Don’t expect to kill fish in a future Subnautica 2 patch: ‘You are here to exist on this planet, not to dominate it’

Since Subnautica 2’s cetacean-sized early access launch last week, a contingent of its players have been vocal about their frustration over their inability to retaliate against its predatory sea life with their own lethal intent. Subnautica 2 devs at Unknown Worlds haven’t been swayed by those complaints, urging players to seek out one of the many other survival games if they’re looking for a sandbox where they’re free to kill whatever they find.

That stance isn’t likely to change in the future. In an interview with PC Gamer ahead of its early access launch, Subnautica 2 developers said killing fish outright is fundamentally incompatible with the game the studio wants to make.

“The tone of the game we’re making is that you are here to exist on this planet, not to dominate it. You’re not the conquering colonist here,” said Unknown Worlds gameplay design lead Anthony Gallegos. “The goal here is not for you to master the world and bend it to your will.”

Subnautica 2 does give players tools to defend against hostile marine life: They can craft flares that distract ocean predators when thrown, and an eventual tool for harvesting resources can also be used to repel sea creatures more directly (and forcefully). And you can, of course, shove fish into your pockets so they can eventually be cooked and eaten or turned into fuel for a bioreactor.

But where even Subnautica 1 allowed players to kill fish using a survival knife, Subnautica 2 maintains a firmer line about whether it will let players kill wildlife at their discretion, because it promotes a relationship between the game’s players and their surroundings that Unknown Worlds doesn’t want to enable.

To explain that stance, Unknown Worlds creative media producer Scott MacDonald offered Subnautica 1’s leviathans as an example. The studio gave its leviathans beefy health stats with the assumption that players wouldn’t think fighting them was worth their time—but crucially, Unknown Worlds left those health bars visible.

“We set the health bars to be so high, we thought no one’s gonna bother killing them or anything like that,” MacDonald said. “And then what happens is the community takes it as a challenge, right?”

As the developers tell it, once players realized they could kill leviathans with enough effort, many of them went about systematically purging Subnautica 1’s oceans so they could gather resources without any danger. Its predatory sea life went from being a threat to learn to coexist with to an inconvenience to be eliminated.

“You do the work of killing Leviathan and now it’s perfectly safe. But you also end up robbing the game of its tension,” Gallegos said. “To us, minor decisions like that have major impacts.”

He noted with a chuckle that Unknown Worlds co-founder Charlie Cleveland “was always a bit sad to see how people used a lot of the things in the game to murder things.” As a result, the studio is being a bit more mindful in maintaining a more equal dynamic between the player and the alien sea life.

“Making sure the leviathans are always kind of present reinforces the idea that you’re not the master of this world,” Gallegos said. “You’re not here to bend the creatures and everything to your will. You’re really meant to coexist with them in a way that, I think, was always the goal of the original Subnautica as well.”

If, after all that, you still really, really want to kill those fish: There’s a mod for that.