I think they added the mist to conceal the islands on purpose. So that new players don't immediantly flock over to them, and instead they explore rather than see the island and go over to it for safety.
I also think that. Also, it's even a bad thing for you to find the Mountain Island early, as the purple tablet is easy to find, and the alien base inside doesn't try to hide that it's a gun (talking about PDA entries in there). That ruins the moment when you see the Sunbeam, hope for your rescue, and end up seeing the explosion.
@@eroth1008 I loved the false hope, even when I knew game logic wouldn’t allow it to happen, it was the small bit of “Well, maybe” and not knowing the events that lead up to it
i think this, too. had i seen the island right away, i can promise you i wouldve just head straight to it, not even knowing there was meant to be a story behind it.
Yeah, this was a really dumb point. You're supposed to find the floating island by following instructions from one of the lifepod wrecks, and you're supposed to find the mountain island by going the Sunbeam's extraction point. You're not supposed to find them early, so they hid them behind clouds. It's that simple.
@@Zealolicious same. I some how did it to the lava place, but it toke me so fucking long it's incredible. I was lucky enough to get only 1 reaper with my first and only map. And he was at the defense tower thing. And I almost quitted at the place where ghost leviathan come before you go to lava
Finding out that there was an Island in a game that I just assumed took place 100% under water was one of the coolest moments I had in this game. I didn't even realize the teleporter was a teleporter right away because I didn't know there was second island. I'm glad they obfuscated the view of the islands. I feel like the beacons provide you with an easy enough way of navigating, along with using the different biomes as reference points.
Once you've played enough, you learn to navigate by biomes and lifepod 5. Blood Kelp Trench is to the SW, the best Lost River entrance is N/NE and so on
when it comes to the ships all landing in the same area, which is a volcanic mountain (hence the large dropoff at the edge): -the degassi ship was making a gravity slingshot maneuver around the planet when it went too low and got shot down. it was hit but not totally destroyed, and they were able to steer it to crash-land in the area. (and then they lived for presumably several months) -the aurora's secondary mission was to look for the degassi, so it entered orbit around the planet and prepared to send down landing craft. (equipped with prawn suits, at least one cyclops sub, and seamoths). at some point, it got shot down, and the captain sacrificed himself and stayed on the ship to manually guide it towards the shallow equatorial crater (identified via scans from orbit). half the lifepods deployed (half were destroyed before launch as they were on the side hit) late into the crash, so were scattered near the crash site. within 8 hours of the crash, everyone but you are dead. most of them from simply landing near large predators or too deep, although two survived to make it to the floating island and then were later killed. this is the luckiest part of the game for you, but it's not like it's that contrived that only one person would survive, and they wouldn't make a game from the perspective of a guy who's fabricator malfunctioned and then he ran out of air.
Or the guy who lit a flare inside the lifepod that had a gas leak and the audio recording shows someone telling him not to do that as there’s an explosion
18:00 Absolutely correct. The devs themselves confirmed that they did not envision the game as a combat experience, so they came up with some intentional tricks to dissuade the player from fighting - like enemies not having loot, lacking health bars and no feedback/emotional gratification when killing aggressive monsters. The game never makes the monsters unkillable, merely shows you that this way of playing is generally not enjoyable and can be avoided. Subjectively, I think it was the right decision. I hate artificial limitations in games, so killing this one leviathan who tried to eat me for the last 10 minutes was kinda rewarding (sweet revenge) but, while enjoyable, it was a sidestep. The game explained it, I viewed it as such and never considered it part of the main loop. Just a quick (or not) thing you can do from time to time when you feel compelled to.
@@JustJuicer234 I honestly don't think that would have been the right option. Making them Invincible makes them look like monster while their supposed to be normal creatures
And if you scan the Sea Dragon leviathan it says it may be one of its last of its species, just to make you feel guilty. If you scanned it without killing it that is.
I wish they had done this better. It would have been much better if they didn’t make the bigger beasts so boring. It would be great if they had a better attack AI, did more damage, and were just... scarier. They become scenery as the game goes on. I want the big sea creatures to be scary not goofy.
A bit late, but: The ships (Degasi, Aurora, and Sunbeam) all coming in range of the cannon does make sense, even aside from the fact that any orbiting ships likely comes into range eventually because of how orbital mechanics work. The Degasi just happened to be shot down because it got too close. The Aurora had a side mission to track the Degasi’s fate according to its logs, so it makes sense that it flew close to the crash site. The Sunbeam was on a rescue operation tracking the location of the player, so this ship was directly heading for the proximity of the crash site.
About the aliens warning intruders: Probably an issue of technological gap. You can’t ward of a group of neanderthals by sending them a radio message or even by putting up a sign. The technology gap would be so large the more primitive species would not even realize there is a warning being given.
@@thomasdiehlen77 "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" When you introduce advanced technology to a primitive species it would be impossible for them to tell
The issue is that the gun has infinite range around the planet. It could have shot down the aurora on the other side of the planet. And the aurora clearly must have exceptional scanners, so there's no need to go right on top of the degassi crash site, just passing the planet should be more than good enough, so going right over the 2km square crater with the only gun that can shoot you down from literally any point in orbit? Not buying it. I'll buy the sunbeam though, they literally come in on your co-ordinates attempting pickup, that's explained. But a construction mothership in spitting distance of a crash site? Not happening. What were they planning to do, look out the windows?
@@Winasaurus The Degasi ship likely decided to land near the largest power signature which happens to be where all the alien structures are such as the ion cube power plant. It's totally reasonable for them to land where they did and subsequently all the ships that came after.
It's also both stated and shown that this part of the planet is a particularly rich mineral deposit, and that both the Degasi and Aurora were monetarily-motivated, so of course they'd try to land at the part that their radar said was full of precious metals. This was also why the Degasi survivors, with some hesitation, built the mushroom cave base, but that differs from Joseph Anderson's claims so directly that I have to wonder if the devs changed it at some point post-release. It's also reasonable that the prior aliens would choose to inhabit/build a research base at that location on the planet. (In this case, I also assumed the infection _started_ on 4546b and never left, which fixes some other issues, but it's possible I missed some audio logs saying otherwise or that it was another change).
@@KongKurs i think it was mentioned in an audio log that the other rescue ships that attempted to scan for the degasi survivors were unable to do that and so they wanted the aurora's better technology to scan for them
Hmmm... I could be wrong since I'm still watching the video, but it seems like you missed the point that the Aurora and the Degassi getting shot down at the exact same coordinates was NOT a coincidence. The Aurora was specifically hunting for the Degassi crew members who went missing and they were performing the EXACT SAME slingshot maneuver that the Degassi was doing when they went dark. So the Aurora was just following the in the exact same footsteps as the Degassi in order to try to locate them. This would be the reason why both ships "coincidentally" landed at the same spot and were shot down from the same location. Also for the broadcasted message: There is one. The massive noise that happens when the Sunbeam approaches the planet is their warning message being broadcast. We were unable to translate it. We were barely even able to translate the alien messages in general. Really your critique should have been that we never actually acquired the means to translate this technology. The PDA advises you earlier that there is an alien language being broadcast that it is attempting to translate but isn't have much luck. So really there should have been a data download in the gun facility that would allow your PDA to understand the alien language to get the confirmation that the Sunbeam WAS given a warning before being shot down.
You also periodically hear the "message" broadcast throughout the game. It comes over the radio once and you usually hear it whenever you go past a vent or cache in your seamoth.
The people on the Sunbeam even acknowledge the warning, you can hear them over the radio ask what the sound is, but obviously they didn't know that it WAS a warning so they just kept going.
It’s implied in the PCF that the precursors visited Earth early in its history and influenced the development of specific cultures, so it stands to reason they could have influenced our language too. This could explain why the PDA was partially able to decipher precursor text. Still, you’re right in saying that there should have been more shedding light on the translation in general.
@53:05 The reason the game suddenly dips into a huge, never-ending hole on all the barriers of the play area is explained. The place where the player crash lands, all of that play area, is actually sitting on top of an extremely large volcano. All those deep areas the player is exploring is actually the hollow center of the volcano and is also why it gets extremely hot the deeper you go, and why the lost river is very acidic. So what happens is when you reach the edge of the map(or play area) you are at the edge of the lip of the volcano, a very, very big volcano, so the dip is ridiculously deep. There is also life outside this volcano, as the player finds out if you roam outside the play area, giant ghost leviathans will come and kill you. But the volcano is warm and has lots of chemicals, it transfers lots of heat and minerals, which is why the play area is so abundant with life. So yeah, the planet is actually insanely deep, which would make sense considering how deep earths oceans are. Didn't you find it odd that the apparent deepest point of the play area is only like 1500 meters? That's because that's just the depth of the volcano, any deeper is all magma.
A volcano that huge and wide would not have a sudden, cliff-like drop off on all sides. No volcanoes have that on all sides. They're generally very climbable, gradual changes.
@@headphonic8 A never ending gradual slope isn't exactly easy to implement. Eventually the terrain would have to end or the game would probably freak out.
@@headphonic8 at a certain point game logic has to happen. You’re right, but it would be too much of a pain for a computer to render absolutely everything in the huge slow drop off. So the explanation is that it’s the lip of a volcano crater is given and the actual details are hand waved away for the sake of not rendering the whole thing.
I like your analysis, but the actual truth is that this is just a video game, and its impossible to simulate planet sized worlds. There has to be an edge to the world at some point, and from a game design perspective, an endless void makes complete sense. Its literally the edge of the map bro
Never will I forget the heart attack I had when I was going straight in one direction on the surface with my Seamoth and got launched into the stratosphere by a Ghost Leviathan from below me.
believe it or not, i got attacked underwater, i heard something and thought: what was that? and then i got smack by it. i hardly saw it, and then suddenly halve of my seamoth's health was gone.
There's an easy enough way to explain why a galaxies spanning human race could've not found any other signs of the precursor race, and you even scanned it. The _malfunctioning_ Doomsday Device. Their other worlds just happened to have devices that worked properly.
Mmm, IDK about that. It seems to be in a display like a museum would display something. It seems more like a novel thing. At least to me, thought I could be completely wrong about that.
FWIW, Charlie explains their logic for not letting the player have more freedom when it comes to combat which frankly I think Subnautica hits the perfect balance. Animals that you SHOULD be able to kill you can but bigger fights will be more taxing. It 'discourages' players from being reckless. For the most part survival in Subnautica is very much soo evocative of the old sentiment "Haste makes waste". ruclips.net/video/6S6bgQnlP1w/видео.html
The speed with which this game goes from "ahh, blissful swimming through the alien reefs" to "oh wow this is triggering most of my phobias at once" is truly shocking lol
Every single time i play subnautica, i make and upgrade the cyclops, only to realize immediately that it’s way too scary to drive it anywhere deep cause you’re just completely surrounded by the black void and I caaaant
@@SwogFrog one of the greatest horror games ever made, i've never gotten much further either. if you like the whole exploration aspect though but want a bit less abject terror, check out the game outer wilds. its a masterpiece.
I find it easier to use the seamoth and prawn suit and build bases along the way. For some reason, the cyclops just makes me feel more vulnerable, probably because you can't react as fast as you can in the prawn or moth.
@@rpemulis-- And I must disagree with you here. Outer Wilds has both a much lower bar for death and a much higher value of light. Where Subnautica threatens but rarely pushes for death, Outer Wilds forces your death anyway and so is much more willing to use death as a lesson or a hard barrier. Where Subnautica has every biome replete with bioluminescence and glowing rivers, Outer Wilds has almost an entire planet full of pitch-dark caves, and another planet where no amount of light will save you, not to mention a DLC half-filled with light-based stealth puzzles. I might just be biased because I love water, but Subnautica never made me sweat like being hunted for your only source of any vision whatsoever.
@@SwogFrog every time I bring my cyclops through bulb zone or blood kelp to go to various lost river entrances, I have to hype myself up on the edge of the biome for like two minutes. "You've done this before, you know exactly where you are going, nothing can stop you in your giant submarine" and then I panick the whole way down
This review was a year ago, so I'm giving it some leeway, mainly with the game mechanics. My issue is the "plot holes", such as the landings. The Degasi arrived to this crater because they detected the excessive minerals on the volcano, which probably has something to do with the Precursors, and the Aurora comes to the same land mass because they were searching for the Degasi. The Kharaa got out through a Sea Dragon attack, did you read any of the info in the lost river base? Enzyme 42 isn't specific to that Emperor, it is heavily implied that is the only emperor around. The enzyme the Peepers are carrying is weakened by the Emperor's age, which is why the planet is barely limping buy, and why there are still fish that have pustules, while others don't. That nullifies a lot of points you complained about, because nothing is cured, and the Precursors had the disease before they arrived. And as for you arriving on a planet that could cure it first, did you read the Doomsday device PDA? The planet was supposed to blow up if they failed, but it malfunctioned, and we can assume the others didn't. The whole thing about why isn't there a warning, there is. It's just indecipherable for a while, until your PDA can read their language. Even if there wasn't, the gun blows up ships entering to ensure no chance of the Kharaa getting off planet. Say the gun let someone land, and then it did the very slow turning and aiming thing as they tried to leave. The ship would leave before the gun could even get into position. Ignoring that, why go through the trouble of letting someone land on the planet with the disease that'll kill them anyway? They might as well just kill them ahead of time and spare themselves the later killing. The Degasi's base has obviously been destroyed, and there's no way the crushed base happened in 10 years without weather interference. Did you consider the storm they're talking about is a temporary weather event, like a hurricane that dissipated or moved elsewhere on the planet in the *10 years* between the Degasi base and the game. Say I went to Florida and said any number of hurricanes there hadn't happened because there wasn't rain that year. The Degasi were going deeper to find the gun power, as they said. And they knew they were infected. As for getting rid of the Precursors, that would just be removing a perfectly fine plot point because some people won't read the PDA, and filling the gaps with an even more nonsensical story. The part about not getting anything from Precursors is meant to show how your character can barely interact with their tech, because they're so much more advanced. And with your rocket building things, those would just be more scavenger hunts that you need to do, but with you needing to give up resources as well. The entire rocket building thing is meant to be your victory lap, going around and getting the last resources after you've saved the planet, and letting you say goodbye. Most of your plot holes were resolved by reading the PDA and having some critical thinking, instead of seeking out holes to poke.
Completely agree with most of the points here. What made me seek out this comment is the Degasi part. It is very obviously fleshed out that the woman wanted to go deep, the old man wanted to stay above ground. While the storm was a factor, the main driving force behind them building bases deeper and deeper was to find a cure for the CORONAVIRUS
28:00 I disagree, i think this was done intentionally to make the player think there is no land at all when first starting only to discover later on that there is land although a miniscule amount. Also it hides the alien facility and unless the player is bold enough to travel that far then will wait until sunbeam contacts them and tells them to go there.
I looked at, but never played this game. I have a real fear of deep water, and I think I would pretty much be paralyzed just watching the screen. If I did manage to give the game a try, I think I would have been one of the players who would try for the islands. Not out of boldness, but out of terror from being stuck in the ocean.
Yes. Also would it have been better to see just two chunks of rock to the side of your lifepod? (Btw I’m not talking to you, I’m just expanding your point so yes, I heavily agree with you). It would just make the whole point of the game of discovering everything yourself pointless.
@@Ritsu362 EXACTLY! Theres no need to show the islands, because people should be able to recognize the presence of animals native to land (birds and the stupid crab things on the Aurora) means there is land elsewhere on the island. One of the first things you see in the game is birds on your escape pod. If you're bright enough to notice it, you'll know this means there is land on the planet.
The fact that we don't see the islands from the start is great imo. I was just going into a random cave (and I was really scared..) then I came out from inside the cave, and stumble onto this island. I was in awe cause I did not expect it at all!
@@123TeeMee that would makes sense anyway, as a creature of that size probably wouldn't be too comfortable with their ability to corner quickly and would be hurt very badly by their bodies contacting something at the speeds they swim
@@isdrakon9802 lol it certainly doesn't add to the horror as a reaper dips into the ground it's so laughable and breaks immersion that it makes the reaper less scary
54:50 I’m pretty sure one of the reasons Margaret had about why they should go deeper is discovered in the second degasi base, where Bart torgal discovers the alien bacterium, and Margaret says that they should go deeper in order to discover how they should cure it, as well as saying, “whatever shot us down is going to do it again, and again, until it’s shut off.” and uses this as another reason to explore deeper.
@@lapis3345 I was just casually looting around the Aurora. Heard a weird sound and turned around 180 degrees. Massive roaring reaper that fills my entire view. Almost a year later and I still remember that moment.
@Aaron Smith yeah but who tf uses that feature also you know the slow as zombies are much slower than you but in subnatica it feels like they are going wayyy faster cuz of sound design
Personally, I always saw that combat with the leviathans was meant to be possible, but unnatural. I felt bad after killing one of them in the Lost River because it just kept floating, dead. Idk I just got the feeling that I was a part of the ocean until I tried to bend it to my will, and then I became separate from it
What's worse is that there is a set number of leviathans within the game's borders. When you kill all of them...that's it. The world feels a bit empty.
Yeah, that was the intended narrative, Mama Emporer talks about it in one of her dialogue segments. Trying to fight back against nature would land you in the same boat as the precursors or the degassi crewmen. Actively trying to conquer nature would end with you dying of the Karar, with the quarantine enforcement platform still online. But actively respecting the laws of nature, and doing your part to repair it, you guaranteed both your freedom, and the survival of the planet you called home for all of the games story.
@@swaawsman Except for that one lady in Below Zero that has been on this planet longer than Riley. She gets to slay leviathans and keep going on with her day lol
@@lsswappedcessna I personally like the fact that the PDA doesn't have personality, although I can see why others would think differently, but I'd like to explain why. In the later parts of Subnautica, the game drives in the point that you're alone very frequently, E.g. The types of music you hear (like 'Crash Site'), the PDA mentioning how people become insane and depressed when recommending an inanimate object to help with loneliness and when you realise there is no one left on this planet besides from you. A blank faced 'Siri' telling you how to survive is just the icing on the cake and drives the point further.
Good video as always. It's interesting, some of the things you pointed out as wasted gameplay potential actually helped the immersion (no pun intended) for me. I *liked* that there were biomes and animals that weren't strictly necessary. It made me feel like just another part of the ecosystem, instead of some sort of planet-conquerer. I also weirdly didn't have nearly the scale of technical issues that you did. Not sure if there was a recent patch or just different hardware reacts differently. Regardless! You continue to prove that quality content is worth waiting for.
In the early access versions, there was a file that had to be deleted manually because it interfered with several of the game's newer patch files which in turn created tons of performance issues and lag spikes. Removing that one, single file made the game MUCH smoother in nearly all aspects. Idk if Joseph's version was a complimentary file that updated and replaced his early-access file with the complete game, or if he downloaded the complete game separately, but it seems to have been the prior and he was uninformed of the file performance detail.
I agree about the performance issues. I have heard a lot of complaints about pop in and clipping and what not, but experienced very little of it myself. I have a good computer but not some badass gaming machine and I was able to run it on the highest settings with few problems. I would give the game 8/10 personally.
Jacob Geller I also like it in games when they have stuff that doesn't link to the main plot or game play, things that are just there for world building. Only adding creatures and items strictly necessary for the core gameplay usually makes the whole thing feel artificial.
the biomes and animals that weren't necessary were really cool and felt immersive but at the same time with how many interactions the stalker has with being a hostile creature, bringing tons of metal scrap to it's nest, being able to use those same scrap to get teeth, and being able to feed it fish to make it tame. It just feels like it would have been cool if more creatures had more interactions with the player to make the game more complex. I feel like the lost river and lava zones could have used this especially as some of the hostile creatures there feel especially bland and could have had a bit more going on like the lava lizard and river prowler which feel really basic compared to the stalker and sand shark
And after the attack, the bacterium was released because they were researching the sea emperor’s ability to suppress the disease. The aliens brought the bacteria to 4546B, but never intended to let it out into nature. It was only after the disease was released was it then that an outbreak occurred, as evidenced in data files, and the aliens died. The Kharaa bacterium isn’t indigenous to the planet, further explaining why even the most evolutionarily advanced animals can be affected and why they created new creatures to further destroy the outliers.
@@arcticguy3455 No, it was not. The precursors brought it onto 4546B for research purposes, because the disease had already wiped out other worlds under their control. They had it isolated, but when they experimented with the fauna then things got out of hand and another world nearly died
I agree with mostly everything, but there's one thing you said that kinda left me confused. I went to the captain's room and started building the space ship right after fixing the radiation problems of the Aurora. I built two parts of the Neptune before i stumbled with materials i didn't know how to get, because i hadn't even reached the river yet. So for me, the Neptune had a huge built up, and i couldn't have been more excited when i finally found the kyanite and the blueprints for the ion power cell. The final parts of the Neptune, after releasing the hatched babies, took me about an hour to finish and then i was done. Maybe it was because you didn't visit that part of the Aurora early enough, but the Neptune is something i was looking forward for almost half my playthrough, and the hype i felt when i was finally able to finish that was huge.
Yeah I started on the neptune I think before I even went to the Lost River, and I gathered most of the resources for it during my excursions to the Lost River and Lava Zones, so to me it was never a tedious hunt at the very end, but instead a secondary objective to keep in mind during the entire last phase.
My friend is afraid of the ocean so we sent him to the craters edge where the ghost leviathans are and turned off the lights and closed the curtains. Lets just say that was entertaining
@@gaminggeckos4388 For some reason I didn't consider that the food from the planet was included in the 1 trillion... But still, most of the food on 4546B isn't described as especially nutritious or flavorful, so it probably wouldn't be worth too much if Alterra chose to exploit it. The cost of the chips and the coffee, on the other hand, also includes the marketing budget, so it might still work out to be more expensive.
I dunno if it’s ever said but wouldn’t it make sense if most precursor planets were exploded by the massively powerful bombs they are shown to have because of the kharaa and this one was put under quarantine BECAUSE of the presence of the cure? I mean why else would they put one in their base besides display, then disable it when they realized how precious this planet is
Yup, it tried to trigger but failed. But, it probably failed because of Precursor intervention, that disabled it before it could explode, and then put it on display.
@@totallynotjevii574 I keep seeing people talk about the planet exploding, where does it say that. The best I can remember is a pda entry at the primary research facility in the lost river. It said that the subjects were terminated except one, which is how kharra escaped initially. After that it was straight to long term storage for the precursors
For all its flaws, Subnautica when it's working properly absolutely nails atmosphere. The Lost River is one of the most memorable locations in gaming to me, right up there with Satorl Marsh at night. You have the ominous giant skeleton, toxic brine pools that look impossible but do indeed happen on Earth and that massive membrane tree. It's scary and beautiful at the same time! Perfect to keep someone interested even if they're terrified to take another step forward. It's enough to make you scared but not too scared to be curious about what's just around the corner.
I think you totally missed an element of the story that explains a lot of your gripes very clearly. The big theme and lesson of subnautica is this idea of respecting nature. The mother leviathian talks about this, and the whole exploration and beauty all builds on this idea of nature as a thing to be respected and not harnessed. the ability to kill things REALLY adds to this in my opinion. you go out into the world thinking one day you will be king over all, controller of your world but in the end you come to appreciate the world instead and understand that even though theses creatures suck ass and smash apart all your sea moths, they are things that need to be respected. The first time you kill something large there is no reward. what you did was not something to be praised, you soiled the beauty of the world. all thats left is an ugly twitching body and the game forces you to look at yourself and think about if you deserved to survive any more than it did. a lot of these gameplay elements come together and really hammer home the message in a way nothing other than a video game could do.
i. jpg and this is emphasized by the degrasi survivors. When the son talks about making enameled glass, he mentions how the last goes head to head woth stalkers. Then he says something like “what’s the point of exploring this world, if we need to destroy it to learn more about it”
Exactly. You are a member of a space-faring megacorp, and here you are, humbled by the alien ecosystem you struggle to understand. By the time you are leaving, you don't want to be the master of this. You want to marvel at this.
This is also further supported by one of the coincidences that were mentioned. The Aliens would have succeeded had they not used such invasive and aggressive means to study the Emperor Leviathan. The player character survives by cooperating with Nature.
i. jpg Right? The first time I killed a Stalker (I just wanted to see if you could kill things), I was just dumbfounded at its twitching body. It never died, and never laid still, just sunk. It was right next to my lifepod too so every time I went back to it, I could see its body just laying there, twitching and dying. I felt bad because there was no point in killing it. It couldn’t harm me, but I could harm it. Seemed cruel. So I left my lifepod and never went back.
The islands are supposed to be unseen. The whole point is that it feels like there's nothing but water. What feels out of place is the fact that the islands exist ti begin with.
I generally agree with the theme of this video, in that Subnautica has a lot of varied problems that keep it from becoming a legendary game. However Joseph is misinformed about a lot of things in the game's world, mostly because he did a sloppy job at reading and understanding the data logs throughout the game. You can see a lot of people in the comments leaving good remarks about the gaps in his information. I love Subnautica, so I hope the developers can browse this place and find the best ideas for improving the next Subnautica game!
@@ineednochannelyoutube5384 Necro-posting - while I do agree with a lot of his critiques and nitpicks, you are right on the money on how he misses things that are right in front of the player's face a lot of the time. I constantly see him miss a connection that is implicitly spelled out multiple times in game narratives.
The Aroura was doing a gravity slingshot maneuver around 4546b because they were scanning for the degasi, so obviously they would be over the volcanic crater where the degasi is. The degasi itself was there looking for minerals, also explaining why they would be on the crater. The degasi crew also didn’t die because of the fact they moved to a deeper and more hostile area, they died because maida brought a mostly dead reaper down there and another one followed. The same would have happened if they hadn’t moved to the deep grand reef, since presumably the crash zone always had reapers, as the mesa area which likely represents what the biome was before the ship crashed has reapers too, and that area is as close to the entrance to the mushroom caves as the dunes are to the deep grand reef.
if memory serves, the islands are covered by the fog so that you can't just immediately go there at the start of the game. it also strengthens the feeling of the whole planet being oceanic, and the only ways to go are into the unfamiliar biomes deeper down, rather than land which would be a lot less scarier for players considering obv we're used to that. although i don't know whether that was how it was intended, or just suspension of disbelief from players to excuse the visual problems it causes
This is one of a few games in recent memory, that didn't have a battle pass, that actually had me sit down and play it daily. I even looked FORWARD to playing it. Just building a base in each biome was enough for me to suddenly realize I'd been playing for 4 hours straight. Then when I figured out I could decorate my submarine I was hooked irreparably. I'm looking forward to Below Zero!
