Super Secret Subnautica Below Zero Feature - SPOILERS

This post describes a feature of Subnautica: Below Zero that you probably don't want spoiled in advance; however our open development structure (you can read everything we're working on at the new Favro boards when they go live) means this info is now public and, if you came here on purpose, I want to say a few words about our plans.

Announcement & Details: Subnautica: Below Zero

It hasn't been a secret that we've been working on an expansion for Subnautica since January this year, with a release date sometime next year. Today we opened up the Trello Board to the public (warning: spoilers), and in concert with that I publish here some background on the project and the story I'm developing for it.

I will avoid in this post plot spoilers of anything but the starting scenario (ie not really a spoiler), but if you do want to come at the story absolutely clean then please consider not reading this post and not playing the early access when it arrives. This post does feature Subnautica 1.0 spoilers.

Objective Project Overview

Below Zero will feature a smaller game world than the original, and offer a 10+ hour experience with the same Subnautica gameplay you know and love, with new story and content. That content includes a whole new map, new biomes, creatures, vehicles, characters and equipment, in addition to a revamped temperature system that we are still tinkering with. We are of course also trying to efficiently reuse assets from the base game where appropriate. You can probably expect an ice peeper.

So this is a standalone expansion set some months after the events of the original game. Ryley Robinson has escaped 4546B and made it back to Federation space, and Alterra has now sent the Vesper - an orbital research station - to the planet, where they maintain a small contractor presence on the surface. Ostensibly they are here to salvage the Aurora and prospect for resources. Alterra being Alterra, this may not be the whole truth.

Since January we have blocked out the world map, planned the story, and begun work on content. The LDs are churning out new biomes, vehicles are coming along, and the barebones of the story are implemented (ie we can play the game start to finish, but it's still very work in progress). I'm currently about halfway through the full first draft.

Story

We did consider adding content to the base scenario instead of creating an entirely new one, but I argued against it from a story perspective, and I am glad we are doing something standalone. The original story has been told. For me to be excited about working on the expansion, and for you to be excited to play it, I wanted a new character with a new set of conflicts which let us further explore the world we created, not just a bolt-on. It's the same approach we took to the expansion to The Talos Principle, and I'm happy with how that worked out.

You will play as one of Alterra's contractors, a zoologist of alien life stationed in a frozen area of the planet, tasked with investigating the alien ruins. Of course, a complication will arise that throws everything upside down and forces you to dive deeper in search of answers.

We hope this scenario gives us a neat twist on the original. You are still on the planet, fending for yourself and surviving against the elements; but now you're in touch with the Vesper in the skies above, which completely changes the context of your actions, and puts the story and character dialog more front and centre. We think of it like the shift from Alien to Aliens - EXCEPT it is in context only, not in gameplay. We are not turning our slow survival game into an action shooter!

Ambitions

For this expansion to be worth the price of entry it has to maintain what made SN1 wonderful, while delivering all new surprises. So we asked ourselves: What is Subnautica?

I think Subnautica is adventure. It's mystery, peril, excitement and wonder. It's life, basically. But can we keep amazing you by building bigger sea-creatures? Can we further scare you by adding bigger teeth? Perhaps... perhaps... But we need to go further. When you play Subnautica the first time, part of that experience is not knowing what the game is capable of. It's a basic survival game, then the Aurora explodes, then you find ancient alien ruins, then you have a telepathic conversation with a sea monster, and so on. How can we pull the same trick twice when this time you know what to expect?

The simple answer is that the more I tell you now, the more difficult it's going to be! But I'll outline one of our ideas, so you get the gist.

In Below Zero you're still going to be exploring an open world, finding abandoned bases, audio diaries, scanning creatures and following clues to the Next Big Surprise. You're still going to be piecing the story together as you go. That story is still going to turn around human interaction with the natural (and alien) world.

BUT. I am trying to tell the story in a way that is more character-driven. In the base game your character has no onscreen personality. They're an avatar. The character's motivations are always a sort of reduction of natural human motivations: you must survive, and everything you do in the game can be read as a means to that end (if you are so inclined as a player). No one can argue with that, but it's also a huge restriction to the kinds of stories your character can be involved in. In the base game there is a disconnect between what happens in the survivor stories, and what happens in the core alien mystery plot. The core story is in the past tense: you discover what happened before, but nothing much changes in the present (with some exceptions, eg the Sunbeam). In the expansion, I would like dialog and core plot to be more intertwined.

To achieve that end we are experimenting with using a speaking player character. This is a controversial decision, even within the team. To my mind it carries two risks: 1. It may create a disconnect between player motivation and character motivation; 2. Too much protagonist voice may take away from the feeling of isolated survival. I hope I can mitigate these with solid writing and lots of playtesting and revisions (that's where you guys come in!); but I accept that the decision in itself will be anathema for some (I hope) small minority. I bite that bullet, because playing it safe as a creative is just never a good option. If we fail, we may as well fail spectacularly.

