Comment on Subnautica 2 Early Access Gameplay Trailer
captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 2 days ago
The thing I took from this…and I didn’t take much, was the line “you’re going to die here, and that’s okay.”
Subnautica has a shipwreck plot. You play as Some Guy: Space Janitor, a man with no voice and no characteristics. Your ship is shot down and crashes on a strange alien world, and from the moment you take control to the moment you press the Win The Game button, your goal is “Survive, escape.” What action you’ll need to take to implement that goal change throughout the game, but “survive, escape” is always your ultimate goal.
Below Zero had a plot they threw away at the last minute and replaced with You are Robin Ayou, xenobiologist and idiot. Your sister Samantha, robotics expert and idiot, has gotten herself killed as an Alterra employee on 4546B. Robin, not believing Alterra’s report that her death was caused by her own negligence, books passage to 4546B to investigate for herself. Robin more or less intentionally maroons herself alone on a hostile world with basically no tools, and almost immediately gets MechaEeyore downloaded into her brain. Sam’s plot becomes entirely optional as the game is actually about building MechaEeyore a body of his own.
Subnautica 2…the plot seems to have a “marooned beyond a point of no return” plot. Not sure how they’re going to put a sense of urgency behind that but we’ll see I guess.
Not sure how they’re going to put a sense of urgency behind that
A sense of urgency is overrated when it comes to a survival and exploration game.
If the entire goal is, ‘let’s build an awesome base and make this place a permanent home’, I think that could be plenty fun.
Dojan@pawb.social 2 days ago
To me it sounds more like Subnautica 2 has a “welcome to the planet that psychically induces you into a suicide cult” plot, which I’d say is a bit more interesting than “marooned beyond a point of no return.” A “solve the mystery of this planet” plot is quite in-line with Subnautica 1, I’d say.
captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 2 days ago
Subnautica 2 is a co-op game. How they treated respawns in Subnautica 1, where the screen goes black and you pop back into existence back at base agreeing with the game to pretend that didn’t happen, isn’t going to work here. So they need to acknowledge why you’re able to get trampled to death by deep sea wildebeests and then keep playing with your friends. Kind of like why in Portal 2 the co-op characters are Atlas and P-Body. Easier to explain why they can get crushed and then keep playing than Chell and Mel.
So is NoA the respawn bot? Does he/it swoop in and collect our hoofprinted corpse to reanimate, hence why he asks us to find a “convenient” way to die? So it’s easy for him to retrieve your pieces?
Is “You’re going to die here, and that’s okay” That whole line about forgetting everything and just exploring at first feels kind of defeated but she’s trying to talk you into being at peace with it? But if you have a resurrection machine…
I’m going to speculate that we’re the second to arrive, the first were the two women we hear. We’re going to follow their trail of audio log breadcrumbs, at first listening in on them getting settled in and “learning how to survive” but then when all is lost they’ll start addressing the players they know are coming to educate/warn us. I think the French accented woman is still clinging to hope that whatever mission can be completed, I think American accented woman has given up and is just embracing existing on this world, and is likely the one who biomods too close to the sun and wants to “go to the tree.”
ripcord@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Or it’s someone/thing else that is “dying” over and over and that is part of the plot