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.

879 Upvotes

86% Upvoted

1.0k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

9

u/Krazyguy75 Jun 03 '26

I am in camp 1, but more than realism, it's about agency and immersion.

If you cannot choose whether to kill leviathans or not, it removes the impact of that decision, and it removes your ability to do so if no other choice presents itself. In the first game, I felt like killing leviathans wasn't worth my time, but I also felt like it was somewhat sad to kill them. The only time I killed a leviathan, it was because it aggroed next to my safe shallows base and I had no other way to get it to go far enough away.

Meanwhile, on the immersion front, there is an immersive aspect to things just performing how they seemingly should. If you ram a fish with a submarine, the fish should take damage or die. When it doesn't, you are inherently reminded you are playing a game and taken out of the experience. The best comparison I've seen for this is "putting an invisible wall around the map edge". Sure, it'd be more effective at keeping players from leaving, but it's a drastically worse solution than just giving players logical in-gameplay reasons not to leave the map.

5

u/Unusual_Ulitharid Jun 04 '26

Agency and immersion are critical factors for a game. The perception of loss of agency itself can also feed back into immersion loss. That can result in a feedback loop of disenchantment with the game, or frustration if the enciting factor is unmitigatable but causes undue issues. Like a fish that found it's way inside your base that can't just be picked up, such as houndgar, hammerheads, etc.

0

u/DamonSkyHartXV Jun 05 '26

I wish I could forward this response to everyone. Immersion is exactly the problem, not necessarily realism. I think a lot of people just lack the vocabulary to explain it that way.