There isn’t the substance and depth we yearn for. There are bugs, warts and problems galore that we know about and know how to fix. So we forced ourselves to release Subnautica as “Earliest Access” today, even though our hearts are screaming. I guess we shall call it an Adventure Game, for lack of a better term. A game without combat and weapons (more on this later). A game currently without a specified goal. It’s a game of exploration, discovery and theme. We’re building a game where you feel like a scientist who has crash-landed on an aquatic alien world and is learning how it (and its strange inhabitants) work. We’re not making a sandbox game, nor a building game, nor a survival game, although at times we thought we were. We talk about Minecraft, Terraria, Don’t Starve, Journey and Skyrim a lot, but none of those are really what we’re building. We didn’t struggle trying to find talent or money (NS2), but we did struggle with the massive technical and production challenges of creating a massive open world in Unity and trying to design a game that wasn’t really comparable to anything we’ve seen. Not this time.īut then we had a year of some of the most challenging game development I have ever encountered. I didn’t want to wait even a year before releasing something to our community. We thought seriously about canceling the project, as it seemed so unknown and risky, but when I threatened that, the team pushed back. This game we must make.īut I proclaimed internally that I didn’t want this to be tiring and long project like Natural Selection 2. We made quite a few prototypes (which are included with the Special Edition), and felt that there was something special there. A year ago, we decided to commit our company’s future to Subnautica.

Subnautica game progress route