Subnautica: Below Zero (Zero Punctuation)

Quit halfway through BZ, just lost interest. Loved the original and don't feel this offered as interesting an experience.

This is why you turn off autosave wherever possible, and do it yourself. So it's absence doesn't surprise you

to be fair if the water was below zero it wouldn't be water

Subnautica "HUURK" below zero

Below Zero is like a group of different people who didn't quite understand what made the original game work decided to make a mod that uses Subnautica as the "background" for a swiss-cheesy linear story written by a Creative Writing sophomore armed with a checklist but no actual creativity. It's not "more of the same", it's less of the same, in every way. Everything good about Below Zero was already in Subnautica, and everything new in Below Zero feels tacked on and detracts from it.

Honestly I'm just so used to saving frequently. I know it had a lot of issues on console but it barely crashes on my pc (even when i was playing the 1st game in beta on a crappy laptop).

the story they had going before the finalized it was alot better and we even got to see a young emperor leviathan

The bit with the water being warmer than the air outside is actually how it works though: water has its highest density at around 4°C, and will therefore stay liquid even under extreme scenarios as long as the pressure is worse than the cold.

So yes, if you are in below zero temperatures, getting into the water would actually be warmer (although it'd still be a stupid idea because of other reasons ofc)

His burn of the PS5 was the best part of the video. Which does say alot.

Yeah this is exactly what happened to me and it just wasn't as interesting as the first game to go back to it.

Odd you talked about the game crashing and being buggy. The first game had those problems for me in a abundance, especially late game, the last hour or so of gameplay ended up taking about three hours because it kept crashing and I had to redo a bunch of things, I also had rebuild the prawn suit at one point because the one I had got stuck it a wall. But I pretty much never had any issues with Below Zero, off the top of my head I can’t remember the game ever crashing.

I really gave this game an honest try but it became clear to me that they padded out the playing time by adding all those petty steps. In the first third of the game I spent more time replenishing my air supply and juggling material in my limited storage than I did advancing the story. And that was in Freedom mode; I don't know what kind of OCD masochist enjoys Survival mode. Perhaps they'd like Ultra Survival in which Robin has to travel 3 Km to the only working toilet once every hour. Plus I couldn't get past that my character was a moron who intentionally went to a frozen ocean planet without any gear. And steered directly at a meteor when entering the atmosphere.

The base building mechanic from Subnautica is further expanded in BZ, only to have even less game under it.

so its like chihuahua being smaller and rubbing against things

as a hobby dev working on an homage to classic JRPGs, the ones with save creatures with pompoms..., save points that have a social life and a social minigame around them i found fun. i wanted to do something like this, and by something i mean 'mine are Owlcats with glasses.... so its different.':

How do i make save points psuedo-mandatory for this game spanning minigame but also not so mandatory that if you have completed 2 dungeons, 36 floors, gotten 4 new weapons, 2 new companions and witnessed a major cutscene before dying and losing it....that you just turn off my game and never pick it up again. I dont want that at all. i just want cute save points with personality...not to make people cry (least not because of saves...its is an RPG. If i don't make you cry once, i prolly made a shit RPG.)

idk how games can come out without having separate saves: one auto and one manual

Not a single mention of the massive fandom thirst for Al-An? I'm surprised...

"I made friends with a shark and named it porthos" that made me laugh so hard for no apparent reason but it did and thank you for that

kinda weird he says its a different plannet but its not

It overall felt kinda worse in every aspect, but at the same time did so to remain different enough from the original to still be enjoyable to veterans.

I can live with that, just always be sure to play through the original before trying Below Zero.

I can't play underwater games. I panic really bad.

Weebs should not be shamed "now and then"... they should be shamed constantly. Though this also assumes they feel any hint of shame still seeing as they are capable of publicly doing things that would make most people who do feel shame never want to be seen again by their pets let alone other humans.

Revisiting this, I realized that what Yahtzee went through with the crash and no autosave business, and being really hesitant to return to the game afterward, is almost exactly what happened to me with Breathedge. Except that I actually WAS saving, and it corrupted my save.

I still don't know when or if I'll bother going back to it. :/

Except Alterra was correct, and her sister die because of her own negligence, because she was busy being an eco terrorist bombing site facilities and murdering other people.

Also, with all due respect, callig the Seatruck "Fully customizable" is not only wrong, it's offensive. You git.

I would've preferred all the new items from Below Zero added to the original game, rather than the actual Below Zero.

