"As Unknown Worlds’ sole stockholder, Krafton had invested $500 million in the success of not only Subnautica 2, but also Subnautica 3, Subnautica 4, and any other future Subnautica franchise product.”
Ew. Survival games benefit more than most genres from iteration, but that’s better done as updates and expansions unless they make a truly qualitative leap, which I doubt will happen under their leadership. This reeks of them wanting to pump out as many full-priced titles as possible, probably with an ever-higher price tag as Subnautica becomes an established IP.
A lot of indie devs are good about that. Squad, KSP’s original devs, even mandated to their buyer that all DLCs existing and future had to be free for backers since they’d listed that as a promise on their original Kickstarter.
Rimworld keeps me buying every couple years with absolutely killer DLC that enhances the game just right. And yeah you can get most of those features for free with mods, but first party support is always welcome.
RimWorld also releases a huge list of polish and quality of life changes for free with each expansion. The latest patch that released alongside the Odyssey expansion obviated the need for about half of the QoL mods I considered mandatory before then.
I agree, but Subnautica was more about exploration than just survival. Sure, you could keep expanding the world to add new environments, but eventually that gets out of hand. For a Subnautica type game, making new ones makes sense, especially to address tech debt as well and start fresh.
Subnautica isn’t just a survival game, but a story driven game as well, and given how janky their engine was, it’s not a surprise that they’d want to overhaul it from the ground up.
i think the comment was more on how they started designing the game with terraformning as a central conceit and a randomly-generated voxel world, then scrapped all that when it was too late to pull it out of the game. so the world is still procedural and fully destructible, but the random seed is static and there is nothing left in the game that damages terrain.
I think placing base foundations still flattens nearby terrain? But yeah, the devs admitted that the destructible terrain was a huge mistake that caused massive pop-in and performance losses, even now after they dialed it down to nearly zero.
They couldn’t just remove voxel terrain entirely because the world is a mishmash of voxel and classic geometry. The voxel destruction/deformation only applied to the sand and soil on the ocean floor, which let players dig several feet down before hitting solid terrain. Most other terrain features are static props.
They’d have had to redo nearly the entire terrain to remake it as a traditional polygonal mesh, so instead they simply removed the player’s dig prompt and the terraformer item. I think there’s even a console command to re-enable everything? There was at some point during Early Access, at least.
I don’t recall them ever saying anything about randomly generated worlds though. It’s been bespoke since the very first alpha, though a lot of first-time players thought it was procgen due to the random spawn locations.
when i first tried it, the plan which they had just scrapped was to have the biomes and general features be static but the details be procedural. so the skin of each part of the map was changeable. this was after the seamoth but long before the cyclops, when all the upgrade parts were untextured safes and all the biomes had not been added yet. there was one corner of the map that was just flat.
at that point they still had terraforming stuff. in fact that’s how i first explored the big hollow trunk in the plate coral forest biome: i blew the top off. i don’t remember if i went there right after the update that added the biome or had to wait for a month, because at some point in the development you couldn’t even look at that part of the map without fps dropping down to fractions. i think they forgot to use instancing so each model used its own drawcall, and there are thousands of them in that area.
I’ve had my eye on Vintage Story for a long time. Have you ever played UnReal World? That game has the most detailed and brutally realistic survival mechanics I’ve ever seen. I’m wondering how VS ranks in comparison.
Yeah, “survival” is about as watered down a term as “roguelike”, especially when it’s “survival-crafting” (a meaningless distinction - crafting mechanics were popularized by survival games in the first place). I play and enjoy both casual and hardcore survival games, though I have to shut my brain off not to get annoyed at some of the former.
There’s a recent trend in the genre where eating isn’t required for survival, food just gives temporary stat bonuses. At least Subnautica has proper hunger and thirst mechanics, even if you’re set for life for both within the first hour.
I can count the games that get the survival gameplay loop right on one hand. Hardcore survival is a sadly neglected niche.
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“We wanted a fresh new debacle instead!”
Edit:
Ew. Survival games benefit more than most genres from iteration, but that’s better done as updates and expansions unless they make a truly qualitative leap, which I doubt will happen under their leadership. This reeks of them wanting to pump out as many full-priced titles as possible, probably with an ever-higher price tag as Subnautica becomes an established IP.
