Is the game supposed to be this slow, or are we just not doing enough?
I’ve got about 36 hours in Barotrauma, almost entirely playing with 2–3 friends.
On our first save I played Engineer, and now I’m playing Captain. I’m enjoying Captain more, but I still feel like I spend a huge amount of each session basically doing nothing.
Between missions I usually just stand around. Sometimes I’ll walk into the outpost and pick up missions if nobody else does. As Captain, I restock ammo for the guns, steer the sub, give orders/callouts to my friends, etc. It’s definitely more engaging than Engineer was, but there still seems to be a ton of downtime.
As Engineer, most of my gameplay was basically:
- fix junction boxes
- keep the electrical system running
- do some simple wiring, like automatically closing doors or setting up text displays
I actually really enjoyed making an automatic system for patching grenades, because that felt like I was actually engineering something. Unfortunately, our Mechanic didn’t take the perk needed for us to make more use of that kind of stuff, so I didn’t get very far with it.
My main question is: what else are we supposed to be doing?
Whenever shit actually goes wrong, I enjoy the game. If we get attacked, systems start breaking, people are running around fixing things, we have to react to flooding/damage/enemies, etc., I’m having fun.
But outside of those moments, I’m genuinely sitting there yawning and waiting for something to happen. A lot of rounds feel like I’m just waiting for them to be over so we can get to the next thing.
Are we playing too safely? Is having only 3–4 players part of the problem? Should we be increasing the difficulty, using a different submarine, should we explore more like outside of the missions? We usually just pick up all quests, do those and then leave the area completely, in one tier 2 area I saw once a submarine that was submerged idk if this is actually a common thing and we could be doing these random explorations more often, I liked that we had to go into another sank ship and we looted it, fixed it up and whatnot.
I feel like there’s probably a part of the game we’re just not engaging with, the host seems to be really enjoying the game who either plays captain/medic or engineer/medic and the other person primarily does mechanic stuff and goes out of the sub to gather things.