Ironically, some of the game’s bigger changes are happening above the surface. Having not played the first game since 2018, I instantly found my sea legs when jumping into Below Zero, immediately losing an hour to its colorful world in what felt like the blink of an eye. After the exciting opening, the game dives into familiar territory with the player slowly crafting some basic survival tools that allow them to dive deeper and collect more resources. That made for a story that better fit with the gameplay we had.” Here on the Land and Seaīelow Zero isn’t a major departure from the original when it comes to moment-to-moment underwater gameplay. Your character took a risky decision to live on a planet alone in a dangerous environment to figure out what happened to her sister. “We changed the story so you came here intentionally. “I really like finding ways for the narrative and the gameplay to really connect, and that’s one of the reasons we rebooted the story after we started development,” Kalina says. Unknown Worlds had to go back to the drawing board to more naturally blend the core mechanics and the story it wanted to tell. An initial draft had players starting with a fully operational base that gets destroyed, forcing them to start from scratch. The story, which revolves around an explorer looking for her missing sister, initially created challenges for a series that’s primarily about survival. The subtle environmental cues are still there, but Below Zero also contains more explicit set pieces, direct dialogue with NPCs, and scripted story beats that bring an extra layer of structure to stitch together the stretches of non-linear exploration.Ī hidden cave in Subnautica: Below Zero. The story drives the game’s flow this time around, guiding players a little more than the game’s more freeform predecessor. It’s a whole new world, new story, new creatures.” Our ambition was pretty big and we didn’t have a clear read on how big it was. So we started by deleting the old world and starting from scratch. “They’re built on the Ultima 6 foundation and it’s basically the same tech and gameplay mechanics, but a whole new world. “We were looking back at old games like Worlds of Ultima,” Kalina says.

Project Lead David Kalina tells Inverse that while the game originally started as an add-on to the original game, that added scale turned it into something much bigger. As Developer Unknown Worlds Entertainment walked through some of the game’s new features, it quickly became apparent that there’s a grander sci-fi story happening on planet 4546B this time around. Inverse attended a preview event for the game, which is set to exit early access sometime this spring.

Subnautica below zero gameplay