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This page is about the video game. For the medical condition, see Barotrauma.

Barotrauma
Developer(s)	Undertow Games, FakeFish Games
Publisher(s)	Daedalic Entertainment
Director(s)	Joonas "Regalis" Rikkonen
Platform(s)	Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Linux
Release	June 5, 2019 (Early Access)
Genre(s)	Roleplaying
Mode(s)	Single-player Multiplayer

Barotrauma is a side-scrolling role-playing video game developed by Finnish studio Undertow Games and published by Daedalic Entertainment.

Barotrauma takes place in the distant future, on a submarine traversing the inhospitable oceans of Europa, one of Jupiter's moons. The player is assigned a job on the submarine, and must coexist with other crewmen aboard the vessel in order to survive.

Gameplay

Barotrauma largely takes place inside submarines submerged beneath Europa's ocean. At the start of each game, players are assigned a "job", which may provide them access to specialized traits and equipment. The submarine's crew are given a mission, which may involve hauling cargo from one outpost to another, hunting hostile undersea wildlife, or recovering alien artifacts. The players are then free to act at their own discretion for the duration of the round, with few, if any, additional objectives provided by the game itself.

Various hazards will frequently jeopardize the submarine's voyage, such as hostile fauna, parasite outbreaks, and player-controlled traitors. Player incompetence can also be a source of disaster, as improperly-maintained ship equipment (such as nuclear reactors or oxygen generators) can quickly render the submarine inoperable. Crisis management is a recurrent theme in moment-to-moment gameplay, as players are implicitly encouraged to use their job skills to both avoid and mitigate disaster.

In the event that the submarine's hull is damaged, water will begin to flood the vessel, which damages submarine structures and significantly impedes player movement; without appropriate equipment, a player trapped in a flooded segment of the sub is liable to suffocate, or in areas with high water pressure, be crushed via barotrauma. As the submarine effectively functions as a lifeline for its crew, an irreparably-damaged vessel often signals the end of a round.

Character Specialization

In Barotrauma you are given a choice between a variety of roles to fulfill, each with their own specialization towards a certain task as well as a unique skill tree. Mechanics are very adept at repairing things such as ballast pumps or the submarine engine, while engineers are better at repairing electrical components of the submarine.

Campaign

The objective of the campaign of Barotrauma is to maintain a submarine and its crew as you move through the hazardous Europan sea. There is an optional Jovian radiation mechanic that progressively renders more and more of the map as inhospitable, forcing the player to move deeper into the Europan sea. In order for the player to maintain their submarine's various facilities they can pick up odd jobs along the way which can yield varying degrees of payment, players can also mine along the sea walls and floors to gain raw materials which they could sell or use to craft. The submarine needs things like fuel rods to maintain power and ammunition for its offensive armaments which can be bought or crafted depending on an individual's skill level.

The deeper a player progresses into Europa, the more dangerous the environment becomes, with different biomes to reflect their depth. The starting biome for example will have a small quantity of weaker enemies, while the highest level consists of consistent large quantities of very dangerous enemies as well as a hostile environment. There are 5 biomes, each 1000 meters apart from one another;

1. Cold Caverns
2. Europan Ridge
3. Aphotic Plateau
4. The Great Void
5. Hydrothermal Wastes

To cope with the increasing difficulty the players can buy and switch out their submarines to something more suited to the task at outposts. A variety of upgrades are also available to the player such as increasing how deep a submarine can dive before reaching crush depth, although crush depth in Barotrauma behaves differently than it would in real life. A submarine that exceeds crush depth is not irrecoverable, however, fractions of the Submarines hull will begin to either collapse or slowly give way to leaks. Exceeding crush depth can be manageable to its crew. After a submarine passes critical depth, usually 1500 meters below crush depth by default, the submarine has a chance to violently implode at any moment, in all likelihood taking the crew with it as well.

The Europan sea harbors creatures all the way from mostly harmless pets all the way up to the Endworm, a feared monster that is larger than the 3 starting submarines available to the player. While creatures like the Endworm are capable of single handedly destroying a submarine with their immense power, they all have their own unique drawbacks. The Endworm for example is very slow and primarily detects the player's submarine through deflection of the submarines own radar waves, it also has certain weak points.

As time progresses, and with some player help, Human habitation gradually spreads across the map.

Modifications

After Barotrauma was released in early access on Steam in 2019 various modification tools were officially implemented into the game for players to use, namely the character editor, level editor, submarine editor, and steam workshop integration. While the submarine editor was present in legacy versions, the rest of these tools were not. Previously, the Undertow Games forum had been used to distribute mods unofficially. The steam release also had significantly more modding capabilities as unlike its legacy predecessor, it could run more than one mod at a time, and in addition to that, loading modded content in most cases did not even require the game to restart.

Modding in Barotrauma is largely intended to be done in XML, although, as Barotrauma's source code is available users have been able to create mods using Lua scripts. Using Lua gives modders access to things that were previously impossible with XML, allowing more creative freedom.

Development

Lead developer Joonas Rikkonen cited the online role-playing game Space Station 13 as the biggest single source of inspiration for Barotrauma, praising its emergent gameplay and emphasis on human interaction. However, he also critiqued Space Station 13's unintuitive user interface and various technical issues; with Barotrauma, Rikkonen sought to create a game that "built on the foundation of SS13" while "smoothing some of the rougher edges". Rikkonen also drew heavy inspiration from "Pressure", a game concept anonymously posted to 4chan's video games board.

Development on Barotrauma began in 2014, under the working title Subsurface. From 2015 to 2018, pre-alpha builds of Barotrauma were freely released to the public for testing and feedback. Following the 2019 commercial release, future versions of Barotrauma were made exclusive to Steam, and the unsupported free version was retitled Barotrauma Legacy.

In 2017, the source code for Barotrauma was publicly released under a limited license to facilitate the creation of community mods. The source repository continues to be updated in tandem with the commercial release.

In 2018, Undertow Games partnered with FakeFish Games to jointly develop Barotrauma, turning the solo project into one developed by nearly a dozen individuals. In early 2019, Undertow Games signed Daedalic Entertainment, a German games publisher, to handle Barotrauma's publishing and marketing.

Barotrauma was released onto early access on June 5, 2019. While originally planned for a full release in Fall 2019, as of January 2022, the game is still in early access.

Reception

Barotrauma was voted "Best hardcore game" at Game Connection Europe 2018, where it was also nominated in three other categories.

External links

• Official website

Category:Upcoming video games Category:Role-playing video games Category:Science fiction video games Category:Cooperative video games Category:Early access video games Category:Video games developed in Finland Category:Windows games Category:Linux games Category:MacOS games Category:Daedalic Entertainment games Category:Video games with available source code