What I hope this gives us is a much greater variety of stories that we can tell. Different ways we can surprise you. Character relationships which actually develop as you progress in the game, and which contextualise your actions and discoveries. An ending that is about more than survival.

A beating emotional heart instead of (or perhaps in addition to) cold scientific analyses.

These things may be very different. But they surely go together.

On Political Discourse (or Why I Think Everyone Sounds Like They Hate Each Other on Twitter)

I have one thing to say on the nature of public, political and internet discourse at this point in time.

Our language sucks for expressing ourselves.

If I look at the stats and discover that in 2017 gingers bought more hair dye per capita than blondes and then state as much, I am expressing a fact about what happened in 2017. It's an unusual statement to make, but let's imagine I'm trying to minimise the effect of hair dye use on local river pollution.(Disclaimer: I did no research on hair dye stats for this article).

If I look at gingers and think their hair is an inherently ugly colour and then state that gingers will always buy more hair dye because they're ugly and we should probably try to have fewer gingers to keep pollution down then I am being a dick, as well as missing out on many fine potential relationships with many fine gingers. (Preferring the look of blonde hair wouldn't make me a dick, but expecting it to be recognised as fact as the basis for discrimination against gingers would).

Unfortunately the way our language works I can say something like 'Gingers incur higher hair dye costs' and it's absolutely unclear to the reader which of the two statements above I'm really making. It would then be totally understandable that a bunch of people online would read two totally different interpretations into my uncontextualised statement and then accuse one another of ginger-hating and truth-denying.

Sometimes someone's being a dick, and sometimes they're denying the truth. Based on the real world humans I've met I'd bet most of the time people are just trying to share some truth and compassion in a world of people calling each other names.

PS Sorry gingers, you're just a less publicly volatile case study than race and gender.

What is Therapy Actually?

Researching the therapeutic process in advance of attending a session, most of what I found was to me unbearably vague - as was my therapist. They talk about integrating personalities and getting in touch with your feelings. They talk about how they won't give you the answers, the answers come from you. They talk about a moment of realisation and personality change. They talk about a lot of things, but the total message to me was something like a magician explaining that what you just saw was a trick. He'll show you this incredible outcome, you ask how he did it, and he says 'Oh, it wasn't really magic, there was a trick to it' then refuses to tell you the trick. You're left knowing that this person is pulling the wool over your eyes, and wondering what advantage it is to them to do so. Why not just talk straight?

I'm the guy that wants to know what the trick was, and I'm going to do my best to describe my experiences directly. This is no parlour trick (though some tricks are employed in the process).

Irrational Investigator Demo Released!

I stopped development on the Irrational series some years ago, because I got sick of designing logic puzzles. However, I was very proud of the demo we put together for Investigator. It moves the gameplay of Redux into a more graphically and world-driven environment, and massively polished the accessibility. I genuinely think it's worth a play.

Thanks again to my contributors, Mikko Tarmia, Martin Camargo and Chris Burrows.

It's my hope over the coming years or so that I can turn out some new indie games of my own. I currently have a functioning demo of a school management sim, and I'll keep you posted as things develop.

It's here if you fancy playing Investigator it's at: https://t.co/WyG4Fv9GDW

On Masculinity & Refusing to Seek Help

This is the second part of an ongoing series describing my experiences with learning about psychology and going into therapy. Here I talk a bit about how old ideas around masculinity can prevent men from seeking help.

Asking for help was fundamentally incompatible with the identity I had drawn up for myself

I'm not going to go into detail about my childhood (but yes, I'm afraid a lot of it does come down to your relationship with your parents, school and peers), but I'm going to say that it was a fairly traditional masculine environment, by which I mean a culture which explicitly embraces the moral philosophy I highlighted in the previous post as problematic. A culture which denies the validity of feelings and the fundamental equality of people. A culture where the moral ideal is the strong, competitive, stoic male; and the inverse is the weak, the emotional. This dichotomy sets up a further moral ideal that encompasses the other two: the ideal of winning over the world.

On Psychological Health & Talking Therapy

Disclaimer: I'm writing the words I would have wanted to read some years ago. I know this will be obvious to some people, but it wasn't to me. Also I apologise if I slip into being too absolute. If you ever feel like I'm telling you what you ought to think or do, please forgive me, it's not what I intend, I just got over excited.

Two years ago I started going to talking therapy (I went for one year). I went privately because I was offered highly targeted, formulaic options on the NHS (eg addiction therapy, cognitive behavioural therapy etc), and I figured that the problem I was trying to overcome was more complex and integral than this set of behaviours or that one. I may have a substance abuse problem, and some people may only have a substance abuse problem, but for a lot of us the problematic behaviours are symptoms of the bigger picture.