Below Zero was ass anyways
this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2025
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Agree. Did not get sucked in like subnautica, which is weird because it's basically a small reskin and new (but much smaller) map.
It should have worked, but it very didn't.
Is it actually smaller, though?
Don't get me wrong, I fully agree in spirit, it just seems like several aspects royally screwed over the map design so it felt much smaller.
- The bay being the main area where you started meant everything felt far more like linear progression regardless of where one wandered to.
- The island bifurcating the bay made the bay itself far more prominent, isolated, and greatly reduced how many under water biomes were simply 'there' to explore. You always HAD to wander out in one of two directions to get to some other under water biome open to the surface, of which there were only, what? three?
- Most later game biomes were solo, single entrance offshoots of the already limited 'main' areas. This made them feel much more like explicitly added game assets instead of areas you'd just wander in to while exploring.
- The story and the game design itself seemed to want the on-land biome to be more cool than it was. It was ONE biome, and not even the type of biome that the game is known for.
- The sea truck is cool in concept, but when every area is disparate and isolated, it SUCKED to drive a loaded truck to any of them.
- The "AI" companion (and really, the story over all) totally and completely popped the isolated explorative feeling of the game.
Basically, the basic design of the map and story ran completely counter to everything that made the first such an amazing experience.
The individual biomes and assets themselves were still great, but they were composed in such a way that left them ... not greater than the sum of their parts.
I think it could've been a banger if they had interconnected more biomes and made them larger so there was ANY point to dragging a loaded sea truck to them. The land biome could have worked if they made it much more like a real arctic; an ocean mostly covered in ice sheets instead of it just being some random biome "over there" largely literally on land. The ice worm would've been waaay cooler if the player had to wonder if it could make an appearance under water, for example, even if it never did. The snow fox (or what ever the land vehicle was called, it's been a while) could've been way cooler if it wasn't for one biome "over there", too.
I don't know how much larger it'd need to be, but a little more creativity in mixing the biomes together would've gone a LONG way.
I think a large part of why everything was segmented is they released the game into EA way too early. It made it to where they had to have a 'gating' system where they could stop players from going to areas that weren't developed out of finished yet. Overall this affected the maps flow, validating all your points there. Also completely agree with the voiced narrative. Part of what made Subnautica great was the silence. It gives more room for hearing the crazy sounds around you. Instead you had some chatty voice in your head that had commentary about every damn thing.
Eh I know what you mean from a development standpoint (remixing the map would be a huge effort), but I still find it a kinda' copout excuse. I bet we'd be here heralding the design instead of lambasting it if they took the time to really mix the biomes together properly once they had the assets complete.
In fact, I remember some early early access games doing exactly that: basically having demos that were WAY different than the final product. Ugh I wish I remembered any names, though such effort in to game development was over a decade ago, when some companies still treated it like an actual art form instead of a money vessel...
Oh no I wasn't excusing the behavior, quite the contrary. I'm saying the map sucked because they went into EA too early and didn't put effort into changing the map for full release. I agree with you!
Yea, if only they had thrown in the extra effort! Maybe we'd be here heralding it as a worthy successor instead of identifying the low hanging fruit still on the branch. lol
I'm adding some second hand experience here, but what made below zero much worse for my son when he played it was that it constantly crashed, resulting in a lot of lost progress. Often crashing when saving, too, so after having accomplished something. He got it on the switch as some kind of double-feature with subnautica and below zero on a single cartridge. He played through subnautica and loved it but ditched below zero after barely a handful of hours played, purely due to the frustration, not even being at the point where those game design points would have mattered.
Ouch. I didn't even know either were on the switch. Ironic that the first ran well because they had a good bit of performance issues with it in beta. Though mostly around efficiently streaming assets while moving around, which I'm sure a cart is much faster than old spinny HDDs.
It's a canon event for any game company that achieves moderate success
It’s a canon event for any ~~game~~ company that ~~achieves moderate success~~ gets acquired by investors
Very much not exclusive to the game industry
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The three people were replaced with a guy who used to work at EA. And one of their first announcements was an unprompted "we wont put loot boxes in the game"..
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They did all this because they know that the vast majority of the playerbase will never hear about this, and many of those that do will either forget, or simply not care enough to boycott the game. We're in an age of apathy across the board, with so much bad press that any given scandal just fades into the background noise.
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Pop it in your calendars? Maybe I'm using calendars wrong, but mine aren't filled with things I should avoid doing. But, I'm willing to learn. What date should I put "Don't Buy Subnautica 2" on?
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I am also boycotting Microsoft and every product from companies owned by them.
Sure, that doesn't leave a lot of games I can buy, but hey, Indie games are often the best games. Also I have a backlog so huge there will probably be peace in the middle east before I'm through with it.
Besides if there is a game I really want to play, I hear there arrrrr still ways to do so without supporting genocide.
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Im gonna need a fact check on that bonus number.
Yes you are going to need to, but as you asked so presumptively I have a couple of links from pretty good journalistic sources.
https://www.theverge.com/news/703373/krafton-delay-subnautica-2-250-million-bonus
The Bloomberg article they reference it's paywalled to hell :D https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-07-09/krafton-delays-subnautica-2-game-ahead-of-250-million-payout?accessToken=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJzb3VyY2UiOiJTdWJzY3JpYmVyR2lmdGVkQXJ0aWNsZSIsImlhdCI6MTc1MjA4MzgyNCwiZXhwIjoxNzUyNjg4NjI0LCJhcnRpY2xlSWQiOiJTWjU4SUFUMVVNMFcwMCIsImJjb25uZWN0SWQiOiJCMUVBQkI5NjQ2QUM0REZFQTJBRkI4MjI1MzgyQTJFQSJ9.R0p1u8-Bar_mXzXyKWDJxsN-yaSdlIWVs2GZ5WCbpAM&leadSource=uverify+wall
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Just gonna copy paste my comment on a related post...
Similar shit happened when they were PUBG Corporation. Fuck these lying assholes. Player Unknown was a smart, capable dude, and they exiled him to a remote office because he got pissed at the CEO for over-monetizing things in a way that cost them players.
When they released the battle pass while the game was retail, all of the non-Korean employees nearly revolted. It wasn't smart, and it was a money grab on the players. When the team lead of market research told the product manager that the feature was a bad idea and would lose them all their Western players, the product manager got him demoted and moved to another team.
When the numbers didn't look good, the data analysts were freaking out because they couldn't deliver bad news up the chain of command, even if it was accurate.
When they acquired Mad Glory, they promised that the dev team would still be contracted to other game companies to build APIs and tools for them, keeping the game industry tooling ecosystem healthy (think op.gg). When PUBG Corporation acquired them, the company canceled their contract with Bethesda for the API they were in the middle of building and forbade them from working with other companies.
Fuck Bluehole. Fuck PUBG Corporation. Fuck Krafton. Fuck game studios in Korea. Don't play Korean games. ~~Kpop and~~ cosmetics and whatever are chill. Don't play Korean games. Korean game companies are fucking cancer.
Don't buy Subnautica 2. The Subnautica franchise died when Krafton became the publisher.
Dude what did Korean devs ever do to you ? You ARE generalizing a bit. What's next ?
The devs themselves are fine. It's the leadership that's cancer. Abusive leadership in Korean companies is actually a pretty well known issue. It's just more self-destructive in game companies, which I have direct experience with. So they did a lot to me and my friends. And said friends shared their stories of other Korean game companies.
You're absolutely right to question, especially with my level of anger, but I'm confident this one is justified.
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