Outside Your Heaven

The Brilliant Narrative Design of Subnautica

Posted: 30 Jan 2019 02:50 PM PST

I'm late to the party on Subnautica. If I had know it was one of the best immersive sims, and open world narrative games, ever made I'd have played it sooner. Maybe it was the uninspired cover art that made me skip it. Nothing about a random weird-looking dude in a wet suit made me think it was what a dream team match-up between Carl Sagan and Origin Systems in their heyday would have been, but that exactly what it is. It's basically everything I wanted No Man's Sky to be -- a gorgeous sci-fi world full of mystery and possibility, where I am able to chart my own path as a survivor and explorer, but with actual hand-crafted content to make that journey feel rich and complex. It's an astoundingly confident piece of deep, nuanced narrative design that ignores convention and succeeds entirely on its own terms.

A little while ago I said that Return of the Obra Dinn offered the first real contribution to video game environmental storytelling tropes in 20 years. While I still agree with that, I do think Subnautica combines familiar tropes in ways I've ever seen combined so successfully before. It might be the closest someone else's game has come to my personal ideal of narrative design, where mechanics alone -- with no mission design, no larger designer-imposed structures -- shape your path through a carefully hand-crafted storyworld with airtight logic that consistently rewards a role-player's mindset.

I've been pining for this kind of design for years. Once I ran a narrative experiment with a team of students at MIT. The idea was to make game where players felt like they were crafting the narrative, but that only relied on player verbs and A.I. to shape this. This meant no shaping mechanisms that felt designer imposed -- no invisible walls, no missions, no quests, no to-do lists, nothing that would suggest anything other than you vs. a world. This approach was against methods of interactive storytelling that involve storyteller A.I.s and other approaches that see "story" or "plot" or "drama" as a tangible formal concept that can somehow be formulatized and managed for the player. Growing up on the Ultima games, which are really nothing but worlds you interact with, where you are free to decide for yourself what's drama and what isn't, trying to control things like plot structures or beats and arcs always felt invasive to me, whether it was dynamically created by A.I. or statically imposed via traditional missions or levels.

The problem with less structured narrative games wasn't that they lacked structure, but that their worlds and characters weren't as nuanced or emotionally charged as they could be -- because that is what inspires players to interpret what they experience in a dramatic way, to see plots, to see arcs in their own experience. We tried to address that by keeping our game open and systemic but setting it in the aftermath of a WWI battle in the dead of winter. It was a very ambitious project, and in the end we were able to do barely anything at all in terms of systemic depth. One way you can see our philosophy in action, though, is in how we had thick narrative justification for the player's lack of mobility -- it is cold and you are freezing to death. Though the game world is open -- there are no invisible walls, no physical barriers of any kind -- this constraint makes you never question the limited scope of the game, and its simple survival context shaped all our other interactions. In other words, by insisting that our only player shaping mechanism be fully diegetic, fully within the fictional world, players invariably reported they were engaged in the "story" of their own survival. Even when you could do almost nothing except walk around a die, it created a sense of ownership over that little sliver of dramatic experience. The intense emotional context made players see it as a story about what it means to walk around and die.

Subnautica is what I would have done if I'd had a decent budget approaching the same set of design problems. It uses the idea of a shipwreck to shape and curtail your agency in ways that always feel compelling and believable. You were some sort of passenger on a spacecraft that crashed on an ocean planet. You are limited by your need of food and water, and you inability to swim too far without dying of thirst or hunger. (Again, no invisible walls.) Its use of science fiction is perfectly balanced in creating just the right amount of narrative justification for the systems you interact with being simple -- you have a Star Trek-like replicator that can synthesize anything -- food, tools, eventually machines -- from the raw elements you find in the ocean. It's like Minecraft, but unlike that game the hand-crafted storyworld provides enough narrative context to promote role-playing the emotional and psychological journey of a shipwreck survivor. Your survival kit actually tells you what to build to get started, and your scanner tells you what periodic table components different rocks, fish, and plants are made of. So you start to put together a plan, learn to live, explore your surroundings. You become Space Tom Hanks from Cast Away -- you go through his beats, his emotional journey. There is no drama management. There is no plot. There doesn't need to be.

This alone wouldn't make Subnautica a great narrative experience. There are lots of games with systems like this, and ones that also go beyond Minecraft's blank slate to provide more context, i.e. No Man's Sky. The big difference between Subnautica and those games, though, is in how hand-crafted and focused its storyworld is. Typically systems-heavy games are light on story, and story-heavy games are light on systems. When a systems-heavy game insists on also being story-heavy, or when a story-heavy game insists on having deep systems, you are in that weird, magical space of the immersive sim, games that try to solve the ultra-hard problem of seamlessly combining written, crafted stories with high levels of openness and uncertainly in player behavior. I'm going to go out on a limb and say Subnautica does this better than perhaps any game of this type since the heyday of the immersive sim in the 90s. Yes, better than Bioshock. Better than Dishonored. And those games are great.

This isn't a random world. You emerge from the life pod to see the wrecked ship sticking out of the ocean in the distance. You can try to swim to the ship, but you'll die of radiation unless you created a radiation suit first. How do you do that? You have to find the right elements. How do you do that? You have to be able to dive far enough to find them. How do you do that? You have to build a waterproof flashlight. How do you do that? And on and on. Or you can do something else entirely. You can not go to the crash, and instead focus on exploring the ocean around you, synthesizing elements to create your own underwater living space. Regardless of what you do, the crashed ship's reactor goes critical and explodes at one point, creating a whole new set of problems.

