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Subnautica: Released (SPOILER WARNING past Post #1)

Blaine

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http://store.steampowered.com/app/264710/Subnautica/
Oh my goodness, top review on release day? It's almost as though I planned this. +M

35aee1ef31.png


I like this, DarkUnderlord likes this, and you might like it, too. There still isn't a single thread for this game on the Codex, as far as I can tell. Well, now there is.
 

Siveon

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Shadorwun: Hong Kong
There's just one map, I assume? Because they don't list "procedurally generated", which is typically a major turnoff for me.

But having one handcrafted map would be a lot more interesting.
 

Zombra

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Is this open world involving crafting and survival or it has actual structure?
Kind of both. You start out just surviving but then you get stuff like radio calls from other survivors. There is an ending to work towards, but it's not apparent at the start. In the early game I spent most of my time searching for building materials just to get my living situation stable, before the bug killed my playthrough. Definitely not a game where you feel a lot of pressure to stop Saren from awakening the Reapers.

There's just one map, I assume? Because they don't list "procedurally generated", which is typically a major turnoff for me. But having one handcrafted map would be a lot more interesting.
Fixed map.
 

Blaine

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Is this open world involving crafting and survival or it has actual structure?

It is open-world and involves extensive crafting and survival elements, but also definitely has structure. It's unique in this regard, and is much more like an adventure game than virtually any game of its ilk that I've played. You have to figure shit out and discover certain tools and techniques in order to unravel the story (of the crash that landed you there, the planet's own central mysteries, and some side plots) and progress through the game. There is an excellent sense of discovery and exploration that I rarely get this side of the 21st century. All of these things are nicely interwoven with each other.

There's just one map, I assume? Because they don't list "procedurally generated", which is typically a major turnoff for me.

But having one handcrafted map would be a lot more interesting.

Yes, it's handcrafted, and quite well done. Wreckage, installations, blueprints, cave systems, resources, creatures and so on are all placed by hand, with a few dynamic exceptions such as metal scrap, which one of the game's predators collects to feather its nest or something.

i read the games completey brojen and has been for a while now

unless massive popping doesnt count

It's not broken generally and bugs are rare, but yes, there's massive terrain pop-in thanks to the Unity engine. The developers are still working on fixing it somehow according to their Trello, and have desperately been trying to do so for a long time, but I wouldn't hold my breath.

According to Burning Bridges (I think), the developers would have to essentially tear the game's code and asset implementation apart and then rebuild it all in order to fix the pop-in at this point. Still, it's a visual issue, and you get used to it. It's a terrible shame in an otherwise beautiful game and its only real flaw.

Yeah. It's a fucking Unity game, like virtually every God-damned motherfucking non-AAA game out there these days, and it's driving me up the wall. See here for my dedicated Unity bitching thread: http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/index.php?threads/fuck-unity.119423/
 

Zombra

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It's like an adventure game
Don't let this scare you off, people. You never have to guess to pour honey on the ground to capture an elf, or randomly find the one pixel in the ocean that provides a vital crafting component. At least in the first several hours. Hope I'm right about the rest of the game.
 

circ

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Yeah I did try it about a year+ ago. I didn't at the time notice any of the assets popping in or didn't pay attention. Anyway, apart from really short submerge timer even after upgrades, game just seemed to be about build increasingly bigger boats and I got bored.
 

Blaine

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Don't let this scare you off, people. You never have to guess to pour honey on the ground to capture an elf, or randomly find the one pixel in the ocean that provides a vital crafting component. At least in the first several hours. Hope I'm right about the rest of the game.

Did we really need to specify that it's not a pixel hunt with Old Man Murray-style puzzles?

Guys, when I say "game," I mean that this is a computer game. That means it's not like Monopoly or Agricola, and isn't laid out on a side table to be played, but is entirely digital must be installed on your personal computer. Run the executable, and then use your mouse and keyboard to play.
 

Unkillable Cat

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Well, I'm a little miffed about the 1.0 release itself.

