Don’t get me wrong, I fully agree in spirit, it just seems like several aspects royally screwed over the map design so it felt much smaller.
The bay being the main area where you started meant everything felt far more like linear progression regardless of where one wandered to.
The island bifurcating the bay made the bay itself far more prominent, isolated, and greatly reduced how many under water biomes were simply ‘there’ to explore. You always HAD to wander out in one of two directions to get to some other under water biome open to the surface, of which there were only, what? three?
Most later game biomes were solo, single entrance offshoots of the already limited ‘main’ areas. This made them feel much more like explicitly added game assets instead of areas you’d just wander in to while exploring.
The story and the game design itself seemed to want the on-land biome to be more cool than it was. It was ONE biome, and not even the type of biome that the game is known for.
The sea truck is cool in concept, but when every area is disparate and isolated, it SUCKED to drive a loaded truck to any of them.
The “AI” companion (and really, the story over all) totally and completely popped the isolated explorative feeling of the game.
Basically, the basic design of the map and story ran completely counter to everything that made the first such an amazing experience.
The individual biomes and assets themselves were still great, but they were composed in such a way that left them … not greater than the sum of their parts.
I think it could’ve been a banger if they had interconnected more biomes and made them larger so there was ANY point to dragging a loaded sea truck to them. The land biome could have worked if they made it much more like a real arctic; an ocean mostly covered in ice sheets instead of it just being some random biome “over there” largely literally on land. The ice worm would’ve been waaay cooler if the player had to wonder if it could make an appearance under water, for example, even if it never did. The snow fox (or what ever the land vehicle was called, it’s been a while) could’ve been way cooler if it wasn’t for one biome “over there”, too.
I don’t know how much larger it’d need to be, but a little more creativity in mixing the biomes together would’ve gone a LONG way.
I’m adding some second hand experience here, but what made below zero much worse for my son when he played it was that it constantly crashed, resulting in a lot of lost progress. Often crashing when saving, too, so after having accomplished something. He got it on the switch as some kind of double-feature with subnautica and below zero on a single cartridge. He played through subnautica and loved it but ditched below zero after barely a handful of hours played, purely due to the frustration, not even being at the point where those game design points would have mattered.
I think a large part of why everything was segmented is they released the game into EA way too early. It made it to where they had to have a ‘gating’ system where they could stop players from going to areas that weren’t developed out of finished yet. Overall this affected the maps flow, validating all your points there. Also completely agree with the voiced narrative. Part of what made Subnautica great was the silence. It gives more room for hearing the crazy sounds around you. Instead you had some chatty voice in your head that had commentary about every damn thing.
Eh I know what you mean from a development standpoint (remixing the map would be a huge effort), but I still find it a kinda’ copout excuse. I bet we’d be here heralding the design instead of lambasting it if they took the time to really mix the biomes together properly once they had the assets complete.
In fact, I remember some early early access games doing exactly that: basically having demos that were WAY different than the final product. Ugh I wish I remembered any names, though such effort in to game development was over a decade ago, when some companies still treated it like an actual art form instead of a money vessel…
Oh no I wasn’t excusing the behavior, quite the contrary. I’m saying the map sucked because they went into EA too early and didn’t put effort into changing the map for full release. I agree with you!
Is it actually smaller, though?
Don’t get me wrong, I fully agree in spirit, it just seems like several aspects royally screwed over the map design so it felt much smaller.
Basically, the basic design of the map and story ran completely counter to everything that made the first such an amazing experience.
The individual biomes and assets themselves were still great, but they were composed in such a way that left them … not greater than the sum of their parts.
I think it could’ve been a banger if they had interconnected more biomes and made them larger so there was ANY point to dragging a loaded sea truck to them. The land biome could have worked if they made it much more like a real arctic; an ocean mostly covered in ice sheets instead of it just being some random biome “over there” largely literally on land. The ice worm would’ve been waaay cooler if the player had to wonder if it could make an appearance under water, for example, even if it never did. The snow fox (or what ever the land vehicle was called, it’s been a while) could’ve been way cooler if it wasn’t for one biome “over there”, too.
I don’t know how much larger it’d need to be, but a little more creativity in mixing the biomes together would’ve gone a LONG way.
I’m adding some second hand experience here, but what made below zero much worse for my son when he played it was that it constantly crashed, resulting in a lot of lost progress. Often crashing when saving, too, so after having accomplished something. He got it on the switch as some kind of double-feature with subnautica and below zero on a single cartridge. He played through subnautica and loved it but ditched below zero after barely a handful of hours played, purely due to the frustration, not even being at the point where those game design points would have mattered.
I think a large part of why everything was segmented is they released the game into EA way too early. It made it to where they had to have a ‘gating’ system where they could stop players from going to areas that weren’t developed out of finished yet. Overall this affected the maps flow, validating all your points there. Also completely agree with the voiced narrative. Part of what made Subnautica great was the silence. It gives more room for hearing the crazy sounds around you. Instead you had some chatty voice in your head that had commentary about every damn thing.
Eh I know what you mean from a development standpoint (remixing the map would be a huge effort), but I still find it a kinda’ copout excuse. I bet we’d be here heralding the design instead of lambasting it if they took the time to really mix the biomes together properly once they had the assets complete.
In fact, I remember some early early access games doing exactly that: basically having demos that were WAY different than the final product. Ugh I wish I remembered any names, though such effort in to game development was over a decade ago, when some companies still treated it like an actual art form instead of a money vessel…
Oh no I wasn’t excusing the behavior, quite the contrary. I’m saying the map sucked because they went into EA too early and didn’t put effort into changing the map for full release. I agree with you!