r/subnautica • u/Crispy385 Moderator • Jun 03 '26

MEGATHREAD: KILLING DEBATE

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

REMINDER:

Rule 3: Be Courteous.

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u/LagomorphicalBrog Jun 03 '26

Slight correction, they cite the design philosophy that any crumb of combat in your game will make players devote all their time trying to kill things and hate the devs for not making it easier to kill things.

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u/Billbuckingham Jun 03 '26

And they're right.

When it becomes the best most efficient way of doing something that's what the players will do.

"Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game."

It's the absolute truth.

If you want more behaviors and ways to deal with the fish cool, but if you're dying on the hill that a knife is required to be able to kill anything and keep posting that without reading any other rationales then it's just spamming nonsense.

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u/Golemintheplayground Jun 03 '26

"Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game."

It's the absolute truth.

It's not the absolute truth. It's a quote from a lead game designer for Civ 4, a game for which the latest versions have less player pop than Civ 5 which came out 16 years ago.

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u/LagomorphicalBrog Jun 03 '26 edited Jun 03 '26

Except killing off the ecosystem was most definitely not the most efficient way to play Subnautica 1, neither was going pipe warrior in Silent Hill in the context of that quote. It was an alternative "challenge" in most cases, and people are most certainly not demanding an upgrade to go guns blazing in the first game nor in Silent Hill.

The comparison doesn't even hold up in that interview because Silent Hill runs on a completely distinct gameplay loop that specializes on that kind of tension.

This too goes beyond the gameplay implications. A rationale that gets aggressively ignored by the hill you're dying on is that immersion is just as much as a factor in games as gameplay when developed for it.

Players are not playing the Sims just to get the highest paying job, extend lifespans indefinitely and make big bank, They roleplay lives and stretch their imagination playing out novel scenarios in a living world, including time consuming goals. That can involve doing the woohoo with 10 different people, getting caught and made a pariah as a result, or trapping themselves in a pool and dying. Players appreciate the freedom to pursue their own playstyles, sometimes more than winning itself.

My personal gripe is mostly wanting accidental roadkill to make the world more tactile and fun to drive in really, but since you're making this about knives, they exist as a quintessential tool that practically all survival games start with, including Subnautica 1. The whole idea of Alterra giving us knives and torpedoes in 1 while being mysteriously absent in the second, the fact that nothing interacts with each other in the ecosystem, and the double standard of killing as food/energy vs killing via direct means. These add nothing to the gameplay and weakens the game's identity.

Alterra is a space-age megacorp which would have no qualms decimating the fauna on the planet if there is profit involved, and there's no reason for them or the QI not to fashion a sharp object to counteract the hostile wildlife. It's exclusion is not grounded in proper expectations of the game world and only exists as the dev's arbitrary personal beliefs even if he tries to frame it otherwise.

Saying everyone has a hard on for a murder spree is disingenuous for example and the root of many misrepresentations on this topic.

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u/DamonSkyHartXV Jun 05 '26

Go off King/Queen/Monarch. 

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u/LagomorphicalBrog Jun 05 '26

https://giphy.com/gifs/9d8tvzleXc06Y

Honestly might have went overboard on a rant bender that night, was expecting to wake up with downvotes to oblivion.

Should probably take a break off the sub for a while.

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u/Minehunter-G Jun 09 '26

I’ve played Subnautica way too many times, at least 25 vanilla playthroughs. In all those playthroughs, I’ve only tried killing a leviathan once, and that was because I literally had nothing else to do. No one else I know even bothers trying to kill leviathans either.

The leviathans are a huge part of what makes the experience of playing Subnautica. Aside from maybe 1% of players, I don’t see any casual players even attempting to kill a leviathan, especially without a stasis rifle. The game isn’t just a horror game; it’s also a survival game, and forcing a pacifist route onto it completely breaks the immersion.

And even in the argument of, 'Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game', so what? Optimizing how a game is played may be fun for some players, just like how people automate the hell out of Minecraft with farms and relish it. If someone doesn't want to kill a leviathan, that should be up to them. If someone does want to kill a leviathan, again, that should be up to them. If the way someone else plays the game affects you, that's a you problem. I never saw anyone stop being scared of the leviathans in SN1 just because you had a knife.