I Wish I Liked This Game More Than I Did
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- Опубліковано 28 лют 2024
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I liked Below Zero, but it DEFINITELY disappointed me. Let me try my best to explain why.
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My feelings on Below Zero arrrrre complicated, so I tried my BEST to explain them. Hope I did a good enough job, and hope you enjoyed the vid itself!
Also: I'm aware now that the 'script notes' I mentioned in the subtitles are actually captions for the heard of hearing, I just wasn't aware at the time. My bad.
Understandable honestly I had the same feeling
Is this the comparison video, or below zero only?
I feel the exact same way. I honestly never beat the game, I never wanted to. Any time I did literally everything in the water and all that was left was to go to the glaciers... I would make a FOB, do some stuff on the ice... and quit and go back to normal subnautica. This game has some nice features, but it is not like subnautica and they should indeed take this as a learning opportunity. I'm honestly going to watch Jacksepticeye's video(s) on this game and see his ultimate response to it because Unknown Worlds loves Jack. Also the fact the ice worm just... pops you off the snow fox is... unbelievable. It's awful that it would do it like that and that often. Not even like a rare and cool animation where it does it, it just does it even when it doesn't actually hit you. Unacceptable. Love you by the way Seth, you're a cool guy.
Don't worry it's well known that below zero is like subnautica lite
Subnautica Below Zero is like the Dark Souls 2 of Subnautica
The ice worm segment is the epitome of "look how they massacred my boy"
Edit: my god thank you all for the likes
I discovered what it was through this video, because I purposefully avoided the early access to play the final game blind this time around. And from what the video describe, it sure is a shame.
I only played a tiny bit of early access and got bored quick tbh, didn't even know about this creature for awhile. I can't believe someone really play tested this and was like "yeah thats a fun mechanic! have em dismount the snowfox!! that's awesome!" but didn't think the chase was fun?
From what I've seen of let's plays and whatnot it is the absolute worst part of either game hands down. The whole idea behind the snowfox was to make traveling across the icy plains less noisy so that the ice worms wouldn't attack people but much like the thumpers they just attack you anyway. Which makes 0 sense even if the snowfox was moderately loud because the damn thing FLOATS.
I don't see how a floating speeder that's quieter than my dishwasher can be heard several hundred feet under solid rock and ice in the middle of a blizzard. Unless those ice worms have the hearing of those demigorgon looking freaks from "A Quiet Place" I don't see how they would be able to hear the snowfox at all, let alone pinpoint the exact location you're about to be in and attack you.
Yeah. I was really looking forward to the land sections, running over vast fields of snow on the hoverbike to flee from the ice worms. In the end what we got out of the land sections was a confusing maze of generic snow terrain that's boring, uninteresting. and annoying to navigate. Its designed in a way that the hoverbike isnt even really a viable way to get around! I took the prawn suit more often. And not once in 3 entire playthroughs have I been attacked by an ice worm. The most ive ever seen of them was one eating a snow stalker in the distance. The things look really cool, are awesome in concept, and had the potential to be this game's equivalent of the reaper leviathan. But alas, we did not get what we were promised.
Another phrase pops into my head when thinking about the worms, and that's "familiarity breeds contempt". The spectacle of it wears off so fast that it almost immediately becomes nothing but tedious annoyance. What made the leviathans so effective in Subnautica was that you saw and heard them looming in the distance and went out of your way to avoid them, they created a constant tension as you're exploring without being overbearing. Imagine they instead constantly teleported on top of you and knocked you out of your submarine then swam away only to do the same thing 10 seconds later and you've got the ice worms.
Wiat wait wiat wait wait hold on hold on. You're telling me, they went back and updated the game so that the Ice Worm does more damage to the prawn suit so you can't use it as effectively INSTEAD OF IMPROVING THE MAIN WAY TO PLAY THE ENCOUNTER?!??!
So the first game is an open world with a story you discover as a consequence of trying to better survive. BZ is a nearly linear set of set pieces that kinda feel like an open world. The prawn suit isn't part of that set piece. So a reason to not use it was arbitrarily added.
It's almost as if the developers, who fired the audio designer over a joke, are complete idiots.
@@frostreaper1607 Considering the audio guy turned out to be an alt-right weirdo. On the long term that avoided a PR scandal. But it does seem like they lost the plot entirely. They wanted to make a more story-focused game yet they wanna keep it a sandbox. Why not do an immersive sim and allow the player to use whatever vehicle they want... The team changed and it feels like they don't know how to keep the essence of Subnautica.
@@mat8791 Wait what?
@@mat8791 by alt-right, what do you mean? a person who is super radicalized and wants america a perpetual war to 'prove our superiority'? or someone who sees kids being taught about sex at third grade, calls it moronic and a waste of money and time then gets arrested for calling it what it is and is accused of being racist, despite race having nothing to do with kids learning about sex in third grade?
Just asking cause I have met people who say both of those are the same thing, but when called out on it, default to "YoU aRe RaCiSt MySoGeNiSt RaCiSt InCeL!"
"They said she died by negligence but i don't buy it! It's a coverup!"
meanwhile she exactly died by negligence.
And the way the handle the reveal is TERRIBLE, its an audio log of a completely random altera employee confirming indeed your sister is a terrorist and a bad one that killed herself and another innocent man. THEN your character who is chatty as fuck throughout the game has absolutely zero things to say when she listens to the log. I thought my game had glitched when it ended because of the deafening silence, I reloaded and did it again, then looked it up online to see if it was just me and nope, game doesn't even acknolwedge the end of the whole reason we came to the planet. Just terrible game design.
@@Legionnaire726literally the main thing that irks me about the game is that the sister plot line(which is the whole reason we’re on the planet) is completely irrelevant, im pretty sure you can beat the game without ever figuring out what happened to her
@@yukiamano2078 I was absolutely baffled because I didn't even realize that the game had given the answer to what happened with Sam. When I got the final info about her, I pretty much just tuned it out as yet another misinformation thing from Alterra. I had gotten every piece of information and still thought I had missed something, so I googled it and was so disappointed by the answer.
@@yukiamano2078 there should be a neutral/bad ending if you don't
My favorite moment in Below Zero was a bug in the beta where if you stood on a baby pengling, and picked it up, you would shoot up into the sky. Instantly. With no warning.
Stand on a baby. Pick it up. Space.
wanna know a fun glitch in the first game that's just like that that's so fun to mess around with? play a beacon on top of your lifepod and get on top of it, jump to the side so the diving animation plays where his arms get put out and pick the beacon up during that animation. you go FLYING. such a fun thing to do in creative. i managed to get to the top of the aurora with that
I was launched high into the air yesterday by dropping titanium and copper onto the ground.
What about the snowfox? *dead silence*. Continues with the script. Absolutely hilarious.
That's what I was thinking.
I'm ded new
#onlyprawn #foreverfaithful
For some reason I expected night time grasshopper chirping.
@@Hr1s7iThey were too uncomfortable and left.
I never even unlocked it i just finangled the mech up there and wandered around in it
Subnautica always felt way more terrifying and immersive to me than Below Zero and I could never figure out why, thank you for explaining it so well!
Maybe because of the story and the fact that there were other humans and of course Alan.
So in a few words, below zero has no real isolation.
they removed immersion alot thats the main reason
Somehow, even after about 200hrs in Subnautica one (but only one completed playthrough) and killing literal dozens of Leviathans by now - most with Stasis Rifle + Knife combo of course since Prawn's Drill Arm is too slow - hearing Reaper's roar still does something to me (at least when I'm not actively fighting it in game).
I don't remember almost anything about Leviathan's in BZ other than how annoying they were.
@@mbaccelloI tried to watch Jacksepticeye play and honestly I lost interest because you’re playing a character instead of just letting it be YOU. The fun of the first game was this adventure is about you, but now it’s a quirky mc with quips and cringy one liners. And just felt so linear from the beginning. Idk, like it looks good and beautiful, but for me it’s hard to even watch much less play
Yeah something about Below Zero didn't rope me in at all. I played for a fair few hours but I just never felt like I wanted to play more of it.
Game implies Sam’s death was not due to negligence, turns out it was actually due to… basically negligence handling the explosive.
imagine a voice log with emanuel's manager voice ordering her to be killed or something it'd fit alterra honestly
I actually laughed out loud when I found out about Sam's death when playing this for the first time. She took homemade explosives into a cave and died of her own negligence.
She died for the cause in the lamest way, the only way it could have been lamer if she slipped on some ice and broke her neck while going to the cave
The game's story was sloppily rewritten so many times that you can tell by the end they just gave up
Also, how did Sam create a cure for the proto form of the bacteria that a whole race of aliens couldn’t? She said she made it herself
It’s not they hard to have saved that segment of the story or at least improved it. All it would take would be a few PDA’s. Just include something about them actually making bio weapons or them planning Sams death
"What about the snow fox ?"
*D e a d s i l e n c e*
How subnautica feels :
Big ocean
How below zero feels :
Big municipal pool
:/
Kinda sad. Below Zero is really visually beautiful, but those incredible alien landscapes are hindered by horseshit world design
@@orange_turtle3412 agreed, let's hope subnautica 2 will be better, i still belive the dev can do great things so let's hope it'll be gud :>
@@LeDemonDeLaRadio They reportedly have an entire subset of the team dedicated solely to creatures, so I think its a given that we’ll be getting a much more intricate and in-depth ecosystem than we did before
@@orange_turtle3412Is that bad or good?
@@ry6554 Having an entire team dedicated to making deep and intricate creatures sounds like a really good thing imo
But, that could be a bad thing too, if that team isn't very good at what they do, or if they're not given the available resources/time/funding to make some awesome stuff
Here we go!!
