). And later on, you get a stasis rifle, which you can use to kill it. Killing it gives you NOTHING (which I really appreciate) but it feels like a major accomplishment. A “look how far I’ve come” thing
Exactly. I've never personally taken the time to kill a leviathan because they scare me even with the stasis rifle.
@@RNGTherapyI’m just finishing my first full play through and I’ve killed all of them except for the ones in the dunes and around the aurora 😭
This was a great breakdown of why this game is so damned effective!
Personally, while there may not be a physical boss in the cove tree zone, the psychological effect of knowing that there is just a ghost leviathan egg sitting there and there's nothing you can do about it gives me a kind of 'nope' I can't explain.
That book sounds fascinating, I'll definitely be looking into it!
Yeah. Find the egg in the tree is definitely a freaky moment. Yeah the book is a great read and not to expensive either.
This analysis helps highlight what went wrong with Below Zero, narratively. That game also has 3 storylines, but two of them are entirely optional, including the primary reason you are on the planet in the first place.
That's interesting. I'm going to make a note of this comment so I can circle back to it when I get around to Below Zero.
If you play smart with the teleporters, you don't have to go back and forth. For example, the material hunt for the hatching enzymes can be avoided as the teleporters in the facility go to each material you need.
Yeah, I know. I kinda felt like I was missing something when I was half way through and remembered that their is a room of 4 different teleporters.
What is smart about it, four of them are basically bringing you to every resources for the imperor end mission, that's the most easiest thing to figure out...
I actually dislike that. The notion that they make a teleporter that spits you out within sight of the ingredients. That scavenger hunt is one of the final "bosses" of the game, it's meant to test your knowledge of the map. You do get a shortcut to the surface so you don't have to do the lengthy drive up and down several times. My first playthrough I had gotten the message to unlock the Captain's cabin and got the blueprints for the rocket on the way down, so I mixed farming for materials to build the rocket with gathering the things for the enzyme.
Now that I'm familiar with the game and kind of played it to death for myself, I find it almost too easy. I've done a Hardcore, baseless, fussy eater run. That is, building no base and living only out of the Cyclops, and eating and drinking nothing but water or food bars found in chests. You can beat the game with only one trip to and from the depths. If you know what you're doing I'd call the game too easy.
Yeah, I only realized that on my second playthrough. lol I just thought they were there to make getting back easier in general
Damn. I've heard of baseless runs but not baseless, fussy eater runs, I'm very impressed (and mildly scared 😂) of your skill. I feel like when you know what you're doing every game becomes too easy. Once you've played a game 10, 15, 20 times, it'll just become muscle memory.
one of the things I heard people say on their playthroughs that stuck with me is that the sense of progression in the game is the best part. that first time with each new piece of equipment or vehicle. it changes and opens up your game. that and the endorphine rush of making it to the surface just in time before you die or getting lost in a cave or wreck and the adrenaline spike of panic as claustrophobia is triggered too. The game plays on so many primal fears.
I completely agree, getting new tech/upgrades feels excellent and the fear of being lost or attacked is very well done/utilised.
I think there's an argument to be made that the boss of the Safe Shallows is actually oxygen, hunger, and thirst. Once you conquer those here, it's not usually a significant threat and becomes a background pressure - kind of like how boss enemies become regular enemies on later levels, like the Tauros and Capra demons in Dark Souls.
That's an interesting take on the Safe Shallows. I personally didn't feel like hunger and thirst were that big of an issue in the Safe Shallows because you're surrounded with an abundance of fish which provide both. I personally feel like hunger and thirst are a bigger issue when venturing far away from the life pod/habitat as you lose access to a fabricator.
In my first playthough, I found my way to the mountain and floating island by noticing a large stationary cloud that they use to hide them
Yeah. You can definitely find them by doing this but I didn't want to rush.
Jean Jacket moment
@ I do not know what you mean by this
@@exiledhero3791 Oh! Spoilers for the movie Nope:
The (possibly alien) entity in the movie Nope (who the protagonist nicknames "Jean Jacket") hides from everyone by controlling the local weather and cloaking themselves in a stationary cloud :D
Great movie, incredible movie, it's one of the best movies I've ever seen, I will never watch it again, it was very disturbing :'>
One thing I'd like to add is that those clouds aren't just stationary. If you look at them theough the semi-transparent display of the PDA, the clouds over the islands stay white, but the rest of the scenery is dimmed out under the overlay.
That effect REALLY makes them stand out.
What I love about Subnautica is how the game only guides you to sprcific things that are mostly necessary for progression, and a few convenient tools. The fact that there are some areas with wrecks full of useful stuff that don't have a marker pulling interest toward them and some locations even intimidate the player with warnings of potential threats, is a good thing. It's reverse handholding, it's throwing you into a pool, warning you about the dangers of the deep parts, and leaving the rest up to you.
Handholding to the point where every area with anything worth looking at is pointed out on the HUD or map with a marker is bad for the exploration element of open world games, and having areas that are entirely optional for even objective focused players is a good thing. If you need markers leading you to every worthwhile location, you aren't exploring a world, you are ticking off a checklist of predetermined POIs. In Subnautica, some of the best POIs are decided on by the player's intuition rather than what the devs tell you to look for.
