Subnautica is a deep-sea-themed sandbox survival-building game, and in that respect, it's actually the same genre as Project Dyson Sphere.

It may seem that the sea is far more familiar than space, but in fact, even today, only 5% of people have explored the sea, so both ocean fans and those who have little understanding of the ocean can enjoy the experience of exploring the unknown in the game.

Unlike Project Dyson Sphere, Deep Trek does not use a random way to generate maps, but instead builds a magnificent underwater world entirely through manual time-consuming and labor-intensive.

Map random generation has the benefits of random generation, but its disadvantages are actually obvious, such as rough modeling is its most difficult to break through the flaw, after playing for a long time, it is easy to produce visual aesthetic fatigue.

And "Deep Trek" in order to achieve the most extreme and realistic game experience, would rather spend a lot of energy than be lazy in this area, and it did get the effect they wanted to achieve.

Many players who have played "Deep Trek" may not know that the development team of this game is only an independent studio of about 20 people, and yes, this game that is not inferior to many triple-A masterpieces is actually an indie game.

After the launch of Steam, "Deep Trek" has maintained a high rating of more than 9 points, has a positive rating of more than 95%, and successfully won the Best PC Game Award in 18 years, and sold more than 6 million on various platforms in the year of its launch.

In fact, many players will confuse sandbox games with open-world games, mistakenly thinking that sandbox is open-world, and open-world is sandbox, but this is not the case.

For example, the two game genres do have similarities in many ways, such as a high degree of freedom, a large amount of game materials, and more storage space than the average game.

It's not hard to tell the difference between the two games, as long as you figure out what the core fun of the two types of games is.

The core fun of sandbox games lies in creation, players continue to explore the game world in which they live, and build various things with various materials collected, so as to repeat the cycle, and its charm lies in the fact that players can shape what they want through their personal strength, and even change the world, such as "Minecraft", "Don't Starve", "Project Dyson Sphere", "City Skylines", etc.

The core fun of open-world games lies in exploration, the world of the game is already preset by the game designer, all players need to do is to experience the game designer's careful design of the map and the world through exploration, through exploration can see their character grow, through exploration can experience some unforgettable things to gain a memory.

The difficulty in the production of open world games lies in the shaping of the world view and the balance of the player's freedom in the game, too much restriction of the player's freedom will lead to the game is not open at all, but too open will lead to a loose plot, giving the player a feeling that although the world built by the game is very large, it is very empty.

The fun of open world games is actually the same as traveling in reality, travel is to go from a place where you are tired to a place where others are tired, travel is to see what you don't usually see, but if you go to a far away place and find that what you see is the same as at home, you lose the meaning of travel. The same is true for open-world games, where players don't see exactly the same scene everywhere they go, hear familiar stories everywhere they go, and receive familiar tasks everywhere they go.

A good open-world game should give players the impression that the content is rich enough, but at the end of the game, there will be a sense of unfinished content.

A good open-world game doesn't give the player absolute freedom, but gives the player relative freedom.

A good open-world game doesn't make players run around like a war horse, but gives players a motivation to explore from the heart.

A good open-world game should not just make the player feel that the map is big, but should make the player feel a sense of exploration.

His masterpieces include The Witcher series, Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Assassin's Creed series, and The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim.

In simple terms, sandbox games are about making players gods, giving players a sense of control over everything, and satisfying players' desire to build and a sense of achievement; Open-world games are designed to take the player as a traveler, to discover the surprises that the game designers have prepared for them, and to discover the secrets of the world.

After having a clear understanding of the two games, you can find that compared with open-world games, sandbox games actually don't pay much attention to the plot, you can have or not, and the plot is more like a giveaway for sandbox games, such as chicken ribs, tasteless food, and it's a pity to abandon it.

Many sandbox games, even if they do the plot, only dare to give a simple background, after all, if they do too much and too much, it is likely to backfire and put the cart before the horse.

And "Deep Trek" is great here, not only does it not compromise on the core fun building gameplay of sandbox games, but also dedicates players to an extremely cleverly conceived story.

Deep Trek is a sandbox game, but it has many of the characteristics of an open-world game, with a clever blend of building and exploration gameplay.

The protagonist of the game is a member of the Altera company, he went to another galaxy with the company's long-distance spaceship "Aurora" to build an interstellar phase gate, but for some reason, the spaceship sailed into the atmosphere of the planet numbered "4546b", and was hit by a high-speed energy pulse from nowhere, causing the spacecraft to be damaged and crashed on the planet, most of the crew died on the spot, and the protagonist and a few people took the escape pod to pick up a life.

Due to the huge impact of the ship's explosion, the equipment in the escape pod is broken, and most of the data in the system is lost, players can find many shipbuilding wreckage dropped by the Aurora nearby, by scanning these wreckage, players can obtain the blueprint of the corresponding item, and after having the blueprint of the item, as long as the manufacturing materials required for the blueprint are obtained, the player can directly synthesize the corresponding item through the crafting table.

Because of this design, an adventure that has to go out to search for various materials and blueprints in order to save himself begins.

Immediately after repairing the damaged equipment in the escape pod, the player will receive a distress message from a companion who also survived the accident, and in the absence of a task list, this message will take on the role of guiding the player to move the next story forward according to the designer's arrangement.

The player's ultimate goal in the game is naturally to create a flying vehicle to help them escape, and such an end goal is still far away at the beginning, if the player's exploration in the early game is not guided, it must be aimless, and the radio signal becomes a good guiding point, after having the goal, the player will take the initiative to grasp the only useful information, and rush to the coordinate position attached to the signal.

When the players arrive at the coordinates, they find a broken escape pod that has completely sunk to the bottom of the sea, and there is no one in the pod, only the crew logs left behind.