When I play Subnautica 2, I often feel as though I am swimming in two worlds simultaneously. On the one hand, there is the world that goes on without me, the world of wonky indigenous beings living out their lives, careless of my presence: shoals of unharvestable fish swizzing past like dropped fireworks, growth cycles half-deciphered in flooded laboratories, crested hammerheads idly circling their territories. On the other, there is the world that goes on for me, its rewards and hazards colour-coded and reasonably predictable, its flora and fauna gated-off and patterned according to their role within the crafting and progression systems. This latter world is the one I recognise from other, more conventional open worlds that exist to be painted your colour, worlds that operate like haunted fairgrounds for endlessly distracted soldier-tourists. And it is precisely this tension — between a living ocean and a conquered playground — that has surfaced in the demand for more weapons from a corner of the playerbase, revealing a deeper unease about what an open world is supposed to be.
Why the Demand for Weapons in Subnautica 2 Exposes a Genre-Wide Contradiction
The call for greater firepower in Subnautica 2 is not simply a matter of player preference or mechanical convenience. It is a pressure point where the game’s carefully constructed philosophy meets the ingrained expectations of the open world genre. Most open worlds are designed to be conquered. They present themselves as exotic, passive landscapes, yours to explore from end to end, possibly resistant but without the capacity to really change the player save for in ways ordained by some extractivist progression system. Given this fundamental power relationship, to restrict an open world player’s ability to kill may seem like contrarianism, though it is actually in keeping with the sanitisation of empire delivered by imagery and descriptions of ‘unspoilt’ worlds — their beautific ’emptiness’ the result of considerable bloodshed out of frame.
The developers at Unknown Worlds have been clear about their intent. Design lead Anthony Gallegos has stated that the game’s minimal weaponry reflects a desire to avoid characterising the player as “conqueror, colonist, dominator.” This is not a casual design choice; it is a structural commitment that runs counter to the gravitational pull of the genre. The game offers little in the way of weapons, save for a few tools that can be repurposed for self-defence. While you are encouraged to hunt smaller creatures for food and water (there are a few ‘vegan’ options, including seaweed salads, though wholly plant-based playthroughs may not be possible), the game gives you minimal means or motivation to fight the grander predators that prowl certain regions.
What is Subnautica 2’s non-violence ethos? The game explicitly avoids positioning the player as a violent conqueror by restricting weapons and instead casting them as a disposable clone pioneer investigating disappearances, with survival and exploration taking precedence over combat against larger predators.
The Colonial Undertow of the Amusement Park World
The tension surrounding weaponry in Subnautica 2 is not happening in a vacuum. It is part of a broader conversation about the imperial and colonial heritage of open world design. Writer and designer Nikhil Murthy, whose projects range from basketball roguelikes to send-ups of Civilization, has developed a rich body of work examining how open worlds might escape what he calls “amusement park” design.
“You go to the village, all the rides spin up,” Murthy explains, describing the conventional open world structure. “You leave the village, all the rides spin down. They’re only moving while you’re there. And it makes the world feel hollow because if Ganondorf is there, if he’s got this giant floating castle of evil, and you have all of these heroic characters all across the world — why are they just waiting for you? Why are you the centre of everyone’s attention?”
The argument cuts deeper than mere gameplay critique. Murthy traces this solipsistic escapism to colonial fantasies like Rudyard Kipling’s picaresque novel Kim, with its characterisation of India as an ornamental chess set, the backdrop for a “Great Game” between Britain and Russia. “[The idea] that this person is the hero who comes out of nowhere and goes back into nowhere, and everything is built just so that this one guy can have fun,” Murthy continues. “Then what are we even talking about, you know — there is no good, there is no evil, there are no statements to be made. It’s just like, we’re here for this one person’s amusement, and that is a narrative that has colonial heritage.”
How Subnautica 2’s Narrative Subverts the Heroic Archetype
Where Subnautica 2 distinguishes itself from the elementary open world hero story — as told by The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild — is in its narrative framing. The game casts you not as a chosen hero awakening from a magical slumber, but as a grotesque of disposable labour: a clone ‘pioneer’ 3D-printed by “Noa,” an automated supervisor, to investigate the disappearances of previous pioneers and their bases. Your biobed rebirths are a travesty of Link’s emergence from his enchanted sarcophagus. The reprintable clone premise flips the script on the concept of a ‘blank tablet’ protagonist; you do indeed “come out of nowhere and go back to nowhere,” as Murthy says of the classic “action man” lead, but this is not an expression of your power — it is a mark of your helplessness.
