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Subnautica, if you ask me, is a game about being incredibly wet and alarmingly hungry. It's an under-the-sea game (you can tell from the name) about hoovering up resources and using them to construct ever-more complex tools that you transcend the barriers placed before you by nature. That's what Subnautica was, and, though I've not played it yet, that's why I'm pretty sure Subnautica 2 is too.
But what if actually it was an ecosystem simulator, or a game where you were constantly bopping between different planets, not just trapped on one?
It's more likely, or at least possible, than you think. In a chat with MinnMax, Subnautica 2 game design lead Anthony Gallegos reflected on the numerous ideas Unknown Worlds dreamt up—and scrapped—for its immensely popular sequel.
"We even entertained ideas like, 'Should this be a direct sequel to Subnautica?'" recalled Gallegos. "Should this be about the same character again? Should we continue the story of [Below Zero]? All those things were explored before we ended up going in a different direction."
Also on the table: something Sea of Thieves-flavoured, centred around "endlessly replayable loops." The long wind-up on development for Subnautica 2 gave Unknown Worlds the space to iterate a lot on some pretty out-there stuff. "We spent like eight months just prototyping wild ideas. Wild ideas like: 'What if we made an ecosystem simulator?' And so some of our early prototypes were like—there's these things that eat clams and the clams breed at a rate of one every 90 seconds, and the clams will then—if you're not careful—eat the kelp forest.
"So what does the player have to do to achieve a balance between [eating] the urchins, the urchins eat the kelp, and left to its own devices, how could these things fall apart or not?"
Which, I must say, sounds like the exact kind of systemic weirdness I go bananas for, but Gallegos says it didn't quite work for Subnautica.
"The problem was, it's really hard to explain to the player without Maxis-level UI—you'd have to bring up a minimap with, like, population density of urchins... so you could understand the information you need to make meaningful change."
That didn't work in a game about being "immersed in the world."
Some other scrapped ideas sound a bit more in keeping with the Subnautica we know, though. "What if we made it closer to something like a No Man's Sky, and you actually went to a bunch of different planets, and every planet had titanium, but you had to figure out how to get it? So on one planet titanium might be rocks on the ground, but another planet it might be fish scales because the fish grow armor," said Gallegos. "Another version was like, 'What if it was a world with no land whatsoever, and your base was a completely mobile thing you built on the surface?' And so everything was diving off of a surface-based floating city that you brought everywhere with you."
Given how well Subnautica 2 is doing, I can't fault Unknown Worlds for leaving these ideas on the drawing board, but I'll admit I wouldn't mind seeing some of them make a return. Maybe in a spin-off? Gallegos sounds open to it. "There are so many spin-off Subnautica games I would love to make that would be wildly different. And I think that's where we could do wildly cool stuff with the franchise," he mused. Clam simulator DLC, coming right up.
