I recently tried Subnautica, a game that sat in my library for years after I picked it up in a humble bundle.
Despite my dislike of survival games I enjoyed the first game from Unknown Worlds, Natural Selection 2. I thought it had a great concept and with a few tweaks would have been a success. They also released a lot of updates and seemed pretty active. So I thought what the hell, I heard good things I'll try it.
Subnautica exceeded my expectations and I genuinely enjoyed it. Upon completion I looked up a few videos for the sequel, Below Zero, and...didn't like what I saw.
I decided to pick up Below Zero for free to try it out and confirm my suspicions before paying for it...and holy shit am I glad I did.
It is such an incredible departure from the original, and disturbingly woke. For no reason. It's a survival game on an alien world, seemingly impossible to fuck up.
And somehow they managed. They made the same mistake Dead Space did and gave your character a voice and personality...except surprise surprise you are now a sassy black female scientist / adventurer who don't take no shit from nobody!
On the surface that may seem small, but the beauty of the original was how minimal the voice acting was. You'd find hints and clues scattered around the world, there was no hand-holding or even a map. It was sparse, you felt isolated and alone considering no other humans are around and you only have dead data logs to figure out what to do.
Now this dumb black bitch straight up tells you what to do. "Oh I need to do ____" "Oh looks like I'll need to go ____" "Sounds like I should ____" and to make things worse it pops up exactly where they are on the map.
So exploration is now a giant fetch quest for a person you can't stand. But wait! It gets worse.
The entire plot now revolves around a dozen characters, 10 of which are women who get 90% of all the voice lines. The two men are both constantly fucking up, being berated, or acting like idiots in every voice log. The 10 women are all scientists in a myriad of various lesbian relationships (I wish I was kidding) but all young and oddly unattractive. Weird how all these young female scientists are all the leads and head of departments while the older men are underlings...
Eventually you even find another human on the planet with you who just so happens to be the classic badass survivalist character who kills everything and drips masculinity...who is also a middle aged woman. Christ I wish I was kidding.
The worst part is despite the addition of all the crap woke elements and disgustingly poor voice acting they managed to somehow make the game worse too. A smaller map...for a sequel? What the fuck, who makes the open world SMALLER in a follow-up? And a huge chunk is on land, which is awkward and defeats basically the entire point of the series.
I looked up the devs and it looks pretty bad:
https://unknownworlds.com/about/
Only a few women but the classic types you'd expect to be working at a game company.
I noticed on a job posting they had this:
We make games that are accessible and engaging for players all over the world. We believe in hiring and supporting the most talented and creative people of diverse backgrounds. That support includes annual professional development and home office stipends, as well as paid time off for volunteer/non-profit work. Join us and be a part of our growing and innovative studio.
Unknown Worlds Entertainment, Inc. is an Equal Employment Opportunity Employer. Qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender perception or identity, national origin, age, marital status, protected veteran status, or disability status.
I have never seen a bigger split between an original game and its sequel before from the same devs. It is insane how badly they fucked up the 2nd one.
Don't give these morons money.
Original: 8/10 great immersive game.
Beyond Zero: 2/10 stay away.
Natural Selection 2: 10/10 give it a shot.
Just...don't pay them for it.
Subnautica's sound director was fired for "hateful statements":
I have Subnautica 1 lying around from when I "bought" it, and the sound quality was excellent. Never played much of it, it's on the back burner, but it's not surprising that the sequel tanked given the firing.
There actually is a noticeable difference in the soundtrack, they bring all sorts of pop songs and actual music into the sequel whereas they relied on mostly ambient and minimalist music to separate the biomes in the original.
It's...jarring to hear pop music on a hostile alien world. I much preferred the original. Seems like all bad news for these devs though sadly.
Ahhh, one of my all time least favorite character tropes. Not saying black people or women can't be scientists, but if there's ever one in fiction you're 99% guaranteed an insufferably smug woke bitch who is supposedly a genius yet acts like a petty retard.
Hey, you're among friends here. No need to qualify like that. Your statement is technically true of course, but we need don't to bury our heads in the sand about IQ distributions like the left.
Oh, I'm not saying you're as likely to find them, but they do exist. But, yeah, statistically speaking it all gets a bit...inconvenient to certain viewpoints for sure.
Isn’t part of the reason every scientist is female in media due to some deal with STEM?
I just figured it was because they hate whites and men, but who knows.
Well that has been obvious for a while. I’m no genius but I could figure that out when so many IP owners constantly whined about white men. Ignoring the fact they made up a good chunk of the fanbase
It's certainly about the "women in STEM" agenda the feminists are pushing. For a movement that pretends to care about women they're sure insistent on pushing them into careers that will bore them to tears.
I don’t think it has really made much of a difference either because it seems that STEM doesn’t appeal to women in large numbers. This is like having a massive push to get men to become preschool or kindergarten teachers.
You bring this up as a hypothetical, but it's a real thing in feminist circles. I wouldn't call it massive, and it's certainly not as widespread as the women in STEM push, but they're absolutely pushing those jobs on men. It's not entirely a bad thing considering how starved for masculine male rolels boys are, but of course they have zero interest in dealing with the pay issue or the false accusation problem.