That segment about the Ice Worm was heartbreaking. They had something amazing with the Beta version but then they really dropped the ball.
What was different in the beta then?
@@th3lonef0x4Did you watch the video? Seth literally shows and discusses in detail how it was before he played through the full release.
So a LOT in the beta / early access? Story, pacing, enemies seemed to be better before and they listened to no one in the community when they changed it.
Yeah. That encounter ROCKED...
At least until they added like 3 more into it and made it so every single god damn time they come up you fall of your snowfox ;-;
that goes for pretty much every part of BZ. the Early Access versions were LEAGUES better than the slop that was the final release.
The dialogue between Alan and Robin could've been amazing. A scientist and a hivemind alien half-AI. It almost writes itself if they actually tried, but the dialogue we got sounds more like a conversation between a motivational poster inhabiting a teenage girl and a human in a robot suit trying to blend in by using only information they got from Pixar movies.
They could've brought up a plethora of philosophical and psychological topics and concepts, with Robin explaining humanity to an alien with actual scientific deconstructions. For example, Robin could've explained how musical patterns and tones can subtly affect human psyche and body, or explain how it came about historically.
But instead we got something akin to "How have an alien not listened to Lady Gaga even once??".
My suggestions in case UW is somehow reading this:
- Let it get DARK. Few things were as atmospheric as the Deep Grand Reef, not everything has to be bioluminescent
- Make the map bigger and deeper, empty space is fine. Not everything has to be a tight, enclosed space, and large barren wastelands are where that "open ocean" feeling comes from. Also it's way less awful to navigate in a large vehicle.
- Give me the seamoth back. Not a seamoth-like vessel, I want the actual Seamoth. It's perfect just the way it is, and doesn't need modification.
- DON'T GIVE ME SO MANY FETCH QUESTS HOLY SHIT WHY ARE THERE SO MANY FETCH QUESTS
- Margeurit is absolutely allowed to swear. She's a mercenary. She *wouldn't* say "bull crap". If you're worried about ratings, then just censor it or something, but few things are more immersion breaking than "My leg was just ripped of, gee willikurs!"
- I'm serious, give me the seamoth back
I think point 2 you made is especially important, because it addresses something that might seem counterintuitive to developers.
It used to be that large, open areas with almost nothing in it but sandy ground were a sign of BAD game design (or, very often, a technical limitation of the game engine, in the past).
Because, hey, why have so much space, when there is basically nothing in it. Certainly its not for realism, because the real world is full of stuff.....right?
And that is true, for about 99% of games. But the ocean floor is literally one of very very few examples where huge open areas containing nothing of interest is pretty realistic. Yes, the ocean is full of life, but a lot of it is either to small for us to see, or to cautious to stay put when a big, loud strange object (a seamoth might seem quiet to us, but for a fish, it would probably be pretty damn loud) closes in.
So yes, the thing you would encounter most on the ocean floor IS actually just sediment and rocks, in a lot of areas. And in this rare instance, that actually IMPROVES immersion.
Also, more space gives more general area for ore rocks. And more ore means making a big base less tedious. I tried to make a large base with Allen containment units or aquariums for each fish, but I ran out of titanium and ore within 700 meters of my base.
To hell with Marguerite, having other survivors doing just fine there for years utterly annihilated the feeling of isolation and dread of being in a hostile, alien environment.
The space issue also ruined the leviathan experience in my opinion. With the original game you had enough room to give leviathans a wide berth and treat them like the immense threats they were supposed to be. In Below Zero, clashing with leviathans became inevitable. The "what if" fear of a distant monster was replaced with the annoyance of regularly butting heads with them: explore, zap, repair, repeat.
I think it would be cool if the next Subnautica game puts us at the bottom of the void it would definitely lean more into the horror side of the game as it would be dark outside all the time but I feel like they could come up with some really interesting deep sea creatures and biomes and maybe a story to fill the void :>
Your Ice Worm footage is BIZZARE to me... I never knew it used to... ACTUALLY WORK.
The Ice Worms in the current version of the game is the single most broken thing in the entire game. I had no choice but to assume that its how the game is supposed to work. But apparently worms were like... AN ACTUAL MECHANIC... And not the... gaming equivalent of a war-crime it is now. What the hell happened?!
If its intended - what did the devs smoke?
If its broken - why is no one fixing this? This entire area of the game is actively detrimental to the project.
If I'm not mistaken, I think there was an ending for Sam's story on the old storyline.
One of your overarching objectives on the old questline was to complete deliveries to the Alterra space station where Sam was working and talking to you from, one of which was a sample of the Kharaa that you grabbed from the frozen leviathan.
Now, my memory is a little fuzzy, but at one point I think Sam is killed by Alterra on the station, which prompts Robin and Al-An to either build a missile or to put an explosive in one of the delivery rockets to blow up the space station and stop Alterra from getting their hands on the Kharaa sample. Maybe that's what prompts the Alterra gunship to try and stop them from leaving the planet.
I remember it being something like Robin’s coworker unleashing the bacterium on the space station and then putting a giant bubble around the planet that was a precursor secondary defense or something. And then they changed the story and that’s the last I knew
Regardless, the old story seems to bite better to me than what ended up in the final release.
It just felt incredibly lackluster, even as I finished the game.
There were a lot of stories drafted that all ended up sounding more interesting than what we got. The last writer they brought in I guess just wanted to explore the relationship between Robin and Al-An but because all the rest of the Sam and Alterra stuff was already integral to the game and explaining why you're even there to begin with they had to include it and so it was clumsily pushed to the back burner.
Seeing that Ice Worm hitbox would make a Dark Souls 2 player wonder how that even happens
Subnautica: below expectations.
I think Below Zero's map layout is definitely in part to blame for missing the feeling base Subnautica had. Not in a 'these regions shouldn't be next to each other' way, but conceptually. Subnautica's map starts you out in the shallows. The creepvine forests feel suffocatingly enclosed but not protective with all that wannabe kelp and terraced rock around you, and the red grassy plateaus feel far too open to be safe, even if the only real large creature there is the reefbacks (though they're not exactly helpful about making you feel safe with those calls either). Both of these biomes are, obviously, a little deeper than the shallows, making you feel less and less safe as you distance yourself from the surface to actually get at anything in them, and each subsequent biome tends to at least partially follow this trend. Some biomes basically revolve around it, like the dunes - they're literally just that feeling of being exposed, too in the open and far out of your element, and there's.. really not a lot else to why it's such a scary place. You know you're being hunted, you're warned of it the moment you get there, and you can hear evidence of it in the form of constant reaper roars, made only worse if you've managed to scan one and by their AI actually trying to circle behind you for attacks. But other than a lot of good fragments, there's not much else to the dunes. It doesn't need anything more than gentle rolling hills (are they hills underwater? Like they're, y'know, dunes, but still) of sand and the knowledge of something nearby, but not precisely where. The void itself is literally just this too but to the absolute extreme.
Anyways, microanalysis of the dunes aside, the biomes get steadily deeper, further distancing you from the surface, and they always feel either too exposed or too cramped depending on which area of them you're in. The later regions being entirely in a massive interconnected cavern network only accentuates this further, but honestly despite being caves they kind of stop doing the claustrophobia thing after a while, save for specific instances like the inside of the brine pools or the lava castle.
Below Zero would've been _perfect_ to lean into that sort of feeling. Rather than the kind of underwhelming sea truck, give us one of those cool cyclops alternatives from the concept art, a big, cumbersome beast of a submarine that makes you feel safe - and then take it away. The map could adventure further and further under the ice sheet, each region being more unsettlingly cramped and labyrinthine than the last, both rather than and still somewhat alongside the depth-based progression of the last game. Some places could open up, either leading to discovering ways in for the larger craft and to set up bases, or leaving you still uncomfortably exposed in your little ones. All this alongside the surface exploration semi-independently, but not quite, as they can obviously still connect, but you're trading the freedom of underwater movement for the restriction of the ramps and cliffs of the ice sheet. But to my knowledge - and I'm admittedly not that familiar with Below Zero's map - it doesn't really do this. Sure, it has cramped and claustraphobic areas, whether they're tighter caves than the crater offered or interestingly unique ones like the twisty bridges, but it just doesn't seem to do this quite that well. Subnautica capitalized on a fear of the depths, of willingly descending further and further away from the surface that you're evolved for. Below Zero had the opportunity to do the same with ice sheets and caves, but it doesn't quite nail it.
Now, another big part of that is feeling alone. Ryley, the character from the first game, never speaks. The most personality we get from him is tool equip animations. When you're nearing death, you don't feel like you're watching an important character die, you feel like _you_ are the one drowning, struggling to reach the surface or a vehicle or safety in time. Below Zero, with multiple NPCs talking to you that aren't just automatic announcements or messages you've already missed, and a voiced protagonist, doesn't really make you feel like the character as much, nor does it make you feel alone. This is a part of that constant noise issue you mentioned, as well. Additionally, you see abandoned bases that are clearly decades old in Subnautica like the Degasi's or centuries in the case of the overgrown precursor structures, and anything else is wreckage from the ship, twisted and flung far across the entire crater, proof that no one could've survived the impact and that everyone else has already been hunted down long before reaching this stuff. You find much fresher ruins and recently (or even currently) inhabited bases in Below Zero, and secondarily the precursor structures are a bit more artistic and decorated rather than the seemingly almost solely functional or incomprehensibly decorated designs of the crater's facilities (a few items in display cases that serve both roles and _maybe_ the wall engravings, and that's it). Those are less important, honestly the main thing that changes them is seeing precursor stuff even react to you beyond the pedastools and terminals automatically doing so to anyone in range. Those bases, despite being mostly unaffected by time beyond some overgrowth on the exterior, felt abandoned. They were cavernous, had things in them, but felt empty in a lonely way. It's a fascinating vibe that I love when games do, BZ just kind of doesn't go for it. Alan is feeling it hard, though, and it's certainly interesting.
