Subnautica 3 (or whatever the game ends up being called) was officially confirmed in a financial report last month, and developer Unknown Worlds has finally acknowledged the news, promising details in 2024 about the game's Early Access launch.
"Your recent excitement for the next game in the Subnautica universe has been infectious," the devs say in a tweet. "While we're not quite ready to surface more info, keep watching this space. We'll share more about our Early Access plans in 2024!" There's also a rocket ship emoji. Between that and the "this space" line, some fans have been taking the tweet as a teaser that the next Subnautica will trade the deep sea for deep space, though that could be reading far too much into the message.
Unknown Worlds has been discussing the next Subnautica game in vague terms for some time, and old job listings have made very clear that something in that universe is in production. Last month, publisher Krafton made it official with some brief details on "the next Subnautica," calling it an "adventure / survival" game that's tentatively set to launch for PC and consoles sometime in the first half of 2025. Whether that release target is for 1.0 or the Early Access version remains to be seen, but my money's on the latter.
Both Subnautica and its expansion-turned-standalone-sequel, Below Zero, launched in Early Access and seemed to benefit greatly from the back-and-forth with fans. The Subnautica series has, to this point, been known for effectively blending open-ended sandbox survival with a robust story and fantastic sci-fi worldbuilding, and I'm very much looking forward to seeing how the third game shapes up.
It has come to my attention that Subnautica is not currently on our list of the best survival games, and I'll be lodging a formal complaint with my editors shortly.
