Warning: Incredibly long, incredibly pissed off rant ahead.
Pretty much done playing the game until this shit is sorted.
Started a new game, can’t find anything. Don’t know where to search. Have to consult a fucking wiki to even figure out which VERY SPECIFIC SPOTS I have to find in the ENTIRE FUCKING OCEAN just so I can get a multipurpose room.
Or a fucking mobile vehicle bay.
Or a FUCKING BATTERY CHARGER.
Progression used to be fun. Go to the new biome, scan some stuff, unlock new things. Now, it’s go to a new biome, and then go home and go fuck yourself because we hid all the content in the game behind wrecks that are hidden in trenches and functionally unfindable unless you’re incredibly lucky or you went and searched for that one specific thing on the wiki.
And if you think I’m just whining, or I’m just salty, then please, I invite you to start a new game, and without consulting a wiki, without spawning in items using cheats, build a base with an alien containment room, a seamoth, a moonpool, and a bioreactor.
See you in a few months.
I loved this game. But when the new player experience is literally searching the ocean floor for a scattered handful of wrecks that hold all of your progress, fuck that. I’m out.
And I don’t know a single person who would enjoy playing the game from scratch in its current state. Unless you have the blueprints already unlocked, playing the game is a chore and comes right down to tiredly searching through wiki pages so you can get the exact location of the one wreck that has the one item you need so you can get far enough into the game that you can actually enjoy it.
Case in point.
Want a moon pool?
Let me just walk through the WATERBOARDING of steps to get the blueprint.
First off, the blueprints are all found below 200 metres. So you need the prawn to get it.
And to get the prawn you have to get through a sealed door.
So you need the laser cutter. Which needs diamond to get
diamonds only spawn below 100 ish metres, and very rarely. So you’re going to want a seamoth.
To get the seamoth, you need the vehicle creation station.
To get the vehicle creation station, you need to find the blueprints that are only found in FOUR VERY SPECIFIC PLACES. Three of them in the kelp zones (enjoy getting eaten by everything in that zone while you search!) and one out in the shallows. Now, if you’re new, YOU DON’T KNOW THIS. You don’t know you have to find one of four very specific places in the ocean to hunt for the vehicle station.
Welp, you got your vehicle station, seamoth fragments are (MERCIFULLY) still just hanging out in the ocean wherever. You can make your seamoth.
Now that you’ve made your seamoth, you can go hunting for diamonds! BUT ONLY TO 200 METRES. Because crush depth.
After an hour of that, you get your one diamond, and then you go and make a cutty tool. And then you go to the aurora, and climb in through the front hatch that NOBODY tells you about, unless you go read up on the wiki. And then you need a propulsion cannon to move the wreckage in front of the door which NO ONE TELLS YOU ABOUT again.
So you go make that, come back, get to the seamoth bay, bust open the door, scan up your prawn suit fragments, and go back home to begin hunting for the fragments needed to make it.
So you go flirt with the crush depth AGAIN to get aluminum oxide, which NOBODY TELLS YOU HOW TO FIND.
And then head out to the mountain to get uraninite (because you magically know they spawn out there!), hopefully without getting eaten by the reaper leviathans that hang out there.
YAY. You now have a prawn suit and can go past 200 metres without dying.
ARE YOU STILL WITH ME?
Because now that you’ve got a crush depth of 900 metres, you can go wherever you please, really! Fucking anywhere. In the ocean. The. Entire. Ocean.
Where’s the moonpool fragments? Who fucking knows. They’re in a wreck somewhere.
So just start walking. I’m sure you’ll find the right wreck eventually.
I mean, it’s not like the moonpool is a required object to get the upgrade station so you can actually get to the deeper parts of the ga-…oh wait, IT IS! (and the upgrade station is hidden inside more wrecks SOMEWHERE IN THE OCEAN!).
The game went from explore the ocean to ‘hey, fuck the ocean, and go fuck yourself while you’re at it’ because literally everything worth a single goddamn minute of your time is hidden inside wrecks that aren’t even hinted at anywhere. I played the shit out of this game with the last update, and now I don’t want to bother turning it on, because trying to play the game is a process of getting WATERBOARDED by indistinct progression routes locking you out of all the fun items by hiding everything in wrecks somewhere in the ocean with no hint, no indication, no fucking nothing.
It would be alright if your A.I said some shit like ‘hey, I’m detecting cyclops fragments over here’ or ‘I’m detecting uraninite somewhere to the north atop a landmass’ or even ‘There’s a faint signal from a wreck in this location’.
But NOPE.
Move all progress to wrecks and fuck new players. Let them spend hours tediously exploring every inch of a kelp biome that covers literally miles so they can hunt for a progression item they don’t even know they need, or know the location of.
Or, you know, make like any sensible person and turn A SURVIVAL GAME into a ‘search the wiki’ game and cheese it so hard you might as well just be using cheats.
You could even make the argument that they’re ‘expanding the survival game time’ and making it longer. No, they’re fucking not, and you shelve that argument right now. Hiding progression behind a handful of wrecks hidden in undisclosed locations in undisclosed biomes is not ‘lengthening the game’. It’s turning the game into a tedious grinding chore of hunting blindly through biomes.
You’re goddamn right I’m salty.
I watched one of my favorite exploration games turn to shit in one single update.
And you’re goddamn right this is a beta, and that’s why I’m leveling the harshest criticism at this game so it doesn’t make it to release like this.
And you can’t even say ‘just enjoy the game, bro, just play the game’ because I lost interest in playing the game when I was wandering around the kelp forest getting eaten by seamonsters trying to figure out how to build the seamoth I already had the blueprint for. Of course, I knew I needed the vehicle station, but a new player wouldn’t. They sure as fuck wouldn’t know that there are two wrecks somewhere in the kelp zone with the blueprints they need, and they wouldn’t know to search them out. Fuck, at that point, I didn’t even have a multipurpose room and had built my two storage containers inside a hallway. I couldn’t even build a base without having to consult the wiki and I’ve done all this shit before in the previous update.
The seamoth is the number one tool for exploration. It is the thing. Because without it, your gameplay is just spending twenty seconds getting to the surface, and then spending twenty seconds to get back to the ocean floor to keep grabbing one or two things for maybe thirty seconds or less (if you have two air tanks taking up space in your inventory) and then spending those twenty seconds again to get back to the surface. And to build it you need to find the very specific undocumented wrecks hidden in the kelp zone which is never told to you. It could be literally anywhere. Is it on the aurora? NOPE. The shallows? NOPE. Spent a month searching the grassy plateau? Well best go fuck yourself because it’s not there, either!
Moving progression to hidden, undocumented wrecks was an incredibly bad misstep and I sincerely hope the dev team gets their shit together and fixes it for the next update or their playerbase of new faces is going to disappear really damn fast.
And if you disagree with me, like I said. No wiki. No cheats. Start a new game and build me a moonpool with an upgrade station in it.
I dare you.
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