Atop that, you willingly came here. You're dropped in not as a survivor from a crashed ship that wasn't even meant to land there at the time, but as someone specifically searching for another here, prepared for it. Even in earlier versions of the story, you were set up _in_ a base on the planet, equipped for the environment. It doesn't have the same feeling from the start.
A personal gripe about Below Zero: I don't really like some of the creatures. I dunno what it is about them, and I know I just wrote like five hundred words overanalyzing the concept of a biome and don't have nearly as much to say on this part, just that some of Below Zero's creatures simply don't feel the same. Maybe it's that they don't really have the same connections to one another that the creatures of the crater have, or maybe I just don't have the nostalgia of watching their development over the course of seven or so years, and some are definitely good, too, but I don't care much for most of them. Particularly the ones that are just variants on others, they feel kind of cheap, like the giant holefish. Others, like the squidshark, just seem a little too earthlike, compared to the honestly quite absurd-looking designs of so many of Subnautica's fish. That said, a good few of them are very well-made, properly alien and terrifying in the right ways. Can't say that fully benefits from the kind of wacky once-was-a-proof-of-concept engine Subnautica runs in, but that's not really the fault of BZ nor something base Subnautica is exempt from. I'm also not as familiar with their sound design as with base Subnautica, but their visuals tend to hold up. The snapping mandibles on the 'chelly' as you called it are a particularly good detail, a pretty strong competitor to the reapers' iconic front profile.
This is the longest comment I've ever seen
@@Deathstalker131 It just kept going 0.0
What a comment, even my essays are shorter lol, love the dedication
Well said
Mary, Mother of God that's a wall of text. Well said though.
I was also really disappointed with the level design. The original Subnautica was a mirrored funnel. The slope of the ocean floor funneled out from the lifepod and the biomes were gated by their depth. You slowly expanded your world as your depth tech increased, allowing you to explore in bite-sized chunks - the lifepod beacons leading you to each new biome in turn, but you had to explore to find fragments. Then in the midgame, the terrain funnelled inward to the precursor bases. Literally, every path leading below 500m led to the lost river, so it was impossible to miss the plot locations if you just kept going deeper. The map design allowed a linear plot in an open world.
Below Zero had only the depth gates - and those didn't apply to the glacier. You could explore about 50% of the map with just a seaglide. It was overwhelming. Alan's beacons still pulled you to new biomes, but only exploration allowed you to find Sam's POI (and most had no critical tech). It was very likely that you'd miss those story locations or encounter them out of order. At least half of streamers I watched never found the frozen leviathan and even less noticed the map that led to the cure (and even less found the log that explains Sam's death.... why would they *hide* that?!?). So the supposed main plot was forgotten by the player and unresolved by the end of their game....
I had completely forgotten about the frozen leviathan plot line by the endgame because going on a trip with AL-AN was so much more interesting to me.
Absolutely over the fact that you venture further and further outwards towards the crater edge as you progress, but by the end of the game you're right back where you started in the center of the map - only a LOT deeper.
What I can define Bellowzero as: indecision, they had so many ideas to try, to do something "more", and they didn't know how to put it all together, constantly changing, until the final version, leaving loose ends isolated with tape.
My main issue with SBZ is that it isn't "more of what we liked" nor "Something new well made". It was an attempt to do both, and fail miserably.
Here is how we can summarize what both games are about :
Subnautica : "You are a random lad whose ship crashlanded on an unknown planet. You are infected with a deadly bacterium. Your odds of survival are laughable. Good luck.
SBZ : "You are Robin Ayou, the sister of a scientist working for Alterra. Following her disappearance, Robin decided to investigate herself, since Alterra's official reason (death by incompetence) smells like a false pretense, since you KNOW your sister isn't incompetent.
In order to do that, Robin decides to land on 4564-B, illegally of course, fully prepared, using a meteor rain as a way to hide her arrival from Alterra's eyes.
You must discover the truth behind your sister's death.
In the first game, it was very clearly a game where YOU had to survive. As for SBZ, survival is not the focus. Robin's story is. And Robin, being an annoying character with a poorly-written story, with quite a lot of inconsistencies, weighs down on the whole game.
(+The map is much less interesting...)
I really hope that the third game brings back the old "full survival game" formula, where the goal is to survive against all odds. Maybe even add references to the older games, such as replacing Craig McGill with Ryley Robinson in the PDA's motivational speeches.
They have shown they can do it with the first game.
1) the Seatruck never felt like a "convinient seamoth+cyclops combo". When it was just the main bit, i still missed the seamoth. When its fully kitted out, made me miss the cyclops. Really makes me wish we got the Atlas submarine.
2) i understand the world was smaller but it, as you said, felt like it was too compact. In subnautica you went long distances, making you feel like you were in...an ocean. Funny that. By the time you can get immesered in BZ, youre leaving.
3) the story itself i think is why i never could beat BZ, but ive beaten subnautica multiple times. In base subnautica, its not only a survival game, but a survival story. From the first frame you gain control to the end credits, your goal remains unchanged. Survive and find a way home. You the player and the character want the same thing. To survive. Theres not that much dialogue, youre left with you, the ocean, and your thoughts. And...
4) as you said, the audio is so much in BZ that youre not permitted to do that.
Seatruck was basically the worst of both worlds. Didn't have the same speed and agility of the seamoth, or the power, spaciousness and room for actual customization of the cyclops. It is the unhappy medium. Plus it's name is also just so lame compared to the former two
For point 3 if you haven't played The Long Dark I cannot recommend it enough. It absolutely defines "survival" as a genre IMO.
Them making only one type of transport vehicle as a convenience is tantamount to making the player able to breath under water for convenience. It’s absolutely ridiculous.
@@halla3184 I didn’t even think about the name before, it’s the only vehicle that isn’t named after some kind of creature
something that really hooked me with subnautica is that there is always the bigger fish, you hunt the small fish in the reefs, stalkers can hunt them and you, reapers hunt you and your vehicles, sea dragons hunt reapers by dragging them down to where they cant function, the big scary monster you encounter up at sea level gets forced down by something even bigger and scarier than it, the same monster that wrecked the ancients research lab and started the whole quarantine all those years ago, and now you have to get past them to save yourself and the planet you are on so you can finally leave it
its just sublime to think about as you figure this out through bits of story here and there, scanning skeletal remains and derelict facilities for clues on how to progress
you also dont start with anything, your ship crashes for some reason, you are in a life pod, go explore and find out what happened while trying not to die, while in below zero you have the constant goal of finding out what happened to your sister and blah blah alterra bad virus experiments better stop the megacorporation again
and yeah the ice worm attacks ALWAYS knocking you off the FLOATING BIKE will never cease to make me angry, the original was like one of those fast paced chase sequences in a sonic 3d game, while the new one is like playing through sonic 06
and then you have the big badass sea emperor. Which is a filter feeder and is not only completely harmless but also fully sapient at a human level.
which is a total switch for the player as all of a sudden the giant half tentacle sea monster is... talking to you in a friendly manner?
@@Nightmare_52 subnautica knows its themes well enough to know when to subvert them, BZ knows its themes poorly enough to not.
As someone who's proudly proclaimed Subnautica as my favorite game EVER for years now, I struggled to put my finger on why I couldn't even muster the motivation to finish Below Zero (still haven't)
And I think this video captured my thoughts perfectly, I really hope that Unknown Worlds uses this as a learning experience going back to what made the first game so incredible for the third entry.
They have a mode that shuts up the constant nagging of the characters... makes it worth playing now since you can (momentarily, an hour tops) recover the feel of it being you in the world
Player and Robin: Alterra is lying through their teeth! There's no way Sam died from "negligence", that's not like her! They're responsible, I'm certain of that.
The PDA that concludes Sam's story: Yeah, she died from negligence and took Parvan with her on top of that by complete accident.
Insert clip of Jontron slamming a book shut, throwing it over his shoulder, and saying "Well that was a load of shit!"
I've mentioned it on a reply but I feel it's probably best to elaborate it on a standalone comment: Below Zero's plot issues are *fundamental.*
The first game made it clear that Kharaa had spread to the entire planet, and that only the area accessible to the Sea Emperor's containment unit bore non-leviathan life because of its efforts at spreading the enzyme. And the original game states these vents didn't spread very far from the volcanic crater, they were there to maintain the Sea Emperor's containment unit. The pole should have been either completely barren, or populated only by Kharaa-resistant leviathans because it takes way longer than 12 years for new life to colonize an area to that level, much less evolve to fit it. Forget wondering how Maida survived for over a decade before the events of Subnautica and Ryley Robinson's efforts resulting in the cure being spread across the biosphere, wonder how the polar biome survived in the first place!
This could all have been avoidedif instead of setting Below Zero in the same world (which was great for nostalgia, sure), they had set Below Zero in its own arctic planet, with the idea that any Kharaa containment break would result in the bacterium freezing out before it could spread. Sam (still working on a robotics research lab) could then have found out about this secret lab, and the whole thing could have unveiled. Alan would need another reason to be around, but the Architects's presence anywhere in the galaxy is pretty easy to explain. Instead of him being responsible for spreading the Kharaa, he's someone trying to find out what happened to his people and how to reunite with them again.