And unfortunately, the only men they end up attracting are the ones that need to be kept as far away from children as possible.
That is a good point. I didn’t have a male teacher until middle school.
That just means they're not trying hard enough and they need to force it down everyone's throats more!
Yes. Women pushed that society needs "role models" for women to enter the hard sciences.
Wasn't the entire reason your options for fighting back limited in the original Subnautica due to a hard political stance the devs were taking against guns and how evil they were? And the player character some mulatto?
I'm not disagreeing with what you are saying. Its what I've heard for years, the original was masterful and the sequel was hot shit. But the wokeness was so deep it literally influenced the entire game premise and mechanics even in the original. You just didn't notice because it wasn't thrown in your face until they got famous enough to try and "mask off" with the sequel.
I mean natural selection 2 was a shooter so that'd be a pretty extreme shift for the devs. I hadn't heard that before I'll have to look into it more.
Yeah they were pretty verbal during Subnautica's development and that was definitely one of their blog posts about not having the ability to kill the wildlife.
And yeah, it did seem like a unnatural departure from their previous work. Even at the time it sounded insincere and more like desperate begging for cred with the game Dev cliques that hate gamers and think they all need their toys taken because they can't be trusted to think for themselves.
Well they fucked up then, cause you most certainly can kill animals. In fact, you have to if you want to survive the first stage of the game. You can't actually grow anything until you make it way out to one of the islands, and most people take a couple hours just to get settled first.
I've noticed that in general, this has been a growing trend in game development as a whole for the last 10-15 years.
It's something I immediately noticed with games set in space/sci-fi types of settings, where there's a dramatic shift away from games with any kind of major wars or conflicts as part of the premise for the game. A lot don't even pretend to have any kind of combat at all.
I suspect this is for a myriad of different reasons. Some are obviously ideological, while I suspect other reasons are for more... cost related reasons. Namely, that a smaller developer could "probably" cut a lot of development time and costs by completely forgoing any combat mechanics and instead just dumping everything into cookie cutter casual gameplay.
IE, crafting, UI-based management gameplay, walking simulators, building games, and standard survival mechanics. When you shift your target to casuals who just want something distracting and mildly stimulating, you don't have to worry about making the gameplay engaging, snappy, satisfying, fun, or bug free. Audio and visual departments also have it easier. No need for thorough level design or even a story most of the time. Game difficulty and balance is no longer an issue to deal with. Etc etc.
As far as I know, having not played it, Subnautica has combat mechanics. They are just extremely limited to poor melee that can only really be helpful against small things.
So even as a "small" dev, they still had to program in almost all elements of combat regardless. They just took away any of your tools and left in all the reasons why you'd want those tools. All for a politic statement.
Beyond this specific example, which the devs made their reasonings clear for, I think the shift away from conflict in sci-fi is due to their inability to actually portray nuance. War is inherently political, both sides will have a point and you will have to portray bad people doing good things. That is the only option short of "they are literally born evil and only exist for evil" writing. When that's the two choices, the modern writer will simply throw it all away because one is too scary and the other is too "below their ability."
Especially as the audience for modern sci-fi is "I fucking love science" followers. Mindless sheep who want to OOO and AAA at wild shit without having to actually think. Which war in space would naturally bring about.
... I'm impressed that being alone and underwater, yet they still managed to push ideolgy.
If someone handed you the concept of a person stranded on an alien world trying to survive by scavenging materials and diving deeper into the unknown...why is there suddenly a need for a bunch of human characters?
It is such a bizarre choice considering the concept. It's like dragging a high school drama into an adult world.
I honestly used to think at some point these developers would realize that pandering to women (especially black women) in genres that women tend to not play very much was pointless. I was wrong. You can see the data on what kinds of games women tend to play vs the kind men play. Not that difficult but these idiots refuse to appeal to a male audience. As a life long comic book collector it seems to have started in that arena. Interesting how Manga is capable of catering to specific groups
They're not pandering to black women, they're pandering to ESG funds. Right? Surely even they can't be retarded enough to keep doing the former?
Black women are like 7% of the US population total and that's probably one of the highest of any First World nation. Let's assume a wildly absurd number like half of them even play games at all.
That's barely 10 million possible sales if you can reach all of them. In an industry where you need to reach 10 million just to break even on most AAA games that have the marketing necessary to reach that many eyes.
There is no possible way they are pandering to black women. They are pandering to Leftie's idea of what a black woman is. Which is why its always afros (protip, black women hate their natural hair, its why the weave industry is so big and they needed a literal movement for 'r/naturalhair' to even feel okay not shaving it off), sassy, and skinny.
Exactly, and that's why those blacks are always exactly what smug white liberals think black women are.
Same reason why black dudes in these games are always non-threatening and dorky. Because real black dudes would be too scary.
