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Previous Subnautica games let you take down the ocean's biggest predators if you were willing to spend enough resources and firepower on the job, but Subnautica 2 makes them effectively invincible. As game design lead Anthony Gallegos explains in a new interview, that design decision is connected to developer Unknown Worlds' desire to create less violent games, but the real impetus was a desire to be a little less Silent Hill 2 and a little more like Alien: Isolation.
"We knew that these would not necessarily be universally popular decisions," Gallegos says, in an interview with MinnMax, commenting on making the Subnautica 2 leviathans invincible. "Though I think that people have a little bit of a misunderstanding of why we made some of those decisions."
This is a topic Unknown Worlds co-founder and Subnautica director Charlie Cleveland has spoken about in the past. The idea for the original game coincided with the tragic Sandy Hook shooting in 2013, and as Cleveland once recalled to Rock, Paper, Shotgun, "I'm thinking: 'We're adding more guns to the world. I mean, they're virtual but are we adding to this culture of violence?' And at the same time also thinking about trying to make a new kind of game, because you want to challenge yourself and make something new. So for all those reasons it just seemed clear. We have to make a non-violent [game]. You know, we have to make a new game with no guns."
Subnautica has, of course, never been completely pacifistic – you do kill and eat all manner of aquatic creatures to survive – but Cleveland's sentiment has been accepted by fans as a core part of the identity of the series. But, as Gallegos explains, that's not entirely the explanation for why the studio's done away with letting you hunt the hunters.
"That was not some decision made because we're a game about pacifism or we're a non-violent studio," Gallegos says. He adds that "now there's this idea that we really are leaning into Subnautica being, like, a pacifism game, which wasn't our intent."
The idea was, in part, to build on the "message of the game," which shows "people learning to live in parallel with the world that they're in," but even that's secondary to the more practical design considerations that led us here.
The team was "really inspired by games like Soma and Alien: Isolation." Gallegos cites an old blog post from Frictional Games "about how Soma ended up being a 'nonviolent game' as opposed to all their previous games. It was really because if they ever gave the players the means to fight things, no matter how miserable they made the experience – intentionally miserable – players would always be like, 'It's always better to master the crappy combat than it is to deal with the constant threat and tension of a thing.' So, they'll be mad at you and they'll sit there and take the time to learn it."
Here, Gallegos offers the example of another one of the best horror games of all time. "Silent Hill 2's combat, it's not great. I love Silent Hill 2, it's one of my favorite games of all time. But people will master that pipe combat because it's way better to kill every creature in every hallway and then freely run through it than it is to dodge with them when they're scary. So, by removing the option to deal with combat, it means that the omnipresent tension and stuff like that gets to be there. That's really where we're trying to lean into it from."
That's not to say that nothing's changing in regard to your ability to deal with Subnautica 2's big threats – the game's still in early access, after all. "We're going to add way more," Gallegos says. "There's going to be biomods that help with it. There will be additional tools that help with it. Various forms of mitigation. Ways to make them run off, ways to dodge them, ways to make them be more interested in something other than you."
These kinds of updates are a "big priority" for the team, but it doesn't sound like you should hold your breath for a rocket launcher update.
"I think for us it's mostly about seeking cool ways for the players to feel smart about it," Gallegos says. "Some of the stuff we've talked about is, like, what if you could build feeders and you could keep creatures so well fed that they don't have any interest in you? Which is something you see in real life when you see people that keep, like, alligators as pets. They're like, 'Oh, alligators are perfectly safe as long as they're not hungry, you know?'"
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