I always make my Cyclops have some cool stuff onboard! A planter with marblemelons, a fish tank full of bladderfish, some furniture (including a bed) and other stuff. Also I like gathering Sea Treader crap for my bioreactor, I have several lockers just for it.
@@lsswappedcessna I did something tragic on my first playthrough. In the island where you can find the melons I thought they were useless and ate them all. Then in my second playthrough I read the stats and regretted eating them bc then i could've had food in my cyclops
Not defending it but he probably meant that it was more detailed and involved than just grabbing a plant and leaving. He described personally needing to interact with the creatures and figuring out each biome's little ticks that make it unique.
I think his main point there wasn't necessarily "going to every biome is bad actually" and more "the way the game sends you to these biomes is uninspired"; more "these areas were underutilized", less "I don't want to be here" Take this with a grain of salt, as I'm not him, but from what I gathered, he wanted to move the marker telling you to go to the biomes (in doing so, changing the objective)-taking it from a footnote at the end game to being a game-wide quest. Remember, in his version, the launch pad is something constructed early on, but the rocket ship itself is an epic creation. Taking it to its logical extreme, there would be context clues in the recipe for each piece nudging you to a given biome, setting a goal for you to conquer so you can mark it as "complete", instead of one magic fish telling you "glad you're here, here's the specific item I need from each of these places." (Of course, that has its own drawbacks, but I digress)
While many of your points are very true, so many "flaws" about the story are just flat out wrong (please correct me if im wrong about anything). The degasi survivors discovered more and more as they went deeper and they debated about going deeper out of curiosity. They had the cuddlefish eggs in their lab and other data bank entries pointed to the fact that they had been to an alien facility, and were in search for something to keep them alive. It's why they had all that non-functonal lab equipment. They didnt just go deeper cuz of weather. The fog is also there as to not spoil the story and the surprise about aliens. It also creates mystery and thought about just barely missing the other aurora survivors, as you get a log leading to the floating island, and you see evidence of people having been there. It helps make the world feel more responsive, and not set in stone. Without the fog, the game wouldve been a good bit worse. I'm using a ryzen 3600 and a gtx 1060. I havent experienced ANY lag except for pop-in grass only. The sea emperor's babies didnt release the enzyme. The sea emperor did, she was able to make it the whole time, but wanted her babies to be freed first. The aliens exist as data, not biological bodies, so she couldnt talk to them, and therefor wouldnt hand over the enzyme considering that her babies would still be trapped. In nature, the sea emperor never wouldve released the enzyme, she just knew how to. You said that there are very few things that are just straight up upgrades, however a key part you missed were oxygen tanks and although you mentioned it, depth upgrades. These STRONGLY impact the game, and I think it's good that subnautica isn't only straight up upgrades, but these types of upgrades are necessary for most games. The aurora was following the degasi people, who happened to crash around the area, and are never found (so its safe to assume they crashed in the void) and the only elevated ground in the area is an obvious choice for the aurora to land, as they were trying to see what happened to the degasi people, making it clear that the chances aren't nearly as low as you say (however its still unlikely that degasi crashed in that general part of the planet leading aurora to it) .There are other things I've missed, but these things that you've gotten wrong really bugged me.
While the adult sea emperor leviathan was able to produce enzyme 42, it is not enough to cure the illness, only weaken it temporarily because it the adult emperor is way too old.
Great points, but I don't remember seeing anything in the game about the aliens not existing as biological bodies, only that one of the infected ones uploaded their mind to some sort of terminal (which I believe you can find). Why do you believe that the Degasi crashed in the void? While we don't find the wreck I very much doubt they would have been able to survive and get to the crater to set up bases. Also I don't mean to be that guy but please write in paragraphs lol
Yeah, in regards to his critique of the story, I think he's overthinking what are perfectly plausible ambiguities rather than plot holes, even without the context of Below Zero. Having some ambiguity in a story always makes the story feel more immersive for me personally. In reality, if you're living through a complex historical event, you're not going to have a grasp on ALL the details of the event, AND events that feel uncanny occur more often than you feel they should sometimes (That's a bias that's common to humans, pareidolia. We tend to have a bad sense of probability and misunderstand that randomness isn't devoid of clumps of order. That often makes us mistake order, that occurred due to random chance, as having some substantial, traceable cause). I feel like a lot of critics do this when critiquing stories and it always bothers me. They over analyze the causality of plot events and assume that any ambiguity or coincidence is a flaw of the story rather than a potential part of it. In the case of Subnautica's story there's too much ambiguity (which I believe is largely intentional) to say for sure whether what he's addressing are really causality errors or contrived coincidences. For example, regarding how this event was supposedly humanity's first encounter with these aliens: We really only see a small minutia of what the precursor alien race left behind. As far as I recall, the game doesn't give any concrete timeline to the spread of the bacteria anywhere besides the planet itself. In the realm of science-fiction the sky's the limit for reasons why this is the first time humans have encounter remnants of this civilization. That's part of the mystery and leaving it ambiguous is a perfectly valid way to handle it because it's a problem (The Fermi Paradox) that we don't even know the answer to in reality, so the chance of anyone coming up with a perfect solution in a plot like this is pretty slim without the use of some sci-fi plot magic. Leaving it ambiguous leaves you with the exact same interesting questions that plague us about the Fermi Paradox and your imagination can run wild at that point. Also, who's to say humans haven't encountered remnants of the aliens already? All we have to go on in the game is our AI's analysis of things and the observations of people who are also stuck on the planet. Neither of those entities are necessarily connected to the whole of the galaxy spanning humanities knowledge in the circumstances of the game. Additionally, whose to say how well persevered other instances of these Alien's remnants are, or how much information they left intact to actually connect ruins that humanity has already found to ones on the planet in Subnautica. Again, there's just to much plausible ambiguity to say for sure.
Not to detract from your performance of the game, but this review was made 4 years ago. Around that time this is how the game ran on the current hardware. It has since recently been fixed and patches and obviously we have much much better hardware nowadays than we did 4 years ago.
@@ThrowAway-gu2lw you can actually find a piece of the Degasi somewhere, your PDA will say something like "this doesn't match other parts from the Aurora" so we can be sure they actually landed in the crater.
I never found the entrance to the Aurora until I had to look up some hints online. Hence, I only ended up building the entire rocket at the end of the game as well. I was stuck with the paradigm that the entire game has to be played underwater despite finding islands which stopped me from looking for entrances to the Aurora on the surface, and just stuck to looking underwater for answers. It wasn't a pleasant experience looking for prawn suit parts all over the sea bed when it turns out, all of them are in the Aurora.
@@DNESE312 the game even tells you to go inside the aurora at one point, and before then it heavily implies it too when *spoilers* it blows up, that happens so early in a game that it's inconcievable that a new player will have gone much deeper than normal before this happens!
Well it happened to me. I kept coming back to the aurora failing to find an entrance underwater up until the end of the game. Then I checked for hints online and surprise, surprise, you were supposed to climb up to the surface and go in from there.
Except that the radio call which gives you the passcode to access the blueprints for the rocket is on a timer. It's pretty easy to be far in the late-game stage by the time that call decides to show up if it's not your first time playing the game. Which I think was what most people who've played the early access versions experienced, me included. I already had all of the submersibles with all of the available upgrades in place and was halfway of building a large aquarium zoo just for the kicks when I first got it. The only reason I hadn't also cured the Kharaa by that point was that I wanted to build said aquarium zoo first before doing the fetch quest for the hatching enzyme, and gathering the materials for 10 two-story aquariums takes a lot of time
You mention the hole in the plot of all of the ships all entering the atmosphere in the same spot on the planet but you seem to ignore the fact that your ship was following the coordinates of the previous ship crashing and the rescue ship was following yours. And most important of all aside from the fact that the gun could warp space-time and shoot around the planet without the first ship having run into the gun and being shot down we might never have had a story and hence a game. This is the same crux of most stories. So I fail to see how this was a problem.
Also, do we know for certain that there's only one gun? For all we know the one that shoots down the Aurora, Degrassi, and Sunbeam could be one of potentially thousands scattered across the planet, ready to fire at all angles.
@@projectbelmont7177 I doubt there's thousands, but definitely multiple ones. There are precursor bases in Below Zero which takes place on a completely different part of the planet, so this doesn't seem too unlikely.
@@billcipher147 I'm fairly certain that there is only 1 gun based on the fact that an alien terminal tells you that the laser bends around the planet's gravity to hit targets in orbit as well as the fact with the PDA entry that mentions the alien facilities on the planet doesn't mention any other gun
17:41 I disagree with the fighting enemies part. It wouldn't fit the overall game style if every enemy comes with a health bar and rewards for killing it. Its not a fighting game, its a survival game and a very realistic one who would lose some of the realistic feel to it if it had that.
its a survival game. so players should be allowed to waste food water and time, killing pointlessly. wasting resources is a survival mistake.. but this game does cleverly play on our brain chemistry.. some people just have to kill leviathans.
Bizz493 no combat? All we have is a dinky little survival knife and a drill on the prawn suit that is meant for drilling. That tells me that this game has very little combat..... like very little. I think it’s ok to be able to kill all the creatures with the little combat we have because these creatures aren’t immortal, they will eventually die, even to a dinky little knife. I think it makes the game more realistic.
I don't know what sort of survival you have experienced, but basics of survival does include ability to hunt things for stuff. Such as hunting larger animal for their skin, if needed. I don't believe for a second that a Reaper would not have ANY useful materials in its body we could use.
@@hydropump8731 Well you can make 2 types of torpedoes. Can be used on the Seamoth and the Mech Suit. Not bothered to build those yet.. So do not know how well they work.
I think that this was a well thought out critique of this game, and you definitely put a lot of effort into it, but things like assuming both ships crashed close to each other was a coincidence when the story gives an explanation kinda throw this video off for me. But I think this is still a great video about what you think of this game.
He didn't pay attention to the story at all🤣 degasi came to the crater cuz there was hella ore, Aurora was looking for degasi, Sunbeam was looking for survivor. He Didn't understand the degasi story at all. This is Honestly it's like he barely read the PDA at all, and with him claiming he didn't like the menus I'm not surprised
@@unsoundmusic8348 It feels like he excels at gameplay critiques but story critiques are really hit or miss. The degasi feel really stupid now though since we know Marguerite survived and there is no explanation for her living that isn't complete off the walls stupid. To be fair to him thinking the Aurora coming to the crater was a coincidence the only real indication that this was there objective are in some easy to miss spots
@@plugshirt1762 I havent played below zero, so I only know the degasi story up until the end of Subnautica. Didn't know any members of their crew survived
@@unsoundmusic8348 ah sorry for spoiling it. For reference though none of them should have survived and by hearing their story in the original there is no real scenario where they would. From what I hear they already had a model of her after changing the story so they were left with it and just kind of inserted her into it without it actually making sense so all their work wouldn't be wasted
"Your submarine and mech suit shouldve been able to carry far more" you can literally deck the cyclops in so many lockers you'll never be able to fill them all. Which is what I did, and proceeded to never worry about inventory space (or build a permanent base for that matter) ever again
@@DrORRB-qm7fl i mean i would appreciate if items in your lockers were automatically consumed by any crafting stations in that ship/base. Many games already implement systems like that and I don't see a reason not to have one in Subnautica. The amount of time I spent trying to organize my inventories and running around the bases trying to remember where i left that ONE piece of iron last time...
Good point. I focused on the “put stuff in” part instead of the “sort it” part and assumed that he didn’t even want to interact with the inventory. A sorting option would actually be really nice.
"The game stutters more than my youngest son when he's trying to learn new words and has more pop up than his favourite books." I can't stop laughing. Good one Joseph.
The pop up does kinda suck from an exploration perspective. If you are already squinting to see what ahead in the dark/depths its bad when things just start materializing 20 feet ahead of you
Actually there is a short term fix for the stutter on pc. Ive used it and it works, which is to erase the contents of cellscache (?) folder. I don't remember exactly because it seems the game fills this cache to keep track of all the changes you are making in the environment... I guess. Either way erasing the folder will erase everything outside of your bases. So all my air tubes vanished and the forcefields reappear, and all the gravity ball things went away etc. So its short term because as soon as you start doing stuff then soon the stutters will be back
Regarding the escape rocket: I don't know how I managed to do this or how you didn't, but I began building it even before my prawn suit. I had the base early on and added each module as the game progressed. I had the whole rocket before meeting the Emperor Leviathan. So for me the rocket was a fun and enjoyable experience.
@@MagicGonads I suppose it comes down to how much an individual explores the map on their own before following each story element (in the form of radio signals)
It was kinda odd because I knew that I needed to make a mobile vehicle bay but had never encountered any fragments for it, but I already had everything I needed to complete the game (aside from the final story element)
@@MagicGonads Hmm, something similar happened to me as well, but it was more minor. I didn't know battery chargers even existed till after obtaining Kyanite. It was on my way back that I found a wreckage where I found all the blueprints.
@@sophisticatednebula4236 I'm currently on a quest to deliberately find battery chargers cus I don't want to have a bunch of empty batteries in my storage (and I have only encountered one modification station fragment so far) Still haven't found a single fragment ...
the rocket was good because you could paint it to look like a banana. also you could build it at any point in the game. the captains quarters are available around the mid-game.
It's pretty clear he didn't pay all that much attention to the story itself. He seems to think that all the fish are cured of the disease, meanwhile the game states that the disease is absolutely everywhere in the ocean, just that the couple of square kilometers the game takes place in is being kept alive by the enzymes, as it suppresses the bacterium. Same when he asked if putting an enzyme-rich peeper into the alien blood tester, the fish is still infected, it's just suppressed. It's the same reason the player doesn't die from the disease. The reason the aliens didn't get the cure is because the leviathan's embryos cannot hatch alive without the hatching enzyme, which I assume would naturally occur or the leviathan would produce by eating the flora required to make it. In confinement, the leviathan cannot or refuses to do so, as all she wants is for her children to swim freely in the ocean. It refuses and, in fact, cannot give the cure to the aliens because it cannot communicate with them. As for why the aliens just shoot down ships instead of warning them? They don't care, plain and simple. Any aliens would know it's a quarantine planet and would know to avoid it.
I was surprised about the criticism of shooting down ships. Like, it's one thing to disagree with a fictional alien race moral value, it's another to say it's a plot hole. It's perfectly reasonable to shoot everything that comes into orbit, the laser is aiming at space, so if it shot things only when they were trying to leave, most likely a ship could land, not notice the quarantine and then try to leave, get shot a bit too late and have some debris full of the disease and maybe even an emergency ship fly off into space. It's just must safe to shoot everything trying to go in and out, than waiting for them to get out.
You're first point on that the Sea Emperor enzyme only suppresses the bacterium is addressed starting at 47:56 Why is it that the enzyme that is suppressing the bacterium in all the other life in the game couldn't sustain the Precursors? If it's capable of keeping everything in the game alive, why wasn't it capable of keeping them alive long enough finish their research? It's not a permanent fix, but given how it's sustained everything else for thousands of years is there any reason why this isn't a viable option? Your second point about the Precursor research was also addressed at 49:34 Even if communication was an issue between the aliens and the Sea Emperor, were these incredibly advanced aliens really incapable of creating a proper hatching enzyme just as you can in game? Even if they weren't, why weren't they able to use the Sea Emperor enzyme to sustain themselves long enough to develop a hatching enzyme? Why even have it in captivity if it would just do all this naturally? Did the aliens seriously doom themselves out of stupidity? As for the laser, the idea that these aliens didn't care about anyone that may fly by the planet contradicts what else we already know about them. I agree that they should have an aggressive defensive measure in place, even if it means shooting literally any ship that comes within range regardless of whether it's landing or leaving. But there's no reason why they couldn't also design something that contacts and prompts the ship well before they come within range of the cannon in hopes of deterring them from coming to the planet and getting shot down by extension. Given what we know about them it seems more out of character that they wouldn't do that. You're telling me that these aliens care so much about the tiny insignificant specks of life on this planet that they would go to the trouble to design a series of tubes connecting the biomes via an underground network forming an immensely complicated filtration system, just so that they could spread the enzymes from the Sea Emperor so that life on the planet could thrive, but also thought that any dumb schmuck in a space ship unlucky enough to fly too close to the planet can go fuck themselves?
@@robotspgc >Why couldn't the enzyme protect the precursors? This is not directly addressed as far as I'm aware, but it could have something to do with how vastly different the precursors were from 'normal' animals. The bacterium is stated as changing the genetic code or creatures, and the aliens (from what brief looks we get into their physiology) are said to be grown from seeds and can apparently 'download' data directly into and out of themselves. Matter of fact, the game suggests most of the aliens on the planet didn't die of the bacterium, but instead transferred themselves onto databases known as sanctuaries, while their diseased bodies were disposed of. So clearly, the base enzyme had either very little to no effect on the aliens. edit: The alien logs specifically state that the enzyme has shown to inhibit symptoms of the bacterium in indigenous life forms. So in its base form, the enzyme did nothing to the aliens. > were these incredibly advanced aliens really incapable of creating a proper hatching enzyme just as you can in game? Yes. They did not get far along in their research before the infection spread to all of them. The player is only capable of making the hatching enzyme because she tells you how to make it. The aliens were incapable to receiving the emperor's communications, and all she wanted was for her children to roam free instead of being test subjects. It's also stated that when the planet was placed under official quarantine and all warp gates were shut down, their research pace plummeted. >You're telling me that these aliens care so much about the tiny insignificant specks of life on this planet that they would go to the trouble to design a series of tubes connecting the biomes via an underground network forming an immensely complicated filtration system, just so that they could spread the enzymes from the Sea Emperor so that life on the planet could thrive No, I'd assume they do not care about whether or not life dies on this planet if it means they can save their species. The reason they built the system to spread the enzyme is so they can research it and its effects in a living ecosystem. If they let all life die on the planet, it would likely mean their research would fail due to lack of data.
I'm inclined to believe that you, as well as many, many other people, have dramatically missed the point, the metanarrative, of Subnautica, which is why it felt so... undeveloped in ways that you expected it to be developed in. For example. When you said that the endgame should have been about "conquering" the environment, I cringed. The Aurora, and the Alterra Corporation behind it, exemplify that "exploit the natural world for profit". It's driven home in some of the more humorous lines, about how much you owe them for your survival, but it's also thrown in through things like Paul Torgal's focus on using the natural lithium deposits for profit, and claiming the moon for mining operations, and in some of the Aurora personnel logs, like the one that has supposedly-loving relationships being explicitly commodified. In the end, the Sea Emperor tells you *explicitly* that she gives you the cure because you came willing to treat her like an actual sentient entity, whereas the Precursors sought only to take from her, violently, as they had tried versus the entire rest of her species. Cooperate with the environment, and you will be rewarded. That's the Stalker tooth thing, and it keeps showing up thematically throughout the story. The Degassi logs do everything but say this outright. More importantly, though, is the fact that you, the character, do not belong in that environment. The predators are scary, and will eat you, but they're easily avoidable. If you understand the ecosystem, how the different predators track their food, you can avoid them, distract them, live with them. That's what the game practically tells you to do, but this is in direct opposition to the way many people play games: with the knowledge that everything is exploitable, and that you are meant to exploit it. This is not how the game wants you to play it, and is not even how the game conditions you to play it. It is, however, how *other* similar games have conditioned you to play it. I have a friend who enjoyed Subnautica like you did. He had a lot of questions for me about the world that he should have found answers to in the scan data and voice logs on the moon. In other survival games, it's just flavor text. Background information that doesn't have an impact on gameplay or understanding of the story. It's easy to gloss over. But in Subnautica, every bit of it is important for contextualizing the core themes of the game itself. Every single thing that you thought was confusing or went unexplained about the plot is very clearly explained in the same way. I hope you revisit the game with this in mind. In fact, I implore you. Revisit it with this new context. It pains me when people say the themes of Subnautica, or even of Below Zero, came from nowhere.
Murdock Grewar The Sea Emperor says that the Precursors locked her up („they build these walls“) and that’s the reason she didn’t want to help them since she wanted her babies free and not locked up in that facility, but. Plus she looks rather exhausted after they are free so idk if she‘s near death and sees the player as her last chance to get her kids hatched, that is just a speculation from my side. Just wanted to clear that up in case you missed that
@Murdock Grewar You missed the point as well. Precursors were one step away from creating a cure. They built teleports to all the biomes to collect resources, they have correctly deduced that the Sea Emperor can be the cure. All the required pieces of the puzzle were in heir hands (if they had hands). The only thing they failed to do was to talk the the Sea Emperor herself. She mentions how she tried to talk to them, to explain what they needed to do in exchange for her freedom but "they never listened". Instead they tried to bruteforce the formula and ran out of time. Whether they were physically unable to hear her, or ignored her, never considering her a sentient being, remains unclear. But there's good ol' irony under all of this. "the buggy twitches from the ragdolls" - these were added by the devs intentionally. A clever decision, actually.
Y'all missed the point of this being HIS critique, he is a RUclips critic and these are his videos of which you may or may not enjoy, it is simply his opinion on the game.
@@inandout3432 His freedom is in expressing his opinion. Our freedom is in pointing out where he is wrong. Claiming that something is "simply his opinion" is not an impervious armor against critique.
About the Aurora and the Degasi landing in the same spot, if you look closely enough it becomes clear that part of the Aurora's mission was to use its superior scanning technology to try and find evidence of the Degasi. That's why it dipped low enough into the atmosphere to trigger the cannon. Because other wise they wouldn't have got close to the atmosphere. A gravity assist only needs to be within a planet's sphere of influence, and while yes getting closer to a planet speeds you up more, getting into the atmosphere would only slow you down.
It’s crazy how you thought about killing the leviathans, I never did, instead I saw them as an obstacle to be avoided, I don’t think I killed a single one
I modded some weapons into one of my playthroughs. I had enough of them screwing with me.. the seamoth lasers generally take a long time to kill anything but most leviathans freak out and swim away letting me do my thing
@@woffsmart8657 but the thing is that he is just saying that the game could've been better with a combat system now obviously I dont agree on that point
You clearly haven't listened to the story, found and read the psa entries, etc. Multiple of the "plot holes" you mentioned have explanations if you pay attention to the pda entries.
Yea and when he said the aruroa(idk how to spell it) just happened to be in the right place at the right time to be shot from the gun, he fails to mention the pda that explains they were launching a ground team to look for any degasi remains AND the fact that the gun can use the gravitational pull of the planet to shoot something on the other side.
The first half of this critique is perfect, but once you start getting in to the story and the so called coincidences it really makes me wonder if you even played the game. Practically every coincidence is explained in detail, to the point where I was cringing every time you brought up a coincidence. From, the Aurora was going to save the survivors of the Deghasi, to Peepers literally being trained to spread the enzyme, to even the smallest details like why the Deghasi crew kept going down. To be fair, your critiques of the story as far as writing were fair, I just happen to disagree, but your critique of the story in terms of plot holes and coincidences is frankly ignorant.
@@sjplive967 yes it does because it wasn't a coincidence? All the ships landed on at the same spot for a reason, the degrassi crashed there, the aurora was looking for survivors from the degrassi so they went to the same coordinates the degrassi did, the sunbeam was looking for survivors of the aurora, they all went to the same place for a reason
I think the islands being hidden is good at first so that people don’t go in over their head, but I think after exploring the island the game should make the islands visible from a distance
@@ceaselessdischarge1026 I have played the game, but I didn't understand why this "so apt" description had to be lauded. I thought the comment was stupid, that's all.
That it so true on my PS4 I am in my cyclops nothing on my radar Then boom big boy ghost leviathan screaming his ass off chewing away at my hull I died coz I didn't have the shits to go out and repair coz although he was gone he could re-appear So now whenever I goto that area I am so fucking scared of the damn ghost leviathan to appear from thin air
Sounds like the console version is pretty bad. I watched some people stream it and they all encountered quite significant bugs and glitches. Fortunately my laptop can run it just fine even with max settings. Might still buy it for my PS4 just to support the game. 🙂
this man spent ten minutes talking about combat, even though the game dialogue expressly tells you that it doesn't want you to fight. it's not a fucking combat sim.
That's why he makes the point "Why make the creatures killable at all if you're not meant to do combat?" His whole point is the game reluctantly allowed for combat and maybe it would've been better off with none at all
@@PutitinDaramen i think his point about the big creatures. Those shouldn't die from a knife or a drill on the basis of their size. It is not unconcievable to think so since its an alien planet.
that doesn't change the fact that their politics around violence made the game worse. they should have discouraged combat in different, more engaging ways. look at rain world, combat is a thing there (as it should be in every scenario involving pure survival) but if you kill too many creatures you invite much worse things to fill the niche you just opened up.
The scariest moment happened to me when I decided to see the end of a map without having any vehicle and it was day and I was swimming in one direction. Suddenly the ground disappeared and all I can see is the colour blue below me and because the sun ray was bright underwater I imagined that there is no bottom to this ocean and I could fall endlessly. To be honest I was relieved when the ghost leviathan came to greet me.
There are a few entries in the Codex which clarify your 'Coincidences'. That said, it is a huuuge string of coincidences. First, the weapon platform mentions that it has energy fields that can manipulate the beam to hit any target on any side of the planet in up to high orbit. Another log from the Aurora Scanner Room mentions that they botched their first scan for the Degassi Survivors and had to move far closer to the planet than they meant to, which triggered the Quarantine Platform. If the Wiki is right, it doesn't appear they ever meant to land on 4546B. The Precursor seem to be biomechanical, not telepathic as you mentioned. Many entries talk about how they use electronics and radio waves to communicate, and that they produce sound so layered that an advanced that the PDA mentions it's unable to translate it all. That led me to believe that the Sea Emperor couldn't communicate with them because they weren't psychic at all. As for the precursors themselves, from inside the game and from learning about Unknown World's other title Natural Selection, which takes place in the same galaxy, you learn that humans use Phasegates to go from planet to planet. It's believable then, that large portions of the galaxy aren't explored. If you have to send people out to a system, build a phasegate, then can only send people within a radius around that gate, then there could be huge swaths of the known galaxy that aren't explored. Don't get me wrong, I agree that there's a LOT of coincidences, and the story falls apart in the third act, but the game does provide the information to answer a FEW of those concerns. EDIT: Thanks, M Reed, for clearing up my mistake about the audio log! Thanks for the amazing video!