But that would require creating a whole new set of wildlife to populate this new planet instead of making so many callbacks to the original creatures and biomes, so I guess that idea wasn't even considered. It does feel like they had a story they wanted to tell *first,* and then hammered the world around that story to make it work. Which makes sense, considering how much more story-heavy Below Zero is. I'm hoping they give us more environmental and log-based storytelling and less dialogue on the next one. The sense of solitude you had on the first one really helped make it pop, compared to all the dialogue (sometimes very poorly timed in its triggers) in Below Zero.
It doesn't help that, and I am not sure if the timeframe is what I heard, about 3 months from release the (at the time) head writer for the story was let off (for completely non-political reasons after making a gay joke that offended nobody) and the new head was... yeah you see their resulting thoughts in the game... they took a near complete game, looked at the script, tore it half, tossed it on a fire and screamed to get to work on the script they wrote in... 5 hours (i think, I heard it was 5 years, months, days, minutes, etc. but it feels like a five hour script with how little things connected noticeably with finality...) the forced everyone to restart the game... FROM SCRATCH on pathing, ai behavior, etc and just reused models... basically it was taking a team design that wins olympic medal with ease, throwing out everyone but the guy who bought his way on the team while bragging about how good he is only for him faint after running for more that fifteen seconds, and throwing a bunch of mentally deficient kids who haven't even graduated school on the same team and saying "Olympic winning team here" despite them not being the team that won the medals or those able to compete...
yeah BZ was... heavily redesigned in a rush that made no sense, and we got the shitty result of an underdeveloped, unloved hate-cest child... with neon rainbow filter thrown on to try making it less of an ANGST reboot of what sounded like a very decent game...
Hell man I would’ve accepted the explanation that the entire pole was under some sort of Architect force field bubble. Simple and kind of stupid? Yeah. Within the realms of acceptable suspension of disbelief and already tread on territory for sci-fi? Also, yeah.
@@Indivenant Sure. Wouldn't have explained Maida's survival, but it *could* have worked as an explanation.
Personally, I'd rather there were less Architect stuff than more. I know Seth found Alan's writing endearing, but the Architects' characterization ended up pretty schizophrenic when you take both Subnautica and BZ into account. Since BZ is set post-human colonization of the planet, they could have laid on the found-footage style horror of the ruined human facilities and having the player investigate what catastrophe had befallen the humans there, instead of the planet having simply been evacuated in good order.
Honestly, it could have worked to just say [like most viruses] that the extremely cold enviroment slowed the progression of Kharaa, as the enzymes that make it function struggle in the frigid temperates.
That would have made it have some sound logic rooted in biology, and given the region a fighting chance at survival.
@@HoltzWorks it's implied that she wasn't affected by khraa b/c she spent months eating a leviathan, which themselves are resistant to it.
i have always felt the same about Below Zero, but couldnt articulate exactly why.
You really mentioned every detail i subcontiously noticed as well. Really well done video.
I love the Original, and Below Zero is fine, but "fine" feels horrible if the Original was one of the best games you have ever played
It's like getting the diet version of a drink, expecting the full cola flavor, that recognizable mouth 'feel'... but constantly getting that 'something is missing... this tastes... fine... but... off.'
Smiling has a lot to do with the eyes, which means you did actually smile and we don't have to imagine it.
I feel like the chelicerates would have been better if the game spawned them in near the surface only once you were in an area and below a certain depth while making them more of an active hunter. Then the lack of distance calls would both line up with the shadow leviathan's haunting predator but with a very different feel. The shadow leviathan would be a spectre you're trapped inside with as it patrols its domain, whereas you are free to escape from the chelicerate but it is hunting you and forcing you to fear the open water. The waters appear to be fine, because they are, but then you dive down and later notice its large silhouette drifting above you and it's only a matter of time until you need to leave the cover of the reefs and draw this predator's attention. Nailing the ice worm as a chase would have further complimented this, as now you can't hide in the one domain that is suposed to be meant for you... but you'd also have to rethink the area design, make the snowfox not suck, and remove the frequent blizzards (yes, cool that happens in real life, but it's miserable... like being out in an actual blizzard).
I really don't understand why so many people say the story doesn't pick sides between Robin and Alan. It starts off well enough with some great dialogue, but the story consistently frames Robin as having a better perspective and not merely a perspective that Alan needs now that he is cut off from. Alan becomes less a forcefully individualized ancient cyborg searching for healing and more a vulcan-esque logic species in need of humanization.
The worst part of the Sam storyline? Altera was right and Sam and Robin are just paranoid. It's implied that Altera is bad and will do bad things with the bacteria from everything we've been told about Altera in the first game... but there's no indication that is actually true. Any scientist would want to study the Kharaa percursor, especially knowing how deadly it is. You'd want to know why the hell it's so deadly in case you ever encounter something like that isn't frozen and actively infecting things and need to make a cure from scratch! But we never get anything that suggests more than that is going on besides that Altera is a dystopian corporatized state. Don't get me wrong, I don't by that Altera wouldn't do bad things with it, but I'm using info that is heavily implied from a pervious game while the current game tells me nothing. It's the main point of conflict in this part of the story and you can't leave that unstated. But nope, we don't get that. To make matters worse: Sam died because of a botched sabotage, which means she died because of negligence to her own plan, and to all of her colleagues, she died because of a perplexing non-sabotage case of negligence. According the the game: Altera is very bad, but Altera is also complete right.
I knew Below Zero wasn't going to live up to the first game to me when I found out it was only 900-950m deep. I huge part of the first game was wondering what was down there and progressing to the point that I could explore it. I was disappointed in Below Zero before it was ever released.
My biggest criticism of the game is how the story is presented. In Subnautica, you progressed the story with your own actions, pieced things together, and won with only the help of a PDA. In Below Zero, there are characters telling you what to do, where to go, what you need. You don't feel like you're figuring things out on your own, but being handheld down the path. I understand they wanted to tell more stories than "Person gets stranded on ocean planet and escapes" but I think they should keep to stories that leave the main character isolated, as I believe that isolation is one of Subnautica's biggest draws. Personally, I also find it very comforting.
And, though I know it goes against what I just said, I would also love a co-op mode, maybe max 2 players on a peer to peer network. That amount of fun is too good to pass up.
Isolation and unknown.
2 biggest resons why subnautica is so good.
Can I just say the only thing I was sad about that Seth didn't lament in was the name of the ice worm in the beta: GAINT WORM.
RIP Gaint Worm, you were infinitely more fun than ice worm.
Order 66
When I first play below zero I encountered a chelicerate really quickly, but because it wasn't nearly as scary as subnauticas leviathan I originally thought it was just another random fish that was angry
In a world of "fall of" and "failure of" bait, it's nice to hear someone's personal take on a matter.
Examples of such?
I think the big differences between Subnautica and BZ can be summarised in when you find a new area.
When you find a new area in Below Zero, you think "Oh shit!"
When you find a new area in Subnautica, you think "Ooohhh... shit."
subnautica has that "Oh Shit!" and then you hear *The Roar* of the area and you go "oh. shit." while BZ has you like "aha i see you generic_leviathan_23 trying to hide in this cramped yet completely visible space"
Goddamn I could feel the pain in that ice worm discussion. that genuinely sucks cause it sounded so good. What the fuck
Also, yeah, the ending with Sam is a bit… flat to say the least. Like a balloon deflating flat.
Here’s hoping the studio can learn from below zero and where it succeeded and failed. I think my advice would be how the players own mind will create horrors compared to a ton of horror designs in other words, more subtlety.
They probably wont unfortunately
@@DiabeticNecromancer i wish to say you are a negative nancy, but yer right. They likely won't.
@@chaosinc.382Sadly, yes. They dont want to make atmospheric survival games, they wabt to make a story game with survival elements and less horror, which, frankly, theyre just not good at.
I agree with a lot of your analysis. My main issue is they put so much stuff in a smaller map, making it feel overwhelming and compact. A consequence of this was I found it difficult to find a nice open spot to build my base. Even the open areas felt cramped, and the deep areas either had cellys or squidsharks. I never finished below zero because the crampedness started to bother me a bit, and ended up driving in circles trying to find the entrance to the crystal caves.
I don't necessarily hate below zero, but the original was more enjoyable for me.
Maida's survival despite the severity of the Kharaa doesn't bother me too much... partially because I have a headcanon of how it might have been possible.
Scanning Maida shows that she has one of those "heavily-redacted military ops" type of backgrounds, suggesting that she isn't just some run of the mill mercenary. With that in mind, it's possible that she has some rather extensive cybernetic modifications to enhance her physical capabilities, and with the implications of her background I imagine that those modifications would include something that increases her resistance to things like poison or disease.
Moving forward to the fate of the Degasi crew... we don't actually _know_ how lethal a Kharaa infection would be to humans. The only person that it's likely to have killed was Bart; Maida and Riley survived, and everyone else was killed by either the wildlife, during the ship crashing onto 4546B, or from some kind of mechanical mishap. For all we know, humans could have a natural resistance to the disease that would give them a better chance of surviving (not a _great_ chance, granted, but still).
There's also the fact that, while the Sea Emperor is the only creature known to be _immune_ to Kharaa, many of 4546B's other leviathans appear to at least be _resistant_ to it (judging by the fact that, save for the Frozen Leviathan and the unique strain it's infected with, none of the other leviathans show any symptoms of Kharaa infection); why else would AL-AN make such a risky move of trying to study Sea Dragon eggs if they weren't a possible lead to finding a cure? Maybe Reapers have an enzyme similar to Enzyme 42 that helps to fight off the Kharaa, just not as effectively, and Maida's immune system was bolstered by consuming the Reaper's flesh and organs while she was riding it across the sea?