For a few months now the game has been in the same state except they've been working on optimizing the game. It was well known that the final part of the game, building a [REDACTED] to reach the ending, was left out until the 1.0 version.

Well, the 1.0 version came... and that was literally the only thing that's different from the version before it. You can now build the thing and end the game. Do so and you get a long cut-scene that's actually just cleverly-placed models moving around you, you're actually sitting still the entire time. [Warning: Video contains ending spoilers!]

I started a new game and I'm at the point where Cpt. Avery Quinn showed up in his invisible ship. Strange... I could swear he had a spaceship in my last playthrough.

The truth of the matter is that the devs cut and ran with the game in the final months of development. They realized that they were way in over their heads, so they only added the bare essentials in order to say that the game was "finished" and threw it out the door and are now waiting for the bucks to roll in. They've made this plainly obvious by immediately starting talking about the first DLC add-on in the media interviews they were giving just before the "release date".

There were still several things they needed to add to the game. I'm not talking more vehicles or new biomes or new monsters. I'm talking stuff like adding an interface for base management, for example. Want to know how much power one of your bases is using? Stand in it and watch the power bar. Want to know if there's a leak in the base, and where? You have to go look for it yourself. What's the base's current hull strength? Add/remove something from it to find out. In other words base management is pure DYI, while the rest of the game runs on awesome FutureTech with direct info feed to your PDA, quest markers and easy-to-use interface.

Yet another of the game's many inconsistencies... but those are to be expected when the developers are bleeding-heart liberals.

It's still a good game, it's just... they kinda fumbled the ball right at the end there. Like how they have a plot-vital crafting recipe right at the end that has the world's rarest plant as an ingredient. I mean the game world is HUGE, and there's only about a dozen of these plants in the entire game, and some of them in well-hidden corners. So finding one is actually a major accomplishment. Except the devs seemingly thought it would be too hard to find. That place where you get this crafting recipe? It's full of this rare plant. So much for that treasure hunt.

This is a game I can see Doug the Eagle sinking his claws into. There's a surprising amount of player freedom in this game.

There's a point in the game where you're told to go to a point to await rescue. This is a timed event BTW. Just by this point is a climbable cliff, and skyrays (imagine a penguin that flies like a manta ray) tend to land there and take off. While waiting for the timer to run out I stood up on that cliff and was going through the piles of data entries on my PDA, when I notice that a skyray landed awfully close to me. So I look down, and there it is, perfectly still, right by my feet. Nice birdie. Good photo op there. After a few seconds it takes off, and I go back to my PDA. I then see it come again to land, but don't really pay it any heed. Guess I should have, because when it takes off it takes me with it. Somehow it had landed in a different spot than the last time, only this time it counted as having landed directly under me. So for a glorious 0.7 seconds I'm flying on the back of a skyray before I'm violently thrown off and suffer a fatal landing on the beach - a fall that normally only does minor damage at best. So I missed the rescue because I got kidnapped and murdered by a bird. Fowl play indeed.

There's a grappling hook in the game. It's brilliant for navigating the murky depths of the ocean when you're without a submarine, but another use for it is to "rodeo" some of the monsters of the game. Aim hook at monster, fire and hold on tight! Strangely enough, embedding a large hook into a creature doesn't hurt it. Not at all.

...

Ever tried using a grappling hook on a skyray?
 

Zombra

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Did we really need to specify that it's not a pixel hunt with Old Man Murray-style puzzles?
Kind of. I thought that "adventure game" had a pretty specific meaning which I don't think applies here. To be clear: what about Subnautica is "like an adventure game"? Honest question.
 
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Zarniwoop

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Shadorwun: Hong Kong
How are the waterphysics? Is diving realistic?



That was gone ages ago...
Was removed years ago already after people started complaining that many of their games are neither good, nor old anymore.

Now they don't even just sell games anymore so they just decided to drop the pretense.

Also, trying to get into Subnautica again but knowing how tiny the world is really ruins it.
 

