Subnautica 2 design lead Anthony Gallegos says developer Unknown Worlds is committing to frequent updates for its newly released Early Access, in part because the studio didn't expect players to be so… trusting when building their home bases.
Gallegos says during a May 18 exchange with Subnautica 2 players on the deep sea survival game's Discord, "We plan on minor updates every few weeks. And then major updates will be several months between." The latter will be a stuffed fruitcake with "new playable spaces, complete with progression, creatures, leviathans, sometimes vehicles, etc," says Gallegos, while the former will presumably soon stop players from confidently putting their limbs inside a monster's mouth.
"Creature mitigation" is a priority for Unknown Worlds, Gallegos explains, as Subnautica 2 players struggle to coexist with the game's alien sealife. Controversially to those whose favorite video game mechanics include slashing and stabbing, Subnautica 2 is a firmly pacifist game, with no weapons whatsoever. On a related Reddit thread with over 1,000 upvotes wondering "when 'No wepon' rule become 'No killing'rule in Subnautica," the top comment riffs, "Wait till the devs discover GTA."
"I think exploring a pacifist message is interesting," agrees another reply, "but honestly I feel some of the responses to criticism the devs are making on Discord are kind of puritanical."
Back on Discord, Gallegos confirms, "You're not ever getting actual weapons, sorry. Mods I am sure will add it, but we're committed to offering more robust mitigation options with making you the sea dominator."
In his eyes, there's more wrong with Subnautica 2 creatures than just the matter of their mortal souls. Like, "right now they aren't communicating that you've impacted them," Gallegos says, "and that will change." Creatures are too quick to react once provoked, barely giving players time to process the damage they're taking. Unknown Worlds is therefore considering "rounds of tuning around creature aggression, downtime between when you run them off, etc," says Gallegos. "We clearly have work to do there, and we're doing it!"
However, Unknown Worlds didn't expect quite so much work. "We knew this would be a problem," Gallegos says about players' frustration with enemy encounters, "but it has become more of a hot button issue than I think we expected for EA1."
"I think what surprised us about a lot of this are where people chose to build," the developer explains. "Many, many more people than we ever saw in playtests have chosen base sites very close to predators or hammerheads. Whereas most of us chose to put our bases away from these."
Hammerheads are highly territorial armored fish who love ramming their cystic brains into defenseless objects and hate visitors, so keeping as far away from them as possible seems intuitive. They make terrible neighbors, but some people think they're cute because they have one eyeball and look like a gelatinized Christmas ham.
So "I don't think we thought people would build by wolves and then be as vocal about being bit by wolves afterwards," Gallegos muses about players' insistence to settle down with the devil under the sea. At the same time, "a good deal of that is understandable due to both poor feedback when you hit a creature and also the creature 'downtime' between going aggressive again being too short," the developer reiterates. Expect that to change, and to never receive anything even as dangerous as pepper spray.