And Subnautica even goes easy on you for not exploring more than where the game directs you. You don't lose out on being able to beat the game or even getting all the achievements/trophies by skipping some areas, and all you'll find is resources, lore and side-grades to mostly mid-game equipment.
It puts the weight of deciding to explore these areas entirely on the player, which is sorely lacking in many modern open world games. There should be locations and secrets that don't draw attention with markers or objectives, that players who are attentive will notice, while those that aren't will miss it without being harshly punished for it. Ignorance of the environment and acting like a drone shouldn't be rewarded as much as thinking freely and exploring of your own free will and intuition.
Sure, the things that are required for progression should pull your attention to them, but optional content is called optional for a reason. Unmarked rewards that can be sussed out by attentive players are indicative of a game that respects the player's time and intelligence. Using markers as a lazy way to find all optional rewards is why Ubisoft's open world HUD and map design gets mocked. It's why open worlds are filled with meaningless collectibles that are all the same in everything but name. "Get 100 feathers and 50 flags and 300 data terminals".
You can go the whole game without ever seeing a cuddlefish egg, because the game doesn't put a quest marker over them for you, and that's something I want more of. A reward for exploring naturally. Because you choose to check, rather than because the game tells you something is there.
This is very well written. I agree that complete handholding is ultimately bad.
I'm sorry to tell you that your time capsule was most likely deleted, ion batteries are on a list of banned time capsule items bc they're unbalanced in the early game
Yeah, found out a few hours ago. absolutely gutted.😂
Wanted to drop another reply because I've figured out how to get Ion batteries through time capsules. If you the battery in a piece of equipment (scanner, flashlight etc.) and then put the equipment in the capsule, it stays. Found a time capsule today with a flashlight and an Ion battery inside it.
Subnautica’s level design is the reason I always come back to it every year, I absolutely love how the game gives you all these optional open ocean biomes like the Sea Treader’s Path or the Mountains for those players who are truly dedicated to learn all there is about the world.
Yeah, I always found myself coming back to it even though it wasn't my type of game. (I tend to lean towards RPGs and Story driven games)
Bro the shock once i saw just 750 views was crazy
This is a million view type of video period.
Thanks. I'm glad you enjoyed.
People gotta stop saying that. It’s because you watched the video when it was like 2 days old, not because it’s underrated or anything.
One of the only criticisms i have is, that there isn't any emphasis to build the Neptune Rocket as you go. Most players will get the blueprints but get railed into the main story afterwards and only start the rocket afterwards. Which A: Sends them ginding out all of the materials or B: Sees them having all the materials at hand already and speedrunning the thing. If they put that process into stages as well, this could have been avoided. I tried to build it as i went in my last playthrough and it made the last bits of the game so much more enjoyable.
I personally found building the entire thing in one go very enjoyable. It kind of gave me a sense of closure as you start the game by building equipment and end it by building the Neptune.
I'd like to shout out the Scanner Room and the hud chip. It is a crucial addition for giving players agency when they can't find one missing blueprint or a few more necessary resources.
Couldn't agree more. I don't even bother building the scanner room until I can get the hud chip.
This also goes to show how the climax of a story doesn't need to be epic, but it needs to FEEL that way.
The climax of Subnautica is meeting the Sea Emperor, hatching her babies after going for a brief scavenger hunt that is pretty much laid out for you in the four portals, and then curing yourself and the planet with it.
Sure, this climax isn't exactly epic in the typical sense. There is no epic final battle or confrontation. However, it doesn't matter because of how much it FEELS epic. Throughout the entire game, the game has been sprinkling all these hints of the story about the kharaa, the precursor race, and the Sea Emperor. We realize that the world we are trying to survive is hanging on by a thread and that the Sea Emperor has been waiting for centries for someone to help save her babies. And when we finally hatch the babies, it's more than just about curing ourselves so we can leave. We have saved the entire planet, we have allowed the Sea Emperor to finally rest after being imprisoned for so long. There isn't really any action in this climax, and yet it feels more epic than most action games I've ever played.
Completely agree. I think the reveal of the Sea Emperor being imprisoned for so long and that the Kharaa was caused by the Precursors disrupting nature on 4546B was a shocking revelation that adds so much depth and terror to Subnautica world.
I've watched the entire video, and I must say, I'm very happy this has shown up on my fyp. I loved the analytical aspect and how you speak to a viewer.
It could be from personal preference, but I felt like you began brushing over details as you went.
In hindsight, it's probably because the story try's to pick the pace up alittle more giving less in depth character and personal story and more environmental.
I also wanted to say that in the inactive lava zone and the area just before it, you can see multiple reaper skeletons. In my eyes this attempts to tell the player that a bigger threat is nearing.
Love the video, hope you make more.
Thank you. I'm glad you enjoyed. I did begin to brush over certain details because by the the late mid game and end game, a lot of resources and enemies are re-occurring and as you said, the story is picking up pace. I completely agree, the reaper skeletons are hugely intimidating to find.
I built a secondary base in the lost river. Took a lot of extra time but I think it was useful for the latter part of the game.
I did try/plan to build a base but I didn't have lubricant for a moonpool which was the only module I really needed so it would have been pointless for me.
