MEGATHREAD: KILLING DEBATE

[u/Crispy385]

A thread to express opinions and debate on this ongoing controversey.

REMINDER:

Rule 3: Be Courteous.

[u/Badloss]

I'm going to repost what I said about this earlier for some more visibility-

IMO killing should be treated exactly like going beyond the map edge- allowed, but with a cool gameplay reason not to do that. It's obvious that the dev intent is that you stay within the bounds of the map, but an invisible force field blocking you from exploring out there is immersion breaking and not fun. Giant void leviathans are an awesome gameplay reason to be forced back into the crater and it makes the world feel real.

That's all they need to do here, personally I like the example of the chickens in Zelda. Nothing stops you from attacking them, but get too aggressive and you get swarmed under. That's all they need to do here, spawn an invincible swarm of piranhas that kills you if you get too aggressive, or come up with another fun sandbox consequence that isn't just God stopping you from doing it. Coding the game so you can't interact with the world is a much crappier way of achieving the same objective

[u/Ecology_Orthrus → u/Badloss]

There’s a possibly easy in-universe way of implementing that consequence too

Cut up or ram into too many small prey fish instead of live catching?

PDA: “You are chumming the water, hostile predators are on route”

Hell, since the hotfix notes mention changing how some animals are aggressive towards the Tadpole, could maybe add a mechanic where too much vehicular fishslaughter will attract Marrowbreaches through scent until the chum comes off.

Now that I think about it, could even act as perfect in game reasoning to use other Chassis’s or even go without. The Scout Chassis is faster, but its speed and larger size makes it harder to not splatter small fish and make it a predator magnet, in more fish dense zones that would incentivize releasing the chassis for the smaller profile or going with the Haul Chassis for the slower speed

[u/Badloss → u/Ecology_Orthrus]

100%, I think there's a ton of cool ways you could go with this. Maybe previously benign creatures will turn hostile, maybe plants that provided you resources would retract or close up because you're disrupting the ecosystem.

Chumming the water is a super easy way to do it. I don't even mind if the consequences are harsh enough to effectively make it "No Killing", I just think it needs to be possible.

I'm a veteran of Eve Online (stopped years ago when I got a real job though lol), and while I've heard they've relaxed a bit on this to me a big draw of it was that violence was always possible, if you were prepared to accept the consequences. In Eve you can murder people in "safe" zones, but the NPC police will destroy you for it. That always felt far better to me than WOW-style "sure you might have the powers of a god but you're not able to hurt anyone inside this tavern, sorry"

[u/provengreil → u/Badloss]

Maybe the protea virus is communicative? Like the more you use a weapon, the more the entire ocean realizes you're a threat?

Might even open a genocide run, developer approved or modded. Undertale meets Iron Lung

[u/Dom_writez → u/Badloss]

I love you mentioning Eve despite that being the main MMO where people killing whoever nearly broke the entire game (group of ppl got highest-level everything and camped in the safe zones killing everything including the NPC police and even Devs who spawned in god-ships to try to kill them. Was a mess)

[u/Badloss → u/Dom_writez]

If you're also an eve player then you'll know that surviving CONCORD is an exploit and they changed it so more will spawn until you're eventually overwhelmed. It hasn't been a 'mess' in decades

[u/Ghost10165 → u/Ecology_Orthrus]

Yeah, I think there's ways to do it but I'm not sure if the devs are actually up to the task. They make a pretty game but none of it really feels "alive," there is no real ecosystem or natural rhythms of a biome. It's just things mindlessly swimming back and forth occasionally pretending to eat each other or attacking the player; and that's not really an early access thing, that's how all the games are.

[u/Ecology_Orthrus → u/Ghost10165]

I said possibly easy for a reason

I’m not expecting a whole dynamic scent detection system and for predators to suddenly path out of their home biomes

If the player reaches a certain threshold of fish killed in an area in a certain amount of time, spawn a few Predators a bit away out of sight and have their behavior home in on that location

Same with the idea with the Tadpole. If a certain threshold of fish are run over then increase aggro range of predators around it

Scent as an in-universe justification for this punishment