Subnautica 2 has no combat, and that’s a good thing

Subnautica 2 instantly made waves with its early access debut, and while most of its big features are welcome improvements over the first game, there’s one change that caught folks by surprise: You can’t kill anything in Subnautica 2. Well, sort of. You can turn small fish into meals, which is technically killing, and the sonic resonator blasts parasites into oblivion, which is also technically killing. But everything else? You just have to deal with it. It’s a big part of what makes Subnautica 2 feel different from the flood of other survival adventures out there, though not everyone’s happy about it.

As of this writing, one popular post on the Subnautica subreddit is someone asking how others felt about the decision. A developer from Unknown Worlds posted in the game’s Discord after someone brought the change up.

“Why can’t we kill in SN2?” the commenter asked. “That makes 0 sense.”

“We aren’t a killing game,” the dev said. “Go play Sons of the Forest if you want something to kill.”

The response comes off as a bit abrupt, but the comparison is apt. Survival games like Sons of the Forest have a completely different feel and set of goals. You’re still solving a mystery, but almost everything you do centers on making sure you have enough resources to fend off, or hide from, mutants. New locations are just places where you haven’t died or met new mutants yet. The threat of danger and how you might confront it overwhelms the thrill of discovery and sense of curiosity about what lies ahead. That’s fine! I like Sons of the Forest and its sort-of-prequel a lot. It’s just not what I want from Subnautica 2.

Some of the most memorable moments in Subnautica 2 stand out because I had to find nonviolent solutions. When you cross from the Tadpole Pens to the Alien Ruins, a massive, angry, hungry squid almost inevitably finds and chases you. I was unaware of this fact the first time I crossed and, foolishly, piloted my tadpole close to the ocean floor to see what was there. The squid caught me, but I ejected from the tadpole before it crushed the vehicle entirely and swam into a small rocky alcove until the beast lost interest and swam away. The damage to my poor tadpole was so severe that I couldn’t pilot it again, so I quickly surfaced and went back to my base to build a new one.

The experience taught me a lot without any tutorials — that heavily damaged vehicles can’t be piloted, that deep ocean is much more dangerous than anywhere else (okay that one probably should’ve been obvious), and that I needed to figure out a plan to get across safely. Which I did and also learned giant sea monsters don’t like to follow you up to the surface. I found out you can deter nibblers from living up to their name by blasting them in the face with a sonic resonator and that needlers are like small children in the sense that you can easily distract them with bright, shiny objects so they stop tormenting you for a brief moment.

Finding creative solutions is a big part of what sold me on Subnautica 2, and the option to hack your problems to pieces with an Alterra-approved murder device just wouldn’t have the same appeal. Not to mention it “makes 0 sense” for a control-freak company like Alterra to give its oppressed, angry employees easy access to weapons via handy blueprints. That’s how you start a mutiny.