Subnautica

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FInally I have escaped this soggy but beautiful world. Great single player game, very exploration focused but surprisingly not very grindy at all.

:thumbsup:

[smilodon]

I thought I'd expand a bit on my thoughts about Subnautica for those who have not had a go at it yet.

There seems to have been a bit of a glut of "survival crafting" games over the last few years. I suspect that may be down to the fact that few of them, if any, have any kind of narrative and are therefore quite easy to make. They are persistent worlds with a crafting feature and some sort of threat or protagonists i.e. zombies, monsters, the elements, cannibals etc. We always start the game in our underpants scared of everything and spend the first minutes being chased about by small but deadly furry animals, eating grass and living in a hole in the ground. From there we progress ultimately to living in our very own mighty citadel, armed to the teeth with death ray guns and nuclear bombs, riding our own dragon around hundreds of acres of personal farmland. But there's no story. Apart from survive and thrive there's nothing else. And it's this that makes them easy to create. No voice acting, motion capture, storyline or cut scenes. This doesn't make the games bad but it does limit them somewhat.
It all started with Minecraft, an amazing game where the Dev took our money, provided us with a world and let us go play in it. Game developers have been iterating on that idea ever since. Some of these iterations are very good and some are not so good. Add in the option of Steams early access program and you don't even need a boatload of cash to create your game. You get players to pay for it first and then you go make it. This has allowed Indie developers the chance to create some fantastic games and some con artists to create crap that lives in perpetual development while they enjoy spending the cash. If the crappy games do ever make it to release they're soon abandoned by the developer as they kick start their next "cash cow".

So finally to Subnautica. Here is a game that went through the whole early access thing, while it built a sandbox 'water' world for you to crash onto and then proceed to fight to survive in. But unlike most other games of this type Subnautica has a start, a middle and amazingly an end. You can actually finish the game..... you get rolling end credits and everything.

It's also a free roaming open world for you to live in and spend as much time in as you like. The 'events' of the game are controlled by incoming radio transmissions. You choose when to move to the next phase buy choosing when to listen to the incoming message. In this way you can spend time exploring, harvesting, building and expanding until you feel like moving the game on a stage. It's a simple but very clever way to combine the best of a story driven game with a freeform open world. It also sets it apart from most of it's contemporaries.

It is a single player game so obviously loses the fun of playing with friends in the way Minecraft, Ark etc does. But it's not persistent, so there's no logging in after a few days to find all your crops have died and your base has been crushed by a herd of stampeding 'whatnots'. It's a game you can dip in and out of at your leisure.

In addition it's stunning to look at with surprises around every corner. Some of the things you can make are truly amazing. And finally it's a very reasonable £20 to buy. Once you have finished it you can play a Minecraft like sandbox game with the ability to instantly build huge underwater bases and fleets of attack subs etc.

It's all good.