That is rather smart though, becuase it ensured the player would be directed to exploring other parts of the map and requiring them to backtrack to certain areas for specific materials. Becuase not all components are available in the safe shallows. And despite reaching the end game, you are sometimes still obligated to return to the start of the game for something.
Everyone builds a base in the lost river, everyone. First thing I put in my cyclops, besides lockers, is creepvine clusters for planting in the lost river for my new base.
I love Subnautica glaze videos
Thanks. Glad you enjoyed. BTW, what are 'glaze videos'? I've never heard of this term before.
@@RNGTherapy glaze is a refrece to sucking d!ck but its come to mean anyone who praises a thing basically people who say drake won the beef with Kendrick are "glazing" for drake
Lovely. Well thanks for the info.
@@RNGTherapy glaze is when u like say really good things about a game and show bias in a way like eg. someone into fortnite might glaze a certain player
Okay. I don't think I'm being biased. I just found that Subnautica was really well made and that it followed the points laid out in the book I mentioned so I made a breakdown vid. Thanks for explain 'glaze' though.
I skipped building the Cyclops and was pretty annoyed when I found out that I needed it to craft a vital component for the rocket.
I remember one playthrough where I did the same. Just walked to the end in the Prawn Suit.
@@RNGTherapyidk if this is an unpopular opinion, because it seems like everyone loves the Cyclopes, but going solo in the prawn suit is far safer and easier. The Cyclopes is just bulky and such an easy target for leviathans I don’t understand why people don’t just walk the prawn down
@@Kali-bs7ojwalking down in the prawnsuit is time consuming and takes a lot of water and food. Easier to just take the prawnsuit down with the cyclops.
@ with a grapple arm it’s light work
@Kali-bs7oj That is valid, I personally use the cyclops because I always do a massive harvesting run whenever I to the lost river and lava lakes and harvest everything I can. I also love the asthetic of the cyclops and using it as a base, I also enjoy the cat and mouse game and challenge of taking the cyclops near leviathans and other hostile fauna.
little nitpick but the blood kelp DOES have a wreck-- in the trench. its always hard for me to find but its there! otherwise, i really liked this video
Glad you liked it. Yeah, I didn't know that the trench had a wreck. I was referring to the Northern Blood Kelp Zone. But you are right.
Something I feel wasn't explored enough was that there are some underwater wrecks that almost all players wouldn't dare to find unless they were being intentional with covering all area.
The ones I would say fit this criteria is:
- One far-south wreck in the grand reef
- 3 wrecks in the dunes (though the nortern-most one I find is least likely to be visited
- A couple wrecks in the Mountains
These wrecks are surrounded by leviathans, and would push players away.
So my thought to improve that would be to put some lifepod quests for those biomes. It's possible the devs explored that idea originally but decided against it so that players arent forced into confronting reapers explicitly.
But I think it would be cool if the game hinted towards exploring everything the game has to offer. Even if the end of the video notes against this though, i still think there needs to be a way to organically push the player in those directions.
Yeah. That's kind of what I was referring to with the part there being "no organic pull to the Mountain, Dunes and Sea Treader biomes" point.
Most people will hear "there are several leviathan class creatures in this region" and immediately leave the dunes and never come back, for a year after I bought the game I thought that that was an out of bounds type warning.
This is truly a beautiful representation of the way the game manages to achieve such a successful story and provide such wonderful experience. I've felt it since the game was just starting to establish it's existence, but it seemed like barely to noone noticed the beauty of the way they present the story. You are not held by the narrator in Subnautica, noone guides and tells you what to do - you are indeed a survivor who got stranded in a wild alien world and it's only up to you and your decisions to decide how and will you survive or not. The game masterly gives hints on what to do by compiling each and one into some form of a situation that awake the curiosity of the player to check their deduction and problem-solving skills in unknown situations. The only time game guided you - was at the start when it said "break limestone".
It was the reason I tried to avoid every leak or spoiler when Below Zero was developing - to once again dive into the sense of unknown world and to feel the story and the secrets that hide beneath the wonders of this series.
And I felt it, and I will never forget the gorgeousness of this narrative, visualized and told by the player themself.
Thank you for this video. Keep up the good work!
Thanks. Glad you enjoyed. I agree. The way the story unravels just a little bit at a time is lovely and really lends itself to giving the player enough time explore, gather and make deductions or even just read the PDAs without taking away from gameplay.
Two things I wish Subnautica had included: 1.) I never felt hurried to cure my disease. Increasing health loss rate as a function of infection level or some other emphasis that I’m getting very ill would have been motivating. 2.) When I first got the cure, for some reason, I misunderstood how easy it was. I had previously collected and stored eggs, not knowing they were just fish tank collectibles. I anticipated that they were going to be a part of medical research. This expectation encouraged me to go searching scientifically for more eggs. I went to non-story places looking around. Eventually, I came to understand that the cure was a simple recipe at the fabricator. I completely overthought the escalation of challenge. Overall I love the game!
Studying the flora and fauna to create the disease would have been a very interesting twist. I feel like having increased health loss would have potentially made the ending too hard but its a nice idea.
As i am alredy a fan of subnautica and i want to learn about game devlopment and programing, i thank you a lot for the level design analyse. Absolutely amasing video also.
