Subnautica below zero

OP here, I never played the first game, like the flag I am I saw a streamer I like play through it and I really liked what I saw of the game . I didn't wanna get 1 since it'd already been spoiled, so I wanted to buy 2 at full price from steam to go into a subnut game completely blind. If it really is that bad, should I just pirate it?

The thing that kills me about 2 is no sonar. Dealing with sonar is imo the most iconic part of 1, and it's just not in 2 at all. So no spooky times.

>Second game is worse because all of the new areas are in enclosed spaces and on a planned progression path.
? The fuck? You can literally do them in any order and the only limitation is depth like in 1.

>dealing with sonar
What do you mean by this?

You know how there's the dark depths and you dive into it with the sonar active? You can't see shit and you're looking for the ghost leviathans to pop up? That was by far the most memorable part of 1 for me, and it just doesn't exist in 2.

yea but its valuable to the aim of creating sequels and mods and other stories within the engine. If the creative direction of the subnautica franchise stays in the hole its dug with below zero, it would be ripe for modded storylines, since voice acting is not necessary for the medium (mainly just discovering journals and scanning things)

Its absolutely without a doubt inferior to the original in every way. Don't waste your time. Its literally annoying to play. Play something better.

It had far too much focus on land sections
I feel like I'm in the minority in that I did like the conversations with the alien though

having played both, buy and play 1. it will still be fun, 2 is miserable in comparison, and realistically not much less janky

I agree that it's extremely valuable but I'm just saying that personally I don't have the balls for such an extreme development.

I have never seen a game turn into shit so fast as this.
It starts out so well, then the more you progress the worse it becomes, as the ice surface really is the nail in the coffin with the snowmobile. That was just fucking dogshit. Also the fear is replaced by "I can't farm while this mob is harassing me."
Its a good idea, but it shows that the people who knew how to make a good experience didn't work on this game, or at least someone who was really important left. Its the classic example of copying something good without understand why is it good and why it works, which unreal asset flippers with vidyo gem degrees are unable to understand.

It doesn't hold up. Subnautica is above 8 stars out of ten, while the sequel is below zero.

1 should have had more sonar, if you ask me.
>diving into a pitch black, murky cavern with nothing but the sonar to warn you about whatever terrifying things lie beneath
They took this away from you.

the conversations with the alien with the original voice actor were okay, without the latter half of the story.

the new voice actor and the ending of the story are miserable. The story ending feels like a pathetic fan service pay off where you see le epick alien eco future technology in harmony with biology. The story in the original of the aliens' failure, and the level of detail we are exposed to, is much more compelling and meaningful. It's as if the sequel was set up for failure by trying to take the alien story which really had been wrapped up at just the right spot, and tried to flog it like a dead horse to the result of some pathetic master chief armor assembling montage at the end which is just lame. Perhaps they could've explored communicating with indigenous life forms, or built on the big evil space corporations sub plot, or even kept going with the alien except without some stupid fetch quest to find all the pieces of full dragonplate armor

I mean, both the seamoth and cyclops have sonar. How much fucking sonar do you need in a game?

I agree with this as well! I hated that the Lost River was easy to see. I was satisfied with the lava zone mostly though.

>How much fucking sonar do you need in a game?
I don't understand the question.

very concise and well thought out post. great job user.

you just hae strong POC women don't you?

I didn't even notice the change in voice actor but I will admit the second half of the story is ass

I do, but the game would have been shit even with a white mute protagonist too.

Remember when they cut terraforming from the first game, the data structures necessary for it being ruinous to performance, then kept pushing back for YEARS the dev objective of converting from voxels to a baked static mesh? They never fucking did it. It's still pop-in hell.

is there any evidence of shifts and changes in the team? They do a lot of blogging and logs im sure if there was some kindof change in people there would be evidence... I think this is more of a case of them just misunderstanding where the success of subnautica was.

The original subnautica was
- pretty bad in terms of writing and voice acting (all the subplots were miserable, the actual lines spoken to you by the leviathan are miserably written compared to other games where you speak with some ancient wisdom)
- very jank, rife with gameplay bugs and visual problems

It was good because it had good sound design, good creature and environment design, and a just good enough implementation of lighting and biomes to get you to the point where you could ignore the graphical issues and enjoy the game. It stayed quiet and let you explore.

And if you think about these strengths in sound design, creature design, environmental design - they are all still there in Below Zero. The reveal of the frozen leviathan was a strong point for me, as well as the mining tunnels. But they are drowned out by lots of loud screeching noise - bad story, bad objectives, too much human/alien structures, etc. If you treated Below Zero as a sandbox and ignored the ice worm sections and snow bike sections, its as good as the original as a sandbox. It's everything on top of the sandbox where I think they are trying harder and making things worse because of it.

A sonar room on the Cyclops would've been goat

It's incredible how they fucked up everything that made the first one so fun and atmospheric.

I think he misunderstood the talk of sonar as options to use sonar on vehicles, and not good places for you to use it. Like if you made the Lost River dark and somewhat require sonar like Bloodkelp was, it'd be a lot damn better. Other opportunities to use sonar than just that would be good too.

dont use the snow mobile, just use prawnsuit grabble + jump, it goes faster and is more fun

No VR support so I didn't buy it. Why would you give your sequel LESS features than the original?