I'm pretty sure that "Another log from the Aurora mentions that they had a navigational error that brought them far closer to the planet than they meant to, forcing them to begin reentry procedures as opposed to dropping an away team. " doesn't exist. You may be misremembering the "Aurora Scanner Room Voice Log" PDA (see subnautica.wikia.com/wiki/Data_Downloads), which simply states that the first scan failed, forcing them to repeat the scan later (closer to the planet) than anticipated. The only other option that I can see is "Lifepod 19 Second Officer Keen's Voicelog", but that's referring to the Captain taking manual control to minimize damage *after* the Aurora had already been shot. In any case, it seems beyond unlikely that an interstellar race would "make a navigation error" sufficient to force a reentry, and (visually, at least) the Aurora doesn't appear to be designed for reentry / landing. If there really is a PDA as you describe, then it just makes the plot hole bigger -- if you have lifepods (that *are* designed to reenter) then you would place everyone in them and launch as soon as you realized that you were in a "We aren't going to make it out of the atmosphere" situation. This would result in a far more orderly evacuation than we see in the intro sequence, so...
You're right about the Scanner Room Voicelog! Thank you. That does clear it up for me. Aurora arrives on a flyby of 4546B, does a scan for the Degassi but gets too close to the planet and triggers the quarantine platform. The platform hits the ship which starts crashing. Evacuation proceeds in chaos, with only a few life pods landing near it's final crash site.
BitterLies I totally agreehh I'm not sure he read much as there's so many little story errors in his recounting. The whole Twitch stream felt rushed, as does this review.
There is also a voice log of the captain steering the Aurora toward dry land as it was crashing so it explains why they landed in the one area of the planet that is hospitable.
When I first played Subnautica, I often stayed above the ocean surface. Gave me at least some sense of security. Because whatever lurks beyond me, it's not there if I can't see it.
@@josephray6264 the same here with me. i like this game a lot, but i am not able to play it because i instantly feel very bad when seing that void blue ocean, you know
@@josephray6264 for me, the problem is not what's in the big blue, but the vision itself. This vision gives me some goosebumps and i feel very bad, then i save and just close the game
Joseph asking _"Why didn't the aliens install a warning sign in English on 4546b ?"_ has the same energy as a German Tourist expecting to see a Sign in Deutsch on his trip to Bali
@@kabershshkabersh4272 This isnet true lol in real life a problem many governments face is how to show that nuclear waste is dangerous for people hundreds of thousands of years in the future. This is because if something horribly where it happen people wouldnet know what a nuclear symbol is
This very same game has an instance of an alien message being broadcast, that your in game PDA translates for you. Its the message about the Vaccine Development Program being canceled. So yes, the Precursor race(later called Architects in Below Zero) do communicate in a method under stable by human methods in the story.
Is there a real penalty for being too cold tho? So far the only thing I noticed was my hunger and thirst increasing faster while being cold and the sprint speed is reduced. Other than that I haven't found anything else (and I accidently left my pc running while being in glacial basin, I starved - but it wasn't the cold that killed me)
@@redzeppelin6 I am very much aware of that and have already played below zero - I didn't notice any real penalty for being in the cold for long periods of time, that's why I'm asking
I mostly agree with all of your points in the video, but there's some considerations I feel you've overlooked. These are my personal nitpicks of your critique, as well as speculation on my part, and don't necessarily reflect my thoughts on the critique as a whole, just these specific parts of it. 1. The Degasi landing in the same area as the Quarantine Enforcement Platform is indeed astronomically unlikely. The Aurora, however, was passing by 4546B with the intent of scanning the planet to search for the missing Degasi crew (as a secondary goal to their primary goal of establishing a phasegate somewhere else). While it's still unlikely that the Aurora would have landed RIGHT THERE, it's less astronomical when you take into consideration that they were specifically scanning the same area of the planet where the Degasi went down. Furthermore, the logs found in the game state that the captain of the Aurora took manual control of the ship in an effort to control its landing. He probably tried to land it near the two islands, which the ship's scans identified and chose as the rendezvous point for the survivors. In fact, thinking it through further, the Degasi also probably tried to steer toward the few patches of land in that area of the planet while crashing. 2. Planet 4546B is the first planet on which alien technology has been discovered. As you said, this alien civilization spanned at least a large part of the galaxy, so why haven't any ruins been found on other planets? Well, as it turns out, the galaxy is REALLY fucking big. Having the technology to traverse the galaxy, and even achieve intergalactic travel, doesn't necessarily mean that the entire galaxy has been explored. There are a hundred billion stars in the Milky Way, with each on average having around 2-3 planets orbiting them. Humanity at the point in which the game takes place probably hasn't explored even 1% of the planets in the galaxy, let alone colonized them. Also, the Aurora was passing by 4546B with the primary objective of establishing a phasegate in another system. Thus 4546B is on the edge of inhabited space at BEST. What if the alien civilization was from the opposite side of the Milky Way, and their civilization spanned only as far as 4546B? What if it didn't even span that far, and since 4546B was a quarantine/research planet it was well beyond the edge of their civilization as a precaution meant to keep the disease from spreading (4546B is "on the outer edge of the Ariadne Arm" which is literally at the other side of the galaxy from Earth)? Again, exploration does not necessarily mean colonization; that the precursors made contact with Earth in the past does not mean they inhabited that area of the galaxy. 2A. Planet 4546B may actually be the ONLY planet still teeming with Kharaa. As explained in the game, the only reason the planet hadn't undergone total extinction is because of the Sea Emperor Leviathan releasing small amounts of enzyme 42 into the ecosystem via the Peepers. Presumably, any other planet which had experienced a Kharaa outbreak would have been driven completely to extinction given that enzyme 42 is unique to 4546B. The Kharaa bacterium on these completely lifeless planets would then also die out with no hosts available. 2B. One of the alien artifacts found is described as a doomsday device capable of wiping out 4546B's entire solar system, which has malfunctioned. Presumably other inhabited Precursor planets which experienced Kharaa outbreaks may have just obliterated themselves with non-malfunctioning doomsday devices in an effort to prevent the disease from spreading to even more planets, which would explain why this one with the (coincidentally) malfunctioning doomsday device is the first Precursor planet to be discovered. 3. The enzyme spread by the Peepers is enough to keep the planet from dying out completely, but isn't enough to prevent the player's infection, because the Peepers have been spreading the enzyme for a thousand years. Life on the planet was forced to quickly adapt to the Kharaa outbreak, which includes the adaptation allowing them to make good use of the miniscule amounts of enzyme 42 in the environment. This would be contrived were it not for the fact that life native to 4546B have the ability to mutate and adapt very rapidly, evidenced by the various diverse biomes existing in such close proximity to each other. Its spread is also inhibited by the Warpers, who hunt down and kill any infected organisms. The Precursors simply didn't have enough time to adapt to it. 3A. At around 50:20 you mention that it's a big coincidence that the Sea Emperor capable of producing enzyme 42 just so happened to be alive at the same time that the Precursors arrived. Not for nothing, but he Sea Emperor in containment has been alive for a thousand years after the extinction of the Precursors. With that information in mind, it's not unfathomable that it might be a few millennia even more ancient than that. 3B. Nobody ever said that shutting down the QEP means that the planet is free of infection. The problem is that infected individuals cannot shut down the QEP, thus necessitating the need for the player to find a cure so they can then shut it down. The QEP is not monitoring the planet for signs of Kharaa. (of course that means the precursors are pretty dumb for not making it do that but the point still stands). 3B-I. The enzyme-carrying Peepers are not immune to Kharaa. As an alien data download states, Peepers die within about 4 days of infection with Kharaa, and only have their symptoms go into remission upon exposure to enzyme 42. They are still infected with Kharaa, just asymptomatic. 4. The Degasi survivors experiencing bad weather is bullshit, yeah. However, them deciding to establish bases in dangerous areas is just like the player. They're going deeper to try to find whatever shot them down, as explained in their voice logs (they don't know about mountain island with the QEP on it, as evidenced by all of their bases being either on the floating island; near the middle of the map in the jellyshroom caves; or beneath the floating island in the grand reef); just as the player goes deeper to try and find a cure. I don't know about you, but I've got bases every 500 meters or so spanning between the safe shallows, all the way down to the grand reef, through the lost river, and into the lava caves. The hypothetical bad weather is a glaring example of separation of story and gameplay, but I think that the Degasi survivors establishing deep sea bases is a great example of unification of gameplay and story.
yep, he also doesnt realize that the aurora crashed on the edge of the crater wall, and that the game takes place on the inside of a crater from an asteroid impact.. and that there is life in deep water on the outside of the impact zone..
Actually it's a volcanic crater, hence the lava zones that exist in the deepest caves in the game, but yes the game does explicitly tell you that the area outside the crater only supports leviathan class and microscopic lifeforms. It's possible that there are other shallow areas or even land on 4546B, especially since the devs are already working on an expansion that would presumably take place in a different area of the planet (unless it's on another planet entirely).
JokingJames2 I do disagree that it’s a volcanic crater, as our own science tells us that large impact craters, remove a large portion of regolith and rock, and often times expose layers of volcanic activity that rupture and add to the catastrophe.. in fact the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs(well some of them at least) was compounded by the volcanic activity unleashed not only at the ground zero of the crater after it cooled down enough to no longer be molten, but also activating the Siberian traps, which were Yosemite/Yellowstone type caldera on a mega-scale that we have never seen in our current recorded history.. I do not believe the shape of the crater resembles that of a mountain that has blown its top.. when a volcano erupts it’s usually from the top of the mountain shearing off, from the buildup of magma. Often times it is not perfectly round at all.. the fact that this crater was almost perfectly round lends credence that it was an asteroid strike and not a volcanic eruption.. it wouldn’t make sense for the aliens to build all those buildings within an active volcano anyways lol... the type of volcanic activity in the game, was typical of what we find at the bottom of the Mariana Trench and the Monterey Canyon, both the deepest, most isolated part of the ocean, yet teeming with life, do to “chimneys” and smokers.. in fact what they illustrated in Subnautica is similar to what scientists hope to find on Europa, that’s is life situated around volcanic vents at the bottom of the ocean.. but that is not the same as a crater from a volcano that has blown off its top structure..
I enjoyed this review, even though I have major objections to it. The first is about killing creatures. I find the fixation on killing the lifeforms on the planet off-putting. I like that the game takes a non-violent approach. The game designers discussed at length their choice to exclude guns and offensive weapons from the game to a significant degree. Dangerous animals can be evaded and part of the beauty of the game is learning behaviours and patterns of the lifeforms to keep yourself safe. I'm very pleased that Subnautica didn't borrow from games like Far Cry and reduce all living things to a simple resource. However, I Think you raise a good point about gathering more value from other species, i.e. Sea Treader droppings, or Stalker teeth. The islands are shrouded because it focuses the player's attention on the marine environment. If you show a human land they will beeline for the islands and operate from there. By obscuring them the player is compelled to press deeper and grow comfortable in the water. I think your criticisms about the game's performance and graphics are justified. My version had atrocious frame rate issues, which was heartbreaking given how much I loved the visuals and discovery in the game. Again, I don't see eye-to-eye with all your points, but I'm glad I watched.
The way you defeat, or more accurately, overcome the leviathans is that you avoid them. In my 50-hour playthrough of Subnautica I never was attacked by a Reaper. Avoiding encounters with them is an entirely plausible approach.
@L I...could be wrong about this, but I'm pretty sure the leviathans *do* attack smaller creatures. Which doesn't invalidate the rest of your post, just thought I'd point that out.
If they didn't want the player to be able to kill or fight leviathans they shouldn't have made them killable and or should have limited how powerful the player is as the stasis rifle and prawn are both way more powerful than they should be
44:00 It does shoot ships when they try to leave, if you try to launch the rocket without disabling the cannon, the game will tell you to disable the cannon first.
Phillip harrison Yea, but he clearly doesn't understand that it shoots down ships no matter what. Why should it only shoot them down when they leave when they *_COULD_* get infected if they get close ? Sure the bacteria isn't airborne but anything that's flying like the birds could catch it, the ship could catch it as it's coming in or out, if it's coming in it's a clear sign of it landing. Still a gaint piece of metal of a ship flying around the planet could be considered landing...
Watching al youtube content about subnautica makes me wonder: Am I the only one who doesn't wait until my character is starving or dying of thirst? All this videos give me anxiety
It's not a coincidence or blind luck that the Aurora came down near the weapon. A lot of people bring this up forgetting that it was explained. In the recording between the captain and first officer, the captain says that the ship detected a land mass and that he would stay behind to perform a controlled crash landing. You didn't just happen to come down in the one place with life, the captain sacrificed himself to maneuver the falling ship as close to the only land he could see, around which the aliens had built their facilities.
Other things that are not coincidental: The Aurora was over the same part of the planet that the Degasi went down over because they had a secondary mission to investigate the Degasi's distress signal that the majority of the crew wasn't told about. Humanity's first recorded encounter with an infected planet happens to be the one with a cure because anyone who crashed on a quarantined planet where finding a cure was impossible would never be able to leave the planet and tell anyone. These would likely be designated as no-fly zones after several failed rescue attempts.
Exactly what I was thinking when I heard that.. You actually have to go through all of the audio files and reading to get to this detail, and I feel like most people don't do that
Philip Daniels this guy barely ddi any research or thought things through i honestly cant stand watching videos like this with poor lack luster little to no actual fact and information and research
Not really. They wouldn't be ignored, they would be investigated. Humans would see that ships don't disappear mysteriously, they are shot down by a weapons. They would then find a way to destroy or disable the cannon, because even though it is more advanced, humans would have all the time they need to figure out a solution, and even savages can defeat a tank if they ambush and kill the crew.
Ivan Ivanovo That was a good idea, but you do realize you're talking about a build machine/weapon that can shoot down any ship from any range, and so far that nobody can get close to it without it detecting you. If _they_ wanna find out how to destroy it _they_ have to get close which is not gonna be easy. Not only that but they have to travel for months or years maybe in space just to reach that planet and find out what the source is in the first place. You said humans have all the time they need well that isn't true in this case...
I always felt like beyond the crater there was life but it would be scarce and large. First time I saw the giant void I thought Holy shit who knows what could be out there
We get some hints. The Ghost Leviathans are scarily big but they pale in comparison to the Lost River remains. The Gargantuan Leviathan alone is estimated to be 5+ kilometers in length and its likely it snacked on smaller leviathans as its primary food source. The colloquially named Biter Leviathan is also larger than anything living, and it's not a stretch to say evolved versions of these apex predators exist in the Void. I wouldn't be surprised if Reefbacks were out there in the void, but due to not being constrained to the volcano mount, they'd be larger. I'd expect very few small creatures, and almost exclusively Larger or Leviathan-class monstrosities would be out there. Phytoplankton would be extremely common especially towards the surface where creatures like Reefbacks and maybe even Whale Leviathans would exist. This would entice the more colossal Leviathans to come to the surface and feed before slipping back into the seemingly endless depths. Towards the bottom of the Void geothermal vents would likely exist, creating small ecosystems of blind and stationary small creatures that feed off the vents. Perhaps in the murkiest depths there may lie something even more dominant than the Gargantuan Leviathan...
I’m quite late to this video and this has likely been mentioned before, but the lack of combat is also explained within the game, with a PDA entry stating that fabricators do not come with weapon schematics due to a massacre that happened at some point, which adds an extra bit of in game reasoning for why you don’t receive any weaponry
The irl reason was that 1:the game was intended to have a decent bit of horror. And two: following the sandy hook shooting the devs at unknown worlds really didn’t want to promote guns so they scrapped any concepts involving them in their next game. Just little bit of dev history for ya.
@sovietbanana4589 I actually like how the banning the guns in this game proves that banning the guns does nothing in regards of safety or ceasing violence.
@@legolegs87 most people in real life don't have to deal with wild animals trying to maul them 100 meters from their home tho... They're also generally less likely to take risks irl, where they can get hurt/permanently scarred or die, than in video games they can always turn off :p
I remember when I first played this game. I remember that almost every creature I encounter is either trying to kill me, eat me or destroy my equipment. Sometimes all three at the same time though not in that order particularly. I remember being scared shitless when first encountering the Reaper Leviathan. I remember being awed when I saw the Aurora's explosion. It was thrilling when I first saw the gun. And you can bet it was terrifying when I got that first Warper massage. But in the last Arc the meeting with the Sea Emperor has changed my view. To me at first it seemed like a hostile environment. After talking with the Emperor my view changed. 4546B is a world that was doomed by Precursors because of their inability to understand. It is stated that Precursors were telepath in nature. Yet they failed to understand the Sea Emperor. Because as the Emperor said they played against the current. It wasn't just a figure of speech. The Precursors never worked with the nature. They took eggs from mother Sea Dragon. And captured one of the most beautiful creature for over 1000 years. It was a miracle that planet even survived the outbreak. But in the end I was reluctant to leave. Then I changed my mind when I hear Reaper Leviathan's roar.
It was actually the Sea Emperor who was telepathic by nature. The Precursors were unable to understand her because of their bio-cybernetic makeup. Riley, and quite possibly Bart Torgal as well, could hear her because he is human and has an organic makeup. When she mentioned those who swim against the current, it's exactly like you said. The Precursors worked against nature or, in the words of Paul Torgal, tried to shackle it to their will, which led to their downfall. That could mean she was referring to both the Precursors and the Degasi survivors, as they both met their ends due to their failure to respect the environment and the creatures within.
For me, Subnautica was an experience that I wouldn't change a single thing about, it was singularly unique and I loved every second of it. First game to take me back to being a kid discovering Mario 64 for the first time, in 20 years.
A few things in 44:00 onward. Spoiler warning for Subnautica AND Below Zero. The crater only has kharaa BECAUSE of the sea emperor leviathan, without her it would have gone naturally extinct presumably, alongside everything else on the planet dying. This is confirmed in the sequel, although I know Joseph had no way to know that upon creation of this video. This is important because it means if other precursor worlds WERE found, they would be unlikely to host any live kharaa that could infect new hosts, due to the bacterium being too deadly for its own good, which is pretty common in the real world too. It becomes even more obvious in the sequel why kharaa wouldn't be a significant concern this long after extinction, specifically because the precursors went fully digital in an attempt to 'wait out' the bacterium. The precursors were determined to keep this contained, so I really doubt they didn't take similar methods on their other planets. Although it is still worth noting that the precursors may in-fact have had many planets colonized, the galaxy is so vast that it would not be even remotely unlikely that we never find one until now, especially since the setting seems to be in its colonization fever stage. Regarding a warning, there is one, it's just not meant for US. The precursors were already informed of the quarantine, making any beacon pointless. Because when the precursors died, we weren't even conceptualizing space travel. It would be very odd of them to make a universal beacon just on the off-chance we evolved to such an advanced stage of space travel, it also likely wouldn't have worked anyways. The precursors would already know ahead of time not to land here, so there would be no valid reason for a ship to be here, and thus, it would make sense to shoot down anyone who attempted it. It's notable we never see crashed precursor ships in this game, because it clearly wasn't a problem for them. Regarding how unlikely it is to land in the crater. It isn't. Because they meant to land there. That's where the Degasi beacons were, so they were already nearby. If the ship's going down, it only makes sense to aim near human signals. There wasn't much reason to suspect an alien death cannon, so while Alterra is negligent, it doesn't come off as stupid here.
From what I know of Unknown world's other games, isn't the Kharaa bacterium more of a flood-like sentient plague? Assembling constructs and potentially even getting off-planet by itself.
@@lynallott3404 As far as I can tell, Subnautica and NS2 are set in the same universe, and Kharaa is in it, although it doesn't behave in any ways that are similar - Kharaa in subnautica is pretty much corona on ultra-steroids, while in NS2, it is literally the Scrin from C&C
A bit of a late comment, but the Aurora was never planning on landing. They were **scanning** to see if the Degassi was where it was last heard from. Even if they'd found hints of the Degassi, they would have continued the slingshot and just left to finish their main mission and report what they found to Altera.
@@DatCameraMON True, but after the Aurora was shot and a crash was immanent (or necessary), the next question would have been where to crash. I imagine "near the faintly detectable signs of human activity" would be the first and most natural answer to that question.
You played this game through twice, and you still managed to misunderstand the story. The Precursors came, brought Kharaa with them to 4546B, and they set up all the bases to study Kharaa. They capture lots of local specimens and infect them with Kharaa to see which might be immune, and they find the Sea Emperor. They take it to the Primary Containment Facility where they set up a whole contained ecosystem to keep it alive, including vents to different biomes around the planet to regulate the temperature and nutrients and whatnot. They start studying the Sea Emperor, including trying to hatch its eggs, and dissecting one of them. The Sea Emperor, which is telephatic, can't for some reason "talk" to the precursors, and despite them having captured it, views them as children and is amused by their efforts. Meanwhile the Precursors continue to capture specimens to infect with Kharaa, in the Disease Research Facility, culminating with capturing a Sea Dragon egg, which leads its parent to attack the facility. The DRF is properly fucked, and THIS is why Kharaa spreads on 4546B. The Precursor scientists then either die, or they just panic and use their warpgates to evacuate the planet, either way they manage to activate the Quarantine Enforcement Planet (the big cannon) before they die/leave. After this the Precursor civilization is presumably destroyed by Kharaa, since they don't come back to a planet with a very possible cure. The Sea Emperor uses the ventilation ducts and its telepathy to train peepers into using the vents to spread Enzyme 42, thus saving life in the surounding area. It's not clear, but it's strongly suggested that all Sea Emperors have the enzyme, but they die anyway when the ecosystem around them colapses, because the circumstances in the caldera are so unique so they can't use the same methods to spread the cure. The last Sea Emperor was aparently 1600 years old at the time, and very old, which would explain the lack of potency of its Enzyme 42, in that it can only partially cure Kharaa infection. A thousand years later, the Degassi tries to land on 4546B, and is shot down. It is so near to the QEP because the whole vulcanic caldera that the game takes place in is rich in minerals and is the only place on the planet with life. A decade later, Aurora is in the vecinity to set up a Warpgate (humans have their own version, unrelated to the Precursors'). Their secondary, secret, mission is to search for the Degassi, which had onboard some VIPs, whose rescue is important to Alterra (Megacorp owning the Aurora). That is why the Aurora is in the exact same place that the Degassi is shot down, because they were actively trying to be there! It crashes down on the same plateau because the water is (relatively) shallow there, and the alternative is going into the surrounding area, which is much much deeper. The logic on which the QEP operates is not made clear in the game, but there's lots of possible justifications for how it choses to select when to fire (for example, it might need a charge up time, and shooting ships as they aproach is the best way to make them unable to leave, as opposed to shooting when they take off, and risking that they make it to space with Kharaa aboard, even if damaged). No coincidences necessary. (btw, in Unknown Worlds other game, Natural Selection 2, Kharaa is present and it's somewhat like StarCraft's Zerg, mutating living things into creatures under it's control, the game being a Space Marines vs Aliens PvP shooter. )
I always presumed that the quarantine defense laser cannon actually does send out warning signals, but the frequency is so alien and outdated (its literally a millennia old) that human vessels simply can't receive those signals and the laser thus shoots down the Degasi and Aurora because it thinks that the signals were being ignored (or something along the lines of that).
Not when he's making a video on it, that's just bad research. Individual players can make those mistakes but when you make an hour long critique you obviously spent a long time researching. As well he has to read logs to get a lot of this info, but he has clearly misinterpreted parts at the very least.
Marc Shanahan honestly this game gave me heavy jeebies throughout playing it. I enjoyed the hell out of this game but the deeper you go the scarier shit gets. The ambient noises and monsters guarantee that.
As someone with a heavy fear of the depths, I can tell you I absolutely loved this game. Sure, it's terrifying and I had to literally stop to steel myself multiple times while exploring the deeper and more dangerous areas, but I think that only added to the amazing sense of satisfaction in discovering and conquering new places. Facing my fear was rewarded with new and stunningly beautiful places to explore, and it was worth every single nightmare.
Lack of combat: The PDA told you weapons were once a thing but got removed from the fabricator after the massacre on obraxis Prime (I guess it's from natural selection 1 or 2) The grind for plants: You can find I guess all of the plants in the environment of the sea emperor, you don't need to revisit the old bioms for the plants. No corpses from the Alien race: They transformed their bodies into ion crystals before dying to safe their memories (can be found on consoles in hidden precourser caves) All ships crash at the same spot: The Degasi was really an coincidence, but the aurora got the secondary mission to find the crew of the degasi, so they went to the last coordinates known. And the sunbeam scaned the planet and found the debris field of the aurora and searched for the nearest landing spot (how ever the wanted to land on that small spot) But, that was a great video and I could relate to many points, especially when it came to the sea traders. You had overall great ideas and it was a pleasure to listen to your constructive Critique. I really hope unknown worlds has seen this video and took some Ideas for below zero!
@@treyr9 Doubt it. The Sunbeam didn't even notice the QEP's power signature until the weapon was already charging. Also might be the fact it doesn't have a power source of it's own but pulls from the Precursor geo-thermal plant down in the Lava Zone.
19:52 This guy does NOT get it. The devs said specifically that they didn’t want the players to have effective tools to kill the creatures of the planet. They didn’t want to make one of these kill-all-that-annoys-you games and they wanted the player to feel like a vulnerable part of the ecosystem and not in dominance and controll of it. Being vulnerable all the time is an important part of the atmosphere and adds to the uniqueness of the game imo.
Except ypu are nigh invoulnerable late game anyways. All the hostile creatures are at that point are a periodic annoyyance, which is why an option to either kill them off or drive thwm off should be an option.
