With the early access release of otherworldly diving sim Subnautica 2, developers Unknown Worlds are dealing with some familiar criticisms about the new survival game‘s absence of weaponry or outright combat elements. Speaking to RPS among other journalists in a roundtable interview, design lead Anthony Gallegos acknowledged that Subnautica 2’s emphasis on living with, rather than confronting larger, dangerous organisms will be “a continued point of resistance” for some players, while reiterating that it’s the heart of the game.
Unknown Worlds have made a couple of bloodier action games in their time, the Natural Selection series, but co-founder Charlie Cleveland decided to move away from kill-driven experiences following the Sandy Hook school shootings in 2012.
“I’ve never believed that video game violence creates more real-world violence,” he wrote on Steam during the original Subnautica‘s early access period. “But I couldn’t just sit by and ‘add more guns’ to the world either. So Subnautica is one vote towards a world with less guns. A reminder that there is another way forward. One where we use non-violent and more creative solutions to solve our problems. One where we are not at the top of the food chain.”
That stance continues to define the Subnautica series today, following Cleveland’s acrimonious departure from Unknown Worlds. “I would still say the studio isn’t like anti-violence in any of our games, but it is a core tenet of the Subnautica franchise,” Gallegos told assembled journalists a week before Subnautica 2’s early access launch, after being asked by website Techraptor whether the devs would let players straightforwardly slaughter the game’s deadly leviathan-class creatures. “The one thing that we wish to push is we want people to feel like they’re learning to adapt to live in a world, not sort of the conqueror, colonist, dominator.”
As with the original Subnautica, Subnautica 2’s disinclination to let you knife and gun your way through the menagerie makes perfect sense in the hands. It’s a survival sim built around careful investigation and appreciation. Researching and evading the bigger, hungrier wildlife is part of the thrill. Still, Gallegos acknowledges that not having the opportunity to craft weapons may seem bizarre within the setting.
“I do know that the sort of theming of what we’re doing, where [the character] started out in the colony ship, it would make sense that there would have been some means of self-defense,” he went on. “We plan on tackling that in the story, over time.” In the wider universe of Subnautica, Gallegos explained, each colony ship may have a squad of armed personnel, which he characterised as “frontiersmen”. The player’s character is not one of these gun-toting types, and you’re separated from your own ship’s squad of “frontiersmen” when it crashlands.
Even without offensive tools, it is possible to kill Subnautica’s grander beasties, including the first game’s nightmarish Reapers, by repurposing tools like the drill-armed Prawn suit. Gallegos is a bit saddened by this, though he understands why people do it. “One of the things that’s always bothered me is that when people play Subnautica 1 – it wasn’t even an intention of the team, but they would go into an area and be like, all right, how am I going to murder this Leviathan, so that I don’t have to deal with it anymore,” he said. “Which I think is unfortunate because it takes away a lot of the tension of the region.
“But of course, players do [that] because the optimal play is to remove the big scary creature,” he went on. “So for our game, we’re trying to push players away from that and say that you’re meant to be here, alongside these creatures, which I know will end up disappointing some people, but it is a thing that we feel pretty strongly about, in the Subnautica franchise.
“And we’re doing some gameplay mechanics that players can use a little bit more than we did in the original game, to kind of help mitigate that, so that they’re not using weapons, but they’re using tools to kind of – rather than run away all the time, maybe they can use a tool to distract or force a creature into a different mindset.” As an early example of this, one of the first craftable items in the current early access build is an emergency flare, which you can toss to lure away a pesky predator.
Later in the interview, I followed up with Gallegos, asking whether he felt the argument for creaturely coexistence in Subnautica had gotten easier or harder over the years.
“I think it’s a point of resistance that we will get repeatedly throughout making the game, but we also feel very strongly about it,” he said. “So for us the main thing is that we want to listen to the feedback from players who say ‘I don’t feel like I can defend myself in this area’, or something like that. Then we want to provide and ideate upon the means by which they can do that, but I think it’s an important and interesting constraint to challenge players to think about how they can avoid things.
“And my hope is that it doesn’t even feel that alien, because you’ve seen a move from a lot of horror games – we don’t consider ourselves a horror game, even though we get the horror tag! But, you know, you’ve seen a lot of moves from horror games where they’ve moved from empowering the player with a knife and letting them kill everything to saying, actually, we’re going to move to where you have to hide from monsters, and that’s sort of way you go through. We view ourselves as much more in that lane of it. Though, I do think it will be a continued point of resistance.”
Gallegos cited early feedback to Subnatica 2, in which players from one region in particular were extremely insistent that the developers introduce weapons. “I won’t mention which country this was, but they were, like, overwhelmingly ‘we want to manufacture weapons’, and I was like, man, I feel like people got a very different vibe out of the original Subnautica than being a weapons manufacturing video game! But you know, it’s very important to us to listen to the fans, but there are certain things that as a studio, we feel very, I guess, grounded on, and we don’t want to deviate too far from the original intent.”
He added towards the end of our call that “to me, it’s not about the fact that there has to be zero implications of violence, just that we don’t want them to go out with the express intent that I’m gonna go kill these things in the environment. In the same way that a diver might see a shark and be like, I’m gonna bop the shark in the nose, to make it turn away, but I still respect that the shark wanted to live.”
Playing Subnautica 2? They’re already working on the game’s first round of patches, which will add a sprint button, co-op player revives and proximity chat, among other bits and pieces.