Like the pure survival premise of Ultima Underworld, your goal is very simple: get off the planet. The only nod to any sort of broad narrative shaping elements are the one-way radio signals you get. These are used as soft story-shaping devices -- getting distress signals from other life pods or coordinates for a rendezvous from a rescue ship -- but they are thoroughly justified by the story, and you are always free to ignore them. Ignoring them doesn't stop the story. It merely makes the story different, since your choice not to act on that information feels like a role-playing decision the game respects... and by "respects" I mean the game never puts it on a list or map for you, where it would hang forever like an unfinished chapter if you chose to ignore it.

This points to another amazing thing about Subnautica: its total lack of a map. It has a huge world, but it refuses to create a map for you, leaving you to rely on landmarks you come across on our own. You can create and name waypoint markers, but that's it. This forces you to keep a mental image of the world in your head, and this works because, while big, its handcrafted nature makes content you come across easy to remember. Eventually you do gain the ability to build a sonar mapping station, which creates a 3D map of a small area of the ocean, which you can then use to scan for elements, but this is the opposite of the way open world games normally use mapping systems, i.e. to overwhelm you with avalanche of waypoints that make exploration feel mandatory and tedious. By positioning maps and resource marking as itself a limited resource within it diegetically airtight sci-fi premise, Subnautica brings back the drama of cartography as a storytelling device. Like in the annotatable map in Ultima Underworld, or the limited scribbles from Thief, or the way you have to kidnap and interrogate enemies to gain map info in Metal Gear Solid 3, the mapping in Subnautica is just another part of its story.

It's not as if Subnautica is doing any one single thing no game has done before. Its crafting and exploration are like Minecraft. Its scanner and machine-building mechanics are like No Man's Sky. Its use of one-way audio messages is classic System Shock / Bioshock stuff. Its food-based survival mechanics are right out of countless games that involve hunting. We've seen it all before, but I don't think we've ever seen all these elements aligned in such a focused, perfectly sculpted way to promote open role-playing with a highly handcrafted scenario. Other games that are this open and deep are never as handcrafted and other games with this level of handcrafted discoverable story-rich content are never this comfortable leaving you entirely at the mercy of mechanics. Subnautica is like what Red Dead Redemption or Assassins Creed would be if they had the courage to let the player experience content based solely at the whim of their own simulation mastery. That is fucking bananas.

The systems force you to engage in authored content in compelling and unexpected ways. For example, when I was first learning to build my underwater habitat I didn't know yet about hull reinforcement, so my habitat flooded. I was rushing through my bedroom as it was filling up with water -- like a scene out of The Abyss -- trying to figure out what I did wrong in my construction. Eventually I figured out I needed more titanium, so I went looking for it on a nearby island, where I happened upon an alien structure, which, it turns out, has major bearing on the story. And there is a "story" of sorts, though it literally follows no structure other than your survival choices, and -- to provide the final piece here as to why all this is so great -- that story itself is well-written and interesting. The world building here, by which I mean the larger fictional world surrounding the actual 3D world of the game, is top notch, with a nice anti-corporate streak in the tradition of the Alien franchise at its best.

All the stuff you find, all the logs of the ships other survivors, all the info about the ship itself and why it even went to the planet, the backstory of the corporation that sent it, the machinations of their stockholders, etc. -- it's all part of the late-capitalist nightmare that is the REAL reason you are stranded on an alien world, trying to keep your edible plant collection together while some Cthulhu monster keeps banging on your hull. As with everything, you can learn all about it or ignore it, but it does dovetail with the common sense progression of the player's exploration. The only way to get off the planet and survive this bureaucratic mess is to build a rocket, but your rocket will be blown out of the sky by the alien technology that refuses to let anything leave. Why wouldn't they let anyone leave? Were they trying to protect the rest of the galaxy from something? What's wrong with the planet? And does that have anything to do with why your ship came, with why they expect their stocks to go up? You have to at least engage with all these questions to shut off the alien security system, and to do that you need to visit the bottom of the ocean, and to do that you need to build better subs, which means you need to build better habitats (that won't flood), and so on.

It's not JUST that the system is great, or that they encourages role-playing. It's that the written content -- the sort that in another game would likely be in cut-scenes or missions or quests -- is carefully threaded throughout it. The general narrative design strategy seems to be to create systemic necessity and then simply put story content in the player's way, so that they can't satisfy that necessity without constantly bumping into story-rich content. I have no idea how all this story material would seem if it were delivered more conventionally, but the sense of ownership from just being allowed to find it makes it all feel fresh and exciting. As a simulation-heavy survival story about corporate cluster fuck on an alien world where humans prove no match for an alien ecosystem... it's almost like a non-stupid version of Prometheus, but as a video game. I keep mentioning the Alien franchise, but it is super apt here. If you replaced the more dangerous sea creatures with Xenophorhs and the dead alien race with Space Jockeys, this would be the greatest Alien game ever. Weirdly it almost feels like if you took the corporate survival horror of Alien and merged it with the environment and creatures from The Abyss, making Subnautica possibly the most James Cameron-eque video game in existence.

I feel like I've been waiting for decades for someone to have the courage to do this sort of narrative design at a larger scope than those old experiments in the 1990s. Like the Souls series felt when it arrived a decade ago, Subnautica is both refreshing and thrilling in its brave disregard for conventional design wisdom -- it really just takes its hand off the wheel and trusts the player to not drive off the road. Combine that with an actually well-crafted anti-corporate sci-fi story about how capitalism is the real reason you're fighting for your life on an alien planet, and you have great piece of topical interactive sci-fi. If only the box art better conveyed that.

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My only genuine criticism of this game is its lack of more diverse options of your avatar. Given the absurd amount of mechanics and features this game has, and given that the protagonist is a silent blank slate, making him a dude feels uncharacteristically lazy for a game that is so on-the-ball when it comes to customizing player experience. It feels like a very strange oversight in an otherwise masterful piece of work.

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