Subnautica - Undah Dah Sea (you die)

[Ser Prize]

How about focusing the plot on uncovering secrets on the ships, having a ship or ships tell their own self-contained stories, or on shooting the shit with your coworkers?

It's a game about breaking ships apart, not a fucking communist manifesto. Why didn't they give the game away for free if they're so butthurt about muh capital?

Yeah, no shit. The point was that hardspace shipbreaking fucking sucks and you wouldn't do it. That goes for just about every game, it's part of making the gameplay premises fun. Videogame settings implementing workplace health and safety controls would be fucking lame. Nobody wants that, but that doesn't mean you could pay me to jump over lava while tripping on shrooms.

"Trannies and soys are unconvincing and unqualified to try to write about this shit" is valid criticism.
"The characters should have been super thankful to have the opportunity to work on the world's shittiest space oil rig where you're expected to die at least a couple times a week" isn't. It's not marxist for characters to not want to be indentured or die for their employer. It's just a dumb idea that clashes with the reason the audience is playing it, especially when it's some tone-deaf californian zoomers writing it.

Realistically, a mature and well-developed story that handled the topic probably would need to include at least one character with a che t-shirt. But they wouldn't be treated like a girlboss surrogate protagonist, they'd be there to reflect why you shouldn't.

Really all they needed was stuff with the AI war in the background. They foreshadow the fuck out of it and they never do anything with it, instead you get the retarded commie plot.

 

[Snekposter]

Modern devs on the other hand all come off the university Marxist indoctrination assembly line, be it via a degree in liberal arts, or in game design. They all think the same, speak the same, look the same, they all have the same basic life experience (or lack thereof), none of them have the deep technical knowledge to make anything revolutionary or ambitious, let alone make a game that runs well, so they all end up producing the same kind of sludge.

Which is how a bunch of random dudes made Palworld, a better Pokemon game than any of the recent Pokemon games.

 

[Xenomorphs Are Cute]

A lot of talk about Hardspace Shipbreaker is going on here, but if anyone wants any comparison to just HOW badly the devs pozzed out & fucked up the actually good game they had... Here's a bit of a lore read-up, it's 3 years old from now so things might have worsened which I have no idea of & I don't think I mentioned how utterly pants-on-head retarded the ending really is (it unironically proves just the type of person to write such a story) or one of the female dev's ironic sex-scandal after her utterly retarded take on men having receipts & women harrasment (that one is just plain hilarious, even if I just remember the general gist at this point), but the general beginning of the end is still there. Also, you may need to watch the Ssethzeentach review to understand some bits.

There's an even better review than the Sseth one honestly that calls out the bullshit directly.

 

[Gimmick Account]

Really all they needed was stuff with the AI war in the background. They foreshadow the fuck out of it and they never do anything with it, instead you get the retarded commie plot.

Yeah pretty sure that was the plan (or the vague idea at least) right from the original early access. Although I don't think it was even as defined as a war yet, they just made a big deal about how you might sometimes find crew logs and should totally pay attention and wooOOooOoo what's up with those spooky ghost ships, huuuuh?
None of which they did fucking anything with, and the full release just kinda tucked the logs bit of the UI somewhere out of sight. That's the real sad shit. They didn't need a cast of characters and voice acting, they needed more ships to break and shit that happens in them. Instead we got like two new classes, a couple variants of existing ones, and... nope, wait, I think that's everything that wasn't already in the early alpha. Oh yeah, they made some new chairs to go in the passenger class.

 

[⋖ cørdion ⋗]

Having translated Below Zero (and the first game), it's clear they got no fucking clue what made Subnautica special (which is just the underwater part). The two black sisters were borderline lesbians in the intro of Below Zero before they axed it. The 'dark souls' isolation is only charming for so long. Imagine how cool it'd be to go down 800 meters then find some dying NPC in a half-broken habitat. Nah, we get text messages on a pda implying they're just always a bit ahead of you.

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

There were screenshots floating around of how modern(-ish) Ubisoft develop games, and it's basically a bunch of dangerhairs using their internal tools (Snowdrop?) that are the Incredible Machine for urbanite liberal faggots.