Thanks. Glad you liked the vid.
I've always loved subnautica and only recently really started playing below zero (subnautica's sequel/spin-off/thing), and I had this beautiful moment where I was standing in my sea truck in light blue, clear water and could see a chelicerate swimming above me. I was both terrified to move and make noise and amazed by how beautiful it was.
I remember watching lots of speedruns of this game and it blowing my mind when I found out how you could reliably harvest stalker teeth. All you have to do is find a couple different groups of them, drop 3-4 metal salvage at each group, wait, come back and grab up the stalker teeth that sank to the ocean floor when they were nibbling the metal. I never even knew that was how you get teeth, let alone that you could reliably farm them enough to get a run below 40 minutes.
We probably all hated language and writing class outlines in school, but given how you can't go around without tripping over hundreds of low effort, first draft of a reddit post opinion blogs these days, seeing a guy open a video with a peer review case and a _book citation_ is jarring. Buckle in bub, this is actually an essay.
Thanks. I did a history degree and in history degrees (and other degrees too probably) you automatically get zero marks if you don't cite your sources.
This is a great retrospective into strong elements in game design I hadn’t appreciated or recognized. Thank you to you, and the comments below me for highlighting great areas of interest throughout the game, and how it promotes player development!
Thank you. I'm glad you enjoyed the video.
i love subnautica! i finished my first playthrough just the other day. i never once intentionally read the PDAs until i had already met the sea emperor, because the map design itself was enough to make me challenge myself to reach the lowest point in the world. i also found collecting all the plantable flora and hatching every egg i found one of my favorite parts so i already had all the ingredients for the enzyme (other than the fungus sample) at my home base by the time i actually needed them. the titanium shortages by the endgame had me exploring the biomes of the map i had mostly avoided till then (the dunes and mountains)
I just explored the Dunes biome properly for the first time 2 days ago and it was terrifying. Even though I wasn't afraid of dying as I'd built up a large supply of materials I still felt an extreme sense of dread when I entered the area.
one thing about the more dangerous biomes (dunes, mountains, crash zone) is that they are a rather smooth transition to the edge of the "playable" world. Looking at the world map, all of these biomes are on the outskirts. Sure you can go there, but the abundant presence of Reapers is a kind, but firm reminder for you to not venture out too deep. Obviously if you eventually do venture out to the edge of the world there is a much stronger enforcement in the form of 3 spooky worms, but it's made clear that venturing into these territories isn't where you should be going unless you're desperate for resources (which all of them except for the crash zone do have in abundance).
Very good analysis! Found myself quite enjoying your breakdown of the story as well, even having completed the game myself a few times over, good work.
Thanks. I'm glad you enjoyed the video.
Phenomenal video!! I love the poetry of you needing to return to the Lifepod for the final fabrication of the Secondary Storyline
Thank you. Glad you enjoyed. When it happened I had one of those "ahh ffs" laughs.
Wow! What an incredible video format, please do outer wilds as well. That game is the perfect example of how level design is interlinked with narrative design.
Just a tip - you should overlay text reminding us of what each numbered item was so I don't have to flip back in the video when you refer to one only by number
That's good shout. I'll do that in my future vids.
I think this was a great video! Came up in my recommendeds and reminds me how much I love subnautica, even if I hate the deeper water.
I dont know how to explain it, but although I taught swim lessons for 10 years and was a lifeguard for several, and absolutely adore sailing and boating, as well as free diving in shallow oceans, I hate being above or in very deep deep water. Im not talking swimming pool deep, I mean so deep you can't see the bottom, or so deep you only see a very dark blue. I think irl it's the thoughts of "if I went in and just sank, I would drown long before hitting the bottom" "I don't actually know what's directly beneath me" "I hate the void of nothing but microscopic organisms" etc. Even in Subnautica, I can't handle the deeper, darker biomes, it gives me awful chills, goosebumps, and freaks me out like almost nothing else. Even though I still remember the entire map, story, locations of wrecks and leviathons, and have played the game to completion several time, including it being the only Steam game in my library to be 100% complete, it still terrifies me. I know the only thing in the void past the crater rim is the coded ghost leviathons, and yet it's not the leviathons that scare me, it's seeing the blackness and the wall dropping away and nothing out there. I can navigate wrecks in the dark, deal with warpers and reapers and sea dragons easily, hardly anything scares me anymore in the game besides the occasional jump from random animals just spooking me. I still can only swim/drive my seamoth to either island by sticking purely to the surface or right up against the ground, even though I've done it tens if not hundreds of times. I cant look up while in deep biomes, where i only see darkness above me. I'm totally fine when enclosed in caves, like the lost river, but as soon as I'm in that deep dark water, I feel that horror and that feeling of my stomach dropping.
Again, I've played this game many times. Seen many playthroughs. Watched all the lore videos, and tons of anaylsis and retrospective videos. And yet I still get that feeling. Ive never felt that way in any other game, save for Raft, which, ironically, is another game I've played for hundreds of hours, and have only not 100% completed since I'm awful at killing screechers and I rarely paint my boat. I'm actively in the middle of playing with my sister, who never finished the story, so she can focus on story while I do the farming and resources. I don't get spooked while on the raft or an island, looking at the water, even when the randomly timed sealife events occur, like whales or turtles swimming by. Its only when I jump or fall in and i see the void, or I swim too far from an island's shallows. It's nowhere near as bad as when I play Subnautica, but it still happens.
