Subnautica 2 Launches Into Early Access With Strong Sales and a Peaceful Vibe

May 16, 2026 - 06:28

Subnautica 2, which entered early access on Thursday after a lengthy development cycle and notable legal drama, is already making waves. The game is lovely, offering a surprisingly chill experience despite the inherent stress of deep-sea exploration on the ocean planet Proteus.

Players can spend plenty of time near the surface, drifting through gorgeous aquatic environments. Float around in the shallows, kick your flippers to chase colorful fish, and find text logs in mysteriously destroyed undersea bases. The conceit is that your human protagonist has woken up in an undersea base on a strange planet, trying to figure out what happened to the other explorers and how to stay alive.

Almost all the action happens in a beautiful underwater seascape filled with rainbow fish, coral domes, and deep caves containing ore and strange plants. At night, bioluminescent flora and fauna illuminate the sea floor. Early gameplay involves meditative loops: diving from your base, grabbing fish, using a scanner to identify plants, managing oxygen levels, gathering resources, building a base, and crafting gadgets.

The game benefits from its relative non-violence. There are fish that butt heads and some menacing ones that chase you, but distraction and evasion are the order of the day. This peaceful vibe stems from a decision made by Unknown Worlds co-founder Charlie Cleveland over a decade ago, when he left guns out of the original Subnautica. Appalled by mass shootings in America, Cleveland said in 2016 that the world might benefit from one less piece of art glamorizing guns.

Subnautica 2 has already sold two million copies in less than one day of release. The game reached more than 467,000 peak concurrent players on Steam on launch day. It is also available on Xbox through the Game Preview program and on Game Pass. Save files from Steam or console can be uploaded to the cloud and accessed on any device.

Lead developer Anthony Gallegos said Unknown Worlds plans to keep the game in early access for at least two years, promising feature parity between PC and console throughout that time. Every patch will go out on Xbox, Steam, and the Epic Games Store simultaneously because the game supports cross-play.

The game is releasing amid an ongoing lawsuit brought by the studio's former leaders against its relatively new ownership. A partial decision restored one of Unknown Worlds' leaders, Ted Gill, to studio CEO just two months ago. The legal battle over whether parent company Krafton tried to deprive the leaders of a chance to earn a nine-figure payout continues. During a pre-briefing, a Krafton host shut down a question about what it was like for developers to build this game during a lawsuit.