Personally I just assumed that she simply wasn't there long enough to contract it. It does take several days for you to get the virus. It's quite possible she was simply lucky.
i really like your suggenstion of a silent protagonist. when i played the first game it felt like *I* was the person in the sea moth. but with below zero that was taken away, along with the dread as i wasnt the person in danger
Non-silent protagonist works best in third person games, there's a reason why we rarely see speaking first person protagonists in singleplayer Valve games
I want to share my original iceworm experience, because for me I got lucky and also unlucky.
I encountered it the first time, on foot. No snowfox.
I didnt even realize it was there, just heard quakes occasionally just happening to accidentally sumble past it, scared and tense out my ass.
And then I finally saw it, and I *screamed*
Subnautica as a series, terrifies me. I am on edge every second I am not in my base, sub zero is no exception and that thing made me lose it.
And so I ran back, and i made a prawn suit, and I went back, looking originally for defense.
The next time it came by, my fight or flight kicked in. and BOY did I pick fight.
I spent the next 30 minutes, in a voice call, YELLING at this digital behemoth as I charged it, desperately flailing and repairing as I tried to take it down.And it wouldnt die, I was convinced it was nearly about to go down...
Then someone in the VC asked a question "Hey does it have a hitbox?"
Turns out, it doesnt. My 30 minutes of fighting and sheer panic, determination to fell the beast, didn't matter.
I did nothing to it, my fight was wasted.
I never have gone from so invested to so upset so quickly in my life.
10:25 That reaction is absolutely perfect! I've done precisely that too many times to count. EVERY. SINGLE. PLAYTHROUGH.
On the topic of the music, one thing I did like that they included for Below Zero was how "mystical" they made it feel, which I'm sure was done to match the cold environment of the game, giving it a "Winter Wonderland" kind of vibe and I honestly dig it. Music is one thing that Subnautica never had a problem with to me, in either games.
Subnautica feels like a survival horror and it's world made me feel like Im somewhere I don't belong.
I don't own below zero but after watching your content (including this vid) BZ just feels like a regular survival game, the environments while pretty don't give off that same unnerving feeling I got when exploring them in S1.
The protagonist also kind of takes me out of the game and lacks that "your alone on a foreign planet trying to survive." feeling.
In s1 you were a nameless crew mate (I don't remember thier name😅) who was way out of his depth (sea pun) and I the player felt the exact same way. Sitting in your pod listening to the last recordings of your crew mates call for help, and then arriving at their pod only to see it destroyed and the crew missing. It fills you with dread of the unknown.
While the BZ protagonist talks as if this just a normal day for them, their a professional researcher with lacklustre responses to things because they've seen most of them before. Yeah Al-An Is great but again you don't feel alone on this foreign planet struggling to survive anymore because well...your not.
I don't think that BZ is a bad game but it just doesn't scratch that same survival horror itch like S1 did.
Also Seamoth for life! ❤
something that rubs me the wrong way about below zero is the devs stated (i think) that they were specifically trying to lean away from the horor aspects which feels like a bad idea since its what made the first game so good!
The silent protagonist in the first one, was the glue that made the immersion stick together. It didn't matter who you were, you could immerse yourself. Your reactions were the characters. your thoughts and feelings were the characters.
Below 0 put a talkative, shallow, and utterly horribly written character as the one you're controlling, which completely ripped the immersion out. You're no longer you, getting lost or going through a story. You're now playing specifically this female, with this badly written character arc, and personality.
If they had made the main character another voiceless, nameless individual that you never got to see, that would instantly make the game better in so many ways.
@@Cramblit Agreed. And yeah it doesn't help that the main character is badly written too. Or at least just completely mischaracterized and missing the tone. She's SUPPOSED to be an esteemed xeno-biologist but in the game she talks like every sit-com high school girl ever, she never shows off any xeno-biologist knowledge ever, nt even when literally meeting an alien. She never analizes anything, she just jumps to blind actionism. And the cringe dialogue with Al-An is terrible more often than not. (Though to be fair, Al-An isn't much better in that regard. He's supposed to be from a highly advanced alien race but he doesn't seem to understand the concept of biological lifeforms. He says that their race is a hivemind, but then he says there are some of them who disagree with the hivemind (which is not how a hivemind works) and then he says that he got banished for daring to criticize his superiors (which he expressly stated before was not a thing that could ever happen in their society, and something he outright berated her for as being "inefficient").
While it _is_ cooler that the leviathans looks less like monsters and more like animals, but in an odd sort of way that actually makes it _less_ scary. Its more familiar to our brains. Meanwhile the leviathans in the original Subnautica feel _alien_ because they don't really look like real life animals, but have real enough features to not feel fake.
Honestly, I think you did a very good job conveing those emotions in a matter that makes sense and in a way that some one can walk away from it with a few more new things to take to heart for the secual.
Also, while I personally am not a game dev, I honestly want to recreate a TTRPG encounter to try and recapture the same frantic panic that the OG Ice Worm chase had just to do it justice properly, even if only a little.
I was ready for the Worm rant, cause I felt the frustration watching you first play through
"Subnautica is known for its slow, anxiety-inducing atmosphere, but what if instead of the cold making life slower... it made it faster? What if the creatures there were so well-adapted to the frozen environment that they were actively _more_ lively than the world's warmer counterpart?" I was hoping for that kind of design philosophy with Below Zero, where the atmosphere wasn't lost, but it was a more active environment, and when I experienced the Ice Worm in pre-release, my hopes were incredibly high. I wanted the creatures to actively hunt me down as I scrambled for temporary semblances of safety and constantly had to stress about merely surviving for the next few minutes. "I know I have to press on, this sanctuary will only keep me alive for so long, but out there, I become prey."
I wanted the cold to, contrary to its concept, make me much more energetically fear my environment, a constant chase that really made me _feel_ like I was a prey item. The warm spots are the places where creatures are the most abundant, after all, so I was hoping that the only environmentally harmless places were the ones with the most dangerous fauna. Do you stay away from the predators and eventually get killed by the environment, or do you risk being eaten in exchange for the chance to keep on kicking a little while longer?
I wanted the leviathans to be smaller but much faster threats, that could chase me through cracks and crevices just as well as I could swim through them. No place underwater would be safe for long, and just building a home-base that would stand on its own would require careful risk-analysis. Your caveman brain tells you that you should huddle up in the cold, but in this place, you don't get that luxury unless you really work for it.
I wanted a design philosophy that would make Below Zero into the original's more energetic, active counterpart, but instead, I just got annoyance and strangely-baked nonsense. It didn't need a complex story, or such a large cast of characters. It needed a compact environment with few but incredible characters, rather than cramming just-barely-character-development, horrible humor, several people's stories, and world-building that you see exactly once and move on into a game that just can't comfortably fit all of that.
If the story was comprised exclusively of the Precursors, the corporate sellout and the down-to-earth Sea Truck driver, and Robin and Sam's journey, I'd _love_ the story. Instead, they crammed about double the characters they needed into it, with voice logs that are literally just dead air, and just made so much _noise_ that you can't sit back and enjoy the vibes of this would-be beautiful game for even a few seconds. Hear me out:
What if the down-to-earth Sea Truck driver was tasked by the corporate sellout to "dispose of" Sam, on threat of him having the same done to him? What if instead of that lame-ass hero story of Robin eliminating Kharaa, there's instead a big reveal that Alterra already has it in its arsenal, and you simply can't see whatever horrible things they're doing with it because you're stranded on this frozen planet? What if that proves to be Alterra's semi-downfall, as revealed in a voice-log by the down-to-earth guy or the corporate sellout having another dry announcement? I've seen the concept art for potential future games, and it would set the universe up nicely for a less corporatized future.
To marguerit: It could be that the leviathans have their own kind of enzyme 42 seeing none of them having the kharaa virus. She survived by eating the raw meat of the reaper that may have contained that enzyme... sorry for spelling mistakes (Im sitting in school but got my work done so im watching rn)
This helps, but the first story indicates only the sea emperor is producing the enzyme, so we still have a plot hole... unless it wasn't a reaper but a sea dragon. Because a sea dragon just so happens appears to be the most closely related extant leviathan to the sea emperor AND it is the leviathan that actually fits the description of what attacked the Degasi survivors in the first game. I just cannot get over this massive continuity error to such a poignant plot point.
@@orthochronicity6428no no, the kharaa is not so bad and you can cure it by combining grass and chillis because fuck you and the stakes
@@orthochronicity6428 no no. It makes sense: Sea emperor gives the enzymes to the peepers -> peepers get eaten by reapers -> marguerit eates reaper = shes cured.
@@Arowstorm_ Sorry, but I've been eating peepers for years, and I only get cured by putting the hatching enzymes together. She may have just been immune, although she was already infected by the time they all went to the Jellyshroom base. Face it, her survival makes no sense whatsoever, she is still an awesome character, but that does not disguise the huge plothole surrounding her survival.
I think the problem with below zero is shift of narrative and priorities. Original game did very cool thing with it's storytelling, i think you talked about it in the retrospective to it: It didn't force you to progress the story. You could stay in safe shallows, and wait for your rescue, but then you get a distress signal. There is a hope that someone survived. You rush to the place through fear, and find only remains of the pod. Perhaps you were too late, maybe they left without you, or maybe, just maybe you're going insane, and there were nobody there in the first place. The game doesn't tell you straight ahead that there is nobody, but you. Part of your brain thinks that it was your fault. You were too slow. And then another. And then another. Then rescue comes... And then assured that there is no escaping this planet that easily... You start to poke around. Exploring. You find that gun that shot your way out can be turned off. You try, and then... Your brain starts a dreadful timer. Your days are numbered. The race between you and infection starts. But there is no timer, there is no day that you will perish on, it's all comes from you. Subnautica doesn't tell you a story, the game is not a book, it's a dnd session. There is narrative, and plot points, but besides that: "You see a mountain? You can climb on it."
