Subnautica 2 | Official teaser trailer

I'd love for them to really get what made the first one great and expand on it, but the previous game showed that I don't think they really did (and also got lost in a bunch of gimmicks).

They're really on the crux of something wonderful, and I'm sorta surprised someone else hasn't beaten them to it at this point with how badly they've fumbled.

Isn't this the third one?

I’m excited and skeptical at the same time. Subnautica is one of my favorite games, but Below Zero is not. It looks like this iteration is returning to a more diverse tropical biome, and I’m glad for it. I think one of Below Zero’s fatal flaws was a monotonous world, maybe symptomatic of a shorter development cycle. Releasing in early access next year worries me the environment isn’t getting the same level of care and detail as the first game.

Hm, trailer hints of multiplayer or just NPCs?

Loved the first game and bought the second as soon as it was available in EA. I'm not going to do that this time, for a couple reasons.

First off, my experience with Below Zero's early access leads me to think this just isn't the sort of game that is best played EA, or else Unknown Worlds has lost the thread of how to develop such a game in EA. With BZ, biomes seemed to be more or less finished one after the other, with new biomes being pasted in as finished with very little development of or integration with the previously "finished" areas. This led the map to feel even more patchwork than in the previous title, and meant that as you played through the various updates there was no incentive to start over from scratch, because you'd just be retreading ground you'd covered before. This was only exacerbated by the questionable decision to focus on dry land exploration rather than in depth (both literally and figuratively).

The end product of BZ almost totally lacked the verticality of the first, which is important when the entire atmosphere of your world is predicated on thalassophobia. Much of the power of the first title lies in that instinctual anxiety that one feels when they're hovering over a watery abyss, with God only knows what monstrosity lurking in the depths beneath. In Below Zero, you knew what was beneath: mostly a sandy sea floor, or else a glacier. There was very little to grab the player by the viscera and engage them.

Then there's the narrative decisions. Oh my, the narrative decisions! The only issues I really had with the protagonist was the decision to replace the original VA–who I felt had a Freema Agyeman in Doctor Who-like vibe, and I thought did pretty well with the material she was given–and the quality of the characterization itself. I see a lot of people criticizing the choice to have a voiced protagonist at all, which I don't think is really the issue. A voiced protag with something actually interesting to say would've been fine, in my opinion, but that's not what we got. She ended up having pretty much no defining characteristics–not even a cool accent, in the end–and the story she was involved in was rather trite and didn't really have anything new to say. It made the choice to characterize her feel more like a marketing choice rather than an organic result of having a story and character UW wanted to show us. Outside of the troll brigade's usual gripes when they see a female person-of-color in a video game, I think this was the real root of people's dislike of the protag in BZ.

Then there's the other protag, Zoots MaGoots, or whatever his comically quotidian name was. He's an alien intelligence forcibly crammed into the main protagonist's mind, so now they have to find a way to transfer his consciousness into a separate body so he can go home.

I loathed Zoots. I think they were aiming for a fish out of water (get it?), super smart but socially inept, wisecracking sidekick kind of thing, but they failed. Hard. He didn't feel endearingly naive, he felt like a condescending asshole who lived in your brain. The fact that I can describe what they were trying to do with him in storytelling cliches, but in the same breath say they failed, should tell you all you need to know about him and the rest of the writing for that matter.

The biggest problem of all though is that they had the opportunity to really flesh-out and develop mechanics that were great about the first game but felt incomplete, and they chose instead to introduce new mechanics that they left feeling incomplete. I'm talking about the mechanics that still drive people to play the original today, such as base-building, resource gathering, crafting, and cataloguing alien species. Those were fantastic ideas, but the execution of them in the first game never really felt as deep and engaging as they could've been.

Base building was far too modular and inflexible, and didn't really give the player the tools or incentive to build something unique. You've seen one big Subnautica base, you've pretty much seen them all. I see this as a big issue, because I always wanted to build a unique, sprawling undersea complex like some kind of tunnel at SeaWorld, but with alien creatures swimming about in bizarre seascapes outside a big picture window. It didn't feel like either game wanted to allow me to do that. Hard clipping limits and the almost total reliance on pre-designed modular rooms meant you built bases kind of like how the ISS was built, which may be realistic and all, but doesn't give your creativity full rein. This is an especial problem with a modern sequel, since so many fantastic games have been developed since the first that took inspiration from Subnautica's base building and did it so much better. Here I'm thinking primarily of Satisfactory, but you could point at a half dozen or more games with base building mechanics that are much better developed than either Subnautica title.

Crafting likewise changed little between games, outside of a couple of new products that could be made. There was no attempt to introduce automation of any sort, and with nothing but a handful of tertiary products the player only needs to build once and never again, there's really no need for it. They pretty much did nothing new with the concept whatsoever, so it feels like something they included simply because they had it in the first game.

I generally dislike quantifying game quality, but gun to my head, I'd give BZ a C+. It's not bad, but fails to live up to the promise of a sequel to the first game by not really taking the concept in a new direction. To be fair to Unknown Worlds, they told us not to think of Below Zero as a true sequel (hence, presumably, this entry's name), but then they failed almost totally in justifying BZ's existence at all. If they were burning to give us a more narratively focused experience and that's why they didn't bother to develop the mechanics much, then why didn't they write a story that was actually worth the telling? It feels like they decided first that they wanted to make a more narratively focused game, and then the story came later, which seems bass-ackwards. You're a game studio. Unless you have a story you think the world needs to hear, you should probably focus on the game first.

We haven't seen really anything about what direction UW wants to take the gameplay, but unless they've genuinely taken the criticisms people had of the second game seriously and re-examine where their strengths as a developer lie, I'm not particularly interested in where they'll take it.