If I was asked to compile the 10 prettiest screenshots from the two games, at least 7 of them are coming from BZ. The deep twisty bridges, the giant anemone cave, the crystal caverns, the…what’s the thing you go up inside of? Subnautica really hits you with the beauty early on in the safe shallows, and otherwise goes for “cool” rather than “pretty.”
I like both soundtracks. My absolute favorite track comes from Subnautica, which often uses music to establish tension. BZ has an overall nicer soundtrack that has a lot of movements that feel “wondrous,” like our character feels amazed at the environment more than anything.
Subnautica’s story works perfectly. It’s a castaway scenario, and Riley Robinson’s goal, from start to finish, never stops being “survive and escape.” What working toward that goal entails takes a winding and scenic path, but at no point does your overall motivation stray far from “Survive and escape.”
BZ’s story belongs in the square hole. Most of the problem is they had written one story, built a lot of the game’s assets including several setpieces around the map with that story in mind, and then they threw it away and had to come up with something else. You play as an idiot named Robin Ayou, whose goal of finding out what happened to her sister is a minor sidequest because Robin becomes a sidekick to the real main character, Al-An.
Subnautica could sometimes have issues with draw distance and pop-in. BZ solves this problem by making everything murkier so no matter what you can’t see more than a few feet forward.
Subnautica features shallow reefs, flat plains, sloping dunes, abyssal depths, narrow canyons, giant forests, huge caverns, narrow passageways, floating islands, lots of varied terrain that present different challenges and opportunities. BZ is made almost entirely of self-similar confusing twisty turny corridors. The caves below the kelp forests, the twisty bridges, the anemone cave, the icebergs, everywhere on land, there’s nowhere that isn’t a twisty turny self similar corridor.
The Snowfox feels broken. That whole segment of the game, I’m amazed they shipped it.
The only game I’m aware of in my library that has a feature like this is Satisfactory, the “ping” feature to find nodes they tutorialize but you’ll probably quickly stop using because you use an external map for planning/get to know the map.
Team Fortress, I’m assuming you mean TF2, was one of the very first games to have microtransactions. They aren’t required for play but they’re definitely there.
Go for smaller studios and indies. Go for the nerd shit, too. Satisfactory just came out of early access, 1.0 is out, it does have multiplayer components but they do not host servers; you can open your own save file for friends to join or you can run your own dedicated server.
Factorio is launching a HUGE expansion pretty imminently.
Subnautica 2 is in the works (Below Zero is now officially an expansion pack of Subnautica 1).
Go play a game called Perfect Vermin. Do not look up anything about it just go play it.
Is that what that was? I got a grey box with no text in it that popped up over Satisfactory and my mouse control went from the POV to moving a cursor. I was building and it was a brief interruption. I got the actual text via email.
I think Adventure of Link could be fixed. There’s a lot of shit that’s “Nintendo Hard” aka unfairly punishing. I think the bones of the thing are okay, but there’s a lot to repair.
Some of those old games from the NES or even into the SNES era were just outright impossible. IIRC there was a Dennis The Menace game didn’t have the final boss ready for the publishing deadline so they just put an impossible jump just before it so players couldn’t get that far.
I don’t own a Steam Deck. I am a Linux gamer, and I appreciate that it exists.
Internally it’s basically a laptop using its AMD integrated graphics, yeah? No discrete GPU? Which makes it actually pretty impressive at what it does.
I think Sony is trying for bankruptcy. With that whole PSN thing with, which game was it, Helldivers? Just…who would ever buy anything from Sony ever again?
I mean, I’m pretty sure you’d be able to see it from everywhere in Australia, so I bet many of them would be like “WTF?” But they’ll be dead soon. Fuckin’ kangaroos.