Topic: Push Square Game Club Spooktacular: Resident Evil 4

Played a couple of hours tonight, although I must have forgotten to claim it while it was free on PS4 so had to play on PC instead! I have a scanner now though, which is useful and I seem to be able to interact with the wee fragment things in the cargo crates after scanning them.

Ha ha it's ok @nessisonett... Make something nice?

I'd played it previously for 5 hours so I have a few tips for anyone and everyone. Especially if you're playing on the survival setting of the game...

▪ Bladderfish (The purple translucent like fish) are the most important for your survival as they can be turned into water with your fabricator.
▪ Make the air tank and flippers as soon as you can. The items for those aren't terribly hard to find in the starting shallows.
▪ Make sure to make a scanner... Looking for cargo boxes and scanning the insides will eventually give you the schematics to make the machines and tech inside (Which you will need)
▪ An air pump and pipe can be used to make a breathing point if you're really exploring the depths of areas (or just found a good point for farming certain rescources).
▪ The pod will dispense 1 first aid kit per day (or thereabouts)

I think that's a good enough set of starting tips for the time being?

I know a little more if anyone needs anything else explained or help with certain things

And remember there is a PS5 version out now that's a free upgrade even if you got/redeemed the PS4 version through the stay at home stuff if I recall correctly!

@Foxy-Goddess-Scotchy

Good tips! Also don't waste your time doing what I did at the very start by trying to board the large ship on the horizon.

You can actually get on the Aurora (I'd done it in the previous five hours of playing)... But you need to craft a number of special items in order to get on board.

Oh and don't forget a fire extinguisher too

As for a progress goal (and being rather cryptic about it)... "Meeting with the Sunbeam" should be a decent enough goal?

I've made a start on Subnautica. At first it was quite daunting as I was worried about running out of food and water. That worry soon went away once I figured out which nearby fish to grab. Now I'm starting to get into the swing of things, and starting to get some useful tools.

I've played for about 45 mins and managed to build a scanner, fins and 02 tank. I'm playing with next gen upgrade on series x and it looks nice. Have found a cave that I need to build some pipes and a tube to get down to so will try that next time out. Going to give it a few more hours before I make a call but the game hasn't grabbed me yet. Hoping that when I start to uncover some secrets (pressuring there are some), that helps hook me in.

Made a bit more progress. I now have a seaglide which is great fun. I can’t find any of that fabric stuff to make fins though, no clue where to get it.

@nessisonett I think I got them from seaweed seeds, can't remember the real name but there's tons of it round the starting area.

@R1spam I’ll have a look then thanks. Haven’t really seen those seaweed things but I have a high capacity O2 tank so maybe I’ll find them further afield!

So, got to spend a little time into this game - probably 2 hours or so. Boy, they don’t give you much instruction or tutorial, do they? I guess that’s the point, but it’s been a lot of trial and error on my part. They don’t even teach you the controls fully. The developer must be assuming players have a certain level of familiarity with the survival genre, for which I am fairly uninitiated. Thankfully I did play a dozen or so hours of No Man’s Sky a few years ago so I feel a certain acquaintance with the gameplay loop. It really reminds me a lot of NMS... although without the guidance and instruction. To be fair, perhaps some of the tutorial stuff is buried in the menus and logs, which I can’t be bothered to read.

And for those who might remember, in the past I’ve expressed my disfavor with underwater gameplay in general; the floaty-ness and imprecise nature of movement is really frustrating. Subnautica does as fine a job as possible, I guess, but underwater swimming is still not my favorite traversal mechanic. And in this game floaty movement is further complicated by an unusually small focus area for picking an item; I’ve sometimes had to spend my whole oxygen supply dancing around an item back and forth trying to get the “pick up with ‘X’” prompt to stay long enough to hit the button. And speaking of movement, there’s this strange tendency to sink to the bottom while swimming so I have to constantly be pressing L1 while swimming because I like to hover several meters above the floor so I can see more of the terrain and spot items better. The pull of gravity toward the bottom feels too strong.

And the vast ocean is very disorienting. This is certainly by design, but it makes the exploration no less frustrating. I have repeatedly found a nice cache of resources, only to discover that while harvesting that my inventory is full, so I need to head back to the pod and do some fabrication and storage, knowing full well that I’ll never find this nice spot again. I see there is some kind of tool I can create that helps you leave a trail so you can find a spot again, so I guess I’ll work on making that.