And below zero tried to make you follow a story. It was still a dnd campaign, but now there were arrows everywhere, telling you were to go, and i think that's the big problem. They should've stuck with either immersive experience, or detailed, narrow and nuanced story. That's probably why worm was "broken". I guess this game was supposed to be much more story driven, but last second developers tried to catch the feeling of the first game.
I propose that they stick to something concrete. Make a more or less linear game about a story, that would be interesting to play through. Double down on chases, stealth, and dire situation, but make some room for us to breathe in the atmosphere.
An interesting idea would be to make third game about an actual AlterA(Umbrella) employee, somebody like Greg, simple man, on a simple job, that stumbles on something that sends the entire facility into fire and flames... Damn... Gotta go play half-life i guess...
Below Zero didn't do it for me for three main reasons.
1. The map was way too claustrophobic and didn't allow for the same element of exploration and loneliness that you felt in the original game because of just how vast the map was. It just felt like you HAD to go exactly where the game wanted you to.
2. The element of terror wasn't there. The devs quite literally just came out and said that they wanted to do away with the horror element of the game which is partially what made the game so good for me. This decision from the devs essentially made interactions with the leviathans more of a nuisance than something that should be avoided and feared. The map is also just a lot brighter and vibrant which once again removed the element of terror.
3. The story just didn't make much sense? Like there were a bunch of plotholes which made you think that either the main characters were gonna find another clue later, or were just plain stupid. After a while I just completely forgot about trying to figure out Sam's story with the fact that the architect storyline was sorta just pushed down my throat instead of laid out in that almost perfect way that it was in the original game.
Don't get me wrong, I still somewhat enjoyed the game. But it just didn't do it for me the same way that subnautica 1 did.
Edit: fuuuuuuuuck I didn’t watch the video all the way through while writing this comment so I pretty much just ended parroting Seth’s points in the comments
De-emphasizing the deep sea terror elements of the game would've been fine if they committed to it, I think. But they didn't. There are still leviathans and other predators, they're just annoying instead of intimidating and your tools for dealing with them are neutered so the best strategy is to just mindlessly zoom past them and let them smack you around then repair the damage off afterwards. It's absolutely baffling, it's like they threw them in there just because they knew otherwise the game would mostly just be you pointlessly floating through empty corridors.
@@NuvizzleI disagree with your first point. Besides exploration, the terror and overcoming it to escape was a manor facet of the first game. It should never have been done away with.
I did a little digging and found something interesting:
Apparently the writer who did the whole story for subnautica, Tom Jubert, was also writing for sub zero, but left the company around 2020. Leaving two other writers, Zaire Lanier and Brittney Morris, to be the primary writers for the rest of development (I'm not sure if they already worked on the project or were hired after Tom left). Strangely, it seems that these two writers had no published games credited to them at the time and, as far as I could find, sub zero was their first project.
On Tom's blog (around 2018) he hinted at the ending that you mentioned used to be in the game, specifically mentioning Al-An and that you help build him a body.
It seems to me that the reason the story is so poorly executed is because the rewrite might have taken place after Tom left the project, with the new story being written by a duo who were underexperienced at the time.
Tom even stats in a later post that subnautica was one of the most difficult writing tasks he has ever had, so it seems a bit odd that the company would replace him with people who don't have anywhere near his level of experience.
Also, I couldn't find any hint as to the reason Tom left, but the credits list him as "additional writing", which to me sounds like the company only left him in because they were legally obligated to.
Perhaps some bad blood lead to him leaving suddenly, which might have made the company desperate to find new writers. Or perhaps Zaire and Brittney had already been working on the project and Tom simply couldn't find common ground with their vision of the narrative. I don't know, and I can't be bothered to look any deeper.
Below Zero saddens me a bit. It's an ok game I suppose, but it doesn't hold a candle to the first, and I can't help but see it's lost potential.
Also, before anyone askes, no this isn't stalking. All of this information is publicly available, and most of it I just got from cross-referencing the credits of the two games and skimming through Tom's blog. Did you know he wrote for Talos principle 1 and 2? I sure didn't.
If I remember correctly, he made a gay joke and was 'asked politely' to leave (fired but was reported to leave on his own desire(which is a bullshit clause corps hide in contract)) as the two decided to write subnautica bz, with below zero qualifications to do so... the overall result speaks for itself... I got back into Below Zero with the Story Disabled mode and found it Vastly more enjoyable than the original run for one simple reason... (you don't have someone going "oh this area has nothing to see, go elsewhere. Oh look a fish, how intriguing...") robin actually has a LONG time she SHUTS UP... allowing me to get some interest in the game and feeling like it is worth playing...
@@jakeforgey5378Probably correct, they also fired the main sound designer of the first game Simon Chylinski over tweets. People left there are obviously not able to continue with the same level of quality so I have little hope for another Subnautica.
@@miroslavvales2069 Honestly part of it was how loud BZ is, how little peace and quiet you get from Robin and AL-AN...
if Subnautica 2(3) ends up with seatruck, and they do the following, No PD upgrade, Generator Module for Battery (2 slots for battery recharge) and a single Powecell slot with something like the Bioreactor, and a greenhouse module or make the aquarium module able to breed fish put inside but not able to draw others in. Then they will at least have improved the Seatruck.
If they revert the PDA to something you can understand, and keep political jokes out (the command center, the one where upon building the first time at each base it says something about changing power, but not society or something shit like that, it was a terrible joke), then the PDA will be worth using...
If they dial down the ambient sounds to soemthing between both Subnautica and BZ it will be fine... as for protag... they just need to add an option to shut the Player Character's voice off when not in 'cutscenes' or a slider with 0 being they shut up and imitate Ryley, and 10 being Robin... that would be best actually...
As for story, make it have two options Story/Campaign mode with story focus and they do whatever the hell the story mode is for it, and Survival/Crashlander Mode, pretty much a throwback to Subnautica 1 in regards to npcs and story mode progression.
If they add in a mixed mode with it being halfway survival-'horror' typing and survival-story mode like BZ was... with a decent story or at least one NOT REUSING anything from Subnautica and BZ climate wise or critter wise... and overall critter ammount with maybe half the visual static in small areas as BZ had and the same as Subnautica had in Vast Deep areas, then it will be a lot better...
Oh and they should ditch landbased things unless they make them a one and done thing if they do reuse the damned snowfox... and keep literal climate consistant rather than 10 second storms that do nothing but annoy you with how the make the PDA a broken record of FiNd ShElTeR!
@@jakeforgey5378yea, I don't think they will improve anything, though expect a lot more political jokes, the company decided to go woke so the only thing left to do is to go broke. Something like Volition with Saints Row.
@@miroslavvales2069 So long as it isn't as dumb of a joke as the BZ power structure joke I can probably tolerate it... that one was just utterly dumb and failed...
one thing i think the cover art of the original does so well is it doesnt give anything away. it doesnt show you a reaper or even a bone shark. all it shows is an innocent man swimming through an innocent reef looking at an innocent fish. this makes seeing these massive leviathans or crab snakes or whatever that much more scary. leaving it so simple creates a sense of actual exploration of the game like you are really finding these "monsters" for yourself as opposed to seeing them on the cover of the game more or less going in expecting big creatures that want to kill you.
The main issue i have with below zero is that you get to comfortable croosing around in your seatruck around the open ocean. The chelicerates just aren't that dangerous of a threat and don't instill the same sense of dread and unease the reaper leviathan did.
What this game really needed was more space between points of interest and one more larger dangerous leviathan that can twoshot the seatruck like the reaper could.
Right now the map just feels like one small bay instead of a vast ocean. It isn't because of the land it is because everything is just packed together to densely. In below zero you can reach every point of interest in minutes meanwhile in the original subnautica it was a long trip till you reached one of the games points of interests.
Most of below zeros problems could have been fixed if they had paid more closer attention to what had maid the original subnauticas experience so memorable and unique.
In summary the things that made the original so great was
-the vast open spaces
-the distance between points of interest
-the constant fear of running in to a reaper leviathan.
-the progression of the story not being pointed out but instead self discovered by the player themselves.
-Limited use of voice acting that allows players to identify and immerse themselves in the game.
Since it was brought up specifically for that exact reason, I feel like it's warranted.
It was November 10, 2017, the game had just come out into full release, and that day was the day that I had my very first Tea Kwon Do Tournament. I had been playing for a couple of weeks up to that point, and had all but 1 or two fragments of the Cyclops Engine blueprint. When I finally found and discovered the Degasi base in the Jellyshroom caves, I found the remaining pieces, that was the last thing that I did just before leaving to the tournament early in the morning. I swear as I was leaving out to the car, I was more hype for the fact that I had unlocked the Cyclops, than I was for my very first tournament.
Every moment of the original game was masterfully crafted. From the environments, to the little story that there was. Every byte of that game was glorious, and there's a reason that I've gone through it, what, 8, 9 times now, every one of them at the very least getting the cure.
memories, i remember going to school wanting to play the shit out of it every day
"What about the snow fox you may ask... I think the music is also a point worth talking about." 11:41
Well, Altara was right about one thing: Sam did kinda die from negligence, namely blowing herself up.
Its kinda a let down that that is how hat story arc ended. She blew herself up and everyone evacuated for no apparent reason.
It would have been cool if like the explosion caused another outbrake and that is why altara evacuated the planet and then Robin has to cure it or something
Immersion and atmosphere are the most important parts of Subnautica for me personally
I remember one other thing the Early Access Ice Worm Experience (TM) was robbed of in the full release, although its exclusion is perhaps a bit more understandable:
*GAINT WORM*
In other news, glad this is finally out, hope you can get a bit of rest now that it's off your docket.