What they can't do with the Duplo of gamedev tools, they subcontract to jeet sweatshops, with predictable results.

It's no wonder modern video games are either disjointed sets of gameplay or a movie with little interaction, when you have developers that don't know how the engine works it just into what's most convenient for them.

What they did have, however, was passion for the medium and the raw talent to see it through, plus the breath and depth of life experiences that brought genuine variety and differing viewpoints to the creative process.

A lot of early game makers had their start in DnD and other tabletop games that inspired them to strike a balance of gameplay and story. Modern devs, even if they play DnD it's 5th edition "talk about your feeling" slop.

A lot of talk about Hardspace Shipbreaker is going on here, but if anyone wants any comparison to just HOW badly the devs pozzed out & fucked up the actually good game they had... Here's a bit of a lore read-up, it's 3 years old from now so things might have worsened which I have no idea of & I don't think I mentioned how utterly pants-on-head retarded the ending really is (it unironically proves just the type of person to write such a story) or one of the female dev's ironic sex-scandal after her utterly retarded take on men having receipts & women harrasment (that one is just plain hilarious, even if I just remember the general gist at this point), but the general beginning of the end is still there. Also, you may need to watch the Ssethzeentach review to understand some bits.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=wX5RgxG-uFQThere's an even better review than the Sseth one honestly that calls out the bullshit directly.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=mrfZ9KFl3FE

The main issue with any corporate slavery plot in those games is twofold:
1. That the people writing don't have actual debt. They have government college loans that will be forgiven eventually, so the numbers don't matter because they literally don't matter to the people writing in real life.
2. If you are really fucking good in a complex work you won't have debt. Corporates will gladly pay you a lot to keep you from other companies buying your debt. A corporate debt plot only works if you are replaceable in a moment's notice, which the writers cannot fathom since it goes against their existence.

 

[p1138]

You're right on the money with that one, except it's even worse than you can imagine.

There were screenshots floating around of how modern(-ish) Ubisoft develop games, and it's basically a bunch of dangerhairs using their internal tools (Snowdrop?) that are the Incredible Machine for urbanite liberal faggots.

What they can't do with the Duplo of gamedev tools, they subcontract to jeet sweatshops, with predictable results.

It's no coincidence that Ubisoft has been making the same exact game, with the same mechanics, for close to 20 years now. They've lost the talent and institutional knowledge to make anything else, and there's nobody in the company left that knows how the internals work that could modify things so they can make something else.

You mean this?

https://x.com/pokeprotos/status/1323163539339575303

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tynker

 

[Ser Prize]

You mean this?

https://x.com/pokeprotos/status/1323163539339575303

Ver archivo adjunto 9075063Ver archivo adjunto 9075067

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tynker

Maybe it's because I can't code for shit but this looks handy.

 

[Gimmick Account]

Maybe it's because I can't code for shit but this looks handy.

I've used a bunch of visual scripting systems and it's really all the same shit, at least when it comes to gameplay logic. There's really no difference whether it looks like colourful blocks or an excel spreadsheet, and no particular reason to be snobby about it. I mean you can see in those examples how it's just regular code if you take the colours and shapes away. Any modern IDE will highlight fucking everything in almost the same way and only the biggest dorks turn it off so they can go back to the good old days of raw text.

Lego-like systems like this one are mainly for children (or I guess level scripters and stuff) who don't know the patterns yet to learn. Ultimately it's easier to just write regular code, once you know enough to confidently type two letters and hit tab instead of picking from a palette. Again, same thing but you can copy, edit, and iterate shit way faster. Plus now you're agnostic to whatever funky shit APIs/libraries might want from you that mr. lego never predicted.

The one significantly distinct paradigm is node-based patcher-like interfaces. That's what Unreal Engine pushes heavily now.
I don't understand why. I hate this for game logic. You are creating a vast mess the moment you have systems interacting or nested in any way.
But if you've used them for audio/visual stuff, you know how great they are for experimenting with effects and tweaking shit on the fly. I'll pretty much always prototype shaders this way and then either reimplement them or clean up the generated code to add whatever shit the node editor still doesn't fucking support. They're so easy I'll usually test something out in Blender then simply recreate the nodes in-engine instead of trying to import materials or whatever.
I'm sure that ease applies to getting a single game actor working and tuned too, but it's fucking insane to take it any further than that. I don't hate spaghetti code, but this is like multidimensional hyper-spaghetti.

