The long-awaited release of Subnautica 2 is finally here after dominating Steam wishlists for nine months, with over five million wishlists. Fans can now hop into the game’s early access and explore the new world it has to offer. A week before release, CGMagazine got a chance to join in on a private deep dive to learn more about the game’s development, including design philosophy and plans for future updates. Unknown Worlds’ Anthony Gallegos, lead game designer, and Scott MacDonald, creative media producer, were there to answer questions.
Subnautica 2’s story is set entirely apart from Subnautica and Subnautica: Below Zero, taking place on a new planet with an entirely different ecological system that series veterans can’t just treat like the ecology of Planet 4546B. Although there won’t be familiar faces like Reaper Leviathans or Peepers, the game was built to emulate the same feelings as those first two games, so returning players can relive the experience of learning to adapt to the strange yet thrilling environment around them, like the first game.
The glimpse we got of Subnautica 2 from the deep dive was just stunning. It really is amazing to see how far the game has come since 2015’s clunky early build of the first game. Besides bringing back all the classic mechanics with a new coat of paint, there’s also this sick new genetic modification system they added, which lets you gain abilities from some of the sea creatures to help your survival.
“The glimpse we got of Subnautica 2 from the deep dive was just stunning.”
These fishy abilities are split into two categories, BioMods and Adaptions. BioMods are interchangeable passive effects described as “situational and class-like.” Adaptions are permanent parts of the story progression, such as your survivor needing to adapt to eating the weird alien life to survive.
Gallegos said, “It’s not meant to be the entire progression for the whole game; it’s meant to be a secondary progression layer that adds onto Subnautica 2 as you go along, so that you’re not just doing the typical blueprint crafting system. We didn’t want these to feel like Bioshock Plasmids. I would say they are more like action-RPG active and passive skills that are very minor. “
We also got two definitive plans for updates 1.1 and 1.2. Update 1.1 will be all about quality-of-life improvements, including more BioMod slots for player builds, PDA entries for more lore to read, and sprint, which apparently was a major request during playtesting. Update 1.2 will be a co-op-centred update with new features like player emotes, player revives, proximity voice chat, and more cosmetic customization options to make your player character your own.
Updates 1.1 and 1.2 should arrive a few months after the launch of early access, but there were no specific plans for when new content will be delivered later. We do know that Subnautica 2 will have big content drops in the future as the world grows for the next chapters of the story, including new biomes, creatures, vehicles, tools, and resources.
Four-player co-op will be the official limit for Subnautica 2’s multiplayer. Gallegos said that expanding beyond that player limit is an optimization problem, adding, “I would not be surprised if someday people ended up modding in stuff that allowed them to take the player count to whatever they thought their PC could handle, but for us, we are really focused on making sure the experience feels good for four players.”
“Subnautica 2 will have big content drops in the future as the world grows for the next chapters of the story, including new biomes, creatures, vehicles, tools, and resources.”
You also do not need to worry about co-op losing those more chilling and isolating tones the single-player experience is known for, as MacDonald said the multiplayer mode is a “shared story experience” still capable of evoking terror in each player. He explained, “You can compare it to going to the cinema with your friends or family, and you are watching a scary movie, you are all having that shared scary experience.”
Returning players to the Subnautica series will also notice that base building looks quite different. Instead of only being able to work with the same circular rooms over and over again, there are now more modular shapes that can be stretched with brush tools to create pretty much any shape a player could want. Even a moonpool can be as small as a pool for a single vehicle or as large as a parking garage floor.
When asked about customizing the shape of vehicles in a similar way, Gallegos said changing the hull of a sub would interfere with the level design philosophy of switching between differently sized vehicles to traverse tighter cave environments. The interior of a large sub is a different story, however. For Subnautica 2’s large submarine, which will be added later down the line, Gallegos said, “We want to provide players with a big open floor plan and let them build the interior of that sub.”
Want to dive into Subnautica 2’s early access? You can play it on Xbox Series X|S and PC via Steam and Epic Games Store.
