Stop spoilering the SR Beta for me, now I want to play it even more. This update takes damn long.
On another side not to No Man's Sky (that's the game that kicked this topic off, remember?), I finally brought myself to buy a very similiar game that I had my eyes on in a long time. Subnautica. It's basically No Man's Sky in water.
I cannot say if it's better or worse as NMS but the genre is very similair and the gameplay is really fun. Except some parts that i will mention later.
Subnautica is still in Early Access and therefor not finished, you notice this in multiple points, mostly because the graphical options are shit, you can only set between good or bad but have no further options, for example shadows or lighting effects. The only other option is water, which makes up 90% of the game, so it is kind of given that they have at least an option for that to scale it up or down.
Anyway, in Subnautica a spaceship with tons of colonists or whatever they were, crashes on an aquatic planet, you can escape the wreck with your emergency lifepod but you are seemingly the only survivor left. What makes it even worse, your lifepod is very close to the wreck of the Aurora (the spaceship) and because of the sustained damage it sends out deadly radiation and it is only a matter of time until the whole area is radiated and you die. So basically you have to find a way to survive. On a planet full of water. No islands. Just water.
Sounds liek alot of fun, especially if you have a phobia of water. You start only with some rations but with no equipment (except an emergency fire extinguisher that you have to use right a the start because your lifepod is on fire). You have however a fabricator which is the only thing that somehow didn't break on your landing. This thing is basically the crafting bench of Subnautica, you can use it to fabricate literally anything 8as logn as you have the blueprints) from raw materials. Materials have to be collected of course underwater, at the start you can collect pieces of the Aurora wreckage and turn them into useful metal. You will also find Quartz crystals around your starting position that you can collect. these can be turned into glass. Combine glass and metall and you get an oxygen tank which you need to make longer dives in the water.
You will dive deeper in the world and start to collect various suff, your PDA gives you basic information about what to do next. You will craft a knife that allows you to collect plants and kill the maritine lifeforms, some are harmless, some are aggressive.
At some point you will craft the scanner, your most important tool in the game. This allows you to scan nearly anything, fishes, plants, even wreckage. Scanning stuff gives you more information about it but you may also unlock new blueprints (crafting recipes) for the fabricator. The broken pieces of the equipment from teh Aurora can be scanned and unlock the blueprint to it, for example you can unlock a seaglider if you scan it's broken remains that are scattered somewhere.
The survival aspect comes from basic needs, food and water, and of course the aggressive lifeforms you may encounter. Also the radiation of the Aurora that increases the closer you get to it.
Some aspects are however still annoying. First, needs. You have to drink each day which is realistically, but because you can only craft at the fabricator, you have always walk back to it to craft your rations there. There is no handcrafting whatsoever in the game. Water is somewhat simple to get compared to food. You have to eat so-called creepervines which are basically giants algaes that you can collect with your knife. These give around 3% of your food need, so you have to collect tons of them to get filled. And most often there are Stalkers, which attack you on sight.
Soem of the resources you need for starter items are hard to find. Crashfish powder can be found in caves which you don't know as new player And it will not spawn all the time, basically crash fish live in plant-like nests and if you get close the crash fish will rush out and explode at your face. In the nest you can find sometimes the powder but most often not. And you need the powder rigth at the start to get the repair tool, so you can repair your lifepod.
I think th emost annyoing part at the start is really that you have to swim all the time back to the lifepod to craft the next thing, then go out to find new stuff, swim back, craft and so on. This changes once you have a habitat build tool, because then you can create an underwater base and create your own fabricator. I recently reached that point and it feels very satisfying.
Base building int his game is simple, it's not block based like in Minecraft or Terraria, instead you have a buildign tool that allows you to select basic base parts, for example corridors, rooms etc. You can connect the different parts to your liking as long as they fit together, you can build simple bases or more complex ones and the corridor system allows you to place one part and enter the base and add other corridors and parts to the base without having to destroy anything. Every corridor you palce is an enclosed system that does not let any water in. You have to place of course a hatch to enter and it needs a power source to produce oxygen for you but once yo have it, you can place devices and furniture to your liking. Designing your base is really entertaining in this game.
The exploration aspect is somewhat limited because of the basic problem: You cannot hold your breath forever. Once you run out of oxygen you have to return to the surface or you drown. If you die during your exploration, you loose everything that you have collected until the last time you were in the base. Entering base sets a save point for your inventory, eerthing you have collected is then safe in your inventory, even if you die, but anything that you collect during your next travel will be insecure. It's a good system that pulls ideas from both aspects.
To make exploration easier you can craft tools and vehicles, the sea glider is the first one, it gives you a powered speed boost and allows you to travel faster as logn as it has enough power. Oxygen tanks and later even submarines help you to travel faster and deeper into the world.
There is currently no end game goal as far as I know but you can fidn the different lifepods that were scattered during the crash, int he world and find out more about the lore of the game. There are however no other humans besides you and the game has and will never have a multiplayer. The game wants that the player feels alone and has to survive on his own wits.
Also, the game looks AMAZING, the graphics and creature designs are well made.
