I'm dreading posting this, so I want to start by saying that I love this game. I burned myself out on it last summer and have only played in short bursts since, but this game sits in my heart as one of the greats (and it's not even in full release yet). I want to jump back into it as soon as I can and experience all of the changes that UW have made in those six months.
But there is one problem with this game that really bugs me. It may just be a personal thing so feel free to completely disagree, but I find the game very unsatisfying in the long run. It has some glaring issues regarding the expansion of this universe that will leave me wanting so much more after the game ends. Again, these issues may be personal, but I think it would be healthy to get these thoughts out there.
The game starts with you jumping into a life pod and ejecting out of the Aurora. The Aurora explodes, the life pod lands in the ocean and you are left on your own. As you look at the enormous ship on the horizon you may start to ask questions like Where did that ship come from? or Did I have any friends on that ship that I should be worried about? or How developed is humanity? Can they create ships as big as moons or is this ship the largest they can construct? And although you do find out that there were other people on the ship and you read their stories of the crash, you fail to discover whether your character knew them personally. You rarely even hear any mention of where they came from; you only hear about their lives during and after the crash. All you know about them is what they were like and what they did just before and during their time on 4546B.
When you journey to the Aurora you find it irradiated and burning. There are no corpses in sight; only broken technology and PDA diaries. This detracts from the emotional weight of the Aurora crash substantially. I know they were trying to keep an age rating, but this ship doesn't feel lived in at all. There is no sign of human life other than their scattered PDAs. The emotional impact of something is directly affected by your involvement with it; when all I have that links me to this crew is PDA entries it doesn't get me invested. Sure, it's sad that they died, but it doesn't bring with it any real emotional impact. The most emotional part of Subnautica is by far (and spoilers) the Emperor's death and the hatching of her young. You feel something when she dies, and this is because we met her, we interacted with her, we knew her motivations and her struggles and we helped her overcome them. If we were given text that just told us that the Emperor had died and her young had hatched the emotional weight would be nowhere near what it is now.
And this is a recurring theme in Subnautica and my problems with it; I feel a lot more invested with the planet than I have ever felt with Alterra or the Federation. I am constantly interacting with the planet and its creatures, I am constantly watching them interact with each other. I love this planet and everything on it because I've spent hundreds of hours exploring, seeing and interacting with these creatures and everything like that. I haven't seen the Federation or my crew mates in-game so I feel nothing for them.
And here's where it all falls apart for me. This is the main point of this post so I guess I'll just put it on its own line in bold with italics and all that:
What I feel as a player contradicts what my character feels. Our motivations don't align.
When it comes down to it, your character's motivation is to leave this planet and return to Federation space, but you never feel the urge to complete this task as you don't know what your character is going back to. Your main reason for playing this game is to explore and experience the world that you've found yourself on, whilst also building vehicles and bases to suit yourself. There's a real disconnect between the player and the character in this game and it bugs me. In, say, Portal, Chell's task is to escape Aperture Laboratories and maybe kill GLaDOS along the way. You as a player are playing the game to do puzzles and solve them, and you feel a connection with the character because there's sympathy there. You are programmed to hate GLaDOS and see her as an enemy like Chell does, and you want to reach and kill her in the same way as the character. You could even take a newer, simpler game like Enter the Gungeon. The characters you play in that game have a sole task: fight through the Gungeon and acquire the artifact at the end. You as a player have that same motivation because it lines up with your gameplay (that being shooting bad guys, becoming stronger and progressing through the levels).
This is Subnautica's biggest weak point for me; you and your character have very different motivations for doing what they do. The character would B-line for where the plot asks him to go so that he can escape the planet whereas the player wants to explore and get to know the world they're playing in. It doesn't line up and it detracts from the experience, as I'm constantly left asking myself: Why is my character exploring the Grand Reef and looking for titanium to build a base when he already has the necessary equipment to get the the Prison? In this case I either, begrudgingly, go to the prison as it's what my character would do, or I would continue what I wanted to do and still feel that disconnect.
To conclude this, I love Subnautica. I honestly can't get enough. The gameplay is great, the creatures are fantastic and the concept is innovative and fun. The development team is doing an amazing job at fleshing out this world and everything on it. The only problem is that me and my character both have staggeringly different motivations. I play to experience the world that is being presented to me and explore it and discover more about it, but my character wants to get off as soon as is possible, to return to a Federation I know nothing about. This may not be a big problem for many out there, but for me immersion is key. It's difficult to put my mind inside a character who wants completely different things to me.
But that's just my opinion. The disagree button's there if you don't really think I'm on the money.