Another irony is my love of space. I almost studied quantum mechanics or astrophysics in college (switched from stem to art!). Its the same feeling when I think too much about how little we all mean in the grand scheme of the universe, and how no matter what we do, eventually every trace of every speck of Earth life will cease to exist and nothing we create will last all that long in a universal time scale. Even if we manage that, eventually the heat death of the universe means everything will fall apart either into whatever the tiniest bits of existence are, or itll all fall into black holes as they are the only things left in the universe before they radiate away.
My whole rambling point is, I enjoyed your video a lot. Made me reminisce on the hours forcing myself to suffer while playing the same story over and over again. (And the handful of hours when I attempted to play below zero, and gave up when i got bored). I think the only thing I would slightly disagree on is what is considered the main storyline. I think you numbered them based on order of appearance in your playthrough, however theres various arguments for which is the most important. I personally would say the Kharaa bacterium is the primary story, since without it, 4546b would be just another planet, and the galaxy would have trillions of precursors (i hate the architect name) still around, and humans would be interacting with them. Then again, the story wouldnt have happened if the aurora didnt have their secret mission to figure out what happened to the torgals/meidah (idr spelling), who were trying to figure out what happened to the degassi, and the mercury was in there too somewhere (cant remember exactly and too tired to refresh my memory), so theoretically they're the primary story. But the primary story could also be the non quest driven one, the story of a lone survivor discovering/rediscovering so much life and helping a pretty much extinct species struggle on, etc etc.
Glad you enjoyed. I'm a huge fan of space as well and I also get that dread feeling in the low visibility biomes like crash zone, sparse reef and grand reef.
@@RNGTherapy it's nice to know I'm not the only one! I look forward to seeing more videos from you!
I would love to hear your take on the second game's storyline.
Subnautica Below Zero experienced some minor controversy regarding how its outstanding gameplay progression and level design were compromised by the storyline.
There was supposedly a different approach to the story the devs attempted, but after some rewriting the game was released.
To summarise the story of the final game. Robin arrives on the planet to investigate some events and gather data. While getting ready with gathering basic materials, she receives a strange signal deeper in a nearby ravine. The game takes a different approach to the player being able to explore more areas with oxygen generating plants that makes vechiles less valuable for oxygen and emphasises the need to follow the story while progression take secondary priority.
Robin also wanted to learn more about what happened to her sister. A surprise development with Marguirite being alive was side plots that offered lore and some upgrades. But these were undermined by the Architect's insistence on finding artifacts (the alien species responsible for the containment, which is provided by an individual called ALAn).
The plot gradually shifts as Robin gets to know more about ALAN, but with the juggling of different plot lines clumsily taking the lead at various parts of the game. The story becomes conflicted between exploration, the game directing the player to follow the story, and the tension ramping from ALAN urging the player to complete the tasks.
It seemed like the old plot included more moving parts where Robin was more involved with the research role her sister Sam takes over in the live game. And Sam was originally meant to be a communication link between Robin and Alterra. This dynamic gave a different side plot of Alterra insisting that Robin finds data on a certain type of bacteria, which calls back to the first game and foreshadowing the concerning question on what Alterra would want with it.
ALAN's entry in this story is similar, but his personality was initially hostile. But as Robin and ALAN get to know each other more, ALAN began relying on Robin for help and trusting her to not follow through with Alterra's demands.
Marguerite was supposedly a secondary plot that detours Robins' first mission and helped shift her focus on getting rid of the bacterium.
The ending was similar to the release, but was more unpolished where ALAN would get his body back, and then leave the planet.
The older narrative had more branching narratives the player can follow and possibly reach different endings.
The final release seemingly delegated these branches into lanes the player could jump to whenever they felt like. Exploration and grinding resources undermine the tension of completing the game.
All said and done, as a player who loved the first game. I did like the improvements of the second game in terms of exploring exciting biomes, different technology, and new fauna.
But did not appreciate the trade off being the storyline being butchered, the exploration condensed into a smaller area, and the clash of being told to explore one moment, given an objective the next, and then left unsure on where to go to progress the story because of missing a certain trigger or piece of information.
Thanks for the info. I'm not going to read this comment yet as I don't want spoilers for Below Zero, but I'm going to make a note of it so I can review it later.
One trick with the bone sharks, turn off your lights. It attracts them. You mught still get your seamoth bit a few times, but they might not destroy it while your searching wrecks
I didn't know that. Thanks
I mean this in the nicest way possible, you sound like if Salad Fingers was a person.
Yeah, I had one of the worst colds of my entire life when I was recording so you don't have to be nice about it 😂
I'd say that the back and forth at the end isnt necessarily a fault of the game by itself. If you upgrade the Cyclops to the max depth you can have it at the PCF. The PCF also has 4 rooms that very conveniently lead you to 4 of the 5 ingredients for the Hatching enzymes.
Even if you dont have a fabricator in the Cyclops, most players likely have built at least a radio inside of it and thus learned that you can build in it. Conveniently, the Fabricator just takes raw material that can all be found in the Lost River.