Supposedly, Maida survived because of the flesh of the reaper. Since the reaper and emperor are related (if you stretch things a bit) the Reaper produces enough Enzyme 42 inside of itself to keep her alive.
Okay I could get behind that logic if not for the tiny little fact that had the game not been set TEN TO TWELVE years after that incident! Also again judging from previous people infected with kharaa you basically die within a few months of being infected that's being genours. Also if I recall correctly sure the reapers might have Enzyme 42 in them however it is not concentrated enough to be an effective cure otherwise 4546B wouldn't have been almost at the last grasp of life that it is in the first game.
@@DayoDusk I’m not saying it’s perfect I’m just saying it might have something to do with it. Other than that though you are completely right.
Well, it can also be a result of the peepers as well.
Remember, Bart basically stayed on the island till his death. And it is never said if he ate peepers and given the Peepers are canonical the reason why any life is still around the planet, maybe they are the reason she is still around till the Emperors were hatched and cured the planet.
@@thevenomspino That also makes sense.
@@thevenomspinoOnly the peepers around the area we explore in the first game carried the enzyme, and Maida was already infected and displaying symptoms when she rode that Reaper off into the sunset. Out in the open sea there was nothing but ghost leviathans.
Hell, this actually makes the whole plot of Below Zero moot: Kharaa had clearly spread to the entire planet, only the area accessible to the Sea Emperor's containment unit bore life because of its efforts at spreading the enzyme. The pole should have been either completely barren, or populated only by Kharaa-resistant leviathans because it takes way longer than 12 years for new life to colonize an area to that level, much less evolve to fit it.
Subnautice is such a triumph in atmosphere that I haven't really experienced since Metroid Prime. It's just to weird that Below Zero not only dropped the ball on building on that, but.. They had something extremely atmospheric but different (the tense fight with the ice worm), which they somehow managed to fuck up.
goes to show how good Simon Chylinski was for the sound design
and they fired him over an "I identify as an apache attack helicopter" joke of all fucking things. Give my man his job back!
When you mentioned not wanting to meet any of the characters, your delivery on "And I don't want to" caught me so off guard and was so perfect that I had to pause the video to laugh so I wouldn't miss anything. I could not agree more with all the points you made and I 100% agree with the stances you take (especially with the ice worm).
So many thoughts and opinions id like to add though one I can confidently say is that the sea truck ruined my experience, while the seamoth was nimble but couldn't go deep and the cyclops was heavy and slow but allowed you to feel a little safer; the sea truck felt like neither, a leviathan couldn't be escaped without cheaply using the shock, and you couldn't "hide" either, instead it triggered a response for me to just get out of the seat and stand in the truck, which I than realize caused the agro of the leviathans to disappear and you could sit in the path of any leviathan (to which I find stupid why are they pathed) and just stand inside the truck with no consequences
The seatruck is the spork of vehicles. It does the job of both a seamoth and a cyclops, but neither as well.
@@centurosproductions8827 it felt like instead of being half seamoth and half cyclops it was more 1/3 of each but atleast it was that together
I'm still a firm believer they should've gone with the hover truck from the concept art. Something like a mobile moonpool, big enough to dock a prawn or sea moth and walk around it a bit, but small enough it's fun to drive around.
Make it like an actual hover craft, that goes over ice and water without noticeable changes. And make it fairly fast. But it cannot go underwater.
It'd take that first moment in subnautica where you have to dive from your life pod into an unknown ocean, and make it so every single time you've moved your truck, you're basically jumping into the ocean blind. Anything could be beneath you, anything could've been chasing you.
Or if you take it on the glacier with the prawn suit. The ice worm would easily detect your truck, so it's a gamble between keeping your mobile base close at hand, and wanting to keep your base alive .
@@mickys8065 huh. Never seen it sound interesting
@@mickys8065 Oh wow, that would've been amazing. Grappling out of your sea truck into the depths and then panicking as you realise where you've dropped would've been amazing.
Great video. I just wanted to support your comments on the sound design and the music as you struck me as apprehensive in making them. IMO the loss of Simon Chylinski on Below Zero is one of the most impactful changes in the sequel and it’s all the lesser for it.
The two main issues I felt with Below Zero compared to base Subnautica is that I couldn't recognize any of the map and the Leviathans didn't feel threatening enough.
The map had a lot of distinct locations, sure, but they felt... difficult to navigate. I could tell that going in certain directions led me to some of the most common biomes, sure, but I never felt like I knew where to go to get to specific locations - especially the deeper I went. The deeper I went and the more tunnels and underground caverns I found, the more I felt like I spent two or three times the amount of energy I was supposed to just figuring out how to get to actual objectives - or worse, how to get out. The crystal caverns where the Shadow Leviathans are most common were the worst of this for me, because I honestly couldn't find the exit and felt constantly pressured and warded away from properly exploring by their near-omnipresence.
As for not being threatened... The stalkers in base Subnautica aren't threatening. They and the Gasbags will spook you the first few times you see them, but pretty soon they're more like an environmental hazard than anything. Not friends, but friendly so long as you know what you're doing. Meanwhile the actual Leviathans are, one and all, terrifying.
But in Below Zero... there's a few different sharks that are mostly just annoying and feel far too common, and then there's the Chelicerae which... just feels like a bigger shark. And again, feels too common. The Shadow Leviathan is properly terrifying, but as I iterated above - the pressure they put on me in the crystal caverns went past terrifying into just plain frustrating and annoying, because there was barely anywhere in those caverns where one wouldn't pop out of fucking nowhere if I took a minute to collect myself and try to retrace my steps.
Oh - this is kind of bizarre. I've just been watching your various videos, and click on the 'next one'. And then after I'm done watching it, I realize this was literally released 2h ago, that's neat! Thank you for your efforts :)
I liked Below Zero, but I absolutely loved the original. I feel like you cover pretty much all points I could think of. I will say, absolutely respect the devs for attempting to branch out, try things, and change up the formula a bit. Without adapting and change, you can't find more fantastic things to put into your games, even if it comes with the downside that sometimes you just don't stick the landing. I'm looking forward to see what they are trying next
One of my personal favorite things was to find that leviathan in the ice - I consistently had that feeling of dread, that it could just break out at any moment, especially once the virus was cured. And... Truth be told, I think it would've been absolutely amazing, to just hear a loud crash in the distance at some point, and then when you go to inspect the ice again, the creature would be gone. I'm not sure if it would be better, but it certainly would've made me feel uneasy for the rest of the game, even if it wouldn't ever have showed up directly anymore (maybe in an ending sequence or something)
I didn't think Alan would smack me with a gut punch but hearing them talk about hope genuinely choked me up.
Video slapped. Thank you for your insights.
50:11 this probably had to do with the re-write if I were to guess, given that Sam was still alive in the Og script it would only make sense that she would have originally been an active player in the frozen leviathan story so it seems likely that after the re-write was decided, they had to rush the expansion for her death while still keeping the leviathan in some way since they already had invested the resources into it. Thus leading to the lackluster ending of that storyline. But Al-an’s story on the other hand was seemingly not changed that much from the before the re-write, to the final game. Thus why it’s so much better, since the resources weren’t mishandled as badly.
54:25 I agree on this (kinda). A silent protagonist is definitely a good choice from a gameplay standpoint (assuming that the game is focused on the horror side of things) something that I think could be a cool compromise to make everyone at least partially happy is if we only had the protagonist speak in pda survival-(voice)log entries similar to how Robin does at the beginning early game in below zero. Things like, story progression, scanning a predator leviathan, crafting a submarine. Could all be cool little things to give a little *character* to our main character without risking sacrificing tension in an otherwise tense moment.
I agree with pretty much everything you said.
Additionally, the external environment was so hostile at times that you'd actually feel safer and more comfortable in the water, which I don't think its something we would want in a Subnautica game...
Alex Ries has a very distinct style when it comes to creatures (e.g. the four-part mouth seen on the chelicerate, ice worm, and pinnacarid, the four eyes seen on many other creatures such as the pengwings and shadow leviathan) and he puts a TON of thought into how a creature would fit in its environment, which is why the leviathans seem so plausible. This dude has put years into speculative biology, and I really look up to him. Just look at the Birrin Project!
The biggest reason I have way more hours in BZ than base Subnautica is because of the custom mode, followed shortly after the fact that I don't need to speedrun the main storyline to not worry about the space aids infecting my pets.
Finally, I can binge watch the entire two series and the two analysis's on it.
56:44 The song is "Moon Theme" from the NES Duck Tales game. searching "duck tales moon theme" usually gets it.
Thanks.
the ice worm looks like a lost planet enemy and that frantic chase absolutely suits it
Was waiting for this, got my popcorn ready ;)
51:30 Yeah, I can agree with damn near all these points. Honestly, I hated the character scripts the most out of everything. The side characters felt almost unfinished while the MC feels like they wanted her talking all her feelings out loud for the player without thinking about how her character would feel, quantity over quality of lines. I've noticed a lot of writing like this for MCs but it's always annoying as hell
Seak fluid intake
I think watching this Video made me realize just WHY these two, very similar games, feel so different. Subnautica1 always had a mysterious feel to it. You are on this planet by accident, everything is new and you're fighting for your own survival. Below Zero feels more like you're on a mission, you have a purpose on this planet. You chose to come here. Its not as scary, it feels more vibrant and cluddered since Robin knew what she was getting into. The game does what it proclaims to be quite well, but that's not something we OG Subnautica fans want out of a Subnautica game. Lets hope Subnautica2 can give us this feeling of being lost in an Alien Ocean again, instead of being there on purpose.