Factorio did it right, IMO. V2.0 as a free update to the base game, launch a paid expansion at the same time.
Wube is pretty much the only developer I have faith in to consistently do things right.
A lot of indie devs are good about that. Squad, KSP’s original devs, even mandated to their buyer that all DLCs existing and future had to be free for backers since they’d listed that as a promise on their original Kickstarter.
Rimworld keeps me buying every couple years with absolutely killer DLC that enhances the game just right. And yeah you can get most of those features for free with mods, but first party support is always welcome.
RimWorld also releases a huge list of polish and quality of life changes for free with each expansion. The latest patch that released alongside the Odyssey expansion obviated the need for about half of the QoL mods I considered mandatory before then.
And let’s not exclude the MASSIVE performance boost in the latest update. They’re doing great over there.
The patch was worth it for the load time reduction alone.
i should buy that game
I agree, but Subnautica was more about exploration than just survival. Sure, you could keep expanding the world to add new environments, but eventually that gets out of hand. For a Subnautica type game, making new ones makes sense, especially to address tech debt as well and start fresh.
Subnautica isn’t just a survival game, but a story driven game as well, and given how janky their engine was, it’s not a surprise that they’d want to overhaul it from the ground up.
Their engine? It was built on Unity.
I mean their codebase more generally.
i think the comment was more on how they started designing the game with terraformning as a central conceit and a randomly-generated voxel world, then scrapped all that when it was too late to pull it out of the game. so the world is still procedural and fully destructible, but the random seed is static and there is nothing left in the game that damages terrain.
I think placing base foundations still flattens nearby terrain? But yeah, the devs admitted that the destructible terrain was a huge mistake that caused massive pop-in and performance losses, even now after they dialed it down to nearly zero.
They couldn’t just remove voxel terrain entirely because the world is a mishmash of voxel and classic geometry. The voxel destruction/deformation only applied to the sand and soil on the ocean floor, which let players dig several feet down before hitting solid terrain. Most other terrain features are static props.
They’d have had to redo nearly the entire terrain to remake it as a traditional polygonal mesh, so instead they simply removed the player’s dig prompt and the terraformer item. I think there’s even a console command to re-enable everything? There was at some point during Early Access, at least.
I don’t recall them ever saying anything about randomly generated worlds though. It’s been bespoke since the very first alpha, though a lot of first-time players thought it was procgen due to the random spawn locations.
when i first tried it, the plan which they had just scrapped was to have the biomes and general features be static but the details be procedural. so the skin of each part of the map was changeable. this was after the seamoth but long before the cyclops, when all the upgrade parts were untextured safes and all the biomes had not been added yet. there was one corner of the map that was just flat.
at that point they still had terraforming stuff. in fact that’s how i first explored the big hollow trunk in the plate coral forest biome: i blew the top off. i don’t remember if i went there right after the update that added the biome or had to wait for a month, because at some point in the development you couldn’t even look at that part of the map without fps dropping down to fractions. i think they forgot to use instancing so each model used its own drawcall, and there are thousands of them in that area.
“Whenever I have a problem I throw a molatov cocktail and it and bam! Different problem.”
Subnautica is as much of a survival game as Minecraft is. The only ‘survival’ happens in the first 5-10 minutes of the game and never again.
Vintage Story player?
Is it really that obvious? 😅
I’ve had my eye on Vintage Story for a long time. Have you ever played UnReal World? That game has the most detailed and brutally realistic survival mechanics I’ve ever seen. I’m wondering how VS ranks in comparison.
Yeah, “survival” is about as watered down a term as “roguelike”, especially when it’s “survival-crafting” (a meaningless distinction - crafting mechanics were popularized by survival games in the first place). I play and enjoy both casual and hardcore survival games, though I have to shut my brain off not to get annoyed at some of the former.
There’s a recent trend in the genre where eating isn’t required for survival, food just gives temporary stat bonuses. At least Subnautica has proper hunger and thirst mechanics, even if you’re set for life for both within the first hour.
I can count the games that get the survival gameplay loop right on one hand. Hardcore survival is a sadly neglected niche.
It’s not a survival game unless you get mauled by wolves in the first 10 minutes.
VS players represent.
Shit, I’ll take sequels over as-a-service any day. Let continuing revenue be the result of making new things and games being good.