Early game hazards too weak - Suggest alternative threats

Ideas:

• Add concussive effect to hammerhead strike, increase damage output dramatically.
• Increase potency of Toxic Sponge poison effect
• Add UI glitching / Paralysis effect to electrical plant and jellyfish
• Add venom to nibbler mango with paralysis effect/vingette/disorienting visuals

I want to preface this by saying that this game is visually and environmentally stunning. The ocean feels alive in a way the other games weren’t prepared to produce technologically yet. Underwater currents are ∗∗∗∗∗∗∗ terrifying and unexpected. Fauna behavior is immersive and shockingly well executed, and the designs genuinely feel alien again. I am running the game on a 1080, and it performs incredibly and looks amazing. The only issue I have had with the GPU so far has been audio, it blasts my ears everytime I pick something up, but that’s because I am below system requirements.

HOWEVER, the damage scaling immediately detracts from the otherwise breathtaking experience. I had been poisoned multiple times over the beginning of the game, and I didn’t know I was poisoned because it didn’t actually deal any damage, I found out it was a mechanic from google gemini. Now if the environmental storytelling in the anti-ai game is so poor i have to learn about it from AI, you’re doing something wrong. I understand the push for a broader market appeal, but the original subnautica was not hard. It just wasn’t mindnumbingly easy to the point it became boring, this game is.

Fauna hazards are even worse for the feel. The hammerhead in particular needs to hit way harder. That guy barely attacks in the first place and looks like he would chunk half your health, and then you get hit and realize its all bark. Make him stun you on hit and chunk your health, leave you stumbling away disoriented and concussed. Put some actual umph into the power and speed it has visually. I shouldn’t be able to just let one keep ramming me while I explore. Crashfish used to deal more than half a healthbar, and you could get swarmed by like 4 in some places, and I have never actually died to a crashfish. So why is this giant ramming fish, that is super similar to the crashfish, smacking me with a pillow.

The game insists I will die here repeatedly, but nothing here is hazardous enough to pose a real threat. What is the purpose of reprinting narratively if I already can’t die? What is the purpose of the horror themed voicelogs if even they acknowledge the only threats in the world are heavy metals and calories? If the story you want to tell here is truly subnautica, a game about being stranded on a hostile and unfamilliar world, then where is the hostility? Its certainly foreign, but not wild enough to be dangerous.

The solution to the problem might not be in damage scaling, but alternative threats. You are already playing around with the themes of losing agency to AI, and not having the ability to exert control over the world. Now actualize it. Give us threats not just to our healthbar, but our sense of orientation, understanding, and control. If taking damage means potentially losing the ability to swim away, understand your resources, or navigate your environment, then the damage scaling becomes secondary to the environmental threat of being underwater.

Cool feedback. Well thought out. I agree with much of this. The game isn’t challenging enough. It’s incredibly beautiful and has a lot of amazing work put into it, but it could stand to be a bit more dangerous.