I play so few survival games that my ability to assume the mindset required by them, the collect, craft, and concatenate some coral into a spaceship mindset, is pretty pitifully resistant to the fantasy that these games promote. Land on a distant planet or come to your stranding in an isolated wood, take a breath and assess, then assemble manifest destiny in the New West - or so, I think, is the arc which most survival games hope to promote: starve > don’t starve > fatten. Again, I don’t really play very many of these games. The essential quality that promotes exciting play, overcoming high level systems that when wrassled with lower level systems become themselves a new baseline, has always felt so much more like work for me than play. I understand the desire for progression paths, but the progress that really gets me going is usually at the accomplishment of player compulsion more so than systems achievement. Like, if I am to fashion an axe to lop down a tree or a pickaxe to open a cave network’s mouth, I would rather the tension of those tasks be something that is made interesting because I have to configure a triangular power relation between me, the obstacle, and my tool; the making into a ladder of these problems, something which can be overcome with fashioning a steel axe instead of a stone axe, has always felt repetitive and distancing to my action as a player within a world.
Just as a side note, this is what makes me more interested in games which automate the gathering and construction aspects of resource management/survival games, such as Infinifactory, because survival is framed as a logistical issue rather than a technological one.
All that said, Subnautica, for at least the first 2/3rds of its playtime, managed to mostly assuage the monotony I encounter in myself typically evoked by these games. Having the play transported from a purely terrestrial setting (as obviously my use of examples above show, there are only so many times, aka once, that punching down a tree to make campfires can maintain interest) to one that transgressed many layers of depth in an alien world with alien accessibilities fuels a necessary drive of play that feels more inhabited than is typical for survival games. There is a human curiosity evoked by Subnautica’s world that rarely comes across in most games, much less woods based survival games. There is also the general lack of vertical progression in the blueprint trees, favouring more broadly a lock and key horizontal progression; the matching of the radial compassing at first, followed later by expansion to the depths, with a toolset that requires new mechanics as opposed to better, or merely upgraded, tools keeps the game feeling fresh, and provides a different station of address as the plotting of the game progresses. This plotting of blueprint scavenging itself is uniquely interesting - the scarcity and abundance of individual coppers or corals is, with the mystery and horror of the depths and what goes on in them, impinged with a necessity that is not purely systemic, but actually expedites any nuisances of travel (of which there are a lot by the late game) with character motivation instead of just avatar motivation. Of course, there is along all of this the charm, and terror, of the design wrapping the acrobatics of underwater game design; each encounter a precious indication of the wonders of being there, and of the distance struck at how close you are to things which should never have been approached as such.
Nonetheless, and despite all the positive things I encountered in my playthrough, Subnautica didn’t convert me to this style of game. The traversal, by the end, was enormously tedious: the radar - not the radar in the Cyclops but the radar that develops in the player as they have to incorporate new elements of play in their mining shuttle runs, seeing the same things over and over until those things become white noise which is only penetrated by shinies and sharks - rarely blips with motes of interest after you really start depth diving, rendering the wonder of the world entirely moot by the time the plot necessities become full meals instead of aperitifs. The resolution of the mysteries is expectedly disappointing if not entirely unforeseen, and as that reveal is more laid out in front of the player, the motivation for progression regresses into typical survival game resource haranguing; after 15 hours, the ocean weeds and leviathans may as well be trees and bears for their familiarity. Unfortunately, alongside all of this, the radial traversal which is so rewarding out the gate becomes just frustrating as you take 5-10 minutes every 30 minutes just navigating your Sea Moth or Prawn suit back to your Cyclops and then back to your base, which itself is annoyingly necessary to the progression and hugely frustrating to shuttle run the required resource for constructing.
All said, Subnautica balances more positively than not, but I would have preferred a tip to more malevolent privation, making things worse and worse as the game went on leading into tragedy - an abundance of resources on the surface and nothing but horror and death and starvation and suffocation at the depths; if the game is going to try and capture some Lovecraftian monster design to evoke horror, why not make the pursuit of knowledge the ultimate downfall of the player? They may go as far into the depths as they like, but they can’t return the same. As it stands, it is just another fattening power fantasy about how cool it is to colonise but how shitty it is to colonise for a boss.
Just as a side note, this is what makes me more interested in games which automate the gathering and construction aspects of resource management/survival games, such as Infinifactory, because survival is framed as a logistical issue rather than a technological one.
All that said, Subnautica, for at least the first 2/3rds of its playtime, managed to mostly assuage the monotony I encounter in myself typically evoked by these games. Having the play transported from a purely terrestrial setting (as obviously my use of examples above show, there are only so many times, aka once, that punching down a tree to make campfires can maintain interest) to one that transgressed many layers of depth in an alien world with alien accessibilities fuels a necessary drive of play that feels more inhabited than is typical for survival games. There is a human curiosity evoked by Subnautica’s world that rarely comes across in most games, much less woods based survival games. There is also the general lack of vertical progression in the blueprint trees, favouring more broadly a lock and key horizontal progression; the matching of the radial compassing at first, followed later by expansion to the depths, with a toolset that requires new mechanics as opposed to better, or merely upgraded, tools keeps the game feeling fresh, and provides a different station of address as the plotting of the game progresses. This plotting of blueprint scavenging itself is uniquely interesting - the scarcity and abundance of individual coppers or corals is, with the mystery and horror of the depths and what goes on in them, impinged with a necessity that is not purely systemic, but actually expedites any nuisances of travel (of which there are a lot by the late game) with character motivation instead of just avatar motivation. Of course, there is along all of this the charm, and terror, of the design wrapping the acrobatics of underwater game design; each encounter a precious indication of the wonders of being there, and of the distance struck at how close you are to things which should never have been approached as such.
Nonetheless, and despite all the positive things I encountered in my playthrough, Subnautica didn’t convert me to this style of game. The traversal, by the end, was enormously tedious: the radar - not the radar in the Cyclops but the radar that develops in the player as they have to incorporate new elements of play in their mining shuttle runs, seeing the same things over and over until those things become white noise which is only penetrated by shinies and sharks - rarely blips with motes of interest after you really start depth diving, rendering the wonder of the world entirely moot by the time the plot necessities become full meals instead of aperitifs. The resolution of the mysteries is expectedly disappointing if not entirely unforeseen, and as that reveal is more laid out in front of the player, the motivation for progression regresses into typical survival game resource haranguing; after 15 hours, the ocean weeds and leviathans may as well be trees and bears for their familiarity. Unfortunately, alongside all of this, the radial traversal which is so rewarding out the gate becomes just frustrating as you take 5-10 minutes every 30 minutes just navigating your Sea Moth or Prawn suit back to your Cyclops and then back to your base, which itself is annoyingly necessary to the progression and hugely frustrating to shuttle run the required resource for constructing.
All said, Subnautica balances more positively than not, but I would have preferred a tip to more malevolent privation, making things worse and worse as the game went on leading into tragedy - an abundance of resources on the surface and nothing but horror and death and starvation and suffocation at the depths; if the game is going to try and capture some Lovecraftian monster design to evoke horror, why not make the pursuit of knowledge the ultimate downfall of the player? They may go as far into the depths as they like, but they can’t return the same. As it stands, it is just another fattening power fantasy about how cool it is to colonise but how shitty it is to colonise for a boss.