You’re still shaking, praying you can outrun the beast snapping at your heels when the second Leviathan swims into view. But then you think about the blackness, and you push onwards, afraid to turn around for fear of what you’ll see closing in on you, jaws big enough to bite your Sea Truck in two. Do you keep going? Maybe you consider abandoning your craft in the hope they’ll choose it over you. But surrounded by the blackness, unsure which way is up, it’s every single nightmare you’ve ever had. You’ve seen a smaller version of this beast before normally, it’s not even the biggest Leviathan Below Zero has to terrorize you with. It should, by rights, be an anticlimax when the creature swims into view, making a beeline for your fragile vehicle. Your mind is racing, wondering what horror has you in its sights. God help you if you’ve read any Lovecraft recently. Then you hear it, the sound of some titanic creature. Just sitting there in your Sea Truck, gazing down into the gloom, is enough to tie your stomach in knots.īut mustering up your courage, you proceed, onwards and downwards, as deep as your modular submarine will allow. No, Subnautica: Below Zero’s answer to players wandering out of bounds is beautifully simple: It’s fear.Īs was the case in the original Subnautica, Below Zero’s lore explains why there’s an ecological dead zone around the map, why the ocean floor drops away into a massive abyss, deeper than anything you’ve explored before. There are no invisible walls, no mountain ranges, no screen-dominating message, nothing as immersion-shattering as that. The solution used in Subnautica: Below Zero, on the other hand, is nothing short of brilliant. Twenty seconds later, he was dead and I was yanked right out of the game. What actually happened was that my health bar started ticking down the moment I left the boundary, as if Max were suffering some horrifying arterial gusher. It was stupid, yes, but it promised to be entirely keeping with the barren hellworld of the Mad Max quadrilogy. I’d drive as far as I could before stumbling out, walking as far as my feet could carry me. So, when I drove off the map into the Big Empty, I knew it was a death sentence.īut I wanted to see how I could get into the wilderness. Run out of the latter and you’re walking. Take Mad Max, set in a post-apocalyptic landscape where water and gasoline are the two most precious commodities in the world. What is infuriating, however, is when designers have a solution right in front of them and they overlook it. I’m not advocating infinite, procedurally generated worlds there’s enough busywork in open-world games as it is. But there are still areas where, if you roam far enough, you slam into an invisible wall, as is often the case with similar titles. Some games do attempt to use geography to corral the player Fallout: New Vegas, for example, has mountains that bar your progress. There are few things more immersion-damaging than seeing a warning message flash across the screen, followed by a near-instant game over. So how do you handle it? In the case of Subnautica: Below Zero, Unknown Worlds has devised a way of penning the player in without making it seem like an insult, a slap in the face that you’ve dared to wonder what’s “out there.” It doesn’t matter how open your open-world game is - sooner or later your players are going to try breaking out of their sandbox. And one that doesn't fit Below Zero.This article contains mild spoilers for Subnautica and Subnautica: Below Zero. The Cyclops was never an especially great vehicle to begin with. So what you'd get out of the Cyclops is that you'd feel big, important, and special for all of five minutes, then you'd realise you had nowhere to actually drive it. There isn't a one-size-fits-all vehicle, your vehicle must suit your environment. It really is like wanting to drive an eighteen-wheeler around a small village, or a jeep through a calm wooded area where people go for picnics. I mean, the Cyclops is so giant, even in the original Subnautica there were plenty of places you couldn't fit it. I've said it before, but this isn't a game where you're out to dominate the depths in a giant, roving castle that-to me-still feels kind of hilariously overcompensatory. Have you considered why you want it? What you'd get out of it? It just doesn't fit here. These aren't long, empty stretches of open land akin to what one might find in the USA's Midwest.
You can try, but it's really not going to work out. It's like wanting to drive an eighteen-wheeler around a small, sleepy European village.
Where would you drive the Cyclops to, Zak? The worldspace isn't designed for it.
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