Subnautica — Expansion Ideas — I
After a long silence and continuous Blizzard content, here I am with some more Subnautica ideas!
If you haven’t seen it, I have a series of behavior ideas for the creatures of Subnautica. I have a few more to add there to complete the series but meanwhile, let’s take a look at some expansion ideas that will, in my opinion, improve the gameplay overall.
I’ll start with a summary and span the detail over two or more articles.
Before I start, a message from future! You can find a list of Subnautica articles, including the behavior series in this publication.
New Systems
There are three main changes to gameplay and one “meta” change regarding game difficulty.
First gameplay change is base upgrades, which allow you to change some things in your base such as shutting power down and apply upgrades to individual rooms, such as having the repair module in your moonpool similar to Cyclops upgrade. Here is the article.
Second is the alien containment unit and farming. It is no longer possible to just grow anything anywhere. External growbeds are restricted and alien containment units need consistency, similar to how salt-water aquariums require special care. If you aren’t careful, the flora and fauna inside will die — or worse. You can read about it here.
Last but not least for gameplay, creatures will now react to your base. You need to be careful about your glasses, as creatures will see through them. Heat and electricity may draw some of them (an example is the behavior upgrade for ampeels here) and some may even be induced to attack your base! You can find it here.
As mentioned, there is also a meta change about game difficulty. I will start with that in this article, so keep reading!
Game Difficulty
Subnautica comes with Creative mode, where the player is invulnerable; Freedom, where the player just needs to worry about health and oxygen; Survival, where the player also needs to worry about hunger and thirst and finally the Hardcore, where the player will have only one life on top of the above concerns.
With the expansion, the game has the same ones as preset options, but players can actually change a lot through a bunch of sliders and options. Each option will contribute to a difficulty score.
“Needs” section will have Oxygen, Food and Water sliders. The default values are the middle of sliders. You can move them either way to make the game easier or more difficulty. (ie getting hungrier) The difficulty score contributed is not linear: The more you push them either way, the more the contribution increases.
“Health” section will have sliders for total health, creature aggressiveness and creature damage.
“Options” section (Probably a UX person needs to think more about how to segment and name these) will have options for toggling invulnerability to damage, invisibility to creatures, not getting titanium from duplicate blueprints, radiation danger (if turned on, radiation area increases daily until aurora is fixed and radiation still wear down the rad suit, more damage the closer you get to aurora… or just damage the player but much more slower than w/o suit) and finally Ironman mode (one life.)
Potentially, there could be options to increase the amount of blueprints and resources, banning a certain blueprint completely or having individual sliders for each resource. Another potential option would be to have a maximum water and food limit, so even if you drain at a regular interval, you can only have 50 maximum, instead of 100 (or 150, if you want to make it easier.)
With these settings players can decide how hard will any part of the game will be. These settings can also be saved, which will then generate a file. This file can be shared with others so players can use same difficulty. There could also be leaderboards, “difficulty of the month”, mutators etc to have some online competitive spirit.
So this is what I think an expansion can offer for the game in terms of difficulty levels.
In my next article, I will talk about Base Upgrades.