One of the worst sequels of all time. God, I'm still mad.
Agreed
most immersion breaking thing in the game for me is the narrator, makes you not feel alone and isolated
Holy crap! This is an amazing video man, keep up the good work! ❤
Subnautica is an atmospheric scifi survival game. Subnautica 2 is an atmospheric scifi trucking simulator.
Hehe among us
fantastic content aside, you’re an incredibly engaging speaker. great music choice, great inflection, the dedication to redoing lost footage on an older version…i’m only halfway through this video and super impressed. subscribed :)
I really strongly resonated with your points, while also providing some room for counter arguments, to discuss over. Might just be one of the best-structured videos ive seen in a darn WHILE. kept me interested the whole thing through. Btw absolutely love how you utilised your avatar at the beginning segment..
Another important aspect of the first game that gave it the atmosphere below zero seemed to be missing was the fact that you were always completely alone. In below zero, you were stuck with ALAN for the entire game, Marguerite kept showing up, there were man-made habitats and structures all over the place, and the audio logs were more numerous and based on more recent events.
this was already such a great and thoughtful assessment of bz but the segment about al-an REALLY sold it for me. theyve been one of my favorite characters since early access and its so nice seeing others with the same fondness for them :) al-an our dearly beloved
40:14 the dialogue being what it is is kinda good if you ask me since it's what I'd imagine mega corporation HR Managers would sound like when they are surrounded by ice and under a veil of extreme secrecy while still trying to uphold that corporate cheery attitude. It sounds extremely tensed and like it's about to give.
13:35 honestly, the one thing that I like from below zero that should be in the original is the jukebox, because it adds a feeling of safety in your base, unlike the exact same music as if you were outside the habitat. You feel absolutely the same when in or outside the habitat in the original with the creepy ambience, but in below zero, if it had better ambience, you would be still terrified if anything would show up but then, you slowly hear the jukebox play as you get closer to your base.
Another thing I like is how everything feels more alive without the kharra as a threat, I don't know if that was on purpose... but it fits the story.
Preversions are a doubled edge sword, a lot of the time they are useful to get player feedback and help with changing the game, but when you change a section and make it 10x worse like the Ice Worm section, then you WILL be called out for it. They should just go back and revert the changes, but we dont know if they have the data to restore that previous version.
Absolutely freakin fantastic video! Words can't express just how much I enjoy this and the last subnautica video, but numbers can. 11/10 would watch again
There were other missed opportunities with the previous story iterations that I really regret not getting. The reason the story changed was because their original creative writer moved on to a different company before the ending was made. In a deal, he allowed them to keep the frame work for the story so long as they did something themselves with it leaving it all feeling so forced at times. There was even a big moment I missed personally more then all where there was an emperor leviathan in the large lilypad zone (most likely because it probably was meant to be more then just 2 years between the games story-wise) and that emperor was meant to be one of the surviving babies from the first game. It was meant to talk to you and had such a lovely set of dialogue as if it remembers seeing your kind before. A lovely nod to one of the best plot points of the first game without letting it smother the entire story of the newer game so it can remain it's own entity.
there were some things I LOVED about below zero that made it such a breath of fresh air to play. I have spent way too much time customizing and expanding and decorating my base than I should have. Being able to listen to your own custom tracks in the base is a lot of fun too, especially with so many extra things to build with. I always had issues with not being able to turn the light/map on and off easily independently of each other with my seaglide which im glad is different in below zero, but I had NO idea how much I wanted that auto swim/drive key. However at some point I realized all of the things I absolutely loved about below zero that werent in the first game were just QoL things or other stuff that could always just be added to the base game
Also the ice worms were TERRIFYING at first but once I realized they just werent that big of a threat they went from something that felt elusive and scary to just constant and annoying. My proposed fix for the ice worms would be some sort of way to make them FAR more deadly and risky to encounter but also wouldn't show up as quickly. maybe they would come up if you made to much noise without revealing themselves just burrowing around trying to find out what made a racket, and if they could pinpoint the source it would be trouble. However I used a thumper only twice and im glad to announce that one of them fell through the map and as far as I know the marker distance # is still increasing. Was fun every once in a while to look down and see it had gone another few thousand meters
Loved this video, thanks for the thoughtful look at these games
These longer review videos are a joy to watch and listen to. I loved your Dark Souls and Subnautica retrospectives and this is a spectacular addition. Thank you for sharing your thoughts Seth.
Making Robin do an animation where they're almost knocked off but managed to hold on would have even better than simply staying on. Adding realism, but not sacrificing gameplay.
About the music soundtrack, one thing I learned at music production school is that simplicity is often better when it comes to background music because its supposed to add to whatever visual you have instead of being its own stand alone track.
I remember playing an early build and having a very similar ice worm experience. It was so thrilling, like a Mad Max meets Dune chase scene! Then when I played the full release, I had the exact same buggy disappointing mess. I’m so glad you had the same feeling, you articulated it perfectly. Also your voice is really nice, I’m glad I got randomly recommended this video (subbed)
Let us compare the way the Reaper and the Cheli are treated.
The reaper leviathan truly feels like you’re in danger when they are around. The devs placed these guys around perfectly, making them swim in murky water so you can barely see their shape until they are already close. Defending yourself from them is a game of stealth, as they are blind but have incredibly hearing, meaning you either have to go back the way you came or ditch your ride if you came in a seamoth or PRAWN. And that roar. When they roar in the distance, their literally ambient growls, it blends in so well with the background noise that you have to stop and look around to make sure that you really did just what what you heard. And when they see you and start hunting you, that deep, throaty roar instills terror and a sense of being dwarfed. Where they placed it in the environment is also genius, almost every reaper is in completely open water near the sea floor without any obstacles the hide behind, but the murky water hides it so well anyway. And this means you cannot see them, and yet you are out in the open with nowhere to hide. Finally we have that design. That nightmarish, entirely alien face with that claws on the side of its head that look beyond fucked up. It almost had a humanoid face, but more akin to a monster than anything recognizably human.
The chelicerate is almost always just there. I can see it far away in the distance, it has such a striking color and it doesn’t really do murky water. They hunt you based off of radius and sight, so having to deal with them is more of an inevitability than reduces the fear factor. Its roar is airy and quiet, it isn’t intimidating at all. I do love the design, but where they place it feels off. It feels too big for where it roams, and the only reason you’d not see it is because it is hiding behind objects. You can so easily hide as well, getting somewhere where they cannot follow and attack you.
I think the most disappointing thing about BZ is the lack of a crushing feel of complete and utter solitude. In subnotica you swam around alone, the pda and whatever vehicles you brought as your only companions. For the first half of the game you feel like gour right on the edge of finding someone, of not being alone anymore, just to have that feeling, that hope, ripped away again and again.
By the time you (or at least me) find the final escape pod it become soul crushingly clear that there is no one. When i saw the sunbeam get distroyed by the gun I actually had tears in my eyes. I was so happy about the idea of seeing another person that i had to put the game down for a few days because i felt so sad and frustrated that thr only other humans i could have seen were gone. Just like that. It made me even more determined to finish the game when i got back on just to spite who or whatever had made that gun just to spite them and say "You cant keep me here. Stop trying."
The first time i saw the sea emperor vision i practically screamed because it was so unexpected. I was so fricken scared that it was trying to kill or trick me because the only experience i had had with anything from another sentient being had killed what i thought was my only way off world. When i got to the containment facility I was happy to see something that although wasnt a human, could talk to me. That wanted to help somehow. Even if it was for a favor. I cried when i came back to tell her i was leaving the planet (i know you cant actually talk to her but still) and found her actually dead, lying on the sand because she wasnt just some alien. She was a friend at that point, the only other person on the planet, and she was gone. I was alone again.
I miss the freling of being completely alone and almost completely helpless on an alien world with no hope of leaving or seeing another human again and SubZero ripped that away at the very start by giving us a talking protagonist (witch im not against) and makeing it clear there were people here. I loved meeting Margaret shes sarcastic and a little bit of an asshole (understandably) and it was fun to hear her and Sam bantering but it took away some of what was so special about Subnotica for me. I really hope we get more games like the first Subnotica but my standards are pretty high at this point.
Another problem with Al-An's plot arch is this:
Al-An came to 4546b to research a cure for Kharaa
His direct actions led to an accidental release of the disease and a subsequent mass extinction event.
Shouldn't he have some interest in obtaining the cure and bringing it back with him?
Why does he appear so disinterested in the plot of Alterra trying to experiment with Kharaa? That should be a big deal to him!
I mean, it's possible that his "preparations to leave" included gathering a sample of enzyme 42, but it's odd that this would never be hinted at.
Also, the fact that anything is even alive at the arctic zone is surprising. Clearly, many of the species there evolved in that climate and didn't migrate from the crater in S1. We also know that Kharaa had been present in the arctic area due to the frozen leviathan. I suppose that you could make a case that the climate inhibited Kharaa and that's even what cured Marguerite, but if the cure was that simple, surely the precursors would have already known that. Especially since they had facilities in that region.
There were so many things I liked about the BZ story, but it also had too many problems that yank you out of the experience.
14:40 Funny that you picked Lava Castle as an example. That track was the reason why i bought the soundtrack of the game separately - so I could use it in my Shadowrun-TTRPG-group when i sent my players and their characters to investigate an underwater habitat housing their then-antagonist and his followers. An individual deliberately tying to eradicate a large urban sprawl not too far away... And with underwater visibility in that area being basically zero (any resemblance to the crash-zone being purely accidental of course). Needless to say that track cranked their attention to the limit.