I think a significant part of your displeasure with the ending is from your lack of connection to the story's themes and emotional narrative. The conclusion isn't meant to be that MECHANICALLY engaging-- high-intensity or evolving mechanics would distract from the emotional aftershocks of recognizing the series of tragedies that occurred on this planet. The Precursors, advanced as they were, died out as a direct consequence of their arrogance, greed, and selfish pragmatism. The things they did to the life on the planet were _cruel_, and the marks linger. Hundreds of humans died in a sudden fireball or miserable and alone on the surface of an alien planet, all because of the greedy ambition of a megacorporation seeking to expand its empire. You did enough to save the race of the Emperor Leviathans, and the planet from the spread of the disease, but only just: the matriarch is dead, and many creatures still died. It would be easier if it weren't a game, because we aren't trained to empathize with games, so we have to go further along to meet the game where it's at. But if you meet it on the emotional front, the end of the game isn't boring-- or at least it wasn't for me. It very much was a final remembrance of the journey I took, and a reflection on the follies of the people who came before me on the planet. And a bitter goodbye to a world I had come to love, even the scary parts. I was too deeply engaged with the emotion it wrought, and the reflection it brought on, to be bored. Now, much of it is still kind of dumb and awkward. The fact that I got infected literally the moment I stepped into the quarantine-gun base, with no indication of why, was super annoying and contrived, just to ensure I didn't break the setpiece and take down the gun. But there was clearly a coherent emotional and moral throughline, only emphasized by the jab at the very end-- reminding you that you owe Alterra Corp billions in salvaged and constructed resources.
I agree with your statement about the emotional aspect of the game but I also have a disagreement with it. I tend to actually get more of an emotional tie to some games like bioshock infinite or I am alive. To be fair though, this game is a relatively open survival in comparison to scripted mission levels. I did have a good emotional attachment with this story line though despite the majority of my time being meaninglessly screwing around with predators being too afraid to loose my stuff or get swallowed lol
late reply, but it's stated in a PDA entry that the water is full of bacteria. you were infected as soon as you touched the sea and the bacteria entered through your skin
@@SwagGuffington 1. its not a plot hole when the game clearly tells you what happened, regardless of whether you're too lazy to read it or not and 2. you dont even NEED to read the codex entry, just putting your crosshair on the physical object thats the focus of the staircase it is located in causes its name to appear on screen nice and clearly without needing to open an entry guess people shouldn't complain about content not existing if they just didnt wanna look at the provided source then
While I get what your trying to say, parts of your understanding of the lore are very flawed. The Aurora wasn't going to build a phasegate on the planet, they were preforming a gravity slingshot maneuver so that they could get to there destination faster. While in orbit of the planet, they were preforming they're secondary mission: scanning for signs of the Degassi crew. Which would explain why were above the same side of the planet as the Degassi landed. Also when they were hit, the captain scanned the planet for dry land and then steered the Aurora near it so that survivors could use the long-range transmissions of the ship to call for help. Another thing: the reason the aliens were not discovered yet is because while the humans have explored a lot of the universe, Subnautica's planet 4546B is located in a remote part of the galaxy called the Ariadne Arm which not many humans have explored and is the whole reason why the Aurora is traveling here: to build a phasegate to encourage exploration in the Ariadne Arm. Also on a side note, the Devs did address the pop-up issues by saying that they could not be fixed because of the way the game is structured and its free range of movement. A normal game will unload part of the map that is obstructed from view by say a wall. In Subnautica, everything has to be loaded all the time because its underwater and it has such a far range of view. Along with the fact that a lot of things in Subnautica are individual entities and have to be loaded on their own. Every single plant, outcrop, item, creature, or even things like the skeletons in the lost river are individual entities and have to be loaded separately from one another and the terrain.
I liked not knowing that there were two islands before actually gowing to them. Though I do think it might've been better if you could see them from far away after discovering them.
I'm sorry, I've watched quite some videos of you and you put a lot of work in them. But I'm afraid I have to give you the "You just didn't get it" on this one. It sounds like you didn't pay that much attention to the story and just read the title of every log, instead of the whole thing.
That's because alot of players don't want to have to read in a video game. We'd rather it be explained at least or acted out. Reminds me RuneScape quests I hated reading and would just skip through the dialogue so I could get the reward which was more rewarding than reading the lore.
@@tomk4984 Then don't play a game where you're supposed to be immersed and in the shoes of the protagonist, who is exploring the world with the help of the PDA.
@@plaguerim5608 I would of enjoyed it if they made it more obvious though that you gotta read it to find out. I thought it was more like Skyrim books where there's hundreds of random lore.
@@tomk4984 Though the PDA does say for you to read the survival checklist at the beginning (which further makes you read the PDA more), I agree that they could have made it clearer (save it for the tons of people that have troubled beginnings because they don't read the PDA)
@Aaron Smith I want it to be optional. Like how alot of games do it, they give you cutscenes and books to read and npc's to talk to find out more lore. But I understand if a game wants it to be a mystery in that I have to discover or something. But, I guess I just didn't know I had to read to figure it out by reading and got flustered.
So, the story complaints are addressed in-game but you didn't notice them I guess. Basically, the planet's cannon can curve its laser around the planet's curve to hit any shit regardless of where it's coming from, and also, the captain of the aurora says in a communication from himself to his first officer that he stayed on board the aurora to attempt a controlled descent. Basically, it landed on the relatively safe area it did to make it possible to salvage. It wasn't a coincidence, it actually makes sense. Which is, by the way, in the PDA logs. It's stated in-game, sorry you missed it.
Like I said, it's explained in the PDA why the aurora landed there. Also, there's a reason why stories don't work like real life. Plot convenience is just something that happens for the sake of creating more interest, and deconstructive narrative analysis is just a separate field from actual writing advice as a result. To put it in with other legitimate criticisms is unfair, and also an unrealistic expectation that every story should make sense 1-to-1 with real life. Speaking as someone who both writes and deconstructs narrative, I can tell you these two things are always going to be at odds with each other, and you cannot create interesting dynamics in most stories without some handwaving. Also, star trek has done a lot of similar shit in the past. It's just genre convention at this point, and that isn't inherently bad. Genre convention leads to shorthand for genre-savvy individuals, and also leads to cultural shorthand for the sake of accessibility. Does it seem like coincidence? Sure, but it's also interesting, and the creative decision here was to forego what makes sense for what sounds cool or interesting, and that is a valid choice to make. It's interesting to think there were survivors here before you and that you're discovering how to succeed where they failed, and it also serves the gameplay function of giving you some direction so you aren't just pissing about for hours not knowing where to go. For all the positives this "plot convenience" does for the game, the one negative of "it doesn't make sense" can be dismissed by any reasonable critic. I think he'd have more ground to stand on if this weren't a video game and didn't have to fulfill game conventions as well as narrative ones for the sake of accessibility and user-engagement. But as it stands, this is just a difference in his taste that he's lumping in with the legitimate criticisms of performance issues. (edit: Also, I do still like his video and I do get where he's coming from but some of the issues he has with the story were talked about in degasi logs and when it's answered in the PDA it feels like a poorly researched low point in an otherwise good video.)
Plot convenience is part of writing, and he clearly isn't a writer. His focus is on analyzing, which can be a useful skill, but takes a backseat when looking forward at a story you need to put together as opposed to looking back at a story you didn't complete. It's neither good nor bad on its own, and it certainly isn't "cheap and lazy" in every iteration that it takes. Also, he himself said plot convenience and handwaving is fine for the sake of interest, because it is. His problem seems to come from the fact that he personally didn't get anything out of the endgame more than any objective problem with it. I, however, did get something out of the endgame. I prefer more philanthropic sci-fi, and the theme of needing to have a mutual arrangement with some other species and come to an understanding with it appeals to me a lot more than it appealed to him. I will agree with the way it was executed being less than optimal, but his story solutions completely write out the philanthropic aspect and undermine a lot of the themes of the game as a result. Which is him pointing out a personal gripe of his, and not an actual flaw.
"so he purposely landed right next to the cannon that literally shot him down from the sky?" I don't see the issue. Especially if it's one of the few parts where it's safe to land.
Um, I'm pretty sure Joseph Anderson's full time job before RUclips was as a writer. He just missed a few crucial details that explained certain things. And you agree with him that the story ending was executed poorly, but then just say it was a personal gripe? Mystery writing isn't rocket science. Regardless of the themes, if the payoff of unveiling the mystery is unsatisfying then it can sour the entire story to the point where you may even wish the mystery was never resolved rather than settling with a lame explanation.
NabsterHax No, I agree with him about the mechanics of the video game. It is a flawed game with frustrating issues. I don't agree with him about the story at all because I personally didn't find its ending unsatisfying. It really is just his opinion. And his solution is not a good one. It isn't even a hint at a good one. He assumes it's fine to remove certain themes from the story because he doesn't understand their function in that story but that just means he's missing the point. The story he recommended the game tell has a completely different feel or message to it, and it's one that I would've enjoyed less, because unlike him, I actually am a fan of philanthropic lite sci-fi. His advice is about as valid as telling a writer to change the entire genre of their story just because he can't make sense of it. It isn't the writer's fault he missed the point, it's his.
I personally like not being able to see the islands, maybe once you go to them for the first time they appear but the surprise was that there WAS land. Which I didn't believe until I saw it myself
I never even thought of killing the leviathans and I only attacked the smaller predators to make them go away, often just one knife swipe will get them to leave you alone entirely. I don't think combat was ever really intended.
Just gonna point out that if you have two drill arms and a Reaper attacks you, you've got a fair chance of killing it with minimal damage to the PRAWN with hull strengthening. Which makes sense, it's a dumb animal and you have two drill arms in its face. Considering there's nothing human-like or sized in the ecosystem, it makes sense that they don't pose a real threat.
Honestly, monsters lurking in dark, deep depths of water is extremely unsettling to me I genuinely used to be scared whilst playing skyrim and exploring shipwrecks, especially that one so deep you need waterbreathing abilities to reach it There's something about reaching the depths of water where light stops reaching, and it just seems endless. You don't know how deep it goes. This is made even scarier due to how restricted you are in water. Even in games that give your waterbreathing abilities, so that's not a concern, you're still extremely limited and figuratively and literally out of your depths. Like in skyrim, you can't fight underwater. You can't do anything. Just swim. I do say I'm scared of it, but it's the intriguing kind of scared where you really want to know what's down there. Make the unfathomable become fathomable. If skyrim were to have had a sea monster in depths, or in a flooded Dwemer ruin, I would have shit myself but at the same time, I was so dissapointed when I found nothing at all. I think it's also why bioshock rapture intrigued me so much. There could be a leviathan so big and with you so small, you can't even get a perspective on the size And you're stuck down there - in its territory
Dude, I'm the same way and I play Skyrim in VR. It's 100x scarier in VR!!!! I literally rip my headset off when I accidentally fall into the water near the ice area up north.
@@themightyjagrafess8596 Oh yah. Up North there's a bunch of shipwrecks, and one of them is REALLY deep. Like you need waterbreathing potions or spells to get down and explore it Some Dwemer ruins are also flooded, so if you want to explore it fully, you have to go underwater Some Falmer caves in the Dawnguard expansion pack have extended underwater areas
Thats why I really wished Skyrim had larger sea creatures, there's def room for them in the Sea of Ghosts. Originally they were going to make a squidlike monster in Fallout 4, but it was scrapped early. Only its textures in the game files remain.
@@CloaksCosplays I wish that they brought back the Whales, because I believe they were hunted and harvested to extinctions by the Dwemer I'm pretty sure it was a Dwemer ruin that contained a lifthole big enough to fit a whale inside, and you can also see the embedded bones along the walls of the drop
I didn't get the performance problems to the same degree you got. If its because I'm playing it much later and these issues have been fixed or if my machine is more beefy, I'm not sure. The islands and above surface also looked much better in my game then yours. As far of the story, there is some rationalization that you missed. For example part of the Aurora's mission, along with opening new phasegates, was to locate the Degasi, and was drawn to it's last known point. See the "Secret Auxiliary Mission" in game PDF. So the fact it crashed so close to the Degasi wasn't THAT much of a coincidence. Also, your video contains factual inaccuracies. For example the Sea Emperor didn't have a special mutation that produced Enzyme 42 , but rather it is produced by all Sea Emperors. The problem is the food source of the Sea Emperors weren't immune to the Kharaa Bacterium. The complex life support system was required to provide for the Sea Emperor despite lacking it's normal food source. The Enzyme 42 produced by the Sea Emperors weaken as they aged, and thus could only stall the effects of the Kharaa Bacterium, requiring additional doses over time. The reason why the precursors couldn't hatch the offspring is because of how all life on the planet reproduces. The creature eggs are for all purposes immortal, and able to keep the embryos in suspended animation for eons. The planet it self goes though massive shifts and can even become uninhabitable for long periods of time. So the lifeforms evolved this method of determining when the right time to hatch is based on the conditions around them. Currently the Sea Emperors natural hatching environment doesn't exist and is impossible to know to anyone other then the Sea Emperor. The Sea Emperor refused to reveal these conditions to it's captors as they would've keep it's offspring in captivity. While I will say the story of the game isn't winning awards, I do find it passable. The more important innovation here, is how the story, in a full on open world sandbox survival game, is told. It does give other developers a road map in these types of games where story telling is generally difficult to do.
@@craideus1943 I started playing it from yesterday, the game is even more buggy than expected. I find it interesting, but the pop in is just unbereable. I made a base and it still shows the grass going trough the floor. AND IT HAS BEEN OUT FOR A YEAR.
I play at recommended specs and structures will literally load in around me, once I had to use console to unstick my seamoth when the jelly degassi base loaded around me and trapped it
@@ГеоргиПопов-щ6я I think that's more a clipping issue than anything. Popin describes how only after swimming towards some stalagmites for a while suddenly the shrooms pop in and they look entirely different all of a sudden. There are still graphical bugs in the game, as well as some gameplay bugs, but i have seen AAA games in a far worse state than this. That is not to say you can't criticize obvious bugs.
Okay idk if Somone has said this, but you said that the player could have left at any time with the final spaceship. But that’s not true at all, you have to turn off the energy cannon, and to do that you have to cure the Kara virus. Not to mention a lot of the materials needed for the rocket are only found in the lava zone. So the player wouldn’t be able to just leave whenever.
The developers of the game actually directly stated that in the recent wake of the school shootings of places like Sandy Hook CT, they wanted to develop a game which was fun, enjoyable, had survival aspects, but almost no combat. If you watch almost any youtuber playing subnautica, when they finally kill their first leviathan, theres this excited joyous few seconds where they feel all proud, then their face sort of drops. They watch the lifeless body float to the sea floor and then just slowly make their way back to their seamoth or prawn, mumbling something about being so glad they accomplished that. In my opinion, Subnautica is easily one of the best games I have ever played. It uses an atmosphere which leaves so much up for interpretation, and yet still hammers down a lesson about how realistically small and unimportant you are in the world. The ending of the game, curing the virus, even that, if you truly think about it. You go to this massive alien structure, and assist this large leviathan in spreading it's young to save the planet. You don't develop a cure. The aliens did that for you, thousands of years before you were even born. You're just a human. Just a small, unimportant animal in this vast oceanic world which happens to help SOMETHING ELSE, cure the virus. Like I said. You don't spread the cure, the Sea Emperors do. You don't discover that Enzyme 42 cures the virus, the aliens do. All you can do is help them along, knowing that even if your character wasn't here, eventually over time, the alien walls which held the emperor would break apart, the eggs would find their way to the safe shallows and hatch, and either the world would perish, or it wouldn't. In the end, you truly have no control. Even when researchers arrive on the planet in Below Zero, the virus is still present. The emperors didn't "save the world". Thats because there is no such thing as a happy ending in nature. There is no cure to a virus. Sure you can find a medicine to cure the flu, but in a year a new strand pops up fully immune to that medicine. Nature will always prevail. This game holds more meaning than honestly any other game I've ever played, and I've played many, many games. As for the performance aspects, I found turning down the graphics a bit made the game much smoother, and didn't really affect the overall appearance of textures and meshes. I don't want to be "that guy" who's excusing the devs for making an incomplete game, but they really didn't. Every game has it's bugs. Sure subnautica has many, and can lose frames at the drop of a hat, or in this case one too many peepers, but Unknown Worlds is a small team. They aren't a AAA company with million dollar budgets. I personally think that the developers could've pushed launch out later and worked out the bugs and such, but in the end, Subnautica will always be my favorite game. It's story will always be a stunning and meaningful one, and perhaps will go down as my all time favorite life lesson.
This is so fucking true. Also, Subnautica has strange optimization. Weaker computers tend to do better with frame rate and pop in, to a extent. My shitty laptop that can't run terraria at 30fps can run Subnautica at 20.
@@TylerSingh wonky optimization like I said. lower end computers can run it at absurdly high FPS's for their power, while really powerful computers will experience pop-in and lag you would think to be relegated to shitty potato pc's.
@FinalHunter Fair, though you would likely find Reefbacks first. They skirt the edge of the safe shallows, and depending on where your life pod lands you might even be able to see one from it.
Fortunately, the Reefbacks are *generally* not hostile. I did have one game where a reefback kept pushing my life pod around, picking it up out of the water, all kinds of annoying behavior. I think that was one of the earlier bugs though. Since then, I've had numerous games where the reefbacks would habitually crash into the first ("near shallows") bases I'd built, often slowly damaging the structure. I'd occasionally come back to base and find myself knee deep in water. Reefbacks seem to be attracted to base buildings.
![DDG & G Herbo - Nosey [Official Video]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/I9Ra0Zc2NlQ/mqdefault.jpg)
I think they added the mist to conceal the islands on purpose. So that new players don't immediantly flock over to them, and instead they explore rather than see the island and go over to it for safety.
I’d also argue the mist was a way of goading the player’s attention, like “what could this mean, and what is beyond here” sorta deal
I also think that. Also, it's even a bad thing for you to find the Mountain Island early, as the purple tablet is easy to find, and the alien base inside doesn't try to hide that it's a gun (talking about PDA entries in there). That ruins the moment when you see the Sunbeam, hope for your rescue, and end up seeing the explosion.
@@eroth1008 I loved the false hope, even when I knew game logic wouldn’t allow it to happen, it was the small bit of “Well, maybe” and not knowing the events that lead up to it
i think this, too. had i seen the island right away, i can promise you i wouldve just head straight to it, not even knowing there was meant to be a story behind it.
Yeah, this was a really dumb point.
You're supposed to find the floating island by following instructions from one of the lifepod wrecks, and you're supposed to find the mountain island by going the Sunbeam's extraction point.
You're not supposed to find them early, so they hid them behind clouds. It's that simple.
I like to think the character walks like a potato on land because he just forgets to take off his flippers
That's actually a good point, have you tried walking with fins?
@@luizpaulodasilvarocha668 They retract on land. But i guess they still might make you walk wobbly.
also he's been in the water for like 2 weeks straight, you ain't gonna walk right after that
Sprint is plenty fast imo
Fins. Flippers are what turtles have.
What I love about this game is that progressing isn’t just make some gear to go deeper, but push yourself to WANT to go deeper.
Exactly, it becomes a you vs yourself problem
we need go deeper
That’s why I had to stop playing. I’m too afraid of the ocean
@@Zealolicious same. I some how did it to the lava place, but it toke me so fucking long it's incredible. I was lucky enough to get only 1 reaper with my first and only map. And he was at the defense tower thing. And I almost quitted at the place where ghost leviathan come before you go to lava
Finally someone understands thank you (I still hate warpers)
Finding out that there was an Island in a game that I just assumed took place 100% under water was one of the coolest moments I had in this game. I didn't even realize the teleporter was a teleporter right away because I didn't know there was second island. I'm glad they obfuscated the view of the islands. I feel like the beacons provide you with an easy enough way of navigating, along with using the different biomes as reference points.
for me the islands were so obvious for the first time, the only thing kept me away from going there was the fear of the unknown areas
Once you've played enough, you learn to navigate by biomes and lifepod 5. Blood Kelp Trench is to the SW, the best Lost River entrance is N/NE and so on
48:15 it’s called bioaccumulation. Search it.
Joseph : subnautica story make no sense
Also Joseph: T. rex runner story is a masterpiece
for me it was finding alien structure ! i was like... what is that? aliens?? aliens??? U joke???
I’m more scared of the back of the Aurora then deep sea tbh
the inside of the aurora reminded me of bioshock or system shock. they could've made an entire game out of that section ^^
teb those damn reapers
THIS.
The stern of large sunken vessels That are semi-submerged are creepy as fuck.
Submechanophobia
@@BarkofthePhoenix semi-submechanophobia
when it comes to the ships all landing in the same area, which is a volcanic mountain (hence the large dropoff at the edge):
-the degassi ship was making a gravity slingshot maneuver around the planet when it went too low and got shot down. it was hit but not totally destroyed, and they were able to steer it to crash-land in the area. (and then they lived for presumably several months)
-the aurora's secondary mission was to look for the degassi, so it entered orbit around the planet and prepared to send down landing craft. (equipped with prawn suits, at least one cyclops sub, and seamoths). at some point, it got shot down, and the captain sacrificed himself and stayed on the ship to manually guide it towards the shallow equatorial crater (identified via scans from orbit). half the lifepods deployed (half were destroyed before launch as they were on the side hit) late into the crash, so were scattered near the crash site. within 8 hours of the crash, everyone but you are dead. most of them from simply landing near large predators or too deep, although two survived to make it to the floating island and then were later killed. this is the luckiest part of the game for you, but it's not like it's that contrived that only one person would survive, and they wouldn't make a game from the perspective of a guy who's fabricator malfunctioned and then he ran out of air.
@@databite2549 Maybe put spoiler alert first idiot
Or the guy who lit a flare inside the lifepod that had a gas leak and the audio recording shows someone telling him not to do that as there’s an explosion
@@joshuapurdy7065 sheesh, what a fucken idot
@@databite2549 fuck you
@@databite2549 when the Cyclops says I'm the best captain on the planet
Get fucked marguerit
18:00 Absolutely correct. The devs themselves confirmed that they did not envision the game as a combat experience, so they came up with some intentional tricks to dissuade the player from fighting - like enemies not having loot, lacking health bars and no feedback/emotional gratification when killing aggressive monsters. The game never makes the monsters unkillable, merely shows you that this way of playing is generally not enjoyable and can be avoided.
Subjectively, I think it was the right decision. I hate artificial limitations in games, so killing this one leviathan who tried to eat me for the last 10 minutes was kinda rewarding (sweet revenge) but, while enjoyable, it was a sidestep. The game explained it, I viewed it as such and never considered it part of the main loop. Just a quick (or not) thing you can do from time to time when you feel compelled to.
I agree with him though that making the creature's in the leviathan class unkillable would have been a better option
@@JustJuicer234 I honestly don't think that would have been the right option. Making them Invincible makes them look like monster while their supposed to be normal creatures
And if you scan the Sea Dragon leviathan it says it may be one of its last of its species, just to make you feel guilty. If you scanned it without killing it that is.
You are telling me using a Prawn suit and going all gurren lagann on a leviathan bitch is unfulfilling?
ok devs. wathever you say.
I wish they had done this better. It would have been much better if they didn’t make the bigger beasts so boring. It would be great if they had a better attack AI, did more damage, and were just... scarier. They become scenery as the game goes on. I want the big sea creatures to be scary not goofy.
A bit late, but: The ships (Degasi, Aurora, and Sunbeam) all coming in range of the cannon does make sense, even aside from the fact that any orbiting ships likely comes into range eventually because of how orbital mechanics work.
The Degasi just happened to be shot down because it got too close. The Aurora had a side mission to track the Degasi’s fate according to its logs, so it makes sense that it flew close to the crash site. The Sunbeam was on a rescue operation tracking the location of the player, so this ship was directly heading for the proximity of the crash site.
About the aliens warning intruders: Probably an issue of technological gap. You can’t ward of a group of neanderthals by sending them a radio message or even by putting up a sign. The technology gap would be so large the more primitive species would not even realize there is a warning being given.
@@thomasdiehlen77 "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic"
When you introduce advanced technology to a primitive species it would be impossible for them to tell
The issue is that the gun has infinite range around the planet. It could have shot down the aurora on the other side of the planet. And the aurora clearly must have exceptional scanners, so there's no need to go right on top of the degassi crash site, just passing the planet should be more than good enough, so going right over the 2km square crater with the only gun that can shoot you down from literally any point in orbit? Not buying it. I'll buy the sunbeam though, they literally come in on your co-ordinates attempting pickup, that's explained. But a construction mothership in spitting distance of a crash site? Not happening. What were they planning to do, look out the windows?
@@Winasaurus The Degasi ship likely decided to land near the largest power signature which happens to be where all the alien structures are such as the ion cube power plant. It's totally reasonable for them to land where they did and subsequently all the ships that came after.
It's also both stated and shown that this part of the planet is a particularly rich mineral deposit, and that both the Degasi and Aurora were monetarily-motivated, so of course they'd try to land at the part that their radar said was full of precious metals. This was also why the Degasi survivors, with some hesitation, built the mushroom cave base, but that differs from Joseph Anderson's claims so directly that I have to wonder if the devs changed it at some point post-release. It's also reasonable that the prior aliens would choose to inhabit/build a research base at that location on the planet. (In this case, I also assumed the infection _started_ on 4546b and never left, which fixes some other issues, but it's possible I missed some audio logs saying otherwise or that it was another change).
43:17 Aurora was ment to check what happen to Degasi group, how they dissapered so its rather obvious that they would check their last location...
I've seen people saying that but where did you get that from?
@@mrmaaf1443 audio logs
I thought they made a slingshot maneuver around the planet, coincidentally came too close to the surface, and then were shot down
@@KongKurs i think it was mentioned in an audio log that the other rescue ships that attempted to scan for the degasi survivors were unable to do that and so they wanted the aurora's better technology to scan for them
@@KongKurs that was the plan, do a quick scan for the degasi wreck while doing a slingshot maneuver.
53:29 "you dont survive the crash because you are the main character, you are the main character because you survived the crash.
Pretty much survivors bias.
nah dude I want to play as those guys whose pod got damaged and sank to the bottom of the ocean
@@Graknorke that would be equal parts awesome and terrifying
I think that his commentary was less on that the main character is the one who survived, but that they were the *only* one to survive.