Going back to your lifepod/habitat is not something that the game makes you do. Going back to the surface to hunt for the enzyme items isnt something it does either due to the PCF having portals to all but the Sea Crown, which is in the PCF itself.
Im not trying to say that you played the game wrong, but I dont think that this fault is a fault of the game. Its a byproduct of the game's design and your way of playing the game. Neither is wrong for a fault, its just an unfortunate byproduct of a certain combination of things.
Yeah. I kind of alluded to that with the "if you're well prepared" part. Plus I forgot about the 4 teleporters room.
I was surprised when i saw how less attention your content is getting considering the quality. Very underrated ❤
Thank you. Means a lot.
I agree, I’m not a real fan of horror or even pure survival games, but I LOVE Subnautica! There’s just something truly unique about it that you don’t get anywhere else. The dev group deserves all of the praise they get. SN Below Zero didn’t seem to capture the same note. The parts were all there, but it just fell flat for a variety of reasons. I am sooooo looking forward to SN2, and I hope they manage to strike gold again. .
During my Subnautica playthrough recently I made soooo much progress before actually getting to the end of the story.
It's definitely a game you can get absorbed in easily.
It's been a week or two since I touched the game's end myself and there's a different perspective I'd like to offer re: back-and-forth towards the endgame.
Thing is, my playstile is wildly unlinear, to the point that I actively avoid anything that resembles a main mission, instead setting my own little objectives and waypoints for exploration and collection. (Or in extreme cases the daily motto is: "let's get hopelessly lost and then try to figure a way out!")
Pretty much all story-critical discoveries I made by accident (and hilariously missed some until very late!) when going out "to take a look what's over there". Since that kind of map-wandering is inherently back-and-forth, I also accumulated quite an arsenal of random resources (an hilariously missed some easy stuff!), and to mitigate the commutes I littered various areas with stashes and little outposts.
As a result there was very little extra work I had to do to accumulate the rocket materials :D
In Subnautica, I dont think of biomes as the actual levels. I think of radio distress calls as levels. With each mission objective you are essentially leveling up and being asked to explore more treacherous waters and fulfill more difficult tasks. The biomes themselves dont really gate your progression because you are still gonna have to go to the life pods to get data boxes for information and recipe unlocks.
That's an interesting way to look at it. I personally feel like the levels do gate a little bit as you don't have the means to travel far / well in the Grand Reef, Blood Kelp Zone, Lost River and Lava Zones without getting the necessary tech.
did yk that all wrecks have random fragments? its a loot pool and changes for everybody, nobodys wreck loot will be the same except for atleast 1 average item. For example, some of the floating island wrecks have a guaranteed certain prawnsuit arm that is random. Only certain places in the Aurora have the same fragments. all other base/precursor structures are the same tho (PS: thanks for this amazing vid bro ur so UNDERRATED
Thanks. Glad you enjoyed watching. Yes. I did know that there is a loot pool for fragments and that it changes from playthrough to playthrough. I just focused on what I found in each wreck rather than read off the wiki.
Nice vid, keep it up!
Thanks
Ha, I was trying to create a flow chart as seen @27:25 myself and failed miserably. Great somebody got it right.
Glad you liked it. Its not a complete one as the text was too small to read but I chose the major points to get the message across.
i'm not sure if i'm the outlier but my radio messages were delayed by quite a bit and compressed into a very short time, when i had already found some of the stuff. maybe because i made the repair tool late, because the "boss" of safe shallows was finding the damn crashfish
I typically find the same thing. I get the first 3 to 4 very slowly and then the last few all within a short time frame. Not exactly sure why but it seems to keep happening for me.
I'd really like to see a video like this but for Below Zero.
Because while I dont like BZ as much as SN1, I am now very curious if it still holds up to the "level design" that SN1 does. And if it doesnt, I am curious to see where it breaks.
Because I can remember 2 moments where the storylines didnt mix well, and 1 moment where I had no direction and no incentive to explore a specific location.
And I cant extract my bias from BZ. But I am really curious if its level design is still good, or if the story and nudging is still well made or not.
Or if its the complete opposite and the level design and story is worse than I think it is.
I didn't plan to do a video on Below Zero but as you and so many others have mentioned it I am considering it.
@@RNGTherapy Happy to hear youre considering it! I found this video quite interesting, considering I got 600+ hours in Subnautica and I never thought of Subnautica as having levels before, and this video made me realise just how well made this game is from a new perspective.
Imagine contrasting this to the second game, below zero, where some people criticize the stories both at the same time set you on rails but also muddle the progression too and hinder proper atmosphere in some cases, among other problems
I don't know much about Below Zero but I am definitely going to play it at some point as a follow up to this video.
@ well i definitely look forward to your perspective on it as a game itself in addition to any other meta-analysis you do
The northern bloodkelp forest and grand reef also have ghost leviathans. One in the bloodkelp biome and two in the grand reef
Yes. I didn't explore the areas enough to run into them and only found out later.
