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Trying to put an upfront narrative into this game that's really about exploration and letting players drive the experience is difficult to balance.
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Most of Below Zero’s themes are about loss, disconnection, and reconnection that are maybe mostly on the narrative layer. How did that help you include more of the “magical” thematic elements? Giovanni: Much of that narrative is told through an alien NPC that travels with you throughout the game. They don’t even need to even be open-world as long as the setting is interesting. We could do similar things in other games. Without those, it naturally becomes the player’s experience. Subnautica doesn’t need to provide players explicit goals.
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Unknown Worlds Entertainmentīut then you notice a story thread, and that's attracting your attention. Subnautica: Below Zero’s hero Robin standing on ice.
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That’s one of the magical things that happens in Subnautica. Our players are always discovering the world, and they're enticed by something just out of sight. We like trusting the player with enough agency and tools to figure out what's interesting to them, making the experience unique. When we think about building a world, we try to design something that's inherently joyful to traverse. First and foremost, it's about exploration and discovery. A Subnautica story needs a frontier that hasn't been explored. We talked about setting it inside the human body or doing inner space-style exploration. Just: What are the narrative tenets of a Subnautica story that would remain if the setting changed? Subnautica benefits from a certain kind of warmth. I think it presents a different set of problems and generally is gonna lend itself to something a little colder. It's mostly really open and cold and inorganic. The thing I always come back to with deep space is just how much of it there is and how not dense it is. There's kind of a lean towards sci-fi in the company in general.Īn alien-like underwater section of Subnautica: Below Zero. Taking some of the same fundamental design principles and applying them to a different open-world space. We've done the exercise of trying to imagine a Subnautica-like game in other environments, whether it's an above-ground aerial game or a space game. Just: Have you considered making a game that takes place in outer space? A similar thing kind of happened on the surface, where we're just taking inspiration from really exotic geological formations and very remote places, starting with something familiar and twisting it in the right directions. If you go to certain places underwater, it's almost not recognizable as Earth. I think that's also part of the secret with the underwater vibe being otherworldly. There's a lot of really exotic-looking, icy Arctic-type environments to draw inspiration from, stuff that looks like it's from alien planets. Giovanni: And how did you achieve that for the new on-land sections? And then kind of teasing you to bring you to deeper, more exotic, scarier locations. Unless you're just terrified of the water. There's some magic in Subnautica that is specifically about taking something that's really familiar and easing you in with something that feels very naturalistic and uncomfortable. Just: How do you make the ocean feel otherworldly? Inverse’s Giovanni Colantonio and Just Lunning forged a small explorer’s duo to ask Kalina about Below Zero and who he considered to be the Lady Dimitrescu of Subnautica.Ī bundle of kelp in Subnautica: Below Zero. With so much to explore in Below Zero, interviewing Kalina had to become a two-man job. Everything is in support of those goals.” “First and foremost, It's about exploration and discovery. “A Subnautica story needs a frontier that hasn't been explored,” Kalina tells Inverse. It even has a grand mystery about an ancient alien race called the Precursors. It adds a narrative throughline, land sections, and other gameplay elements. While the original is aptly described as “ Minecraft but underwater,” Below Zero is a bold step forward for the budding franchise.
#Subnautica below zero lead full#
Late in Subnautica’s development, the team began working on an icy expansion called Below Zero that evolved into something much grander: a full sequel helmed by David Kalina. It launched Subnautica into early access back in 2014, a survival game where players explore the ocean depths on an alien planet. A recently leaked Navy video shows some kind of unidentified flying object plunging into the ocean.ĭeveloper Unknown Worlds sees mysteries like that as a call to adventure. We don’t really know what’s down there it may as well be an alien planet. According to some scientists, humanity has yet to explore 95 percent of the ocean.Ĭonsidering that 71 percent of the world is water, there’s an entire world out there that remains undiscovered.