@@Graknorke there’s a mod that does that. It can also spawn you in a random location.
Hmmm... I could be wrong since I'm still watching the video, but it seems like you missed the point that the Aurora and the Degassi getting shot down at the exact same coordinates was NOT a coincidence. The Aurora was specifically hunting for the Degassi crew members who went missing and they were performing the EXACT SAME slingshot maneuver that the Degassi was doing when they went dark. So the Aurora was just following the in the exact same footsteps as the Degassi in order to try to locate them. This would be the reason why both ships "coincidentally" landed at the same spot and were shot down from the same location.
Also for the broadcasted message: There is one. The massive noise that happens when the Sunbeam approaches the planet is their warning message being broadcast. We were unable to translate it. We were barely even able to translate the alien messages in general. Really your critique should have been that we never actually acquired the means to translate this technology. The PDA advises you earlier that there is an alien language being broadcast that it is attempting to translate but isn't have much luck. So really there should have been a data download in the gun facility that would allow your PDA to understand the alien language to get the confirmation that the Sunbeam WAS given a warning before being shot down.
You also periodically hear the "message" broadcast throughout the game. It comes over the radio once and you usually hear it whenever you go past a vent or cache in your seamoth.
The people on the Sunbeam even acknowledge the warning, you can hear them over the radio ask what the sound is, but obviously they didn't know that it WAS a warning so they just kept going.
It’s implied in the PCF that the precursors visited Earth early in its history and influenced the development of specific cultures, so it stands to reason they could have influenced our language too. This could explain why the PDA was partially able to decipher precursor text. Still, you’re right in saying that there should have been more shedding light on the translation in general.
Also with the sunbeam she also mentioned though briefly that was tracking the aurora so again not coincidence
I agree with everything but being able to translate the language. It's more realistic to not basically become a god of this planet.
@53:05 The reason the game suddenly dips into a huge, never-ending hole on all the barriers of the play area is explained. The place where the player crash lands, all of that play area, is actually sitting on top of an extremely large volcano. All those deep areas the player is exploring is actually the hollow center of the volcano and is also why it gets extremely hot the deeper you go, and why the lost river is very acidic.
So what happens is when you reach the edge of the map(or play area) you are at the edge of the lip of the volcano, a very, very big volcano, so the dip is ridiculously deep. There is also life outside this volcano, as the player finds out if you roam outside the play area, giant ghost leviathans will come and kill you. But the volcano is warm and has lots of chemicals, it transfers lots of heat and minerals, which is why the play area is so abundant with life.
So yeah, the planet is actually insanely deep, which would make sense considering how deep earths oceans are. Didn't you find it odd that the apparent deepest point of the play area is only like 1500 meters? That's because that's just the depth of the volcano, any deeper is all magma.
A volcano that huge and wide would not have a sudden, cliff-like drop off on all sides. No volcanoes have that on all sides. They're generally very climbable, gradual changes.
@@headphonic8 A never ending gradual slope isn't exactly easy to implement. Eventually the terrain would have to end or the game would probably freak out.
@@headphonic8 remember that we're discussing astrogeology, not regular geology
@@headphonic8 at a certain point game logic has to happen. You’re right, but it would be too much of a pain for a computer to render absolutely everything in the huge slow drop off. So the explanation is that it’s the lip of a volcano crater is given and the actual details are hand waved away for the sake of not rendering the whole thing.
I like your analysis, but the actual truth is that this is just a video game, and its impossible to simulate planet sized worlds. There has to be an edge to the world at some point, and from a game design perspective, an endless void makes complete sense. Its literally the edge of the map bro
Never will I forget the heart attack I had when I was going straight in one direction on the surface with my Seamoth and got launched into the stratosphere by a Ghost Leviathan from below me.
or all the times i thought something was behind me turned around and yep there was
believe it or not, i got attacked underwater, i heard something and thought: what was that? and then i got smack by it. i hardly saw it, and then suddenly halve of my seamoth's health was gone.
There's an easy enough way to explain why a galaxies spanning human race could've not found any other signs of the precursor race, and you even scanned it.
The _malfunctioning_ Doomsday Device. Their other worlds just happened to have devices that worked properly.
That actually does make sense
:o
@@kedarunzi9139 lol nice
Mmm, IDK about that. It seems to be in a display like a museum would display something. It seems more like a novel thing. At least to me, thought I could be completely wrong about that.
that actually makes sense. Keep in mind this disease literally killed planets, their core worlds were also quarantine (if not straight up just nuked)
"And what's the point in surviving here if we have to kill everything that makes it so wonderful?"
-Bart Torgal
Popcornium Clap Clap Clap
FWIW, Charlie explains their logic for not letting the player have more freedom when it comes to combat which frankly I think Subnautica hits the perfect balance. Animals that you SHOULD be able to kill you can but bigger fights will be more taxing. It 'discourages' players from being reckless. For the most part survival in Subnautica is very much soo evocative of the old sentiment "Haste makes waste".
ruclips.net/video/6S6bgQnlP1w/видео.html
I'm a game vegan
I eat trees
I mean, not being eaten alive is pretty ideal.
bravo!
The speed with which this game goes from "ahh, blissful swimming through the alien reefs" to "oh wow this is triggering most of my phobias at once" is truly shocking lol
Every single time i play subnautica, i make and upgrade the cyclops, only to realize immediately that it’s way too scary to drive it anywhere deep cause you’re just completely surrounded by the black void and I caaaant
@@SwogFrog one of the greatest horror games ever made, i've never gotten much further either. if you like the whole exploration aspect though but want a bit less abject terror, check out the game outer wilds. its a masterpiece.
I find it easier to use the seamoth and prawn suit and build bases along the way.
For some reason, the cyclops just makes me feel more vulnerable, probably because you can't react as fast as you can in the prawn or moth.
@@rpemulis-- And I must disagree with you here. Outer Wilds has both a much lower bar for death and a much higher value of light.
Where Subnautica threatens but rarely pushes for death, Outer Wilds forces your death anyway and so is much more willing to use death as a lesson or a hard barrier.
Where Subnautica has every biome replete with bioluminescence and glowing rivers, Outer Wilds has almost an entire planet full of pitch-dark caves, and another planet where no amount of light will save you, not to mention a DLC half-filled with light-based stealth puzzles.
I might just be biased because I love water, but Subnautica never made me sweat like being hunted for your only source of any vision whatsoever.
@@SwogFrog every time I bring my cyclops through bulb zone or blood kelp to go to various lost river entrances, I have to hype myself up on the edge of the biome for like two minutes. "You've done this before, you know exactly where you are going, nothing can stop you in your giant submarine" and then I panick the whole way down
This review was a year ago, so I'm giving it some leeway, mainly with the game mechanics. My issue is the "plot holes", such as the landings. The Degasi arrived to this crater because they detected the excessive minerals on the volcano, which probably has something to do with the Precursors, and the Aurora comes to the same land mass because they were searching for the Degasi. The Kharaa got out through a Sea Dragon attack, did you read any of the info in the lost river base? Enzyme 42 isn't specific to that Emperor, it is heavily implied that is the only emperor around. The enzyme the Peepers are carrying is weakened by the Emperor's age, which is why the planet is barely limping buy, and why there are still fish that have pustules, while others don't. That nullifies a lot of points you complained about, because nothing is cured, and the Precursors had the disease before they arrived. And as for you arriving on a planet that could cure it first, did you read the Doomsday device PDA? The planet was supposed to blow up if they failed, but it malfunctioned, and we can assume the others didn't. The whole thing about why isn't there a warning, there is. It's just indecipherable for a while, until your PDA can read their language. Even if there wasn't, the gun blows up ships entering to ensure no chance of the Kharaa getting off planet. Say the gun let someone land, and then it did the very slow turning and aiming thing as they tried to leave. The ship would leave before the gun could even get into position. Ignoring that, why go through the trouble of letting someone land on the planet with the disease that'll kill them anyway? They might as well just kill them ahead of time and spare themselves the later killing. The Degasi's base has obviously been destroyed, and there's no way the crushed base happened in 10 years without weather interference. Did you consider the storm they're talking about is a temporary weather event, like a hurricane that dissipated or moved elsewhere on the planet in the *10 years* between the Degasi base and the game. Say I went to Florida and said any number of hurricanes there hadn't happened because there wasn't rain that year. The Degasi were going deeper to find the gun power, as they said. And they knew they were infected. As for getting rid of the Precursors, that would just be removing a perfectly fine plot point because some people won't read the PDA, and filling the gaps with an even more nonsensical story. The part about not getting anything from Precursors is meant to show how your character can barely interact with their tech, because they're so much more advanced. And with your rocket building things, those would just be more scavenger hunts that you need to do, but with you needing to give up resources as well. The entire rocket building thing is meant to be your victory lap, going around and getting the last resources after you've saved the planet, and letting you say goodbye. Most of your plot holes were resolved by reading the PDA and having some critical thinking, instead of seeking out holes to poke.
Anthony Hunter this needs more likes
Completely agree with most of the points here.
What made me seek out this comment is the Degasi part.
It is very obviously fleshed out that the woman wanted to go deep, the old man wanted to stay above ground. While the storm was a factor, the main driving force behind them building bases deeper and deeper was to find a cure for the CORONAVIRUS
Dang, this is a really good and thorough response to his biggest complaints about the story. Nicely done
Joseph Anderson thinks BotW doesn’t have enough Zelda
I don't think we have to try this hard to fill the gaps but you have a point about pda filling most crucial parts.
28:00 I disagree, i think this was done intentionally to make the player think there is no land at all when first starting only to discover later on that there is land although a miniscule amount. Also it hides the alien facility and unless the player is bold enough to travel that far then will wait until sunbeam contacts them and tells them to go there.
I looked at, but never played this game.
I have a real fear of deep water, and I think I would pretty much be paralyzed just watching the screen.
If I did manage to give the game a try, I think I would have been one of the players who would try for the islands.
Not out of boldness, but out of terror from being stuck in the ocean.
The flying aliens you see ocassionaly flying in the sky is a small hint that there is some dry land out there
Yes. Also would it have been better to see just two chunks of rock to the side of your lifepod? (Btw I’m not talking to you, I’m just expanding your point so yes, I heavily agree with you). It would just make the whole point of the game of discovering everything yourself pointless.
@@Ritsu362 EXACTLY! Theres no need to show the islands, because people should be able to recognize the presence of animals native to land (birds and the stupid crab things on the Aurora) means there is land elsewhere on the island. One of the first things you see in the game is birds on your escape pod. If you're bright enough to notice it, you'll know this means there is land on the planet.
came here to say that
The fact that we don't see the islands from the start is great imo. I was just going into a random cave (and I was really scared..) then I came out from inside the cave, and stumble onto this island. I was in awe cause I did not expect it at all!
who the fuck is "in awe" when they're playing a fucking videogame?
@@MsMoonDragoon Who the fuck is judging people for their reactions to a videogame? Let people do what they do.
@@MsMoonDragoon lots of people
@@MsMoonDragoon you are an intellectually lazy contrarian
@@MsMoonDragoon you are a sad creature
For me the worst was how the leviathan creatures clipping through everything that was the most obnoxious problem.
yep. a reaper's tail clipping through my cyclops while driving it was not fun
I suppose its a hard thing to fix. Maybe they just cant ever swim anywhere near walls and stuff
@@123TeeMee that would makes sense anyway, as a creature of that size probably wouldn't be too comfortable with their ability to corner quickly and would be hurt very badly by their bodies contacting something at the speeds they swim
I say right on, just adds to the horror
@@isdrakon9802 lol it certainly doesn't add to the horror as a reaper dips into the ground it's so laughable and breaks immersion that it makes the reaper less scary
54:50 I’m pretty sure one of the reasons Margaret had about why they should go deeper is discovered in the second degasi base, where Bart torgal discovers the alien bacterium, and Margaret says that they should go deeper in order to discover how they should cure it, as well as saying, “whatever shot us down is going to do it again, and again, until it’s shut off.” and uses this as another reason to explore deeper.
and bart was getting visions, which were probably to do with the sea emperor. Marguerite probably got the too, so she wanted to meet it and go deeper.
Literally the single biggest scare I've had in the last 10 years was when a Leviathan first appeared behind me.
I almost shat my spine out.
Why not Dean the image of that.. *shudders*
@@lapis3345 I was just casually looting around the Aurora. Heard a weird sound and turned around 180 degrees. Massive roaring reaper that fills my entire view.
Almost a year later and I still remember that moment.
The scariest thing about this game is when you are being chased but you cant look back and see how close it is
@Aaron Smith yeah but who tf uses that feature also you know the slow as zombies are much slower than you but in subnatica it feels like they are going wayyy faster cuz of sound design
@Aaron Smith yes but thats only at night so if you just sleep then you are good the things in subnatica dont care if its night or day
Personally, I always saw that combat with the leviathans was meant to be possible, but unnatural. I felt bad after killing one of them in the Lost River because it just kept floating, dead.
Idk I just got the feeling that I was a part of the ocean until I tried to bend it to my will, and then I became separate from it
What's worse is that there is a set number of leviathans within the game's borders. When you kill all of them...that's it. The world feels a bit empty.
Yeah, that was the intended narrative, Mama Emporer talks about it in one of her dialogue segments. Trying to fight back against nature would land you in the same boat as the precursors or the degassi crewmen. Actively trying to conquer nature would end with you dying of the Karar, with the quarantine enforcement platform still online. But actively respecting the laws of nature, and doing your part to repair it, you guaranteed both your freedom, and the survival of the planet you called home for all of the games story.
@@swaawsman Except for that one lady in Below Zero that has been on this planet longer than Riley. She gets to slay leviathans and keep going on with her day lol
@@CloaksCosplays she's a bad bitch, you cant kill her
@@swaawsman what is the Degassi again? I forgot
'uncharismatic A.I' ... not sure about that. I found her funny and sarcastic. Overall a pretty good look at the game!
The PDA is basically a better Siri or Cortana.
100% charismatic, imagine if a person talked like her. That being said, it added to the charm of the game that much more.
reminded me a little bit like Glatos from Protal
@@lsswappedcessna I personally like the fact that the PDA doesn't have personality, although I can see why others would think differently, but I'd like to explain why.
In the later parts of Subnautica, the game drives in the point that you're alone very frequently, E.g. The types of music you hear (like 'Crash Site'), the PDA mentioning how people become insane and depressed when recommending an inanimate object to help with loneliness and when you realise there is no one left on this planet besides from you. A blank faced 'Siri' telling you how to survive is just the icing on the cake and drives the point further.
@@jogolord8122 Yeah, I can definitely see your reasoning behind that.
"no substansial way to dodge attacks other than moving your character away"
Please explain what you mean with dodging
Moving you character out of the way FLASHILY!
"Do a barrel roll!"
Maybe a thruster. Outer worlds made it work.
How tf you dodge in water?
Pretty sure he wants something like a barrel roll which gives frames of invincibility lmao
Good video as always. It's interesting, some of the things you pointed out as wasted gameplay potential actually helped the immersion (no pun intended) for me. I *liked* that there were biomes and animals that weren't strictly necessary. It made me feel like just another part of the ecosystem, instead of some sort of planet-conquerer.
I also weirdly didn't have nearly the scale of technical issues that you did. Not sure if there was a recent patch or just different hardware reacts differently. Regardless! You continue to prove that quality content is worth waiting for.
In the early access versions, there was a file that had to be deleted manually because it interfered with several of the game's newer patch files which in turn created tons of performance issues and lag spikes. Removing that one, single file made the game MUCH smoother in nearly all aspects.
Idk if Joseph's version was a complimentary file that updated and replaced his early-access file with the complete game, or if he downloaded the complete game separately, but it seems to have been the prior and he was uninformed of the file performance detail.
I agree about the performance issues. I have heard a lot of complaints about pop in and clipping and what not, but experienced very little of it myself. I have a good computer but not some badass gaming machine and I was able to run it on the highest settings with few problems. I would give the game 8/10 personally.
+
Jacob Geller
I also like it in games when they have stuff that doesn't link to the main plot or game play, things that are just there for world building. Only adding creatures and items strictly necessary for the core gameplay usually makes the whole thing feel artificial.
the biomes and animals that weren't necessary were really cool and felt immersive but at the same time with how many interactions the stalker has with being a hostile creature, bringing tons of metal scrap to it's nest, being able to use those same scrap to get teeth, and being able to feed it fish to make it tame. It just feels like it would have been cool if more creatures had more interactions with the player to make the game more complex. I feel like the lost river and lava zones could have used this especially as some of the hostile creatures there feel especially bland and could have had a bit more going on like the lava lizard and river prowler which feel really basic compared to the stalker and sand shark
The Kharaa bacterium wasnt accidentally released. they explain how a sea dragon leviathan attacked the base.
And after the attack, the bacterium was released because they were researching the sea emperor’s ability to suppress the disease. The aliens brought the bacteria to 4546B, but never intended to let it out into nature. It was only after the disease was released was it then that an outbreak occurred, as evidenced in data files, and the aliens died. The Kharaa bacterium isn’t indigenous to the planet, further explaining why even the most evolutionarily advanced animals can be affected and why they created new creatures to further destroy the outliers.
Actually, the disease was already in the water before the sea dragon, that's why they were researching the disease
@@arcticguy3455 No, it was not. The precursors brought it onto 4546B for research purposes, because the disease had already wiped out other worlds under their control. They had it isolated, but when they experimented with the fauna then things got out of hand and another world nearly died
Pretty sure that could be considered an accident
....so an accident
I agree with mostly everything, but there's one thing you said that kinda left me confused.
I went to the captain's room and started building the space ship right after fixing the radiation problems of the Aurora. I built two parts of the Neptune before i stumbled with materials i didn't know how to get, because i hadn't even reached the river yet. So for me, the Neptune had a huge built up, and i couldn't have been more excited when i finally found the kyanite and the blueprints for the ion power cell. The final parts of the Neptune, after releasing the hatched babies, took me about an hour to finish and then i was done.
Maybe it was because you didn't visit that part of the Aurora early enough, but the Neptune is something i was looking forward for almost half my playthrough, and the hype i felt when i was finally able to finish that was huge.
Yeah same
Yeah I started on the neptune I think before I even went to the Lost River, and I gathered most of the resources for it during my excursions to the Lost River and Lava Zones, so to me it was never a tedious hunt at the very end, but instead a secondary objective to keep in mind during the entire last phase.
So that means you looked up the code for the captains cabin ?
@@Rags_222 The code is transmitted to you by Alterra HQ, you don't have to look it up. That was also my incentive to go into the Aurora.
@@snonky damn it gave me the radio signal right after I got enzyme 42 so I just figured that they do that so u can get the Neptune launch my b
6:18 that cut was so damn smooth
What cut?
@@parkour_tnt1331 when he rises above the water and goes back in there’s a cut. You can see the area and numbers change.
@@parkour_tnt1331 See the fact you didn't even notice the cut is why it's a damn smooth cut.
Plot twist: It was a bug
I can watch this game without issue, but i physically cannot go into certain biomes within game because i am a little coward
I tended to send camera drones in before I went in.
Same but since multiplayer mod it helps
@LemonLord Haha *No*
@Aaron Smith Saaaaame
My friend is afraid of the ocean so we sent him to the craters edge where the ghost leviathans are and turned off the lights and closed the curtains. Lets just say that was entertaining
10:57 Personally, I prefer sustaining myself on a very healthy and balanced diet of limitless free coffee and chips.
EXACTLY
I just ate lantern fruit untill both the thirst and food bar gets full
So, I'm guessing your final bill for reentry into Alterra space ended up being 2 trillion, then?
@@Wix92 You think coffee and chips is more expensive than exotic alien produce?
@@gaminggeckos4388 For some reason I didn't consider that the food from the planet was included in the 1 trillion... But still, most of the food on 4546B isn't described as especially nutritious or flavorful, so it probably wouldn't be worth too much if Alterra chose to exploit it. The cost of the chips and the coffee, on the other hand, also includes the marketing budget, so it might still work out to be more expensive.
So far all of these "coincidences" are literally explained in the game.
I dunno if it’s ever said but wouldn’t it make sense if most precursor planets were exploded by the massively powerful bombs they are shown to have because of the kharaa and this one was put under quarantine BECAUSE of the presence of the cure? I mean why else would they put one in their base besides display, then disable it when they realized how precious this planet is
@@totallynotjevii574 it wasn't disabled the pda states it malfunctioned so It doesn't work
Yup, it tried to trigger but failed. But, it probably failed because of Precursor intervention, that disabled it before it could explode, and then put it on display.
@@totallynotjevii574 I keep seeing people talk about the planet exploding, where does it say that. The best I can remember is a pda entry at the primary research facility in the lost river. It said that the subjects were terminated except one, which is how kharra escaped initially. After that it was straight to long term storage for the precursors
@@isdrakon9802 There's a "doomsday device" in a class case at the GUN. Scanning it will give you the info you're looking for.
For all its flaws, Subnautica when it's working properly absolutely nails atmosphere. The Lost River is one of the most memorable locations in gaming to me, right up there with Satorl Marsh at night. You have the ominous giant skeleton, toxic brine pools that look impossible but do indeed happen on Earth and that massive membrane tree. It's scary and beautiful at the same time! Perfect to keep someone interested even if they're terrified to take another step forward. It's enough to make you scared but not too scared to be curious about what's just around the corner.
this will be a short critique he said.
It won't take long he said.
Subnautica video will be out this week.
- Joe three weeks ago
I mean, it IS half an hour shorter than usual.
It's half the length of the Super Mario Odyssey critique.
Jonas Völler the longer the better
I think you totally missed an element of the story that explains a lot of your gripes very clearly. The big theme and lesson of subnautica is this idea of respecting nature. The mother leviathian talks about this, and the whole exploration and beauty all builds on this idea of nature as a thing to be respected and not harnessed. the ability to kill things REALLY adds to this in my opinion. you go out into the world thinking one day you will be king over all, controller of your world but in the end you come to appreciate the world instead and understand that even though theses creatures suck ass and smash apart all your sea moths, they are things that need to be respected. The first time you kill something large there is no reward. what you did was not something to be praised, you soiled the beauty of the world. all thats left is an ugly twitching body and the game forces you to look at yourself and think about if you deserved to survive any more than it did. a lot of these gameplay elements come together and really hammer home the message in a way nothing other than a video game could do.
i. jpg and this is emphasized by the degrasi survivors. When the son talks about making enameled glass, he mentions how the last goes head to head woth stalkers. Then he says something like “what’s the point of exploring this world, if we need to destroy it to learn more about it”
Exactly.
You are a member of a space-faring megacorp, and here you are, humbled by the alien ecosystem you struggle to understand. By the time you are leaving, you don't want to be the master of this. You want to marvel at this.
This is also further supported by one of the coincidences that were mentioned. The Aliens would have succeeded had they not used such invasive and aggressive means to study the Emperor Leviathan. The player character survives by cooperating with Nature.
but when I die the alien fish get loot from me, why the fuck can't I get loot from them? it's the cycle of life, bro.
i. jpg Right? The first time I killed a Stalker (I just wanted to see if you could kill things), I was just dumbfounded at its twitching body. It never died, and never laid still, just sunk. It was right next to my lifepod too so every time I went back to it, I could see its body just laying there, twitching and dying. I felt bad because there was no point in killing it. It couldn’t harm me, but I could harm it. Seemed cruel. So I left my lifepod and never went back.
Did he just brush off the reinforced dive suit in favor of the piss suit?
jarate
Yeah, he doesn't know what he's talking about lol
@@henrycrabs3497 Because he made a single choice in the game you disagree with, none of his opinions matter?
@@ThrowAway-gu2lw idk it'd been a while.
@@henrycrabs3497 that's fair
The islands are supposed to be unseen.
The whole point is that it feels like there's nothing but water.
What feels out of place is the fact that the islands exist ti begin with.
They’re are also covered by fog/clouds, to make it seem like there’s really nothing if you don’t put much attention
@@carlonalessandro9021 Yeah, can't argue with that.
They feel tacked on and unfinished as heck.
It’s called sub nautica, not nautica.
@@noremac687 well worded
ik hearing that made me cringe
I generally agree with the theme of this video, in that Subnautica has a lot of varied problems that keep it from becoming a legendary game. However Joseph is misinformed about a lot of things in the game's world, mostly because he did a sloppy job at reading and understanding the data logs throughout the game. You can see a lot of people in the comments leaving good remarks about the gaps in his information. I love Subnautica, so I hope the developers can browse this place and find the best ideas for improving the next Subnautica game!
@@shyguyy19
I've only watched one of his videos, so I don't get the meme
@@protonjones54 He is a bit slow at picking up clues and horrible at inductive logic. He is also an egotistical asshole about it.
@@ineednochannelyoutube5384 Necro-posting - while I do agree with a lot of his critiques and nitpicks, you are right on the money on how he misses things that are right in front of the player's face a lot of the time. I constantly see him miss a connection that is implicitly spelled out multiple times in game narratives.
@@Centrophy no necroes. This is youtube, not usenet.
Bringing old topics up again is not a problem here.
@@ineednochannelyoutube5384 what is usenet
The Aroura was doing a gravity slingshot maneuver around 4546b because they were scanning for the degasi, so obviously they would be over the volcanic crater where the degasi is. The degasi itself was there looking for minerals, also explaining why they would be on the crater. The degasi crew also didn’t die because of the fact they moved to a deeper and more hostile area, they died because maida brought a mostly dead reaper down there and another one followed. The same would have happened if they hadn’t moved to the deep grand reef, since presumably the crash zone always had reapers, as the mesa area which likely represents what the biome was before the ship crashed has reapers too, and that area is as close to the entrance to the mushroom caves as the dunes are to the deep grand reef.
Damn, that edit at 6:19 was silky smooth.
I didn't even notice it at first damn
Holy hell i did not even realise something happened there.
I had to re watch it a few times, it really is silly smooth
I've watched BotW. This is too short.
Ya ya, so nice so smooth! Ya ya, silky smooth!
He called the Sea Emperor a "psychic whale" :( that's disrespect
How dare he disrespect the royal majesty
Nooo, my Sea Waifu!