Nice thumbnail (looks a little familiar to mine)
I does a bit.
not to nitpick on how u played or anything but at the end where you gather all the resources for the hatching enzymes there is portals in the sea emerors facility that lead you to the locations of each of them (also you didnt mention the blood kelp trench or the craig field)
Yeah. I forgot about the teleporters until the end but didn't bring it up as that was my mistake. I didn't mention the blood kelp trench as I focused on the larger northern blood kelp area and the crag field as it has the unmarked life pod but I never found it so didn't want to waste 5 minutes talking about how I searched the sparse reef thinking it was there.
@ thats all good
@ loved the vid btw
There is one large wreck in the blood kelp biome.
Yes, I became aware of the Blood Kelp Trench Wreck towards the end of making the video but as I never visited the trench I didn't feel the need to add it in.
@RNGTherapy that's one of the best features with this great game design. You have multiple ways to accomplish goals and you don't need to visit every wreck. Rarely are you bottlenecked into one course to advance.
you could make a video on the sequel, subnautica below zero, which is also a good game but a lot of people say that it feels small and not lonely like the first one
Yeah. From what I've heard the map is smaller and they made the character movements slower but I don't know enough. I'll consider making a Subnautica Below Zero vid.
@@RNGTherapyThree things I want to let you know about Sub Zero. First, it was intended to be a DLC but wound up being made into its own game. Second, the story has a lot of issues in terms of flow and dismissing existing lore (no spoilers). Third, you have a talking protagonist instead of silent protagonist.
@@asteropax6469 I knew about Second and Third but not First so thanks for info.
@ You’re welcome.
I'm already liking this video a lot more than that UpIsNotJump video, can that guy really not see the point in being given the freedom to explore in any direction you want from the very beginning?
I think his criticism was more from a point of having a well structured narrative rather than criticising exploration. In FO3 you can straight up skip the first 1/3rd of the story by going straight to vault 112.
@@RNGTherapy Yeah but that criticism is invalid when he ignores Fallout New Vegas having the same issue. You can either blitz past the Deathclaws (what I do) or walk the long path ignoring the story and just go straight to Benny. Funny thing, the first time I ever played New Vegas I went straight to Benny and had no idea all that other stuff existed.
It is much harder to do in new vegas though (in my opinion) but you are right.
2:47 oh interesting, this time you DID manage to include "its" correctly, unlike previously (1:34). 😵
Oh god, I didn't notice that. Thanks for pointing it out.
sadly your time capsule wont give the players those batteries, its in one of the list of banned objects for the capsules, if it does get approved, theyll see your message tho :) good video, i love it and ive shared it with my friends
Yeah. I found out a couple days ago. you can get Ion batteries into time capsules by putting them in equipment like scanner, flash light, etc which I discovered yesterday when replaying.
Thank you!
You're welcome. Thanks for commenting
If you leave any items in the time capsule that are very advanced such as ion batteries other players won’t be able to find it
Really? I've found things like Ion batteries in the past.
@ that’s weird because you aren’t supposed to get them from time capsules because it would mess up the players progression in the story
@@matthewelam8562 It was many years ago so maybe it was different back then.
Wanted to drop another reply because I've figured out how to get Ion batteries through time capsules. If you the battery in a piece of equipment (scanner, flashlight etc.) and then put the equipment in the capsule, it stays. Found a time capsule today with a flashlight and an Ion battery inside it.
@ cool, I was wondering about that but never tried it for myself
Other examples of masterful open world level design: Breath of the Wild, Elden Ring
I've not played either of those but I will certainly give them a look.
I just found seaglide parts after almost all lfepods and now i know i should've found it at first lifepod... i would not survive real shipwreck i guess
Despite exploring most the wrecks I missed some really important bits as well, I didn't get a laser cutter for way too long and I never found the reinforced dive suit so I'm no expert myself.
I've played both games. Mechanically, FO:NV beats FO:3 by a country mile. Atmospherically and gameplay wise, FO:3 wins by a light year. Exploration is SO much more interesting in FO:3. New Vegas doesn't have anything like the Metros or Arefu. New Vegas really is not terribly fun to explore at all, and I GREW UP IN THE MOJAVE. I think the better game overall is FO:3. I will make concessions that NV had better crafting, better weapons, better RPG systems, better levelling, and better writing than FO:3, but overall I actually enjoyed FO:3 as a game more than I did FO:NV, and New Vegas was my introduction to the series. Initially, I actually dropped FO:3 due to the lack of ironsights, but I picked it back up a year or so later and eventually finished it, and came to the ultimate conclusion that it was overall more enjoyable to me than FO:NV.
I agree. I prefer FO3 story wise, but map, mechanics, writing and levelling wise FONV wins. I quite liked the exploration of both tbh, both had great vibes and was just pleasant to walk around in, which is a odd thing to say about a nuclear wasteland.
if subnautica had perfect level design you wouldnt be able to get your prawn suit stuck in the floor because of poor level design. though overall the map is pretty well done other than lack of foresight on that bit. wish i knew programming so i could understand why its such a hard fix. seems to me like they just have 2 physical layers in the areas. a solid cube of a foundation then the graphical polished surface which is stacked on top. when you portal away and leave your prawn suit behind the graphical layer despawns/renders so on return your prawn has gotten stuck between layers. ok so allow the prawn suit feet to noclip or something i dunno. or have an unstuck button for the thing
I've only ever had my prawn suit get stuck in the ground after going through a teleporter but I figured that was because of the teleporter rather than the prawn suit.