Subnautica, but shit.

The number of people I see confused by the fact that you don't freeze in the water but do on land baffles me. If the water is in a liquid state, it's at least 32 degrees yeah? So if you have a wetsuit that can keep you warm in 32 degrees, then you get out of the 32-degree water into the -50 degree air, you start to freeze.

Weird.. the PC version has autosave. Another nail in the PS5 i guess (Still hate Sony, so fuck the PS5).

Fun fact, the temp in the water is only 1 degrees celcius, you start freezing slowly when you don't move

I'm not really sure why they brought the prawn suit back in this game, since the sea truck is capable of exploring the deepest part of the game. The prawn suit can't float and most of the game is incredibly vertical making it a ballache to get around; plus once you start adding modules to the sea truck it becomes harder and harder to manhandle it into the nooks and crannies.

The story for Below Zero feels far less engaging than OG Subnautica. Being forced to survive on a fascinating alien world versus looking for information about someone I don't care about? I'll take the first one.

I too got screwed by the lack of save, but not that badly.

subnautica below zero bugs i found (and hated) : my sea truck modules getting stuck (permantely) in bits of terrain that loaded as i passed through them when they werent there seconds ago and then the second time this happened, water physics stopped working and i had to jump off small cliffs taking bits of fall damage to kill myself cause i couldnt drown to fix it while fish still swam around me. i have not gone back to it since..and that was months ago

Subnautica Below Zero is a game with a weird mix of good ideas with poor execution. The weirdest part for me was how it made the whole story optional. Having the main character be an actual character with a personality with her own goals, who has agency and chooses to go to the planet on her own personal quest is a bold choice that could have been very interesting... so it's weird that she just completely forgets what she's there for, and it's even possible to win the game without doing the slightest bit of investigation into her sister's death. No spoilers, but I actually won the game without ever finding the base belonging to the owner of the exosuit, (if you've played, you know who I'm talking about) and it's not from lack of trying to find it; the game just hides a significant amount of its content from the player, making it totally optional.

Compare that to the original game, where your goals and the story are closely linked to each other, which makes for a much more satisfactory experience. Like don't get me wrong; SBZ still has plenty of enjoyable moments, and I don't regret buying it, but I definitely consider it a weaker game overall.

The no auto-save screwed me in the first game. It boggles my mind that they didn’t include it in the second. For devs that pride themselves on improving based on user feedback, this seems like a massive oversight. Unless there’s a faction of community nerds that have protested against it or something. But even that makes no sense. It’s not like a permadeath game. If you die, you go back to your ship, unless your game crashes. Then you are fucked. I. Don’t. Get. It.

remember in the Kingdoms of Amalur review when Yahtzee mentions how a slight tweak to a core feature can have ruinous consequences

So how do you complain about lack of autosave in subnautica and not complain about the lack of ANY save in Returnal? That particular oversight, where your hours-long progress is completely wiped if you turn off the console, the power goes out, you switch to another app and end up closing the game, or, say, the game updates itself to keep itself from deleting your progress, seems like it would be ripe for ridicule.

Subnautica below zero is buggy I've lost 2 saves 1 disappeared randomly I didn't delete it and the other wouldn't load the terrarain and I couldn't save

The sequel needed to be about Craig mcgill: Craig McGill, who crash-landed in the acid swamps of Boreal 9 and fought off arachnid kidney-poachers for 47 months, before hijacking a tame starwhal and riding it to the nearest phasegate."

If you read the PDAs it's actually explained why there are no temperature issues in water, the suit you're wearing is designed to compensate for that, but only in water.
Idk how realistic it is but I mean it's sci fi, and it's at least some kind of explanation instead of just ignoring it completely.

I just used the prawn suit docking module on my sea truck and then just used the prawn suit as storage. That way the sea truck took up less space

More subnautica? ✅
New Subnautica? ❌

To answer your question, Impact damage.

You...you bastard. I can hear the notes, I can feel the music in my soul. How could you do this to me? I thought we were friends.

the cold does freeze underwater, but only if you're stationary

Yeah, this game took a bad turn during development. The original writer left the company for some reason and whoever replaced them really phoned it in. I think there was supposed to be interesting stuff with the Altera company, the virus, and that crazy survivor lady you meet. But the finished version of the game just cuts those three plots out and ends the game. Really disappointing honestly. I wonder if you can still go back to one of the early release versions of the game, they really were better.