There’s plenty of reasonable middle ground between “constantly evading relentlessly aggressive predators that ignore most attempts at distraction and cannot be damaged, discouraged, dodged or escaped or in a reasonable timeframe or with any measure of permanence” and “I want to kill every one of them until I become master of all the ocean” they just need to find it.
As a player I don’t want wholesale murder either. I won’t necessarily mind if that’s an option, but I don’t think that should be the focus. I just want more tools to deal with the situations that evolve, I don’t want hammerheads camping my base and attacking my docked tadpoles with impunity, because once they fixate on it, they will never leave and there is no way to make them go away. I don’t think having to move my base whenever one gets attracted is a reasonable ask. Perhaps it’s even realistic and fits the game lore, but it’s not fun. And fun needs to be the point. We need something to discourage and defend ourselves somehow, it doesn’t have to be lethal or even harmful, it could even be friendly. Maybe the hammerheads love to eat a particular plant and if we grow it somewhere other than our base for long enough, they’ll be attracted to wander over there and go eat it and maybe if they eat enough of it even fall asleep for awhile. There are so many possible options and I hope the devs actually understand that there is plenty of middle-ground to explore that are both non-violent and player-friendly. It doesn’t have to be a chore of burning consumables and hypervigilance from risk of death to keep it engaging. People watch fish tanks for a reason. We want to see behaviors that make sense and be able to have some limited, mild influence on those behaviors both over the short and long terms, without necessarily having absolute control.
djsoren19@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 hours ago
I just don’t get why it’s not an option.
Like, murder was not easy in Subnautica. It was incredibly inefficient, often ended up in you needing to heal way more than otherwise necessary, and for some targets could take a really long time. I remember killing the big Leviathan down in the lava caves because I just didn’t want to have to deal with it constantly badgering me all the time while collecting resources, and it took me like 30 minutes of wrangling it with the mech’s grappling hook and hitting it with the drill.
I can get the stance of not wanting to give the player conventional weaponry, and pushing you into the role of being prey instead of predator, especially for a game whose main theme is about living in harmony with nature. I have plenty of fond memories of the first game playing with those constraints. but you’re just creating less gameplay by making the fish immortal. I’d even say that for someone like me, it makes me less interested in the direction of the franchise as a whole. I’ve always thought that as far as difficulty curves go, starting as prey and ending as predator is way more satisfying then starting as prey and ending as prey that’s harder to kill.