Subnautica and Player Agency: The Issue of a Map Boundary
The previous article in this series started the exploration of player agency in Subnautica through the design of threat and challenge. This article will explore a specific issue encountered by all open world games: the problem of a map boundary, and how Subnautica creatively and effectively solves this problem.
Nowhere is the idea of theoretical freedom which is in actuality carefully restricted by manipulating the player’s choices more exemplified than in the actual boundaries of the map. The developers of Subnautica were clever. They knew the power the leviathans they designed had, and they knew how to manipulate that power, along with the thalassophobia of any rationally minded human, to make a limited space feel limitless, simply through the manipulation of player agency.
In any open world game, setting a clear boundary to the map is a necessary and difficult challenge: part of the point and fun of an open world is losing yourself within that world: the feeling of limitlessness that comes with exploring a vast, well-designed map which you learn about and get to know across your game. If the boundaries are obvious, then it is not just going to take you out of the immersive experience, it will also make you realise just how limited that world really is. It can immediately make an expansive, vast area seem like a restrictive prison. The simplest solution to creating a map boundary is simply to have an invisible wall: there is a certain point on the map where your character hits a wall and simply can’t go further. Assassin’s Creed games, such as ‘Black Flag’ or ‘Origins’, often have this solution, occasionally dressed up with interesting visuals to try and hide the fact that this is what they’re doing:
A screenshot of the wall which makes up the map boundary of Assassin’s Creed Origins, invisible until you get too close to it, and then impossible to pass.
Alternatively, as in other Assassin’s Creed games, one can warn the player. A message like "Reaching map boundary, turn back," followed by ongoing damage to them until they return to map boundaries, or simply instantly kill them when they venture too far from the playable area (for example, the ‘red sea’ which forms the boundaries of the map in ‘Sea of Thieves’). Perhaps a crude solution, but it certainly gets the job done.
A screenshot of the ‘Red Sea’ in Sea of Thieves, an area surrounding the map which destroys your ship, killing you in the process, when you venture too far into it.
Other games, however, will try and be more creative. In ‘The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim’, one of the most famous open world games out there, the map boundaries are within the national boundaries of the country ‘Skyrim’, which is conveniently surrounded by mountain ranges on three sides and a frigid sea in the North. This means most ways out of the map are impossible to reach, and the few routes which work their way through the mountains have border guards who block one’s path. This manages to maintain immersion well enough, though isn’t a perfect solution, as if one ignores the guards, and attempts to cross the border, you are still fundamentally blocked off by an invisible wall.
A screenshot of the mountain ranges which act as part of the map boundary in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.
Subnautica and Player Agency: Subnautica’s Solution to the ‘Map Boundary’ Problem
Subnautica is an example of a game with a perfect solution, tying together gameplay, story-telling and worldbuilding to create a perfect, immersive cut-off to the map. This only works because of the way it manipulates the player.
There is no invisible wall in Subnautica, no limit to how far you can swim in one direction, if you really want to. Rather, the further you go out from the middle of the map, the deeper you tend to get – the areas surrounding the map boundary, such as the ‘dunes’ and the ‘grand reef’ can get over 500 meters deep. All of them, though, eventually have a cut off point: a drop off.
A screenshot of the sharp drop-off of the Void in the ‘Dunes’.
This is the point at which the water blackens, flora and fauna disappear and the ground simply drops away into nothingness. As someone who is thoroughly terrified at the thought of looking down into the sea and seeing nothingness staring blankly back, this would be quite enough for me.
Of course, the developers were hardly going to stop there. The PDA warns you as soon as you cross this drop-off that you are entering an ‘ecological dead-zone’ where the only two life forms are microscopic and leviathan size. If this warning isn’t enough, there are the actual leviathans themselves. Similarly to how the Reapers guard and restrict player movement in the ‘Dunes’, ‘Ghost Leviathans’ play the role of policing the borders of the map. As soon as you enter the void, one will spawn, far enough away that it will be out of view, but always aware that you are there, as long as you stay in the void.