27:30 he forgot alien thermal plant
I tried to fit it in but the words were too close or would have been to small to be appropriately readable.
I get the strong impression that you read a book, got your mind blown, and now everything has to follow that. Like, when you complained about one area not having a lead to it made it seem like you don't want an open world game, but a semi-linear game with the illusion of an open world. Final Fantasy VII Rebirth and Baldur's Gate 3 are like that (and they're great games). Also makes sense why you'd like F:NV over F3, since the latter has vast regions you have to actually explore on your own, rather than being led by the nose through quests and stuff like in the former.
Not everything has to follow that. There are always exceptions. I addressed the whole "not having a lead" when I said I spoke to friend who reminded me that the story isn't supposed to lead you everywhere, and that the points between radio messages should be used to just explore freely. The games you've mentioned are good picks. I've never played Final Fantasy but I have played Baldurs Gate 3 and its currently my favourite game. The point is, I picked up a book about game writing and wanted to see if games held up to what it was saying so I selected a game I haven't played for many years to test this and as Subnautica isn't a story focused game, it was never going to fit perfectly but it fits very very well considering that point.
@@RNGTherapy BOCTAOE always applies. I wouldn't use the word "exceptions" though, since I don't think there are so few games in that category that they aren't the majority. I also don't think Subnautica fits _that_ well, though it hits a lot of points. Like there aren't really any bosses. A boss is a final challenge, or the climax of the level, most of the time. The enemies there are just that, enemies, without any structure to how they appear. The areas don't follow the "goal, complication, resolution" pattern. Getting into the action isn't relevant after the intro, since you never leave the action except for the breaks you take on your own. There is a steady progression both in equipment/resources and in story, though, since those logs are scattered all over. But they're more like puzzle pieces of a greater story than anything level-based (and for that type of story, Outer Wilds is great).
And that's kind of my point. There are some things that match that guideline, and some things that don't. But it doesn't make the game any worse. I don't think it would be much different from a game actually based on levels. As a writer, I've seen so many different takes on things like these, and in the end, you have to find a way that suits your story. It's the same for games. (As a minor thing, I wouldn't equate levels with chapters. Scenes are a better fit (or pairs of scenes, if you follow a popular guideline), since they have a similar structure to the second point of your book's key features. Chapters don't have a set definition, and while they can fit, you can have chapters consisting of a single sentence or dozens of scenes.)
The part where you addressed not having a lead is what made me think of the Fallout 3 vs NV comparison. It's also why I prefer 3, since I want to explore on my own rather than follow some predetermined plot line. It's kind of the point of having an open world, to explore what you want to explore, and not be led so much by the plot. Also why I don't like the Ubistandard open world games, with tons of quest markers to point you in all directions, and why I don't follow the often-repeated "make worlds denser" mantra you hear so often. I like some emptiness between locations or events.
@AnotherDuck. Again, I think you've made some really excellent points.
No there aren't really any bosses (especially when put like that). At the time of writing I was viewing them through the lens of "a danger that needs to be overcome or avoided", although I will freely admit that this also doesn't fit well. I agree that logs are more puzzle piece than level based but I still think that that is important as it helps make Alterra, The Degasi and the Subnautica universe feel well fleshed out and grounded (which is something I really like but is not necessarily important for gameplay), but Outer Wilds is great for that I completely agree.
That's why I completely agree with what you said about some things that match and don't match but it doesn't make the game any worse.
I also completely agree that you have to find a way that suits your story/game. There will always be stories/games that defy conventional categorisation and that doesn't diminish them.
I understand what you're saying about emptiness between locations but from a gameplay perspective it isn't necessarily good to have emptiness as it invites the risk of boredom/being boring. I feel like Witcher 3 had a good balance of denseness and open space/emptiness with the player always being five minutes away from something.
@@RNGTherapy The enemies certainly are a danger, but they're more about the "complication" part, as they're often what bring up the tension in any particular area. Without them it'd just be a scavenger hunt (which would make the game more of a cozy game than a survival game with horror elements). I think the way the reapers are designed is a perfect example of that. As a boss, they would need to be defeated, and would try to kill you in turn. But they're not meant to kill you. They're meant to hurt you so you get afraid of them. This is because once you actually die, the tension drops significantly, while if you flee, it's still there. So they're designed to _almost_ kill you.
The most boss-like is probably the final challenge of collecting all different samples for the recipe. It challenges your exploration knowledge, which is the main challenge of the game, IMO. It's helped a lot if you've unlocked the portal system, since all or almost all of them (the one you find there excluded) are accessible close to the portals, and that's something you need to explore on your own to find out.
The emptiness really depends on the type of player. I know a lot of players, especially younger players, want things to happen all the time, with small or no breaks between, but for me it enhances the stuff that's there. Ebb and flow is more satisfying than a constant stream.
I never thought about the creatures damage in that way but that is an interesting point.
I've always loved subnautica and only recently really started playing below zero (subnautica's sequel/spin-off/thing), and I had this beautiful moment where I was standing in my sea truck in light blue, clear water and could see a chelicerate swimming above me. I was both terrified to move and make noise and amazed by how beautiful it was.
I'm looking forward to playing below zero after my next video is complete.