 

[The Incredible Gassy]

I CAN'T SWIM!!! I CAN'T SWIM!!!

 

[geckogoy]

About a month after launch, it has dwindled heavily

For comparison, kingdom come deliverance II, widely panned for being gay declined to about 50% of its launch player count in the same time frame. Taking 24hr high this is down to 2.9%

 

[Alex Yiik]

About a month after launch, it has dwindled heavily
Ver archivo adjunto 9155638

For comparison, kingdom come deliverance II, widely panned for being gay declined to about 50% of its launch player count in the same time frame. Taking 24hr high this is down to 2.9%

Subnautica right now:

Subnautica 2:


2 had a massively successful launch and has gone down to more stable numbers. It's currently getting a bit under twice as many players as 1. From what I can tell from the first game's charts it seems like the sequel is performing quite a bit better both in terms of peak players and number of players sticking around after the peak. Percentage-wise it looks horrible but that's just because they did 10x the numbers that Subnautica peaked at.

I find it interesting that Subnautica 1 had about these numbers consistently for years, got a huge bump just before 2 came out, and is now back to normal numbers. Just as many people are playing the first game as before, even with the sequel available.

 

[geckogoy]

the sequel is performing quite a bit better both in terms of peak players and number of players sticking around after the peak

False, it was still hanging around 30% of release peak a month after release the current thing is a tenth of that

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

A lot of talk about Hardspace Shipbreaker is going on here, but if anyone wants any comparison to just HOW badly the devs pozzed out & fucked up the actually good game they had... Here's a bit of a lore read-up, it's 3 years old from now so things might have worsened which I have no idea of & I don't think I mentioned how utterly pants-on-head retarded the ending really is (it unironically proves just the type of person to write such a story) or one of the female dev's ironic sex-scandal after her utterly retarded take on men having receipts & women harrasment (that one is just plain hilarious, even if I just remember the general gist at this point), but the general beginning of the end is still there. Also, you may need to watch the Ssethzeentach review to understand some bits.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=wX5RgxG-uFQThere's an even better review than the Sseth one honestly that calls out the bullshit directly.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=mrfZ9KFl3FE

I was interested in Hardspace specifically for the company town allegory, but the style of presentation was fucking horrible (hijack my game to ramble to me annoyingly every mission, can't be skipped), the writing itself was often dull (zesty brown lesbian acts chirpy), and in the end it just couldn't sustain my interest long enough to finish it even though the gameplay itself was compelling at first.

I don't know how it ended, but I think this is a rare case where the gmae would have... done better narratively as a roguelike. Which sounds creatively bankrupt, but one of the problems I had with it was that I was pitched this idea that it's about the horrors of how pre-unionized industrial capitalism works people to death, and then it had the failure state of a lot of games that are trying to argue an idea in that its mechanics didn't support this. You can die by rushing your job, yes, but because of the commitment to the whole "your debt is unfathmoably large" joke, that doesn't mean anything.

I think it should have been a roguelike (or at least something akin to Far Cry Primal's one life mode) where you have a little resource optimization puzzle like Paper's Please does with the family, you have to buy your spare lives, basically something where you can actually fail - actually care about how much money you bring home AND the risk - and because of that feel the sort of specific misery I was promised but didn't get. And if they'd taken a page from the Mine Wars they could have had a narrative arc about gradually mixing in more industrial sabotage with the climax being something like a raid on a space station where you have to fuck up the Space Pinkertons in 10 minutes before they can respond.

But instead we get Miss Lesbo thinking she's my best friend while I bang my head into a wall. 10/10 recreation of working a dead-end job with someone that isn't morally bad but you still can't stand.

 

[Fig Kommandant]

company town allegory

Company towns are a modern mythos. There were plenty that offered good compensation, plenty that slaved their employees. It's a really overused commie narrative that all private companies are bad.