For the first-time player, the void is already ominous, exploiting anticipation to its extreme. The sudden drop-off takes you into an area with midnight dark water, an abyss which stretches out in front of you in every direction, including directly below you, without any flora or fauna to speak of. It is a uniquely blank area, a literal ‘dead-zone’, where the mind can run rampant with possibilities at what could be lurking in the darkness. And then, you are confronted with this:
A screenshot of a ‘Ghost Leviathan’ stalking through the black water of the Void.
Lurching out of the water with an ear-splitting, phantasmagoric screech comes the surreal head of the ghost leviathan, glowing neon blue, with hammer-head cephalofoils and a membrane of translucent skin running across its angular, eel-like body. Again, it is not just the larger-than-life appearance of these behemoths which makes them terrifying: it is the anticipation of them. When you first visit the void, it is the expectation of a mysterious something in the pitch blackness, the fear of seeing that darkness spreading out before you in every direction, hearing the screams of the leviathan before it slowly appears out of the darkness. Then, ever-after, the experience of reaching the crater’s edge becomes one of immediate terror: the drop-off comes, the water goes black, and the player flees back to safety before a leviathan can even appear.
For those players who might brave the area again, in an attempt to find something beyond its emptiness, they are given no hope. The water stretches out as far as the player can travel, and the longer they spend in the area, the more leviathans appear to attack them. Even the bravest of players have no choice but to leave eventually, or be hunted down by the ghosts.
A screenshot of three Ghost Leviathans, the amount that attack you in the Void after the player has spent over a minute in the area.
This design is one of the cleverest things about Subnautica. It solves a problem that all open-world games encounter, the issue of creating a map-border, without sacrificing player-immersion, in a way that completely lines up with the world and the story, and without ever limiting player agency either. Unlike so many other games, which have forced or crude solutions, Subnautica’s is completely natural: you are never forced to leave the map boundary, you always make the active choice to. This choice is not a contrived one, forced by simply damaging or killing the player arbitrarily, but a completely logical one made due to a threat which exists as a naturally incorporated part of the game-world that is explained and justified within its environment. (The life-cycle and development of Ghost Leviathans, and their role in the Void, as well as the nature and existence of the Void itself, is discussed and revealed to the player slowly throughout the later portions of the game – they are not merely enemies which happen to inhabit a contrived abyss.)
This solution is, though particularly clever, representative of Subnautica’s design philosophy throughout: its careful manipulation of the player and player agency in order to guide them to specific areas; its story and approach to story-telling which creates a sense of isolation; and its exploitation of the anticipation of an engaged, immersive mind which can create its own horror when the right atmosphere is cultivated for it.
Conclusion
Overall, Subnautica is a game which carefully judges and takes advantage of many aspects of a game experience, from plot, storytelling, lighting and sound design to the design of enemies and manipulation of the player’s agency, to create a deeply immersive, and oftentimes terrifying horror experience.
There are many ways the design of Subnautica helps achieve this, including things beyond the scope of this already bloated article (for anyone interested, the consideration of the victimisation of the player through removing the ability to fight back against leviathans is a key point which I did not have time to elaborate on in this article). The aspects I consider particularly powerful, though, are those explored in this work: the sense of isolation and solitude created by the story and design of Subnautica’s side-plots; the carefully constructed atmosphere which facilitates anticipation of fear or dangerous experiences to the immersed player; and the manipulation of player agency to create limits within the game-world where there otherwise are none. These carefully crafted parts of the game’s design creates a powerful and uncomfortable experience: one in which the player is never truly at ease, and is always waiting for the next horror to unearth itself to them.
This has been an exciting labour of love for me to write, and try to properly adapt from an excessively long essay into a series of articles, exploring a game which is rich with analytical depth from a number of different angles and perspectives. Games are inherently multi-disciplinary, combining aspects that appear in literature, in film, in art, music and their own unique features, that can only be understood in video games. I hope the detailed exploration of a game which is so rich in so many aspects has been enjoyable, and I highly encourage anyone who enjoyed this series to explore video games from a more analytic perspective more: there are countless examples of masterpieces in the medium, which bring together so many elements to create truly powerful and emotional experiences.
Comments