I’ve seen this in the sci-fi and fantasy literature fields. They really push the whole black women thing and I got attacked on a subreddit for saying my experience black women are the least likely to be into sci-fi/fantasy. N.K. Jemison won three straight Hugos and used her acceptance speech to whine about racism. I read the summary of her books and surprise surprise it’s all about oppression
Human hair wigs are possibly the most successful product sold on aliexpress, given how prevalent it always is on their front page. And I'm sure they're all sold to black women trying to pretend they have hair like asian women.
But if a game had a black woman with straight hair, it would definitely be considered a white supremacist statement. It's essentially an emperor's new clothes situation, only the ending is that the kid who speaks up gets killed by the emperor's guards. Everyone knows natural black hair is unattractive, including the women in question, but acknowledging that truth in any way makes you Literally Hitler. And so afros it is.
Black dudes play nba2k and fighting games. Black women don’t play video games.
Or they're just insufferably woke assholes making what they want. They're pandering to other insufferably woke assholes.
I heard good things about Subnautica and was going to try it out, but read some comments from the developer that made me decide to never give them my money. I don't remember what it was that they said but I also don't really care. Any signaling of wokeness and I'm out. They wouldn't want my bigoted money anyway.
There's plenty of other stuff to play.
ESG is the excuse. Where are they getting all their money in the first place? What is really deciding how it is spent?
Yea I guess it is ESG funds because what else explains ignoring your core audience
Black women are honestly more likely to be playing around in stuff like VR Chat or GTA than any kind of a game set in space.
So yeah, it's definitely an ESG thing. Or at the very least ideological preaching.
Seems to be the case in a lot of these narrative-driven survival games and movies, like Tides or Aniara.
This obsession with wokeness completely destroys any immersion whatsoever. I tend to find that the only people insufferable enough to enjoy it are people thoroughly entrenched in Leftist politics. But the main issue is that it's such a pervasive trend we keep seeing it spread more and more throughout media to the point where it's becoming inescapable.
Funny story. I recently had a recruiter try to connect me with UW. They need a principal engineer and I'm more than qualified, I have directly relevant experience to their project, and I live in an inexpensive area of the country so they don't need to pay San Francisco prices for me. Their need is urgent, from what I've been given to understand.
However, I don't work for companies that do political activism. Hard rule. I told the recruiter I'd entertain an interview if I could speak with company leadership and be convinced that they're done doing political stuff and want to focus on making good games and money.
Surprisijgly enough, that call isn't happening.
ETA: some of their political work is trying to get anti-gun laws passed in Texas. Not only are they evil, they're also stupid.
I've known their games since the original natural selection HL1 mod. That was a top notch mod at the time.
They had the talent to keep making good games for a while but it was clear they desperately wanted acceptance from the IDGA type crew and the culture rot set in pretty immediately after they incorporated. I vaguely recall Charlie also penned a pretty vociferous defence of other game devs' IMO predatory business practices shortly after UW's founding, further cementing the impression that the ingratiating themselves with the prevailing industry culture was more important than the players.
NS2 thankfully managed to stay on target mostly, but even with Subnautica they were always harping on in the Dev blogs about how too many games are about killing and that makes them big sad, so they wanted a game where you weren't given the chance to kill the wildlife, only scare them off temporarily. Or some spiel about how they hope their game teaches people how we're killing mother earth.
They've gone full pretentious indie cliche lately and their latest project is a miniature wargame title in early access that tries to style itself as a simulation of a tabletop boardgame rather than a video game, even complete with digitally painting your miniatures, and 2 of the 3 human faction leaders are black women.
That explains their website homepage art, damn too bad like you said natural selection started out as a really cool idea that deserved being fleshed out. Shame that they couldn't keep their own bullshit outside of their creative ideas, hard to find decent devs nowadays.
To piggy back on a few of your points. Even if the game wasn’t woke, it still dropped the ball on gameplay. SN1 was filled with spectacular areas that were both terrifying and awe inspiring. It was almost entirely underwater with the exception of the crashed ship and the one or two small islands. SN2 had mostly forgettable areas and biomes. Nothing truly terrifying. A lot was spent on land, so much so that vehicles were tailored around it.
My biggest disappointment was the lack of the submarine. It was an excellent feature in SN1 that served as a mobile base complete with a hanger. And it was still susceptible to attack by the big baddies. In SN2 it was replaced by a more compact train thing. It just didn’t feel as amazing as the sub. Plus, as you alluded to, the map is smaller and the sub wouldn’t even fit.
Overall it was a poor follow up gameplay wise which was ruined even more by the lesbian strong black wahman.
All that aside the game also suffers from the most unforgivable of crimes that a game or movie can have.
It's fucking boring.
Dang, I was hoping this was news article stating they went bankrupt and were shutting down despite earning much acclaim from the Subnautica games because they actually overspent on those and thus failed to turn a profit or something along those lines. That would have been a fun read nearly on the level for the disastrous end of Telltale Games.
ah natural-selection, the BEST competetive game ever to see the light of day. the thousands of hours played in pcws and leaguematches.
i remember trying to convince the homo about what made that game great, ofc he didn't have a fucking clue why it was so successfull and thus ns2 sucked ass.
well at least he gave us the sourcecode and some american made a patch to make it run perfectly on new pcs.
You're correct in everything except:
It's not a sequel, it's DLC.