Hello Gammers, HelloGames … oh well.

Don’t worry, this is constructive. I have over 500h on Permadeath and countless others in other modes and I am soon restarting all over again, I love this game.

These days I was wondering what made me want to actualy play another “open world survival” game that is so much smaller, and I noticed something. That game has somethings very small, easy to implement, but that ends up creating a strange sense of novelty every time you replay. That game is Subnautica.

You see, in Subnautica you have a small dread of the unknown, of finding something … dangerous. Lurking around. So even when you are an experienced player who literally knows where every dangerous area/creature is, it is still thrilling to get near those areas, to enter and dare the big challenge.

I miss that on NMS. The game has none of that, the most danger you get is tame compared to that. And lets face it, in the vastness of the universe, you are just as likelly to find cute rideable unicorn-bears, as something that will eat you – whole.

So why not do this tiny bit change. Some planets can have something powerful, something sinister, either on the depths of the oceans or the high mountains. And they don’t need to be that big, but should be respectable, visible, loud.

The idea is not to put something that will scare users, that will make someone rage quit they lost their progress. The idea is to put something that has fair warning, that tells you “dude, you shouldn’t be here, I hope you know what you are doing”. And if you are up to it, you don’t need rewards, you only need the thrill of slaying that thing, of putting your foot down (because if you add unique rewards to very hard encounters, the more casual players won’t really like it a bit).

Something that I miss in Subnautica (and NMS), is the possibility of large creatures to actually damage your base. Sure, 99.99% of people wouldn’t build a base nowhere near these dangerous creatures, but what if I wanted? what if I want to dare? Build a base with redudancies and extra layers of protection to stand that sandwork, that winged demon? the treachearous boss abomination?

And same in space. From time to time you should bump into something that will scare you. The random encounters right now are silly, you chuckle and go away, mark down one more encounter you hadn’t experienced yet. But what if you encounter something that tells you …. no, not even going to scan it, I’m out of here.

So, a little sense of awe, of dread, not necessarily always leading to death and loss, but to get out of there, or maybe, let’s face this thing!

And its not even hard to do it. Get some big assets, put huge HP, some good damage (but not one-hit kill), and some rules on where it can spawn (planet type, star system type). Maybe even just tweak the already existing random encounters, and then add some 5 new mobs that could even look the same everywhere, but for that reason … you know what it is, and its time to run.

Don’t get me wrong – seeing action and life in certain places is great – but it is way too frequent and more importantly, it seems way too random. You discover an uncivilized planet at the edge of the system with a few relics from another era. You want to build your base and discover what is there, but every 2 minutes some spaceships fly around close to the surface… doing what exactly?

I would love it if planets and systems had more meaningful parameters for population/traffic density (for example, there is a huge trading platform, so more ships are flying around). But I also like to discover planets that have not been discovered, where you can have your own “edge of the universe” feeling. It is the same with the frequency of pirate ships or massive freighter spawns when you are in outer space…

it feels like the developers were afraid that the game would feel too empty and as a response just let everything randomly spawn everywhere all the time… Perhaps others like this, but for me, it is killing the immersion

I’m the kind of player who has no love for Minecraft, but absolutely loved Terraria. I thought the former was too ugly but most of all too focused on building stuff for the sake of it. On the other hand, everything you did in Terraria could be (or was, in my case) in preparation of an ulterior goal, like a dangerous expedition into a new area filled with treasure or a harder boss fight. Since I wanted that treasure and I wanted to kill those bosses, they were great, concrete goals to work towards.

With that in mind, about once a year or so I’ll log in to NMS to see what the updates have to offer, hoping to latch on to it and starting a new file to ease myself back into the controls and systems. But every time, as soon as I get past the “survival” part of the game, it feels as though the game just expects you to build/explore/fight/trade for the sake of it with no ulterior goal to play towards, and this kills my motivation to play.

Am I missing something? Is there a concrete goal I could aim for? I already reached the center of the galaxy back around launch, maybe they added some new reward for that since?