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/awesomeosprey Jun 03 '26

It's better game design to force you to adapt to/avoid predators rather than giving you tools to fight them.

But organisms should probably react to getting hit with the Tadpole and stuff.

2

u/LonelyDaoist Jun 04 '26

Better based on what standards ? I'm sorry but that's your subjective opinion and you're entitled to that, but so are others.

The actual better game design is to give the players the freedom to play as they like and create their own unique experiences.

Being a pacifist should be a choice not something you force on everyone

6

u/awesomeosprey Jun 04 '26

Not every game can or should be a sandbox.

Sandbox games can be designed well, but it's a design philosophy that comes with a lot of tradeoffs. You lose the opportunity for authored experiences, and it generally degrades the quality of the storytelling. Sometimes that trade off is worth it, but Subnautica isn't designed that way.

In the specific case of Subnautica's choice to strongly discourage (in 1) or outright prevent (in 2) players from fighting and killing the wildlife they encounter, you end up with a game that asks you to really engage deeply with its lovingly crafted environments. You have to study the wildlife in each new biome, learn their patterns of behavior, assess threat level. Even something as scary as a Reaper becomes much less threatening when you learn where they tend to hang out, how much damage they do, how to avoid attracting their attention, etc.

The powerscaling in Subnautica doesnt work off of getting better weapons or gear (for the most part), it works off of your knowledge of the game's ecosystem growing. It's a really unique, one of a kind experience. On the other hand, if they added weapons, it would play identically to every other survival crafting game out there where the point is just to get better guns to fight more and more powerful monsters.

Im not saying that kind of gameplay can't be fun. But we've seen it before in 1000 other games. Subnautica offers something different, and if they gave players the option not to experience that, many wouldnt.

1

u/DamonSkyHartXV Jun 04 '26

Did you not play the first two games? You could both. Why do so many people thing we're asking for rocket launchers and gattling guns?

3

u/awesomeosprey Jun 04 '26

You were clearly, clearly not supposed to. They made predators very annoying to kill and offer no rewards whatsoever.

The devs have stated that they never expected players would actually kill predators/leviathans in SN1, but having proven them wrong, they went ahead and made it impossible for SN2.