Zarniwoop

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Yes, it's handcrafted, and quite well done. Wreckage, installations, blueprints, cave systems, resources, creatures and so on are all placed by hand, with a few dynamic exceptions such as metal scrap, which one of the game's predators collects to feather its nest or something.

They're called Stalkers, those long, thin, swordfish-looking things.

I like that they finally show you the names of the fishies now. I used to just called them "the big swordfish thing" or "the fucken red mouthed shark that charges you" or the "fish of peace" that goes AAAAAAAAAAAAAIIIIIIIEEEEEEE and explodes. Turns out those are called crashfish. Found in the ever-so-inappropriately titled "safe caves".
 

Blaine

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They're called Stalkers, those long, thin, swordfish-looking things.

I know what they're called... I mentioned them in my review. +M

Speaking generally: If this game looks at all appealing to you, I suggest ignoring the inevitable THIS NEW GAME IS SHIT Kodex Kool Kredit farming attempts and giving it a whirl. It has a few flaws, but is otherwise an excellent game. I've got 90 hours in it, and DU for some reason has 198 hours in it. Our glorious leader wouldn't play a shit game, would he?

Half the time, when you look at the Steam profiles of people shitting on objectively good games, you'll find something like this:

d9b4fa1964.png


I'm afraid this is real. It's from the profile of a Codexer who sent me a friend request yesterday. I won't name him, since he sent me the request so that he could accept his winnings from a giveaway I did, but he knows who he is.
 

Zarniwoop

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Shadorwun: Hong Kong
I know what they're called... I mentioned them in my review. +M

Speaking generally: If this game looks at all appealing to you, I suggest ignoring the inevitable THIS NEW GAME IS SHIT Kodex Kool Kredit farming attempts and giving it a whirl. It has a few flaws, but is otherwise an excellent game. I've got 90 hours in it, and DU for some reason has 198 hours in it.

Half the time, when you look at the Steam profiles of people shitting on objectively good games, you'll find something like this:

d9b4fa1964.png


I'm afraid this is real. It's from the profile of a Codexer who sent me a friend request yesterday. I won't name him, since he sent me the request so that he could accept his winnings from a giveaway I did, but he knows who he is.

I've had it on Early Acces for years. Bought into the hypetrain started by Burning Bridges. At some point I thought it would never come out but since even Starbound and Grimoire exist as actual games now who knows? We live in interesting times. We might even see Star Citizen in our lifetimes.

That's how I know about the main drawback, the laughably tiny world. I have many many hours in it too and noticed that beyond about 2km away from the Aurora everything turns into the endless void. Haven't played since about April 2017 but now I'm looking forward to the actual story mode, which would set this game apart from all the other survivalcraft snoozefests.
 
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Blaine

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I should have said "Speaking to everyone in general and not to you specifically."

The size of the world is another consequence of the Unity engine's limitations, although most of the time, I find that games with absolutely huge open worlds are mostly empty. In my view, the roughly 5km-diameter world (it's a little more than 2km from dead center) seems big enough to be serviceable, since it's packed with interesting things and all seamlessly connected; however, certainly by the middle to late game, a player will notice that he's surrounded by an abyss.

If any of you have any ideas for getting good programmers back into game development so that Obsidian et al. stop licensing trash game engines and start building their own again, let me know. The Unity cancer is everywhere, and seemingly the only way out is to find another hobby.
 

Daedalos

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Kind of looks like what No Man's Buy SHOULD have looked like, eh? :smug:

Anyway, not into this genre, but I imagine people who are, would like it.
 

CyberWhale

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There should be a Gaming Law that prohibits using Unity for anything 3D. Developers would be forced to use Unreal that way, at least the ones who want to make modern looking games.

Those who don't comply would get 1) no release on digital gaming sites 2) no release at retail 3) no reviews/covering of any kind at bigger gaming sites and 4) no threads on Codex.

Problem solved, we just need to make an Anti-Unity Union.

:russia:
 

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