Big Beautiful Alien Mommy!
It's true tho
if memory serves, the islands are covered by the fog so that you can't just immediately go there at the start of the game. it also strengthens the feeling of the whole planet being oceanic, and the only ways to go are into the unfamiliar biomes deeper down, rather than land which would be a lot less scarier for players considering obv we're used to that. although i don't know whether that was how it was intended, or just suspension of disbelief from players to excuse the visual problems it causes
This is one of a few games in recent memory, that didn't have a battle pass, that actually had me sit down and play it daily. I even looked FORWARD to playing it. Just building a base in each biome was enough for me to suddenly realize I'd been playing for 4 hours straight. Then when I figured out I could decorate my submarine I was hooked irreparably. I'm looking forward to Below Zero!
I always make my Cyclops have some cool stuff onboard! A planter with marblemelons, a fish tank full of bladderfish, some furniture (including a bed) and other stuff. Also I like gathering Sea Treader crap for my bioreactor, I have several lockers just for it.
Wow you wanted to play a game that you liked... what do you play normally that you DONT look forward too?
@@lapis3345 theyre called videogames & they suck ass
@@lsswappedcessna I did something tragic on my first playthrough. In the island where you can find the melons I thought they were useless and ate them all. Then in my second playthrough I read the stats and regretted eating them bc then i could've had food in my cyclops
I've spent 13 hours on the game just having fun, I haven't even built the prawn suit yet. Just exploring and having a good time
"Complains about having to go to every biome for the enzymes"
"i wish every biome had a special thing for the rocket"
Not defending it but he probably meant that it was more detailed and involved than just grabbing a plant and leaving. He described personally needing to interact with the creatures and figuring out each biome's little ticks that make it unique.
I think his main point there wasn't necessarily "going to every biome is bad actually" and more "the way the game sends you to these biomes is uninspired"; more "these areas were underutilized", less "I don't want to be here"
Take this with a grain of salt, as I'm not him, but from what I gathered, he wanted to move the marker telling you to go to the biomes (in doing so, changing the objective)-taking it from a footnote at the end game to being a game-wide quest.
Remember, in his version, the launch pad is something constructed early on, but the rocket ship itself is an epic creation. Taking it to its logical extreme, there would be context clues in the recipe for each piece nudging you to a given biome, setting a goal for you to conquer so you can mark it as "complete", instead of one magic fish telling you "glad you're here, here's the specific item I need from each of these places."
(Of course, that has its own drawbacks, but I digress)
While many of your points are very true, so many "flaws" about the story are just flat out wrong (please correct me if im wrong about anything). The degasi survivors discovered more and more as they went deeper and they debated about going deeper out of curiosity. They had the cuddlefish eggs in their lab and other data bank entries pointed to the fact that they had been to an alien facility, and were in search for something to keep them alive. It's why they had all that non-functonal lab equipment. They didnt just go deeper cuz of weather. The fog is also there as to not spoil the story and the surprise about aliens. It also creates mystery and thought about just barely missing the other aurora survivors, as you get a log leading to the floating island, and you see evidence of people having been there. It helps make the world feel more responsive, and not set in stone. Without the fog, the game wouldve been a good bit worse. I'm using a ryzen 3600 and a gtx 1060. I havent experienced ANY lag except for pop-in grass only. The sea emperor's babies didnt release the enzyme. The sea emperor did, she was able to make it the whole time, but wanted her babies to be freed first. The aliens exist as data, not biological bodies, so she couldnt talk to them, and therefor wouldnt hand over the enzyme considering that her babies would still be trapped. In nature, the sea emperor never wouldve released the enzyme, she just knew how to. You said that there are very few things that are just straight up upgrades, however a key part you missed were oxygen tanks and although you mentioned it, depth upgrades. These STRONGLY impact the game, and I think it's good that subnautica isn't only straight up upgrades, but these types of upgrades are necessary for most games. The aurora was following the degasi people, who happened to crash around the area, and are never found (so its safe to assume they crashed in the void) and the only elevated ground in the area is an obvious choice for the aurora to land, as they were trying to see what happened to the degasi people, making it clear that the chances aren't nearly as low as you say (however its still unlikely that degasi crashed in that general part of the planet leading aurora to it) .There are other things I've missed, but these things that you've gotten wrong really bugged me.
While the adult sea emperor leviathan was able to produce enzyme 42, it is not enough to cure the illness, only weaken it temporarily because it the adult emperor is way too old.
Great points, but I don't remember seeing anything in the game about the aliens not existing as biological bodies, only that one of the infected ones uploaded their mind to some sort of terminal (which I believe you can find). Why do you believe that the Degasi crashed in the void? While we don't find the wreck I very much doubt they would have been able to survive and get to the crater to set up bases. Also I don't mean to be that guy but please write in paragraphs lol
Yeah, in regards to his critique of the story, I think he's overthinking what are perfectly plausible ambiguities rather than plot holes, even without the context of Below Zero. Having some ambiguity in a story always makes the story feel more immersive for me personally. In reality, if you're living through a complex historical event, you're not going to have a grasp on ALL the details of the event, AND events that feel uncanny occur more often than you feel they should sometimes (That's a bias that's common to humans, pareidolia. We tend to have a bad sense of probability and misunderstand that randomness isn't devoid of clumps of order. That often makes us mistake order, that occurred due to random chance, as having some substantial, traceable cause). I feel like a lot of critics do this when critiquing stories and it always bothers me. They over analyze the causality of plot events and assume that any ambiguity or coincidence is a flaw of the story rather than a potential part of it.
In the case of Subnautica's story there's too much ambiguity (which I believe is largely intentional) to say for sure whether what he's addressing are really causality errors or contrived coincidences.
For example, regarding how this event was supposedly humanity's first encounter with these aliens:
We really only see a small minutia of what the precursor alien race left behind. As far as I recall, the game doesn't give any concrete timeline to the spread of the bacteria anywhere besides the planet itself. In the realm of science-fiction the sky's the limit for reasons why this is the first time humans have encounter remnants of this civilization. That's part of the mystery and leaving it ambiguous is a perfectly valid way to handle it because it's a problem (The Fermi Paradox) that we don't even know the answer to in reality, so the chance of anyone coming up with a perfect solution in a plot like this is pretty slim without the use of some sci-fi plot magic. Leaving it ambiguous leaves you with the exact same interesting questions that plague us about the Fermi Paradox and your imagination can run wild at that point.
Also, who's to say humans haven't encountered remnants of the aliens already? All we have to go on in the game is our AI's analysis of things and the observations of people who are also stuck on the planet. Neither of those entities are necessarily connected to the whole of the galaxy spanning humanities knowledge in the circumstances of the game. Additionally, whose to say how well persevered other instances of these Alien's remnants are, or how much information they left intact to actually connect ruins that humanity has already found to ones on the planet in Subnautica. Again, there's just to much plausible ambiguity to say for sure.
Not to detract from your performance of the game, but this review was made 4 years ago.
Around that time this is how the game ran on the current hardware. It has since recently been fixed and patches and obviously we have much much better hardware nowadays than we did 4 years ago.
@@ThrowAway-gu2lw you can actually find a piece of the Degasi somewhere, your PDA will say something like "this doesn't match other parts from the Aurora" so we can be sure they actually landed in the crater.
Just a little sidenote, the rocket IS meant to be built as the game progresses, not at the end!
I think most people will build the rocket at the end, like I did because i couldn't be bothered to collect the resources
I never found the entrance to the Aurora until I had to look up some hints online. Hence, I only ended up building the entire rocket at the end of the game as well.
I was stuck with the paradigm that the entire game has to be played underwater despite finding islands which stopped me from looking for entrances to the Aurora on the surface, and just stuck to looking underwater for answers. It wasn't a pleasant experience looking for prawn suit parts all over the sea bed when it turns out, all of them are in the Aurora.
@@DNESE312 the game even tells you to go inside the aurora at one point, and before then it heavily implies it too when *spoilers* it blows up, that happens so early in a game that it's inconcievable that a new player will have gone much deeper than normal before this happens!
Well it happened to me. I kept coming back to the aurora failing to find an entrance underwater up until the end of the game.
Then I checked for hints online and surprise, surprise, you were supposed to climb up to the surface and go in from there.
Except that the radio call which gives you the passcode to access the blueprints for the rocket is on a timer. It's pretty easy to be far in the late-game stage by the time that call decides to show up if it's not your first time playing the game. Which I think was what most people who've played the early access versions experienced, me included. I already had all of the submersibles with all of the available upgrades in place and was halfway of building a large aquarium zoo just for the kicks when I first got it. The only reason I hadn't also cured the Kharaa by that point was that I wanted to build said aquarium zoo first before doing the fetch quest for the hatching enzyme, and gathering the materials for 10 two-story aquariums takes a lot of time
You mention the hole in the plot of all of the ships all entering the atmosphere in the same spot on the planet but you seem to ignore the fact that your ship was following the coordinates of the previous ship crashing and the rescue ship was following yours. And most important of all aside from the fact that the gun could warp space-time and shoot around the planet without the first ship having run into the gun and being shot down we might never have had a story and hence a game. This is the same crux of most stories. So I fail to see how this was a problem.
Why would it follow the same coordinates?
@@JohnSmith-ik8nt cause the ship was missing and they tried to find out what happend or to rescue survivors
Also, do we know for certain that there's only one gun? For all we know the one that shoots down the Aurora, Degrassi, and Sunbeam could be one of potentially thousands scattered across the planet, ready to fire at all angles.
@@projectbelmont7177
I doubt there's thousands, but definitely multiple ones. There are precursor bases in Below Zero which takes place on a completely different part of the planet, so this doesn't seem too unlikely.
@@billcipher147 I'm fairly certain that there is only 1 gun based on the fact that an alien terminal tells you that the laser bends around the planet's gravity to hit targets in orbit as well as the fact with the PDA entry that mentions the alien facilities on the planet doesn't mention any other gun
17:41 I disagree with the fighting enemies part. It wouldn't fit the overall game style if every enemy comes with a health bar and rewards for killing it. Its not a fighting game, its a survival game and a very realistic one who would lose some of the realistic feel to it if it had that.
That's why he says it would be better to either not have combat at all, or keep the combat clear.
its a survival game. so players should be allowed to waste food water and time, killing pointlessly.
wasting resources is a survival mistake..
but this game does cleverly play on our brain chemistry..
some people just have to kill leviathans.
Bizz493 no combat? All we have is a dinky little survival knife and a drill on the prawn suit that is meant for drilling. That tells me that this game has very little combat..... like very little. I think it’s ok to be able to kill all the creatures with the little combat we have because these creatures aren’t immortal, they will eventually die, even to a dinky little knife. I think it makes the game more realistic.
I don't know what sort of survival you have experienced, but basics of survival does include ability to hunt things for stuff. Such as hunting larger animal for their skin, if needed. I don't believe for a second that a Reaper would not have ANY useful materials in its body we could use.
@@hydropump8731 Well you can make 2 types of torpedoes. Can be used on the Seamoth and the Mech Suit. Not bothered to build those yet.. So do not know how well they work.
I think that this was a well thought out critique of this game, and you definitely put a lot of effort into it, but things like assuming both ships crashed close to each other was a coincidence when the story gives an explanation kinda throw this video off for me. But I think this is still a great video about what you think of this game.
He didn't pay attention to the story at all🤣 degasi came to the crater cuz there was hella ore, Aurora was looking for degasi, Sunbeam was looking for survivor. He Didn't understand the degasi story at all. This is
Honestly it's like he barely read the PDA at all, and with him claiming he didn't like the menus I'm not surprised
@@unsoundmusic8348 It feels like he excels at gameplay critiques but story critiques are really hit or miss. The degasi feel really stupid now though since we know Marguerite survived and there is no explanation for her living that isn't complete off the walls stupid. To be fair to him thinking the Aurora coming to the crater was a coincidence the only real indication that this was there objective are in some easy to miss spots
@@plugshirt1762 I havent played below zero, so I only know the degasi story up until the end of Subnautica. Didn't know any members of their crew survived
@@unsoundmusic8348 ah sorry for spoiling it. For reference though none of them should have survived and by hearing their story in the original there is no real scenario where they would. From what I hear they already had a model of her after changing the story so they were left with it and just kind of inserted her into it without it actually making sense so all their work wouldn't be wasted
@@plugshirt1762 to be fair, below zero's story is just kinda overall bad and conflicting lmao, imo it's easier to just not count it as hard canon
"Your submarine and mech suit shouldve been able to carry far more"
you can literally deck the cyclops in so many lockers you'll never be able to fill them all. Which is what I did, and proceeded to never worry about inventory space (or build a permanent base for that matter) ever again
Yes but you still have to put the stuff in those lockers and sort it and it's annoying as hell.
Spellweaver DEAR GOD! YOU HAVE TO INTERACT WITH THE GAME!?
T H I S I S M A D N E S S !
@@DrORRB-qm7fl ah yes, sorting items between dozens of boxes, the pinnacle of gameplay. How dare me and Joe not love it.
@@DrORRB-qm7fl i mean i would appreciate if items in your lockers were automatically consumed by any crafting stations in that ship/base. Many games already implement systems like that and I don't see a reason not to have one in Subnautica. The amount of time I spent trying to organize my inventories and running around the bases trying to remember where i left that ONE piece of iron last time...
Good point. I focused on the “put stuff in” part instead of the “sort it” part and assumed that he didn’t even want to interact with the inventory. A sorting option would actually be really nice.
"The game stutters more than my youngest son when he's trying to learn new words and has more pop up than his favourite books."
I can't stop laughing. Good one Joseph.
Joseph "Savage" Anderson
It was amazing. Total mic drop moment!
The pop up does kinda suck from an exploration perspective. If you are already squinting to see what ahead in the dark/depths its bad when things just start materializing 20 feet ahead of you
Derek McGowan especially when considering how bad the frame rate is when it only loads things in about 50m in every direction.
Actually there is a short term fix for the stutter on pc. Ive used it and it works, which is to erase the contents of cellscache (?) folder. I don't remember exactly because it seems the game fills this cache to keep track of all the changes you are making in the environment... I guess. Either way erasing the folder will erase everything outside of your bases. So all my air tubes vanished and the forcefields reappear, and all the gravity ball things went away etc.
So its short term because as soon as you start doing stuff then soon the stutters will be back
Regarding the escape rocket:
I don't know how I managed to do this or how you didn't, but I began building it even before my prawn suit. I had the base early on and added each module as the game progressed. I had the whole rocket before meeting the Emperor Leviathan. So for me the rocket was a fun and enjoyable experience.
I had the prawn suit schematics (and all the parts to make it) before unlocking the mobile vehicle bay...
@@MagicGonads I suppose it comes down to how much an individual explores the map on their own before following each story element (in the form of radio signals)
It was kinda odd because I knew that I needed to make a mobile vehicle bay but had never encountered any fragments for it, but I already had everything I needed to complete the game (aside from the final story element)
@@MagicGonads Hmm, something similar happened to me as well, but it was more minor.
I didn't know battery chargers even existed till after obtaining Kyanite. It was on my way back that I found a wreckage where I found all the blueprints.
@@sophisticatednebula4236 I'm currently on a quest to deliberately find battery chargers cus I don't want to have a bunch of empty batteries in my storage (and I have only encountered one modification station fragment so far)
Still haven't found a single fragment ...
the rocket was good because you could paint it to look like a banana.
also you could build it at any point in the game. the captains quarters are available around the mid-game.
It's pretty clear he didn't pay all that much attention to the story itself. He seems to think that all the fish are cured of the disease, meanwhile the game states that the disease is absolutely everywhere in the ocean, just that the couple of square kilometers the game takes place in is being kept alive by the enzymes, as it suppresses the bacterium. Same when he asked if putting an enzyme-rich peeper into the alien blood tester, the fish is still infected, it's just suppressed. It's the same reason the player doesn't die from the disease.
The reason the aliens didn't get the cure is because the leviathan's embryos cannot hatch alive without the hatching enzyme, which I assume would naturally occur or the leviathan would produce by eating the flora required to make it. In confinement, the leviathan cannot or refuses to do so, as all she wants is for her children to swim freely in the ocean. It refuses and, in fact, cannot give the cure to the aliens because it cannot communicate with them.
As for why the aliens just shoot down ships instead of warning them? They don't care, plain and simple. Any aliens would know it's a quarantine planet and would know to avoid it.
I was surprised about the criticism of shooting down ships. Like, it's one thing to disagree with a fictional alien race moral value, it's another to say it's a plot hole. It's perfectly reasonable to shoot everything that comes into orbit, the laser is aiming at space, so if it shot things only when they were trying to leave, most likely a ship could land, not notice the quarantine and then try to leave, get shot a bit too late and have some debris full of the disease and maybe even an emergency ship fly off into space.
It's just must safe to shoot everything trying to go in and out, than waiting for them to get out.
You're first point on that the Sea Emperor enzyme only suppresses the bacterium is addressed starting at 47:56
Why is it that the enzyme that is suppressing the bacterium in all the other life in the game couldn't sustain the Precursors? If it's capable of keeping everything in the game alive, why wasn't it capable of keeping them alive long enough finish their research? It's not a permanent fix, but given how it's sustained everything else for thousands of years is there any reason why this isn't a viable option?
Your second point about the Precursor research was also addressed at 49:34
Even if communication was an issue between the aliens and the Sea Emperor, were these incredibly advanced aliens really incapable of creating a proper hatching enzyme just as you can in game? Even if they weren't, why weren't they able to use the Sea Emperor enzyme to sustain themselves long enough to develop a hatching enzyme? Why even have it in captivity if it would just do all this naturally? Did the aliens seriously doom themselves out of stupidity?
As for the laser, the idea that these aliens didn't care about anyone that may fly by the planet contradicts what else we already know about them. I agree that they should have an aggressive defensive measure in place, even if it means shooting literally any ship that comes within range regardless of whether it's landing or leaving. But there's no reason why they couldn't also design something that contacts and prompts the ship well before they come within range of the cannon in hopes of deterring them from coming to the planet and getting shot down by extension. Given what we know about them it seems more out of character that they wouldn't do that.
You're telling me that these aliens care so much about the tiny insignificant specks of life on this planet that they would go to the trouble to design a series of tubes connecting the biomes via an underground network forming an immensely complicated filtration system, just so that they could spread the enzymes from the Sea Emperor so that life on the planet could thrive, but also thought that any dumb schmuck in a space ship unlucky enough to fly too close to the planet can go fuck themselves?
@@robotspgc
>Why couldn't the enzyme protect the precursors?
This is not directly addressed as far as I'm aware, but it could have something to do with how vastly different the precursors were from 'normal' animals. The bacterium is stated as changing the genetic code or creatures, and the aliens (from what brief looks we get into their physiology) are said to be grown from seeds and can apparently 'download' data directly into and out of themselves. Matter of fact, the game suggests most of the aliens on the planet didn't die of the bacterium, but instead transferred themselves onto databases known as sanctuaries, while their diseased bodies were disposed of. So clearly, the base enzyme had either very little to no effect on the aliens. edit: The alien logs specifically state that the enzyme has shown to inhibit symptoms of the bacterium in indigenous life forms. So in its base form, the enzyme did nothing to the aliens.
> were these incredibly advanced aliens really incapable of creating a proper hatching enzyme just as you can in game?
Yes. They did not get far along in their research before the infection spread to all of them. The player is only capable of making the hatching enzyme because she tells you how to make it. The aliens were incapable to receiving the emperor's communications, and all she wanted was for her children to roam free instead of being test subjects. It's also stated that when the planet was placed under official quarantine and all warp gates were shut down, their research pace plummeted.
>You're telling me that these aliens care so much about the tiny insignificant specks of life on this planet that they would go to the trouble to design a series of tubes connecting the biomes via an underground network forming an immensely complicated filtration system, just so that they could spread the enzymes from the Sea Emperor so that life on the planet could thrive
No, I'd assume they do not care about whether or not life dies on this planet if it means they can save their species. The reason they built the system to spread the enzyme is so they can research it and its effects in a living ecosystem. If they let all life die on the planet, it would likely mean their research would fail due to lack of data.
@@robotspgc I don't really wanna write a essay, but Viruses have differences from bacteria's. Quite a bit infact.
@@robotspgc And you referred to a bacterium as a viral.
I'm inclined to believe that you, as well as many, many other people, have dramatically missed the point, the metanarrative, of Subnautica, which is why it felt so... undeveloped in ways that you expected it to be developed in.
For example. When you said that the endgame should have been about "conquering" the environment, I cringed. The Aurora, and the Alterra Corporation behind it, exemplify that "exploit the natural world for profit". It's driven home in some of the more humorous lines, about how much you owe them for your survival, but it's also thrown in through things like Paul Torgal's focus on using the natural lithium deposits for profit, and claiming the moon for mining operations, and in some of the Aurora personnel logs, like the one that has supposedly-loving relationships being explicitly commodified. In the end, the Sea Emperor tells you *explicitly* that she gives you the cure because you came willing to treat her like an actual sentient entity, whereas the Precursors sought only to take from her, violently, as they had tried versus the entire rest of her species. Cooperate with the environment, and you will be rewarded. That's the Stalker tooth thing, and it keeps showing up thematically throughout the story. The Degassi logs do everything but say this outright.
More importantly, though, is the fact that you, the character, do not belong in that environment. The predators are scary, and will eat you, but they're easily avoidable. If you understand the ecosystem, how the different predators track their food, you can avoid them, distract them, live with them. That's what the game practically tells you to do, but this is in direct opposition to the way many people play games: with the knowledge that everything is exploitable, and that you are meant to exploit it. This is not how the game wants you to play it, and is not even how the game conditions you to play it. It is, however, how *other* similar games have conditioned you to play it.
I have a friend who enjoyed Subnautica like you did. He had a lot of questions for me about the world that he should have found answers to in the scan data and voice logs on the moon. In other survival games, it's just flavor text. Background information that doesn't have an impact on gameplay or understanding of the story. It's easy to gloss over. But in Subnautica, every bit of it is important for contextualizing the core themes of the game itself. Every single thing that you thought was confusing or went unexplained about the plot is very clearly explained in the same way. I hope you revisit the game with this in mind. In fact, I implore you. Revisit it with this new context. It pains me when people say the themes of Subnautica, or even of Below Zero, came from nowhere.
Murdock Grewar The Sea Emperor says that the Precursors locked her up („they build these walls“) and that’s the reason she didn’t want to help them since she wanted her babies free and not locked up in that facility, but.
Plus she looks rather exhausted after they are free so idk if she‘s near death and sees the player as her last chance to get her kids hatched, that is just a speculation from my side.
Just wanted to clear that up in case you missed that
@Murdock Grewar You missed the point as well.
Precursors were one step away from creating a cure. They built teleports to all the biomes to collect resources, they have correctly deduced that the Sea Emperor can be the cure. All the required pieces of the puzzle were in heir hands (if they had hands).
The only thing they failed to do was to talk the the Sea Emperor herself. She mentions how she tried to talk to them, to explain what they needed to do in exchange for her freedom but "they never listened". Instead they tried to bruteforce the formula and ran out of time.
Whether they were physically unable to hear her, or ignored her, never considering her a sentient being, remains unclear. But there's good ol' irony under all of this.
"the buggy twitches from the ragdolls" - these were added by the devs intentionally. A clever decision, actually.
I felt this game exactly like you, it's nice to see someone explain it exactly how I felt it hahah
Y'all missed the point of this being HIS critique, he is a RUclips critic and these are his videos of which you may or may not enjoy, it is simply his opinion on the game.
@@inandout3432 His freedom is in expressing his opinion.
Our freedom is in pointing out where he is wrong.
Claiming that something is "simply his opinion" is not an impervious armor against critique.
About the Aurora and the Degasi landing in the same spot, if you look closely enough it becomes clear that part of the Aurora's mission was to use its superior scanning technology to try and find evidence of the Degasi. That's why it dipped low enough into the atmosphere to trigger the cannon. Because other wise they wouldn't have got close to the atmosphere. A gravity assist only needs to be within a planet's sphere of influence, and while yes getting closer to a planet speeds you up more, getting into the atmosphere would only slow you down.
It’s crazy how you thought about killing the leviathans, I never did, instead I saw them as an obstacle to be avoided, I don’t think I killed a single one
He said there no reward so I'm guessing your not meant to kill them
I modded some weapons into one of my playthroughs. I had enough of them screwing with me.. the seamoth lasers generally take a long time to kill anything but most leviathans freak out and swim away letting me do my thing
A lot of good points are raised in this video but you also raise some things that are just flat out wrong.
What do you think is wrong.... I'm just wondering
@@lofikidd2284 Him complaining that there isn't a good combat system. The game isn't supposed to be a fighting game, you're supposed to be helpless.
@@woffsmart8657 but the thing is that he is just saying that the game could've been better with a combat system now obviously I dont agree on that point
@@lofikidd2284 he said that they should have either not let people kill anything or the game should have a more interesting system.
HamsterC6 and he’d obviously complain if a big diamond drill wouldn’t be able to kill anything, these points you have to take with a grain of salt.
You clearly haven't listened to the story, found and read the psa entries, etc. Multiple of the "plot holes" you mentioned have explanations if you pay attention to the pda entries.
THANK YOU ^^^^^^ WHY DOES NO ONE UNDERSTAND THIS
Yea and when he said the aruroa(idk how to spell it) just happened to be in the right place at the right time to be shot from the gun, he fails to mention the pda that explains they were launching a ground team to look for any degasi remains AND the fact that the gun can use the gravitational pull of the planet to shoot something on the other side.
ikr? like how the SEL cannot produce the enzyme for "some reason" XD
@@bobgunjoe2577 ok you didnt explain anything
@@welcome2wyzard calm the fuck down." Read PDA" doesnt explain shit
The first half of this critique is perfect, but once you start getting in to the story and the so called coincidences it really makes me wonder if you even played the game. Practically every coincidence is explained in detail, to the point where I was cringing every time you brought up a coincidence. From, the Aurora was going to save the survivors of the Deghasi, to Peepers literally being trained to spread the enzyme, to even the smallest details like why the Deghasi crew kept going down. To be fair, your critiques of the story as far as writing were fair, I just happen to disagree, but your critique of the story in terms of plot holes and coincidences is frankly ignorant.