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To be fair Subnautica VR isn't really well-implemented. Has the standard lazy unity implementation.

>And if you think about these strengths in sound design, creature design, environmental design - they are all still there in Below Zero.
Lol are you kidding? Monster sounds in BZ not only sound pure dogshit and samey, but the fucking audio mixing is all fucked up. Crpytosuchuses roar as loud as leviathans but are barely the size of the seatruck cabin, and squidsharks biting something sound like they're right next to your ear regardless of how far away they are.
The only "good" audio thing BZ has going for it is the soundtrack because Ben Prunty can't make a bad OST, but the creature sound design seems to have been handed down to diversity hires once they fired Chylinski.

I agree, but it didn't stop it from being one of my favorite games to play in VR anyway. IIRC they said they dropped it because they felt like they "couldn't do it justice" but all it really needed was some UI rescaling.

I haven't played it since beta so I dont have a strong memory of the sounds in Below Zero, perhaps they are sub par compared to the original.

just reading about this firing of the sound person from the first game. absolute classick lol

I think they really wanted to make the tools something more "VR-like" instead of just being affixed to your face, but at the time, unity VR tech was just not good. It's better now but it's still not excellent. I've done contract work on VR porn games in unity, so I really get where they're coming from and why they would feel so dissatisfied. Even so, I would love to see more VR work done with subnautica.

The first game has the log feels like apocalyptic log
The second game feels like you hear co-workers chit chat and adds nothing to the mystery

Am I the only one who quit both of these after like 5 minutes? The ocean scares me.

Stop being a little bitch, lmao.

yes

I dropped it when I learned you don't get rewarded with a giant sub at the end.

wew of all the legitimate reasons to hate the game you pick the most idiotic one

Honestly I would be fine with that if the sea truck actually had a fucking hinge on its modules. The sea truck being staticly fixed is hell. Also it apparantly used to have a rear view camera for backing up and I hate that that's missing now too, because the prawn suit covered it.

i was googling about the sound person they fired just then and oh my goodness reddit and twitter are full of so many miserable people larping as psychologists and politicians

user
I don't need to look up people to know its not the same.
I only need to take a glance at the map you make and already know that you have absolutely zero clue why did you put shit in there as you only copied a person who knows why is there.
Same exact problem is with the seabus. It sounds good on paper, as it combines the small sub with the big one, but its an abysmally shit vehicle. Why is that? Because the people who worked on it didn't understood why was the big sub and the small sub a crucial part, especially progression wise, it has shit controls too, and its a shitty hallway, unlike the big submarine which legit feels like a home you can move.
But this is everywhere in gaming, I honestly think the best example is World of Warcraft deepwind gorge battleground. Its literally a copy of Arathi, but the people who made it didn't understood why does it look like the way it is, just made it similar and ended up as an inferior copy to the original.
The shotgun is on the wall, and the devs don't understand why is it there, and this is very prevalent in western games.

Hey friendo, suggest me some VR games that at minimum have WMR usability? I could definitely use some more suggestions than H3VR and Boneworks

I am gripped by absolutely paralyzing fear in certain areas of the game (really anywhere with reapers) and I've still beaten it. It is entirely possible to beat the entire game only going into areas with reapers twice: once for the aurora and once for the mountain island alien base. idk why someone would be in a thread about 2 without having played 1 but you never know

>I've done contract work on VR porn games
based. I can only guess how jank unity's VR implementation must be behind the scenes just from the fact that it only lets you record from the left eye. I can't complain though, the VR catalogue wouldn't be what it is if they didn't rush it out when they did.

Ruined by women in charge of narrative design, same as Hardspace: Shipbreaker

You can bonk reapers with the repulsion cannon.

Your fear of Reapers is now cured.

I don't even have to look up who did the story for BZ because I already know it's some pink-haired woman or tranny lunatic.

>Women were in charge for that abortion they call a story revamp
That makes too much sense. Fucking stupid cunts did Weaver so dirty.

Cyclops > Sea truck

Sea truck is nigger shit.

I really do understand what you are saying in terms of the devs missing the point, im just questioning whether its new faces not knowing what made the original great (e.g. the classick bluepoint remaster argument) versus the same/similar design/dev team that struck it lucky and then managed to overinvest and overstep in areas they lack skills (e.g. fable 3, cyberpunk). Or somewhere in between these two ends. I say this because I feel like Subnautica was lucky in that it was a simple story on top of a strong sandbox, and below zero I feel like they tried to build more ontop the sandbox and ended up cluttering it and making it worse.

The fear of reapers (or any other leviathan) instantly goes away once you figure out you can kill all of them with the stasis rifle and a knife with zero risk. I honestly can't think of a bigger mistake subnautica made than the stasis rifle, other than maybe the prawn and cyclops

It's pretty spotty but improving slowly. VR games are basically doable at this point without significant amounts of nonsense. Just minor amounts of it.

I mean, I like the cyclops a fuckload more, yeah.

>the original VA was much better imo and the story is the weakest point of the game
I keep hearing that everything about the original voice delivery and story was more interesting than the version they actually went with.

>tfw you accidentally brought Reaper to safe shallows

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Not well.
I can't remember a single moment of that game that wasn't better in the first one.

Sorry, user, I basically only play VR-compatible regular games and I'm totally unfamiliar with windows' mixed reality

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