12/9/2023 0 Comments Subnautica lead sound designerJules Verne clearly wrote 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea after he’d had some prescient dream about the visuals in Subnautica. So far, I’ve had one filled with the basics and a lovely message telling me ‘Good luck out there’, and another full of alien creature eggs with a note that simply read ‘FREE RANGE’. If they receive enough votes, and the notes pass a screening process, they are seeded into the game world for other players to find. Buildable by end-game players just before they complete, the Time Capsule can be filled with game goodies, like nutrient blocks or first aid kits, along with player created note, and submitted online for review. A couple of nice little features have also recently appeared, such as the Time Capsule. It’s nice direction and purpose, without anything screaming in your ear or flashing in your face, or relentlessly signposting you by taking up every piece of NCP dialogue. Building it will inevitably need something that you don’t yet have/haven’t discovered, so the narrative points you to the right path. Using your trusty scanner – one of the first things you should build – you catalogue these until, after you have enough fragments, you are rewarded with a blueprint for the complete piece. But why go into the scary abyss, you may ask, when you can scamper and paddle in the sun with the fishies? It’s to follow the story, which is fairly light touch, serving more as a means to get you from place to place on the map in order to discover new materials and bits of wrecked technology. However, seeing as you’re smack bang in the middle of an ocean, you find that you need to go deeper and further into the depths to get your supplies, which in turn enable you to go deeper and further still. Later, you begin to acquire copper and lead, gold and silver, lithium and diamonds and a load of other bits to make more and more sophisticated items, which are more and more essential for your survival. In the Safe Shallows, where you initially find yourself, this mostly involves scavaging some titanium wreckage to get yourself a scuba tank, which you need to be able to stay under the surface for more than 30 seconds. In turn, you convert these resources into any number of useful, and downright essential, pieces of equipment using your pod’s emergency fabricator and, later on, other devices. You go about this task by collecting a wide variety of resources throughout the game world, which is no mean feat as it’s a fair old size. A few hints and tips from the handy PDA tablet later and you’re ready to get on with your primary mission: survive. You get up, grab the fire extinguisher and with a pull of the trigger to snuff out the blaze, you’ve started the game. During a rocky descent, you are knocked unconscious by a violently flailing metal door panel and wake up, however long later, with your life pod completely in flames. The setting is thus: your nameless protagonist just about makes it into an escape pod before the starship you were traveling on explodes in the upper atmosphere of an uncharted ocean world. At its core, it’s a survival game, and seeing as I have a thing for the survival genre, this was a welcome plug indeed. I’ve been playing since March 2017, the game having been hurled into my field of vision by Steam’s handy ‘recommendations’ feature. The 3-year development featured integrated community bug reporting and feedback, which in turn resulted in ongoing developer bug fixing and tweaking. Subnautica, however, made its full debut on 23rd January in all its oceanic glory. The game might be great – but it could also be impossible to play, plain awful or, god forbid, it might never get properly released. I plan to talk about this a bit more in a future article, but suffice to say that you obviously take a bit of a risk when you follow this particular road. you get to play it before everyone else, but with the small caveat that it’s not finished yet. For the uninitiated, early access means exactly what you would expect it to mean – i.e. Subnautica has actually been around since December 2014, available to the masses via Steam Early Access.
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