@@sjplive967 yes it does because it wasn't a coincidence? All the ships landed on at the same spot for a reason, the degrassi crashed there, the aurora was looking for survivors from the degrassi so they went to the same coordinates the degrassi did, the sunbeam was looking for survivors of the aurora, they all went to the same place for a reason
@@sjplive967 That's because it's not a coincidence. Things happened for a reason.
@@sjplive967 WRONG
@@sjplive967 It's funny how you only respond to the troll and not the actual people giving facts. Why is that? :)
He also brags about an upgraded computer and complains about rendering when my 600 USD mini ITX can run it without loading issues
I think the islands being hidden is good at first so that people don’t go in over their head, but I think after exploring the island the game should make the islands visible from a distance
but they are
"a manic fish that screams at you before exploding"
I have never heard a description so apt.
wtf that's just what they do? how is that a peticularly well-worded description?!
@@RandolphCrane you never played the game? Because that is all they do.
@@ceaselessdischarge1026 I have played the game, but I didn't understand why this "so apt" description had to be lauded. I thought the comment was stupid, that's all.
@@RandolphCrane That's all they do. Scream and charge at you before exploding.
@@castoru3398 OMG did you even read what I wrote? Feck off
One of the funnest things of subnautica was me drawing a map of the game on paper, it felt like the coolest thing ever
13:50 playing on console adds another layer of terror because you never know when a Leviathan will just spawn on top of you
It's not called bad design, it's called drama
That it so true on my PS4 I am in my cyclops nothing on my radar
Then boom big boy ghost leviathan screaming his ass off chewing away at my hull
I died coz I didn't have the shits to go out and repair coz although he was gone he could re-appear
So now whenever I goto that area I am so fucking scared of the damn ghost leviathan to appear from thin air
@@disthingsuxyt8272 lol Why did the console player cross the road?
Zoitr3x x to render the ghost leviathan on the other side
Sounds like the console version is pretty bad. I watched some people stream it and they all encountered quite significant bugs and glitches. Fortunately my laptop can run it just fine even with max settings. Might still buy it for my PS4 just to support the game. 🙂
this man spent ten minutes talking about combat, even though the game dialogue expressly tells you that it doesn't want you to fight. it's not a fucking combat sim.
That's why he makes the point "Why make the creatures killable at all if you're not meant to do combat?" His whole point is the game reluctantly allowed for combat and maybe it would've been better off with none at all
@@milonorrena5753 realism is the point. you stab a fish with a knife enough it will die.
@@PutitinDaramen i think his point about the big creatures. Those shouldn't die from a knife or a drill on the basis of their size. It is not unconcievable to think so since its an alien planet.
@@sambhavsingh7415 i agree, the sea dragon should be unkillable. the ones with soft skin should die tho.
that doesn't change the fact that their politics around violence made the game worse. they should have discouraged combat in different, more engaging ways. look at rain world, combat is a thing there (as it should be in every scenario involving pure survival) but if you kill too many creatures you invite much worse things to fill the niche you just opened up.
The scariest moment happened to me when I decided to see the end of a map without having any vehicle and it was day and I was swimming in one direction. Suddenly the ground disappeared and all I can see is the colour blue below me and because the sun ray was bright underwater I imagined that there is no bottom to this ocean and I could fall endlessly. To be honest I was relieved when the ghost leviathan came to greet me.
Even when it gave you a nibble?
@@yogurtofthemultiverse2200 he hungry
@@LockheedC-130HerculesOfficial he do be hongr
There are a few entries in the Codex which clarify your 'Coincidences'. That said, it is a huuuge string of coincidences. First, the weapon platform mentions that it has energy fields that can manipulate the beam to hit any target on any side of the planet in up to high orbit. Another log from the Aurora Scanner Room mentions that they botched their first scan for the Degassi Survivors and had to move far closer to the planet than they meant to, which triggered the Quarantine Platform. If the Wiki is right, it doesn't appear they ever meant to land on 4546B. The Precursor seem to be biomechanical, not telepathic as you mentioned. Many entries talk about how they use electronics and radio waves to communicate, and that they produce sound so layered that an advanced that the PDA mentions it's unable to translate it all. That led me to believe that the Sea Emperor couldn't communicate with them because they weren't psychic at all. As for the precursors themselves, from inside the game and from learning about Unknown World's other title Natural Selection, which takes place in the same galaxy, you learn that humans use Phasegates to go from planet to planet. It's believable then, that large portions of the galaxy aren't explored. If you have to send people out to a system, build a phasegate, then can only send people within a radius around that gate, then there could be huge swaths of the known galaxy that aren't explored. Don't get me wrong, I agree that there's a LOT of coincidences, and the story falls apart in the third act, but the game does provide the information to answer a FEW of those concerns.
EDIT: Thanks, M Reed, for clearing up my mistake about the audio log!
Thanks for the amazing video!
I'm pretty sure that "Another log from the Aurora mentions that they had a navigational error that brought them far closer to the planet than they meant to, forcing them to begin reentry procedures as opposed to dropping an away team. " doesn't exist. You may be misremembering the "Aurora Scanner Room Voice Log" PDA (see subnautica.wikia.com/wiki/Data_Downloads), which simply states that the first scan failed, forcing them to repeat the scan later (closer to the planet) than anticipated. The only other option that I can see is "Lifepod 19 Second Officer Keen's Voicelog", but that's referring to the Captain taking manual control to minimize damage *after* the Aurora had already been shot.
In any case, it seems beyond unlikely that an interstellar race would "make a navigation error" sufficient to force a reentry, and (visually, at least) the Aurora doesn't appear to be designed for reentry / landing. If there really is a PDA as you describe, then it just makes the plot hole bigger -- if you have lifepods (that *are* designed to reenter) then you would place everyone in them and launch as soon as you realized that you were in a "We aren't going to make it out of the atmosphere" situation. This would result in a far more orderly evacuation than we see in the intro sequence, so...
You're right about the Scanner Room Voicelog! Thank you.
That does clear it up for me. Aurora arrives on a flyby of 4546B, does a scan for the Degassi but gets too close to the planet and triggers the quarantine platform. The platform hits the ship which starts crashing. Evacuation proceeds in chaos, with only a few life pods landing near it's final crash site.
BitterLies I totally agreehh I'm not sure he read much as there's so many little story errors in his recounting. The whole Twitch stream felt rushed, as does this review.
Colin Hoffman thanks kid
There is also a voice log of the captain steering the Aurora toward dry land as it was crashing so it explains why they landed in the one area of the planet that is hospitable.
When I first played Subnautica, I often stayed above the ocean surface. Gave me at least some sense of security. Because whatever lurks beyond me, it's not there if I can't see it.
Reaper:GIMME THEM LEGS
lol, i dive in but not too deep, just enough to see the ocean floor, i have thalassophobia so seeing the blue ocean is terrifiying
@@josephray6264 the same here with me. i like this game a lot, but i am not able to play it because i instantly feel very bad when seing that void blue ocean, you know
@@alvarofs131 yeah, after i beat the game, it wasnt any scary because you know what's in the blue
@@josephray6264 for me, the problem is not what's in the big blue, but the vision itself. This vision gives me some goosebumps and i feel very bad, then i save and just close the game
Joseph asking _"Why didn't the aliens install a warning sign in English on 4546b ?"_ has the same energy as a German Tourist expecting to see a Sign in Deutsch on his trip to Bali
No, it doesn’t? Warnings can pretty easily be made with no understanding of language… have you ever like, seen a warning sign?
@@kabershshkabersh4272 This isnet true lol in real life a problem many governments face is how to show that nuclear waste is dangerous for people hundreds of thousands of years in the future. This is because if something horribly where it happen people wouldnet know what a nuclear symbol is
@@nicholascuevas7447 source?
This very same game has an instance of an alien message being broadcast, that your in game PDA translates for you. Its the message about the Vaccine Development Program being canceled. So yes, the Precursor race(later called Architects in Below Zero) do communicate in a method under stable by human methods in the story.
@@kabershshkabersh4272 what would your equivalent for a space warning sign be…? Like a big picture of a ship exploding or what?
"you will never have to worry about being too cold"
Robbin: hold my disinfected water
Is there a real penalty for being too cold tho? So far the only thing I noticed was my hunger and thirst increasing faster while being cold and the sprint speed is reduced. Other than that I haven't found anything else (and I accidently left my pc running while being in glacial basin, I starved - but it wasn't the cold that killed me)
@@SebiBubble It sounds like something they would add. they might not though
@@SebiBubble I think they main the new game takes place near an ice cap.
@@redzeppelin6 I am very much aware of that and have already played below zero - I didn't notice any real penalty for being in the cold for long periods of time, that's why I'm asking
Jizz I don’t think the cold mechanic has been added yet into the game. It’s still in early access I believe
I mostly agree with all of your points in the video, but there's some considerations I feel you've overlooked. These are my personal nitpicks of your critique, as well as speculation on my part, and don't necessarily reflect my thoughts on the critique as a whole, just these specific parts of it.
1. The Degasi landing in the same area as the Quarantine Enforcement Platform is indeed astronomically unlikely. The Aurora, however, was passing by 4546B with the intent of scanning the planet to search for the missing Degasi crew (as a secondary goal to their primary goal of establishing a phasegate somewhere else). While it's still unlikely that the Aurora would have landed RIGHT THERE, it's less astronomical when you take into consideration that they were specifically scanning the same area of the planet where the Degasi went down. Furthermore, the logs found in the game state that the captain of the Aurora took manual control of the ship in an effort to control its landing. He probably tried to land it near the two islands, which the ship's scans identified and chose as the rendezvous point for the survivors. In fact, thinking it through further, the Degasi also probably tried to steer toward the few patches of land in that area of the planet while crashing.
2. Planet 4546B is the first planet on which alien technology has been discovered. As you said, this alien civilization spanned at least a large part of the galaxy, so why haven't any ruins been found on other planets? Well, as it turns out, the galaxy is REALLY fucking big. Having the technology to traverse the galaxy, and even achieve intergalactic travel, doesn't necessarily mean that the entire galaxy has been explored. There are a hundred billion stars in the Milky Way, with each on average having around 2-3 planets orbiting them. Humanity at the point in which the game takes place probably hasn't explored even 1% of the planets in the galaxy, let alone colonized them. Also, the Aurora was passing by 4546B with the primary objective of establishing a phasegate in another system. Thus 4546B is on the edge of inhabited space at BEST. What if the alien civilization was from the opposite side of the Milky Way, and their civilization spanned only as far as 4546B? What if it didn't even span that far, and since 4546B was a quarantine/research planet it was well beyond the edge of their civilization as a precaution meant to keep the disease from spreading (4546B is "on the outer edge of the Ariadne Arm" which is literally at the other side of the galaxy from Earth)? Again, exploration does not necessarily mean colonization; that the precursors made contact with Earth in the past does not mean they inhabited that area of the galaxy.
2A. Planet 4546B may actually be the ONLY planet still teeming with Kharaa. As explained in the game, the only reason the planet hadn't undergone total extinction is because of the Sea Emperor Leviathan releasing small amounts of enzyme 42 into the ecosystem via the Peepers. Presumably, any other planet which had experienced a Kharaa outbreak would have been driven completely to extinction given that enzyme 42 is unique to 4546B. The Kharaa bacterium on these completely lifeless planets would then also die out with no hosts available.
2B. One of the alien artifacts found is described as a doomsday device capable of wiping out 4546B's entire solar system, which has malfunctioned. Presumably other inhabited Precursor planets which experienced Kharaa outbreaks may have just obliterated themselves with non-malfunctioning doomsday devices in an effort to prevent the disease from spreading to even more planets, which would explain why this one with the (coincidentally) malfunctioning doomsday device is the first Precursor planet to be discovered.
3. The enzyme spread by the Peepers is enough to keep the planet from dying out completely, but isn't enough to prevent the player's infection, because the Peepers have been spreading the enzyme for a thousand years. Life on the planet was forced to quickly adapt to the Kharaa outbreak, which includes the adaptation allowing them to make good use of the miniscule amounts of enzyme 42 in the environment. This would be contrived were it not for the fact that life native to 4546B have the ability to mutate and adapt very rapidly, evidenced by the various diverse biomes existing in such close proximity to each other. Its spread is also inhibited by the Warpers, who hunt down and kill any infected organisms. The Precursors simply didn't have enough time to adapt to it.
3A. At around 50:20 you mention that it's a big coincidence that the Sea Emperor capable of producing enzyme 42 just so happened to be alive at the same time that the Precursors arrived. Not for nothing, but he Sea Emperor in containment has been alive for a thousand years after the extinction of the Precursors. With that information in mind, it's not unfathomable that it might be a few millennia even more ancient than that.
3B. Nobody ever said that shutting down the QEP means that the planet is free of infection. The problem is that infected individuals cannot shut down the QEP, thus necessitating the need for the player to find a cure so they can then shut it down. The QEP is not monitoring the planet for signs of Kharaa. (of course that means the precursors are pretty dumb for not making it do that but the point still stands).
3B-I. The enzyme-carrying Peepers are not immune to Kharaa. As an alien data download states, Peepers die within about 4 days of infection with Kharaa, and only have their symptoms go into remission upon exposure to enzyme 42. They are still infected with Kharaa, just asymptomatic.
4. The Degasi survivors experiencing bad weather is bullshit, yeah. However, them deciding to establish bases in dangerous areas is just like the player. They're going deeper to try to find whatever shot them down, as explained in their voice logs (they don't know about mountain island with the QEP on it, as evidenced by all of their bases being either on the floating island; near the middle of the map in the jellyshroom caves; or beneath the floating island in the grand reef); just as the player goes deeper to try and find a cure. I don't know about you, but I've got bases every 500 meters or so spanning between the safe shallows, all the way down to the grand reef, through the lost river, and into the lava caves. The hypothetical bad weather is a glaring example of separation of story and gameplay, but I think that the Degasi survivors establishing deep sea bases is a great example of unification of gameplay and story.
yep, he also doesnt realize that the aurora crashed on the edge of the crater wall, and that the game takes place on the inside of a crater from an asteroid impact.. and that there is life in deep water on the outside of the impact zone..
Actually it's a volcanic crater, hence the lava zones that exist in the deepest caves in the game, but yes the game does explicitly tell you that the area outside the crater only supports leviathan class and microscopic lifeforms. It's possible that there are other shallow areas or even land on 4546B, especially since the devs are already working on an expansion that would presumably take place in a different area of the planet (unless it's on another planet entirely).
JokingJames2 I do disagree that it’s a volcanic crater, as our own science tells us that large impact craters, remove a large portion of regolith and rock, and often times expose layers of volcanic activity that rupture and add to the catastrophe.. in fact the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs(well some of them at least) was compounded by the volcanic activity unleashed not only at the ground zero of the crater after it cooled down enough to no longer be molten, but also activating the Siberian traps, which were Yosemite/Yellowstone type caldera on a mega-scale that we have never seen in our current recorded history.. I do not believe the shape of the crater resembles that of a mountain that has blown its top.. when a volcano erupts it’s usually from the top of the mountain shearing off, from the buildup of magma. Often times it is not perfectly round at all.. the fact that this crater was almost perfectly round lends credence that it was an asteroid strike and not a volcanic eruption.. it wouldn’t make sense for the aliens to build all those buildings within an active volcano anyways lol... the type of volcanic activity in the game, was typical of what we find at the bottom of the Mariana Trench and the Monterey Canyon, both the deepest, most isolated part of the ocean, yet teeming with life, do to “chimneys” and smokers.. in fact what they illustrated in Subnautica is similar to what scientists hope to find on Europa, that’s is life situated around volcanic vents at the bottom of the ocean.. but that is not the same as a crater from a volcano that has blown off its top structure..
JokingJames2 scratch that, you are right, I checked the wiki.. but my point is still whatever it was lol..
For note there IS a meteor crater in the game.
I enjoyed this review, even though I have major objections to it.
The first is about killing creatures. I find the fixation on killing the lifeforms on the planet off-putting. I like that the game takes a non-violent approach. The game designers discussed at length their choice to exclude guns and offensive weapons from the game to a significant degree. Dangerous animals can be evaded and part of the beauty of the game is learning behaviours and patterns of the lifeforms to keep yourself safe. I'm very pleased that Subnautica didn't borrow from games like Far Cry and reduce all living things to a simple resource. However, I Think you raise a good point about gathering more value from other species, i.e. Sea Treader droppings, or Stalker teeth.
The islands are shrouded because it focuses the player's attention on the marine environment. If you show a human land they will beeline for the islands and operate from there. By obscuring them the player is compelled to press deeper and grow comfortable in the water.
I think your criticisms about the game's performance and graphics are justified. My version had atrocious frame rate issues, which was heartbreaking given how much I loved the visuals and discovery in the game.
Again, I don't see eye-to-eye with all your points, but I'm glad I watched.
The way you defeat, or more accurately, overcome the leviathans is that you avoid them. In my 50-hour playthrough of Subnautica I never was attacked by a Reaper. Avoiding encounters with them is an entirely plausible approach.
@L have you ever heard of a stealth game?
@L I...could be wrong about this, but I'm pretty sure the leviathans *do* attack smaller creatures. Which doesn't invalidate the rest of your post, just thought I'd point that out.
If they didn't want the player to be able to kill or fight leviathans they shouldn't have made them killable and or should have limited how powerful the player is as the stasis rifle and prawn are both way more powerful than they should be
@@user-qv5sm5dw1v😂 Stupidest take i’ve ever seen
44:00 It does shoot ships when they try to leave, if you try to launch the rocket without disabling the cannon, the game will tell you to disable the cannon first.
Jerry Zou This guy clearly hasn't done enough research, i honestly can't stand it when they do these kind of videos and "talk shit" all day long.
He meant as opposed to a ships arrival
Phillip harrison Yea, but he clearly doesn't understand that it shoots down ships no matter what. Why should it only shoot them down when they leave when they *_COULD_* get infected if they get close ? Sure the bacteria isn't airborne but anything that's flying like the birds could catch it, the ship could catch it as it's coming in or out, if it's coming in it's a clear sign of it landing. Still a gaint piece of metal of a ship flying around the planet could be considered landing...
are you having a stroke
@@kevinfortin8240 This is a race that can manipulate spacetime. I think they can determine the direction of an object.
Watching al youtube content about subnautica makes me wonder:
Am I the only one who doesn't wait until my character is starving or dying of thirst? All this videos give me anxiety
well most people probably wait until theyre actually hungry/thirsty to avoid wasting food and water
I keep my eat and drink to keep my hunger and thirst metres topped up as well.
Yo tampoco espero hasta estar muriendo de hambre/sed.
I play in freedom mode lol
I just forget to check until it starts pulsing red and my PDA starts cursing at me
It's not a coincidence or blind luck that the Aurora came down near the weapon. A lot of people bring this up forgetting that it was explained.
In the recording between the captain and first officer, the captain says that the ship detected a land mass and that he would stay behind to perform a controlled crash landing. You didn't just happen to come down in the one place with life, the captain sacrificed himself to maneuver the falling ship as close to the only land he could see, around which the aliens had built their facilities.
Other things that are not coincidental:
The Aurora was over the same part of the planet that the Degasi went down over because they had a secondary mission to investigate the Degasi's distress signal that the majority of the crew wasn't told about.
Humanity's first recorded encounter with an infected planet happens to be the one with a cure because anyone who crashed on a quarantined planet where finding a cure was impossible would never be able to leave the planet and tell anyone. These would likely be designated as no-fly zones after several failed rescue attempts.
Exactly what I was thinking when I heard that.. You actually have to go through all of the audio files and reading to get to this detail, and I feel like most people don't do that
Philip Daniels this guy barely ddi any research or thought things through i honestly cant stand watching videos like this with poor lack luster little to no actual fact and information and research
Not really. They wouldn't be ignored, they would be investigated. Humans would see that ships don't disappear mysteriously, they are shot down by a weapons. They would then find a way to destroy or disable the cannon, because even though it is more advanced, humans would have all the time they need to figure out a solution, and even savages can defeat a tank if they ambush and kill the crew.
Ivan Ivanovo That was a good idea, but you do realize you're talking about a build machine/weapon that can shoot down any ship from any range, and so far that nobody can get close to it without it detecting you. If _they_ wanna find out how to destroy it _they_ have to get close which is not gonna be easy. Not only that but they have to travel for months or years maybe in space just to reach that planet and find out what the source is in the first place. You said humans have all the time they need well that isn't true in this case...
I always felt like beyond the crater there was life but it would be scarce and large. First time I saw the giant void I thought Holy shit who knows what could be out there
We get some hints. The Ghost Leviathans are scarily big but they pale in comparison to the Lost River remains. The Gargantuan Leviathan alone is estimated to be 5+ kilometers in length and its likely it snacked on smaller leviathans as its primary food source. The colloquially named Biter Leviathan is also larger than anything living, and it's not a stretch to say evolved versions of these apex predators exist in the Void.
I wouldn't be surprised if Reefbacks were out there in the void, but due to not being constrained to the volcano mount, they'd be larger.
I'd expect very few small creatures, and almost exclusively Larger or Leviathan-class monstrosities would be out there. Phytoplankton would be extremely common especially towards the surface where creatures like Reefbacks and maybe even Whale Leviathans would exist. This would entice the more colossal Leviathans to come to the surface and feed before slipping back into the seemingly endless depths. Towards the bottom of the Void geothermal vents would likely exist, creating small ecosystems of blind and stationary small creatures that feed off the vents.
Perhaps in the murkiest depths there may lie something even more dominant than the Gargantuan Leviathan...
I’m quite late to this video and this has likely been mentioned before, but the lack of combat is also explained within the game, with a PDA entry stating that fabricators do not come with weapon schematics due to a massacre that happened at some point, which adds an extra bit of in game reasoning for why you don’t receive any weaponry
The irl reason was that 1:the game was intended to have a decent bit of horror. And two: following the sandy hook shooting the devs at unknown worlds really didn’t want to promote guns so they scrapped any concepts involving them in their next game. Just little bit of dev history for ya.
@sovietbanana4589 I actually like how the banning the guns in this game proves that banning the guns does nothing in regards of safety or ceasing violence.
@@legolegs87 the ban on fabricator weapons was not put in place expecting the Aurora to crash on a hostile alien planet
@@legolegs87 most people in real life don't have to deal with wild animals trying to maul them 100 meters from their home tho...
They're also generally less likely to take risks irl, where they can get hurt/permanently scarred or die, than in video games they can always turn off :p
@@li_ka2 the risks IRL are surely scaled down comparing to videogames, but are never zero, unfortunate. So stay safe and be prepared, pal!
I remember when I first played this game. I remember that almost every creature I encounter is either trying to kill me, eat me or destroy my equipment. Sometimes all three at the same time though not in that order particularly.
I remember being scared shitless when first encountering the Reaper Leviathan. I remember being awed when I saw the Aurora's explosion. It was thrilling when I first saw the gun. And you can bet it was terrifying when I got that first Warper massage.
But in the last Arc the meeting with the Sea Emperor has changed my view. To me at first it seemed like a hostile environment. After talking with the Emperor my view changed. 4546B is a world that was doomed by Precursors because of their inability to understand. It is stated that Precursors were telepath in nature. Yet they failed to understand the Sea Emperor. Because as the Emperor said they played against the current. It wasn't just a figure of speech. The Precursors never worked with the nature. They took eggs from mother Sea Dragon. And captured one of the most beautiful creature for over 1000 years. It was a miracle that planet even survived the outbreak.
But in the end I was reluctant to leave. Then I changed my mind when I hear Reaper Leviathan's roar.
It was actually the Sea Emperor who was telepathic by nature. The Precursors were unable to understand her because of their bio-cybernetic makeup. Riley, and quite possibly Bart Torgal as well, could hear her because he is human and has an organic makeup. When she mentioned those who swim against the current, it's exactly like you said. The Precursors worked against nature or, in the words of Paul Torgal, tried to shackle it to their will, which led to their downfall. That could mean she was referring to both the Precursors and the Degasi survivors, as they both met their ends due to their failure to respect the environment and the creatures within.
For me, Subnautica was an experience that I wouldn't change a single thing about, it was singularly unique and I loved every second of it. First game to take me back to being a kid discovering Mario 64 for the first time, in 20 years.
This game reminds of the outer wilds
I loved it as well but Was also feeling less and less great towards the end.
@@nils4481 how so?
@@dx5gaming715i think the precursors and sea dragon and emperor arent great, but i think thats mostly my preferences.
A few things in 44:00 onward. Spoiler warning for Subnautica AND Below Zero. The crater only has kharaa BECAUSE of the sea emperor leviathan, without her it would have gone naturally extinct presumably, alongside everything else on the planet dying. This is confirmed in the sequel, although I know Joseph had no way to know that upon creation of this video. This is important because it means if other precursor worlds WERE found, they would be unlikely to host any live kharaa that could infect new hosts, due to the bacterium being too deadly for its own good, which is pretty common in the real world too. It becomes even more obvious in the sequel why kharaa wouldn't be a significant concern this long after extinction, specifically because the precursors went fully digital in an attempt to 'wait out' the bacterium.
The precursors were determined to keep this contained, so I really doubt they didn't take similar methods on their other planets. Although it is still worth noting that the precursors may in-fact have had many planets colonized, the galaxy is so vast that it would not be even remotely unlikely that we never find one until now, especially since the setting seems to be in its colonization fever stage.
Regarding a warning, there is one, it's just not meant for US. The precursors were already informed of the quarantine, making any beacon pointless. Because when the precursors died, we weren't even conceptualizing space travel. It would be very odd of them to make a universal beacon just on the off-chance we evolved to such an advanced stage of space travel, it also likely wouldn't have worked anyways. The precursors would already know ahead of time not to land here, so there would be no valid reason for a ship to be here, and thus, it would make sense to shoot down anyone who attempted it. It's notable we never see crashed precursor ships in this game, because it clearly wasn't a problem for them.
Regarding how unlikely it is to land in the crater. It isn't. Because they meant to land there. That's where the Degasi beacons were, so they were already nearby. If the ship's going down, it only makes sense to aim near human signals. There wasn't much reason to suspect an alien death cannon, so while Alterra is negligent, it doesn't come off as stupid here.
