That’s what a lot of the upgrades boil down to, yeah. Air tanks increase endurance, fins and seaglide increase movement speed, rebreather eliminates an endurance draining effect at depth, seabases and submarines allow you to start your dive from greater than zero depth. Pretty much all of that boils down to “dives to this depth are now practicable.”
Other than that, the knife allows you to harvest plate coral for making computer chips, kelp for making fabric, and seeds for plants. The scanner is required to obtain the blueprints for several other required buildables. The mobile vehicle bay is required to build the Cyclops. The Cyclops is required to make the shield module. A radiation suit…I think speedrunners don’t use it and just tank the damage with medkits, but I consider it a requirement.
There is one straight-up key you have to craft; there are several others for required or optional doors but you only have to craft one to complete the game and two to unlock all doors.
There’s a tool that is like Half-Life 2’s gravity gun, which can be used to move heavy obstacles out of paths, but it’s never outright required for anything. I usually don’t bother with it.
The laser cutter is required, You have to cut through one of two doors in the Aurora to gain access to the Captain’s Cabin.
Do you mean Stardew Valley or Haunted Chocolatier?
Stardew Valley is a combination of a creativity toy, a dating simulator, a soap opera and a security blanket. You’re actually able to return to a humble artisanal life, make absolute bank doing it, and beat the giant megacorp should you choose do to so. A decreasing number of places offer that kind of hopeful feeling in reality.
Haunted Chocolatier? I don’t know, didn’t really see the appeal when it was explained to me.
Not only on Switch 2. There was at least one Tony Hawk Pro Skater game that did this.
If I remember the episode of Guru Larry, the developer noticed their rights to the IP were set to expire, so they went to shit out one last game as fast as possible. They had to get the game published by a certain date, as in discs on store shelves by this date. The game was not going to be ready in time, so they put the tutorial level on the disc to print and distribute it while they finished the game, which would then be a multi-gigabyte download. Meaning that a physical copy of the game is worthless once the servers shut down.
Valve has made an emasculatingly large amount of money this way. Following in the footsteps of Id Software, Valve has been very open with their development tools. I don’t know about the very earliest copies but the ZOMG GOTY edition of the original Half Life included its SDK on the disc. Counter Strike and Team Fortress started out as mods that Valve just…hired.
Releasing the tools to their customer base and then hiring the cream that rises to the top is a strategy I struggle to get mad at.