Subnautica was made by the same devs that made Natural Selection 2. The games share their setting, it's the same universe. Subnautica wasn't some tirade against firearms, it started as one dev thinking, 'Eh, I'm board of shooting mechanics and want to try something new.' Sure, part of what got him thinking about that was Sandy Hook, but I think you're overstating the influence a bit.
Personally, I think it works. 'Shooting' critters with a tricorder to get a wiki index is fun. Scanning the leviathans without becoming chum was exhilarating. Reading peeper phylogeny is my jam :meow-floppy:
If you really want, you can kill the beasties. I spent the better part of an hour luring a reaper into the shallows, so I could punch it to death with my PRAWN suit. Just to see what would happen. It turned belly up, and died. No loot, no resources. Just me and the corpse of a once great thing. The model didn't even de-spawn. It just... lay there. It made me feel hollow. I had a replicator. I had the means to flee. There was no need to kill it - that was the cold, detached act of... someone just playing a game. Sure, I was just playing a game. But that didn't make my stomach feel any better.
Is that ultimately silly? Yes, of course it is. But... for a moment, the fantasy broke the detachment. Acknowledged it diegeticly. For a moment, it became too real. Made me feel like my - dumb, computed, make-believe - actions had irreconcilable consequences. A book could never do that.
"Weapons were removed from standard survival blueprints following the massacre on Obraxis Prime. The knife remains the only exception."
OH, yeah! huh. The reference is oblique enough, someone on the steam forms had an even darker interpretation:
'massacre' kinda implies that some other civilian crew got stranded on a planet, met the locals and decided to just build weapons and commit mass-murder.
So Alterra made military-grade technology a restricted thing.
Subnautica was made by the same devs that made Natural Selection 2. The games share their setting, it's the same universe. Subnautica wasn't some tirade against firearms, it started as one dev thinking, 'Eh, I'm board of shooting mechanics and want to try something new.' Sure, part of what got him thinking about that was Sandy Hook, but I think you're overstating the influence a bit.
Personally, I think it works. 'Shooting' critters with a tricorder to get a wiki index is fun. Scanning the leviathans without becoming chum was exhilarating. Reading peeper phylogeny is my jam :meow-floppy:
If you really want, you can kill the beasties. I spent the better part of an hour luring a reaper into the shallows, so I could punch it to death with my PRAWN suit. Just to see what would happen. It turned belly up, and died. No loot, no resources. Just me and the corpse of a once great thing. The model didn't even de-spawn. It just... lay there. It made me feel hollow. I had a replicator. I had the means to flee. There was no need to kill it - that was the cold, detached act of... someone just playing a game. Sure, I was just playing a game. But that didn't make my stomach feel any better.
Is that ultimately silly? Yes, of course it is. But... for a moment, the fantasy broke the detachment. Acknowledged it diegeticly. For a moment, it became too real. Made me feel like my - dumb, computed, make-believe - actions had irreconcilable consequences. A book could never do that.
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I think the in-universe explanation is that the mega-corporation doesn't want workers arming themselves.
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OH, yeah! huh. The reference is oblique enough, someone on the steam forms had an even darker interpretation:
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Corporations do good-ish things to avoid "bad PR" sometimes