#subnatica 2

now, do not take me as a "I WANNA KILL ALL THE NATIVE ANIMALS" person. i do not want to have guns to shoot all the wildlife in the environmentalist game subnautica 2. i agree with the message of being apart of an environment rather than exploiting it. however, i do not think that making their sea monsters entirely invulnerable to player harm is the correct way to go about spreading this message.

chiefly because of one thing: its patronizing.

what do i mean? well, take a look at subnautica 1: your only deadly option is a tiny utility knife and that's it; pretty much every other option you are given is non-violent. if you really, really want to kill the wildlife, you can- but it will be tedious and dangerous and you're better off just avoiding the leviathans or using a stasis gun. this was a great way of communicating the same idea, because it allowed the player to organically understand that killing the wildlife is not a good idea, and that working around it is a better way of doing things.

compare to subnautica 2, where you cannot kill any of the wildlife beyond small, nonviolent fish you cook for food; every single animal is effectively immortal. now, the choice is out of the player's hands- instead of killing the wildlife being a technically available but entirely unappealing option, it is just impossible. it goes from organic to railroaded, and serves only to frustrate the player; the developers make the choice for you rather than allowing you to make it yourself, and so the player learns nothing.

and like, i know a lot of people will say that that's the point, to hammer home the idea of being apart of an ecosystem- and to those people, i ask: do you think animals dont kill each other in an ecosystem? subnautica 2 isn't a game about filming a no-interference nature documentary, its about living in and adapting to a hostile alien world. the idea that nature has to be treated as this sacrosanct untouchable thing, with the well-being of animals and plants placed above human life- is an incredibly harmful piece of rhetoric when discussing actual ways to live in harmony with nature.

and i know some people in the original subnautica decided to kill all the leviathans anyway, out of completionisim or spite or purely because it was hard and tedious and they wanted to prove that they could do it. to those citing this as reason why subnautica 2 had to take the choice out of the player's hands, i urge them to familiarize themselves with the Lord British Postulate; for those who do not want to read a TVtropes article, the idea is that if you make a thing in a video game that people aren't meant to do for whatever reason, someone will find a way to do it anyway. this doesnt detract from the message of environmentalism; literally any moderately popular game with unkillable NPCs or unwinnable boss fights has seen people kill/beat them anyway, just to prove they can- i have no doubt that someone will find a way to kill the subnautica 2 leviathans, as well. this isn't a problem of people not understanding the main idea of your video game, this is just a bunch of technically minded nerds trying to see if they can do something that has been designated by the developers as impossible.