Not a criticism but just curious, what do you guys like about these types of games? Theres no real story or characters from what I could tell. It’s just resource mining.
I played Subnautica for an hour or so and found it pointless and boring. To each their own of course.
I love games where you can explore, but I generally don't particularly gravitate toward Survival games. Something about Subnautica is just the perfect storm.
Specifically with Subnautica I really like the atmosphere and the world they built. The visuals are beautiful, every different biome is unique and vibrant. The creatures you encounter (both dangerous and friendly) stick out and are alien, while also maintaining a semblance of familiarity to earth. If you only played for about an hour and never left the safe shallow zone then you won't be able to really experience the real depths of the environment (pun intended).
I don't find the game terrible in the sense of resource mining. As Osprey said, the resource mining is actually purposeful. You need to improve your equipment to access new areas and build different tools to explore, as well as improving the quality of your base.
I also really love the quietness and solitude of the environment. Many games, especially multiplayer, are very intense and action oriented so being able to explore at your own pace and build as much or as little as you want is something I like.
When you start to get further into the game there is more storyline and other character development. You don't interact directly with the other characters, but the audio and text logs that you get make you feel like you are getting to know them. I've always found the history of what happened on Planet 4546B pretty interesting as well, but it takes a bit of time to start to learn about it. When you get the radio call from the ship that is coming to the planet is when you really start learning more about it.
I think one of the biggest things that I love about this game is just that you can feel the dedication and passion poured into the game by the developers. They carefully crafted every aspect of the world, the story, and the gameplay. They built in a system for players to give real-time feedback on the game from the pause menu, and appeared to really care about and consider the feedback that they got. Below Zero was a bit of a dud, but I thought it was incredible how the developers Unknown Worlds acknowledged this, and even went back to add in some QoL and content updates from BZ into the original game after the fact. Never really heard of a developer doing that before.
