What does it mean to be a Subnautica game? That’s the question developer Unknown Worlds had to answer when starting work on Subnautica 2, which will be released on May 14 in early access after a messy pre-release period that included a much-talked-about delay.
“I think for us, it was making sure that we had a really cool underwater alien world to explore that had surprises for people,” game design lead Anthony Gallegos told Polygon recently over a video call. “We could set it on the same planet again, but I feel like we’ve started to make that planet maybe not as surprising at this point.”
Though Subnautica 2 has the number two in the title, it’s technically the third game in the series. The original Subnautica was followed up by a spin-off in 2021, Subnautica: Below Zero. To set the upcoming adventure apart from the previous games, Unknown Worlds had to bring something new to the table: In comes co-op. Subnautica 2 will support up to four-player co-operative multiplayer from launch.
“From day one, co-op has been in the game, even from the very earliest builds,” creative media producer Scott MacDonald told Polygon.
Unknown Worlds focused on simultaneously nailing the single-player Subnautica 2 experience while also designing and building everything with co-op in mind. The team would prototype features and once a feature was identified as worth pursuing, they’d immediately make it workable in co-op.
Fine-tuning co-op required plenty of testing to make sure everything functioned properly. Gallegos said the team worked to avoid situations where a player would “click on a box and you’re like, ‘Oh my God, look at what it did.’ And everyone’s like, ‘What are you talking about? Didn’t do anything.’”
If Unknown Worlds had had its way with the first Subnautica, co-op wouldn’t be a new feature for the sequel. “Co-op was something that they even thought of putting in the original Subnautica,” Gallegos said. “They just moved on from it at some point.”
It was never going to be easy for the team to implement co-op once Subnautica was in active development. MacDonald noted how, when working with Unity, co-op would basically have to be added in at the ground floor of development. “Otherwise it would be very difficult to build in afterwards,” he said.
MacDonald has been with Unknown Worlds since 2011 and has worked on all three Subnautica titles. (“I’m an old man,” he said.) MacDonald said that the studio experimented with different ways that environmental plants and sea creatures could react to players, but that CPUs and performance in those early days couldn’t handle all the different dynamic features the studio wanted for a co-op mode, let alone for a single player.
With technological advancements and by working with Unreal Engine 5, the team has made Subnautica 2 its most feature-rich game yet. “It’s just so much more interactive and dynamic compared to what we could do in the past,” MacDonald said.