As regards the current early access release, Subnautica 2‘s plot traps you between this insidious AI overlord and an indigenous, networked organism of comblike growths that reworks other lifeforms to ambiguous end. The two parties mirror each other, each seeking control over the bodies of the game’s humanoid characters. The oceanic entity infests the castaways, inducing delirium alongside some helpful mutations; it seeks always to lure people towards the strange treelike structure on the horizon. Noa, meanwhile, endows you with a tree of unlockable crafting recipes while trying to maintain command of the corrupted flesh of its minions through a purgative ‘medical’ regimen of euthanasia and reprinting. The lines between these pervasive antagonists are blurry: Noa is something of a sea monster, its network of autonomous base terminals modelled on the cognitive architecture of cephalopods.
The Limits of Subversion: Where Subnautica 2 Still Waits Upon You
Much of the intrigue in Subnautica 2 exists primarily in the writing. In the moment to moment, the game distances you from its interrogation of offworld colonialism for the sake of some familiar routines of exploration and extraction. There are fixed biomes of creatures who are designed for easy recognition as resources or threats. The artistry of these creatures reflects study of ocean fauna, but also has a lot in common with the animate props of many other videogames. Above all, time is yours to dispose of — save for the developer’s own early access updates, the world only changes in significant ways when you act upon it.
How does Subnautica 2 challenge open world conventions while still conforming to them? The game undermines the heroic power fantasy through its clone narrative and restricted weapons, yet it still relies on familiar systems of resource extraction, fixed biomes, and a world that primarily changes only in response to player action.
Murthy’s Vision for Postcolonial Open Worlds
Murthy’s ideas for decolonising the open world offer a framework for understanding what Subnautica 2 reaches toward, even if it does not fully arrive. Many of his proposals are simply about reversing or distributing agency, allowing other characters, events, places and things to ‘happen’ and continue happening, without the player’s involvement.
“It can even be something like a dynamic stalemate, where you come into the situation, not from the start of the story, but the middle of the story,” he says. “A town is constantly being besieged and there’s just that ongoing back and forth, so when you enter it, it doesn’t feel like you’ve come in at the start of the chapter, but more at the middle.”
Murthy also argues for worlds that do not quite comprehend themselves, for history books that disagree and for sites of incoherence, rather than the steady formation of a single, authoritative body of lore. “I think it’s important to give players that, to tell players that there are things that the game itself doesn’t know, that as a game designer, I don’t actually know,” he says. “The game itself, the world of the game, there are things within it that it doesn’t understand.” He also makes the case for permanent consequences; players should be able to scar the world, even when acting with the best of intentions, rather than having the locations reset between visits.
Where Subnautica 2 Aligns with Postcolonial Design Principles
By the time you arrive in Subnautica 2‘s ocean, the clash between Noa, the Tree, and the other human colonists is well advanced. You enter in the middle of the story, not at its beginning. The other settlers offer contrasting views in audiologs about how to gainsay the AI, and the possibility of “solidarity” with the sealife — a noisy constellation of possible solutions to the same problems you face as player. The seabed is littered with abortive efforts at putting those ideas into practice, abandoned bases and labs you pick through like a hermit crab looking for a new shell. There are other artefacts, deeper down, that charge all of these convolutions with new complexity.
The ocean simulation is also less player-centric than that of the original game. One deceptively minor technical adjustment is that creatures are more able to respond to each other. Larger, territorial creatures seek to drive each other off. The world thus has a ‘live’ agency that extends beyond its relationship to the player, and which is more compelling, in its way, than any petrified lore description or scripted encounter featuring some abyssal intelligence.
Murthy has commented on Bluesky about the Subnautica 2 non-violence debate, and his fingerprints are visible across the game’s current early access build. The game is clearly wrestling with the very questions he raises about agency, conquest, and the ethics of world design.
The Persistent Tension: A World That Waits, Even as It Rebels
Still, the liveliness is carefully constrained. It is possible to overfish a biome, but the predators never rinse the crevices of the waterslugs and other fauna you need for potable water and food. Much of this can be justified by pointing out that players do not exist here for long enough to observe larger changes, but the bare truth is likely that if Subnautica 2‘s world were as unruly and encroaching as described, it would not meet expectations for its genre. Its world is not yours to destroy, nor entirely a vehicle for your amusement, but on some level, it waits upon you.
This is the unresolved chord at the heart of Subnautica 2‘s early access. The game is swimming against the currents of its genre — a story about indentured settlers that routes away from the violence widely expected of open worlds, a richly adorned landscape of plunder that refuses to arm you for wholesale conquest. And yet it cannot fully escape the gravitational pull of the amusement park. The demand for weapons is, in a strange way, a testament to the game’s success: it has created a world convincing enough that players want to dominate it, and restrictive enough that they feel the absence of that power as a lack. What remains to be seen is whether the finished game will find a way to resolve this tension — or whether, like the best postcolonial art, it will simply teach us to sit more uncomfortably with it.