As far as fabrication, I’ve made the first O2 tank, the knife, the air pump thing (which seems worthless right now... not sure what or how to use it), the repair gun, the fins, flares, a couple floating storage containers, and the scanner. I’m going crazy trying to find the last of 3 blueprint pieces for the vehicle dock thingy, which is apparently key to progressing to create the seamoth. I feel like I’m wandering aimlessly otherwise. 😅

Nevertheless, thanks to @Foxy-Goddess-Scotchy for a few early tips. They have come in really handy.
And yes, I’ve ventured into some underwater wreckage, unknowingly into a radiation field and died quickly of radiation poisoning. I also have contracted some kind of underwater bacteria infection too. Not sure how to cope with these maladies, so I just die. My first 3 death seemed to be “freebies” but now I’m losing inventory if I die.

@Th3solution

Donkey Kong wants to have a word with you about floaty imprecise controls! 😅

@ralphdibny Haha! Yes, underwater controls have plagued us from the beginning. 😄

Not sure what the controls are like on PS4 but I actually quite like them on PC! I’m tempted to check out the VR mode too, although using PSVR on my laptop with Trinus can be a bit fiddly, it makes me feel violently ill and simulating being underwater might make me feel even worse 😂

@nessisonett 🧐 that's a thing?? Is it better or worse than using PSVR normally? I would have thought better with the extra power of PC to back it up but I'm guessing the non-natural config throws up some drawbacks

@nessisonett Playing the PS5 version but assuming PS4 is the same— Default controls are L1 to ascend, R1 to descend, R2 to use whatever you have equipped in your hand, left and right D-pad to quick select item for use. You have to open the menu and select the item and press “X” to place it into the hotbar for quick select and there is no option to map the quick select bar, it will just place whatever item you select into the farthest left and push everything else down one spot. That’s fine except it will then drop whatever is on the right end, which is not always the one you want to replace with the new item. So if you want to replace an item from the bar that is in the middle, you’re effectively having to solve a mini-puzzle game in your head to cycle through the items in the menu, selecting them in the order that you want them to appear in the quick-select bar. It’s not the end of the world, but it’s an inelegant way to organize your loadout.

Otherwise the controls are reasonable. Just press the left analog in the direction you want to swim and usually you go that direction. My issue is mainly trying to get used to the physics of the game and in the grab/hit box detection.

————

I made the seamoth now and it’s adding an interesting new approach. It takes some getting used to driving, as bumping around on the rocks will quickly deplete your ship integrity. But having a endless supply of oxygen that you can park at 100 m depth has opened up the ability to dive deeper without fear of not making it to the surface in time. I’m starting to appreciate some of the problem solving and skill required to advance the game. Right now I’m just a little put off by needing a bunch of resources that I have no idea where to find. Thankfully the game drip feeds distress signals on the radio that pulls you to certain areas, but I still feel like I’m searching in the wrong place sometimes.

As an interesting aside — did anyone else notice that the trophy percentage for “Getting your feet wet” is only at 76%?
We had just been talking about the surprising number of people who boot up a game and literally barely give it 5 minutes chance before abandoning it. You get that first trophy literally for just watching the opening scene, put out the fire and then jump in the water. 1/4 of players don’t even make it that far. 😆
Not sure what people were expecting from a game called “Subnautica” if they weren’t even going to jump in the water.

I would have liked to see what that trophy percent was before the game was offered for free.

@Th3solution that's weird! If it's the same game as it is on Xbox then it's a really easy trophy list that you can do in less than an hour using console commands. Might be worth mopping up with that method after a normal playthrough

@ralphdibny Oh really? Wow, I don’t think the trophies are very easy although so far I’ve popped 3 just naturally playing through the game. There are only 18 total trophies, so a lot of silver and golds. The platinum is at 4.5% rate of achievement, so pretty rare.
I’m not aware of any special developer console command options on PS4/5.

@Th3solution console commands are like cheats so it wouldn't be natural to do it that way! I think you hold L1 and R1 on the pause menu to get to the developer menu. I feel like that shady guy that wears a coat with loads of inside pockets full of fake rolexes 😂

@Th3solution Out of curiosity where are you seeing the 76% number for the Getting Your Feet Wet trophy? On my PS4 it shows up as a slightly more sensible 91.2%.

As for the people that didn't get the trophy, maybe some of them put this game in their backlog and plan to play it eventually. I'll sometimes check that a new game is installed and runs correctly, before putting it aside because I'm too busy with other games.