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[Subnautica] Below Zero Launch on May 14th

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  • ViskodViskod Registered User regular
    Took them long enough.

    Still waiting on that Cyclops dock.

    I want to like Subzero but it’s map layout is atrocious. The biomes by themselves are nice but the overall flow is terrible.

    The island in the middle of the water portion totally breaks up the flow of building a base and slowly going further and further out and deeper down.

    There’s also no good spot on land to build a large main base on the edge of the water that goes down into the water from the surface.

    It just can’t compare to how intelligently the map from the first game was laid out.

  • Ninja Snarl PNinja Snarl P My helmet is my burden. Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered User regular
    Yeah, there is, sadly, just way too much shifting between land and sea and running your ass all over the surface. Chasing clues across a desolate frozen wasteland was just not my idea of entertaining, and the second game never gets anywhere near touching on those primal fears like the original. Those tunnels with the friendly grabby-critters especially left a bad taste in my mouth; I spent literally hours searching for an upgrade because literally one piece of it spawns in one place and it's embedded around all those same-looking nests. I had been swimming over it for ages before I finally lost my patience and looked it up.

    And honestly, the game is just too shallow. I mean literally shallow. For the original game, you hit those underground mushrooms after your first set of depth upgrades and it's a combination of pretty neat and pretty get me the fuck away from these snake things. Then you have to head down into a coral forest and it's all "wow, neat". Then you have to start heading down past electric murder squidcrabs and synthetic killdroids and you start going "holy fuck, how far down does this go and what the fuck else is down here?" In the second game, they end up arranging the zones more like across a broad plate than stacking them, and the deeper areas don't even have a lot of reason for you to go down there.

    The map in the second game is just... weird. The whole central area is obnoxious desolate volcano and the story bits are really scattered, so there's never really a good place to set up shop. Having to deal with the cold mechanic really didn't help the surface areas, which feel hugely limited after being able to swim around everywhere else. Way too many narrow tunnels, above and below the surface; having to deal with underwater ice tunnels was especially bad and aggravating. I know they wanted to force you out of the safety of a vehicle but c'mon, most of the tension of the original was because of implied threat, not actual threat. Since you have that smaller sea truck this time instead of the Cyclops, it also meant that they really had to get restrictive with those tunnels to dissuade taking a vehicle down there, which just felt terribly artificial to me.

    Once I got into the later part of the game and was having to chase down way too much shit on land, I honestly just used to glitchiness of the Prawn grappling hooks to skip most of the terrain. You could easily glitch enough height and velocity to cover hundreds of meters at a time and hop on top of the level geometry, letting you shortcut an absurd amount of circuitous twisting-turning canyons and tedious worm-harassed expanses. I just didn't have any more patience at that point for trying to navigate even more identical-looking ice walls.

  • MorninglordMorninglord I'm tired of being Batman, so today I'll be Owl.Registered User regular
    edited September 2022
    The land stuff worked well enough for me, even though I didn't have the prawn grappling hook, or even the prawn for ages. I explored everywhere thoroughly.

    My main big trick was realising if you take the resources for a small habitat and a door with you, you can warm up anywhere. I actually ended up walking all over the entire land area soon after finding it and even found the outside of a fair few endgame places I was meant to go to much later, and then wandered out again, and didnt have to come back until much later. Later I used that scooter thing, which warms you up. Eventually I got the prawn, but again, I had no grappling hook. By the time I was meant to go back, I realised where it wanted me to go, and I had mapped out how to get there easily and safely, so I just went there.

    Quite enjoyed the entire game, land and water, resource management and etc.

    But I have very good spatial navigation. I did not get lost in any ice caves or anything like that, the closest I ever came to getting lost underground in subnautica was in the big mushroom in 1, which was just too cramped and I forgot one way up and died. I had a really good adventure in one cave where I decided to follow a path in and then it kept on going and I kept wondering if I should turn back, but I decided to continue, and then I finally found a new way out with very low oxygen and had to suck some off a nearby fish. I look back on that as a really good memory. Survivalist adventure!

    Every other enclosed area didn't really rate since I automatically spatially mapped it on the way in, and if I was in doubt, I used the tool designed for that to lay beacons.

    Very good survival game, forced me to use survival tools!

    Glitched ice worms made those sections a bit frustrating at times, since they were really erratic and sometimes bugged the fuck out. Everything else is absolutely fantastic.

    In particular I enjoyed making multiple bases, and they actually give you the ability to make a stash that can swap items between areas. I had like three or four small mini bases at the end spread around the map, felt very survivalist instead of lord of the ocean in your giant castle from the first game. Which is fair, they don't all have to be the same. Your vehicle doubles as a portable mini base as well with a fabricator, and much much more mobile and handy than the cyclops, especially detaching the front briefly to explore tighter areas.

    Morninglord on
    (PSN: Morninglord) (Steam: Morninglord) (WiiU: Morninglord22) I like to record and toss up a lot of random gaming videos here.
  • ViskodViskod Registered User regular
    I had multiple smaller bases in most zones in the first game, and I tried making little outposts in this game as well but with all of the new and great features for base building that Subzero implemented, they don't have an ideal spot to make huge "home base" as it were.

    The easiest way to fix the water portion of Subzero's map is to just make the main island a floating island like the first game, and make the volcanic sections all around it under the water its own zone beneath it that the twisting bridges opens up into as you go deeper.

    Also cut the size of the main land area by at least half. There's way too much "space that's here just to be space" there that gets in the way.

  • MorninglordMorninglord I'm tired of being Batman, so today I'll be Owl.Registered User regular
    edited September 2022
    I made my main base on the edge of the starting area hanging over the twisting bridges.

    I've seen a base made in that giant jellyfish, which is cool as heck.

    Morninglord on
    (PSN: Morninglord) (Steam: Morninglord) (WiiU: Morninglord22) I like to record and toss up a lot of random gaming videos here.
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