From what I know of Unknown world's other games, isn't the Kharaa bacterium more of a flood-like sentient plague? Assembling constructs and potentially even getting off-planet by itself.
@@lynallott3404 As far as I can tell, Subnautica and NS2 are set in the same universe, and Kharaa is in it, although it doesn't behave in any ways that are similar - Kharaa in subnautica is pretty much corona on ultra-steroids, while in NS2, it is literally the Scrin from C&C
A bit of a late comment, but the Aurora was never planning on landing. They were **scanning** to see if the Degassi was where it was last heard from.
Even if they'd found hints of the Degassi, they would have continued the slingshot and just left to finish their main mission and report what they found to Altera.
@@DatCameraMON True, but after the Aurora was shot and a crash was immanent (or necessary), the next question would have been where to crash. I imagine "near the faintly detectable signs of human activity" would be the first and most natural answer to that question.
You played this game through twice, and you still managed to misunderstand the story.
The Precursors came, brought Kharaa with them to 4546B, and they set up all the bases to study Kharaa.
They capture lots of local specimens and infect them with Kharaa to see which might be immune, and they find the Sea Emperor. They take it to the Primary Containment Facility where they set up a whole contained ecosystem to keep it alive, including vents to different biomes around the planet to regulate the temperature and nutrients and whatnot.
They start studying the Sea Emperor, including trying to hatch its eggs, and dissecting one of them. The Sea Emperor, which is telephatic, can't for some reason "talk" to the precursors, and despite them having captured it, views them as children and is amused by their efforts.
Meanwhile the Precursors continue to capture specimens to infect with Kharaa, in the Disease Research Facility, culminating with capturing a Sea Dragon egg, which leads its parent to attack the facility. The DRF is properly fucked, and THIS is why Kharaa spreads on 4546B. The Precursor scientists then either die, or they just panic and use their warpgates to evacuate the planet, either way they manage to activate the Quarantine Enforcement Planet (the big cannon) before they die/leave. After this the Precursor civilization is presumably destroyed by Kharaa, since they don't come back to a planet with a very possible cure.
The Sea Emperor uses the ventilation ducts and its telepathy to train peepers into using the vents to spread Enzyme 42, thus saving life in the surounding area. It's not clear, but it's strongly suggested that all Sea Emperors have the enzyme, but they die anyway when the ecosystem around them colapses, because the circumstances in the caldera are so unique so they can't use the same methods to spread the cure. The last Sea Emperor was aparently 1600 years old at the time, and very old, which would explain the lack of potency of its Enzyme 42, in that it can only partially cure Kharaa infection.
A thousand years later, the Degassi tries to land on 4546B, and is shot down. It is so near to the QEP because the whole vulcanic caldera that the game takes place in is rich in minerals and is the only place on the planet with life.
A decade later, Aurora is in the vecinity to set up a Warpgate (humans have their own version, unrelated to the Precursors'). Their secondary, secret, mission is to search for the Degassi, which had onboard some VIPs, whose rescue is important to Alterra (Megacorp owning the Aurora). That is why the Aurora is in the exact same place that the Degassi is shot down, because they were actively trying to be there! It crashes down on the same plateau because the water is (relatively) shallow there, and the alternative is going into the surrounding area, which is much much deeper.
The logic on which the QEP operates is not made clear in the game, but there's lots of possible justifications for how it choses to select when to fire (for example, it might need a charge up time, and shooting ships as they aproach is the best way to make them unable to leave, as opposed to shooting when they take off, and risking that they make it to space with Kharaa aboard, even if damaged).
No coincidences necessary.
(btw, in Unknown Worlds other game, Natural Selection 2, Kharaa is present and it's somewhat like StarCraft's Zerg, mutating living things into creatures under it's control, the game being a Space Marines vs Aliens PvP shooter. )
Oh, they brought Kharaa with them?
KubeSquared make sure Anderson sees it
I always presumed that the quarantine defense laser cannon actually does send out warning signals, but the frequency is so alien and outdated (its literally a millennia old) that human vessels simply can't receive those signals and the laser thus shoots down the Degasi and Aurora because it thinks that the signals were being ignored (or something along the lines of that).
well, if you play a game twice and still missunderstand the story of that said game, then maybe there is a problem there on the games part?
Not when he's making a video on it, that's just bad research. Individual players can make those mistakes but when you make an hour long critique you obviously spent a long time researching. As well he has to read logs to get a lot of this info, but he has clearly misinterpreted parts at the very least.
I could never play this game. Finding Nemo scared the hell out of me.
I always hold my breath when characters are underwater. NEVER AGAIN
Marc Shanahan honestly this game gave me heavy jeebies throughout playing it. I enjoyed the hell out of this game but the deeper you go the scarier shit gets. The ambient noises and monsters guarantee that.
The fact that you can play this in VR is even scarier
As someone with a heavy fear of the depths, I can tell you I absolutely loved this game. Sure, it's terrifying and I had to literally stop to steel myself multiple times while exploring the deeper and more dangerous areas, but I think that only added to the amazing sense of satisfaction in discovering and conquering new places. Facing my fear was rewarded with new and stunningly beautiful places to explore, and it was worth every single nightmare.
Marc Shanahan thank God I’m not scared of the ocean
Lack of combat: The PDA told you weapons were once a thing but got removed from the fabricator after the massacre on obraxis Prime (I guess it's from natural selection 1 or 2)
The grind for plants: You can find I guess all of the plants in the environment of the sea emperor, you don't need to revisit the old bioms for the plants.
No corpses from the Alien race: They transformed their bodies into ion crystals before dying to safe their memories (can be found on consoles in hidden precourser caves)
All ships crash at the same spot: The Degasi was really an coincidence, but the aurora got the secondary mission to find the crew of the degasi, so they went to the last coordinates known. And the sunbeam scaned the planet and found the debris field of the aurora and searched for the nearest landing spot (how ever the wanted to land on that small spot)
But, that was a great video and I could relate to many points, especially when it came to the sea traders. You had overall great ideas and it was a pleasure to listen to your constructive Critique. I really hope unknown worlds has seen this video and took some Ideas for below zero!
The grind for plants isn't even that bad. Each of the teleporter rooms takes you to the appropriate biome to find it.
@@Servellion Yeah, I noticed that. Idk why so many dislike that part.
Is it possible that the Degasi detected the QEP as a large energy source and was going down to investigate when they got blown up?
@@treyr9 Doubt it. The Sunbeam didn't even notice the QEP's power signature until the weapon was already charging. Also might be the fact it doesn't have a power source of it's own but pulls from the Precursor geo-thermal plant down in the Lava Zone.
@@GeeeDubb Ah, I found one of the plants in Sea Emperor's area. Tried looking for them all in there, then concluded that I need to use the teleports.
I died like 4 times from hunger before realizing I can just grab the random fish and eat them.
19:52
This guy does NOT get it.
The devs said specifically that they didn’t want the players to have effective tools to kill the creatures of the planet.
They didn’t want to make one of these kill-all-that-annoys-you games and they wanted the player to feel like a vulnerable part of the ecosystem and not in dominance and controll of it.
Being vulnerable all the time is an important part of the atmosphere and adds to the uniqueness of the game imo.
Except ypu are nigh invoulnerable late game anyways.
All the hostile creatures are at that point are a periodic annoyyance, which is why an option to either kill them off or drive thwm off should be an option.
I think a significant part of your displeasure with the ending is from your lack of connection to the story's themes and emotional narrative. The conclusion isn't meant to be that MECHANICALLY engaging-- high-intensity or evolving mechanics would distract from the emotional aftershocks of recognizing the series of tragedies that occurred on this planet.
The Precursors, advanced as they were, died out as a direct consequence of their arrogance, greed, and selfish pragmatism. The things they did to the life on the planet were _cruel_, and the marks linger. Hundreds of humans died in a sudden fireball or miserable and alone on the surface of an alien planet, all because of the greedy ambition of a megacorporation seeking to expand its empire. You did enough to save the race of the Emperor Leviathans, and the planet from the spread of the disease, but only just: the matriarch is dead, and many creatures still died.
It would be easier if it weren't a game, because we aren't trained to empathize with games, so we have to go further along to meet the game where it's at. But if you meet it on the emotional front, the end of the game isn't boring-- or at least it wasn't for me. It very much was a final remembrance of the journey I took, and a reflection on the follies of the people who came before me on the planet. And a bitter goodbye to a world I had come to love, even the scary parts. I was too deeply engaged with the emotion it wrought, and the reflection it brought on, to be bored.
Now, much of it is still kind of dumb and awkward. The fact that I got infected literally the moment I stepped into the quarantine-gun base, with no indication of why, was super annoying and contrived, just to ensure I didn't break the setpiece and take down the gun. But there was clearly a coherent emotional and moral throughline, only emphasized by the jab at the very end-- reminding you that you owe Alterra Corp billions in salvaged and constructed resources.
I agree with your statement about the emotional aspect of the game but I also have a disagreement with it. I tend to actually get more of an emotional tie to some games like bioshock infinite or I am alive. To be fair though, this game is a relatively open survival in comparison to scripted mission levels. I did have a good emotional attachment with this story line though despite the majority of my time being meaninglessly screwing around with predators being too afraid to loose my stuff or get swallowed lol
late reply, but it's stated in a PDA entry that the water is full of bacteria. you were infected as soon as you touched the sea and the bacteria entered through your skin
You're infected long before you make it to the gun. If you scan yourself periodically, it'll actually tell you that you're infected.
@@SwagGuffington 1. its not a plot hole when the game clearly tells you what happened, regardless of whether you're too lazy to read it or not and
2. you dont even NEED to read the codex entry, just putting your crosshair on the physical object thats the focus of the staircase it is located in causes its name to appear on screen nice and clearly without needing to open an entry
guess people shouldn't complain about content not existing if they just didnt wanna look at the provided source then
@@SwagGuffington Yeah what kind of person reads??? Haha.
While I get what your trying to say, parts of your understanding of the lore are very flawed. The Aurora wasn't going to build a phasegate on the planet, they were preforming a gravity slingshot maneuver so that they could get to there destination faster. While in orbit of the planet, they were preforming they're secondary mission: scanning for signs of the Degassi crew. Which would explain why were above the same side of the planet as the Degassi landed. Also when they were hit, the captain scanned the planet for dry land and then steered the Aurora near it so that survivors could use the long-range transmissions of the ship to call for help. Another thing: the reason the aliens were not discovered yet is because while the humans have explored a lot of the universe, Subnautica's planet 4546B is located in a remote part of the galaxy called the Ariadne Arm which not many humans have explored and is the whole reason why the Aurora is traveling here: to build a phasegate to encourage exploration in the Ariadne Arm. Also on a side note, the Devs did address the pop-up issues by saying that they could not be fixed because of the way the game is structured and its free range of movement. A normal game will unload part of the map that is obstructed from view by say a wall. In Subnautica, everything has to be loaded all the time because its underwater and it has such a far range of view. Along with the fact that a lot of things in Subnautica are individual entities and have to be loaded on their own. Every single plant, outcrop, item, creature, or even things like the skeletons in the lost river are individual entities and have to be loaded separately from one another and the terrain.
I liked not knowing that there were two islands before actually gowing to them. Though I do think it might've been better if you could see them from far away after discovering them.
*Standing on molten magma* temperature: 67C
It's not temperature of the magma.. it's the temperature of the water above
Water would still not be 67c that's not how heat transfer works
@@a3-radio The rest of the heat is absorbed by computer and sent to AMD users to heat up their homes.
@@Hiddenus1 it dont heat that much anymore
Hiddenus if anything intel temps are 5x worse than AMD
I'm sorry, I've watched quite some videos of you and you put a lot of work in them.
But I'm afraid I have to give you the "You just didn't get it" on this one.
It sounds like you didn't pay that much attention to the story and just read the title of every log, instead of the whole thing.
That's because alot of players don't want to have to read in a video game. We'd rather it be explained at least or acted out. Reminds me RuneScape quests I hated reading and would just skip through the dialogue so I could get the reward which was more rewarding than reading the lore.
@@tomk4984 Then don't play a game where you're supposed to be immersed and in the shoes of the protagonist, who is exploring the world with the help of the PDA.
@@plaguerim5608 I would of enjoyed it if they made it more obvious though that you gotta read it to find out. I thought it was more like Skyrim books where there's hundreds of random lore.
@@tomk4984 Though the PDA does say for you to read the survival checklist at the beginning (which further makes you read the PDA more), I agree that they could have made it clearer (save it for the tons of people that have troubled beginnings because they don't read the PDA)
@Aaron Smith I want it to be optional. Like how alot of games do it, they give you cutscenes and books to read and npc's to talk to find out more lore.
But I understand if a game wants it to be a mystery in that I have to discover or something. But, I guess I just didn't know I had to read to figure it out by reading and got flustered.
So, the story complaints are addressed in-game but you didn't notice them I guess. Basically, the planet's cannon can curve its laser around the planet's curve to hit any shit regardless of where it's coming from, and also, the captain of the aurora says in a communication from himself to his first officer that he stayed on board the aurora to attempt a controlled descent. Basically, it landed on the relatively safe area it did to make it possible to salvage. It wasn't a coincidence, it actually makes sense.
Which is, by the way, in the PDA logs. It's stated in-game, sorry you missed it.
Like I said, it's explained in the PDA why the aurora landed there. Also, there's a reason why stories don't work like real life. Plot convenience is just something that happens for the sake of creating more interest, and deconstructive narrative analysis is just a separate field from actual writing advice as a result. To put it in with other legitimate criticisms is unfair, and also an unrealistic expectation that every story should make sense 1-to-1 with real life. Speaking as someone who both writes and deconstructs narrative, I can tell you these two things are always going to be at odds with each other, and you cannot create interesting dynamics in most stories without some handwaving.
Also, star trek has done a lot of similar shit in the past. It's just genre convention at this point, and that isn't inherently bad. Genre convention leads to shorthand for genre-savvy individuals, and also leads to cultural shorthand for the sake of accessibility.
Does it seem like coincidence? Sure, but it's also interesting, and the creative decision here was to forego what makes sense for what sounds cool or interesting, and that is a valid choice to make. It's interesting to think there were survivors here before you and that you're discovering how to succeed where they failed, and it also serves the gameplay function of giving you some direction so you aren't just pissing about for hours not knowing where to go. For all the positives this "plot convenience" does for the game, the one negative of "it doesn't make sense" can be dismissed by any reasonable critic.
I think he'd have more ground to stand on if this weren't a video game and didn't have to fulfill game conventions as well as narrative ones for the sake of accessibility and user-engagement. But as it stands, this is just a difference in his taste that he's lumping in with the legitimate criticisms of performance issues.
(edit: Also, I do still like his video and I do get where he's coming from but some of the issues he has with the story were talked about in degasi logs and when it's answered in the PDA it feels like a poorly researched low point in an otherwise good video.)
Plot convenience is part of writing, and he clearly isn't a writer. His focus is on analyzing, which can be a useful skill, but takes a backseat when looking forward at a story you need to put together as opposed to looking back at a story you didn't complete. It's neither good nor bad on its own, and it certainly isn't "cheap and lazy" in every iteration that it takes.
Also, he himself said plot convenience and handwaving is fine for the sake of interest, because it is. His problem seems to come from the fact that he personally didn't get anything out of the endgame more than any objective problem with it.
I, however, did get something out of the endgame. I prefer more philanthropic sci-fi, and the theme of needing to have a mutual arrangement with some other species and come to an understanding with it appeals to me a lot more than it appealed to him. I will agree with the way it was executed being less than optimal, but his story solutions completely write out the philanthropic aspect and undermine a lot of the themes of the game as a result. Which is him pointing out a personal gripe of his, and not an actual flaw.
"so he purposely landed right next to the cannon that literally shot him down from the sky?"
I don't see the issue. Especially if it's one of the few parts where it's safe to land.
Um, I'm pretty sure Joseph Anderson's full time job before RUclips was as a writer. He just missed a few crucial details that explained certain things.
And you agree with him that the story ending was executed poorly, but then just say it was a personal gripe? Mystery writing isn't rocket science. Regardless of the themes, if the payoff of unveiling the mystery is unsatisfying then it can sour the entire story to the point where you may even wish the mystery was never resolved rather than settling with a lame explanation.
NabsterHax No, I agree with him about the mechanics of the video game. It is a flawed game with frustrating issues. I don't agree with him about the story at all because I personally didn't find its ending unsatisfying. It really is just his opinion. And his solution is not a good one. It isn't even a hint at a good one. He assumes it's fine to remove certain themes from the story because he doesn't understand their function in that story but that just means he's missing the point. The story he recommended the game tell has a completely different feel or message to it, and it's one that I would've enjoyed less, because unlike him, I actually am a fan of philanthropic lite sci-fi.
His advice is about as valid as telling a writer to change the entire genre of their story just because he can't make sense of it. It isn't the writer's fault he missed the point, it's his.
I personally like not being able to see the islands, maybe once you go to them for the first time they appear but the surprise was that there WAS land. Which I didn't believe until I saw it myself
I never even thought of killing the leviathans and I only attacked the smaller predators to make them go away, often just one knife swipe will get them to leave you alone entirely. I don't think combat was ever really intended.
Just gonna point out that if you have two drill arms and a Reaper attacks you, you've got a fair chance of killing it with minimal damage to the PRAWN with hull strengthening.
Which makes sense, it's a dumb animal and you have two drill arms in its face.
Considering there's nothing human-like or sized in the ecosystem, it makes sense that they don't pose a real threat.
Honestly, monsters lurking in dark, deep depths of water is extremely unsettling to me
I genuinely used to be scared whilst playing skyrim and exploring shipwrecks, especially that one so deep you need waterbreathing abilities to reach it
There's something about reaching the depths of water where light stops reaching, and it just seems endless. You don't know how deep it goes. This is made even scarier due to how restricted you are in water. Even in games that give your waterbreathing abilities, so that's not a concern, you're still extremely limited and figuratively and literally out of your depths.
Like in skyrim, you can't fight underwater. You can't do anything. Just swim.
I do say I'm scared of it, but it's the intriguing kind of scared where you really want to know what's down there. Make the unfathomable become fathomable.
If skyrim were to have had a sea monster in depths, or in a flooded Dwemer ruin, I would have shit myself but at the same time, I was so dissapointed when I found nothing at all.
I think it's also why bioshock rapture intrigued me so much. There could be a leviathan so big and with you so small, you can't even get a perspective on the size
And you're stuck down there - in its territory
Dude, I'm the same way and I play Skyrim in VR. It's 100x scarier in VR!!!! I literally rip my headset off when I accidentally fall into the water near the ice area up north.
Wait what, there's underwater areas in skyrim?
@@themightyjagrafess8596 Oh yah. Up North there's a bunch of shipwrecks, and one of them is REALLY deep. Like you need waterbreathing potions or spells to get down and explore it
Some Dwemer ruins are also flooded, so if you want to explore it fully, you have to go underwater
Some Falmer caves in the Dawnguard expansion pack have extended underwater areas
Thats why I really wished Skyrim had larger sea creatures, there's def room for them in the Sea of Ghosts. Originally they were going to make a squidlike monster in Fallout 4, but it was scrapped early. Only its textures in the game files remain.
@@CloaksCosplays I wish that they brought back the Whales, because I believe they were hunted and harvested to extinctions by the Dwemer
I'm pretty sure it was a Dwemer ruin that contained a lifthole big enough to fit a whale inside, and you can also see the embedded bones along the walls of the drop
I didn't get the performance problems to the same degree you got. If its because I'm playing it much later and these issues have been fixed or if my machine is more beefy, I'm not sure. The islands and above surface also looked much better in my game then yours.
As far of the story, there is some rationalization that you missed. For example part of the Aurora's mission, along with opening new phasegates, was to locate the Degasi, and was drawn to it's last known point. See the "Secret Auxiliary Mission" in game PDF. So the fact it crashed so close to the Degasi wasn't THAT much of a coincidence.
Also, your video contains factual inaccuracies. For example the Sea Emperor didn't have a special mutation that produced Enzyme 42
, but rather it is produced by all Sea Emperors. The problem is the food source of the Sea Emperors weren't immune to the Kharaa Bacterium. The complex life support system was required to provide for the Sea Emperor despite lacking it's normal food source. The Enzyme 42 produced by the Sea Emperors weaken as they aged, and thus could only stall the effects of the Kharaa Bacterium, requiring additional doses over time.
The reason why the precursors couldn't hatch the offspring is because of how all life on the planet reproduces. The creature eggs are for all purposes immortal, and able to keep the embryos in suspended animation for eons. The planet it self goes though massive shifts and can even become uninhabitable for long periods of time. So the lifeforms evolved this method of determining when the right time to hatch is based on the conditions around them. Currently the Sea Emperors natural hatching environment doesn't exist and is impossible to know to anyone other then the Sea Emperor. The Sea Emperor refused to reveal these conditions to it's captors as they would've keep it's offspring in captivity.
While I will say the story of the game isn't winning awards, I do find it passable. The more important innovation here, is how the story, in a full on open world sandbox survival game, is told. It does give other developers a road map in these types of games where story telling is generally difficult to do.
I have a literal shit PC and with some graphic adjusting, it all looks great
Remember how old this review is. It's likely they patched it a bunch in the meantime.
@@craideus1943 I started playing it from yesterday, the game is even more buggy than expected. I find it interesting, but the pop in is just unbereable. I made a base and it still shows the grass going trough the floor. AND IT HAS BEEN OUT FOR A YEAR.
I play at recommended specs and structures will literally load in around me, once I had to use console to unstick my seamoth when the jelly degassi base loaded around me and trapped it
@@ГеоргиПопов-щ6я I think that's more a clipping issue than anything. Popin describes how only after swimming towards some stalagmites for a while suddenly the shrooms pop in and they look entirely different all of a sudden.
There are still graphical bugs in the game, as well as some gameplay bugs, but i have seen AAA games in a far worse state than this.
That is not to say you can't criticize obvious bugs.
Okay idk if Somone has said this, but you said that the player could have left at any time with the final spaceship. But that’s not true at all, you have to turn off the energy cannon, and to do that you have to cure the Kara virus. Not to mention a lot of the materials needed for the rocket are only found in the lava zone. So the player wouldn’t be able to just leave whenever.
The developers of the game actually directly stated that in the recent wake of the school shootings of places like Sandy Hook CT, they wanted to develop a game which was fun, enjoyable, had survival aspects, but almost no combat. If you watch almost any youtuber playing subnautica, when they finally kill their first leviathan, theres this excited joyous few seconds where they feel all proud, then their face sort of drops. They watch the lifeless body float to the sea floor and then just slowly make their way back to their seamoth or prawn, mumbling something about being so glad they accomplished that. In my opinion, Subnautica is easily one of the best games I have ever played. It uses an atmosphere which leaves so much up for interpretation, and yet still hammers down a lesson about how realistically small and unimportant you are in the world. The ending of the game, curing the virus, even that, if you truly think about it. You go to this massive alien structure, and assist this large leviathan in spreading it's young to save the planet. You don't develop a cure. The aliens did that for you, thousands of years before you were even born. You're just a human. Just a small, unimportant animal in this vast oceanic world which happens to help SOMETHING ELSE, cure the virus. Like I said. You don't spread the cure, the Sea Emperors do. You don't discover that Enzyme 42 cures the virus, the aliens do. All you can do is help them along, knowing that even if your character wasn't here, eventually over time, the alien walls which held the emperor would break apart, the eggs would find their way to the safe shallows and hatch, and either the world would perish, or it wouldn't. In the end, you truly have no control. Even when researchers arrive on the planet in Below Zero, the virus is still present. The emperors didn't "save the world". Thats because there is no such thing as a happy ending in nature. There is no cure to a virus. Sure you can find a medicine to cure the flu, but in a year a new strand pops up fully immune to that medicine. Nature will always prevail. This game holds more meaning than honestly any other game I've ever played, and I've played many, many games. As for the performance aspects, I found turning down the graphics a bit made the game much smoother, and didn't really affect the overall appearance of textures and meshes. I don't want to be "that guy" who's excusing the devs for making an incomplete game, but they really didn't. Every game has it's bugs. Sure subnautica has many, and can lose frames at the drop of a hat, or in this case one too many peepers, but Unknown Worlds is a small team. They aren't a AAA company with million dollar budgets. I personally think that the developers could've pushed launch out later and worked out the bugs and such, but in the end, Subnautica will always be my favorite game. It's story will always be a stunning and meaningful one, and perhaps will go down as my all time favorite life lesson.
This is so fucking true.
Also, Subnautica has strange optimization. Weaker computers tend to do better with frame rate and pop in, to a extent.
My shitty laptop that can't run terraria at 30fps can run Subnautica at 20.
Did you really need to type a whole ass Bible on how a scary fish game made you depressed
@@houdinied8619 I played on PS4 so I’m not sure how it is on PC
@@TylerSingh wonky optimization like I said. lower end computers can run it at absurdly high FPS's for their power, while really powerful computers will experience pop-in and lag you would think to be relegated to shitty potato pc's.
@@sultanofswag8901 did you really have to read and comment on it?
Reaper Leviathans are not the first Leviathan class creature you will come across, surprisingly enough, Reefbacks are Leviathans
@FinalHunter Fair, though you would likely find Reefbacks first. They skirt the edge of the safe shallows, and depending on where your life pod lands you might even be able to see one from it.
Was picking up on that too
Fortunately, the Reefbacks are *generally* not hostile. I did have one game where a reefback kept pushing my life pod around, picking it up out of the water, all kinds of annoying behavior. I think that was one of the earlier bugs though. Since then, I've had numerous games where the reefbacks would habitually crash into the first ("near shallows") bases I'd built, often slowly damaging the structure. I'd occasionally come back to base and find myself knee deep in water. Reefbacks seem to be attracted to base buildings.
Reefbacks are 30m long as adults, i don't see any surprise at all
given that Leviathan just means pretty large, not that surprising
"Like a snowball following a trail left by Batman" Best analogy 2018
Naman Khilrani where does a say that?
im pretty happy to say that many of the issues brought up in this video has been fixed as of 2023