Below Zero was ass anyways
this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2025
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Agree. Did not get sucked in like subnautica, which is weird because it's basically a small reskin and new (but much smaller) map.
It should have worked, but it very didn't.
Is it actually smaller, though?
Don't get me wrong, I fully agree in spirit, it just seems like several aspects royally screwed over the map design so it felt much smaller.
- The bay being the main area where you started meant everything felt far more like linear progression regardless of where one wandered to.
- The island bifurcating the bay made the bay itself far more prominent, isolated, and greatly reduced how many under water biomes were simply 'there' to explore. You always HAD to wander out in one of two directions to get to some other under water biome open to the surface, of which there were only, what? three?
- Most later game biomes were solo, single entrance offshoots of the already limited 'main' areas. This made them feel much more like explicitly added game assets instead of areas you'd just wander in to while exploring.
- The story and the game design itself seemed to want the on-land biome to be more cool than it was. It was ONE biome, and not even the type of biome that the game is known for.
- The sea truck is cool in concept, but when every area is disparate and isolated, it SUCKED to drive a loaded truck to any of them.
- The "AI" companion (and really, the story over all) totally and completely popped the isolated explorative feeling of the game.
Basically, the basic design of the map and story ran completely counter to everything that made the first such an amazing experience.
The individual biomes and assets themselves were still great, but they were composed in such a way that left them ... not greater than the sum of their parts.
I think it could've been a banger if they had interconnected more biomes and made them larger so there was ANY point to dragging a loaded sea truck to them. The land biome could have worked if they made it much more like a real arctic; an ocean mostly covered in ice sheets instead of it just being some random biome "over there" largely literally on land. The ice worm would've been waaay cooler if the player had to wonder if it could make an appearance under water, for example, even if it never did. The snow fox (or what ever the land vehicle was called, it's been a while) could've been way cooler if it wasn't for one biome "over there", too.
I don't know how much larger it'd need to be, but a little more creativity in mixing the biomes together would've gone a LONG way.
I'm adding some second hand experience here, but what made below zero much worse for my son when he played it was that it constantly crashed, resulting in a lot of lost progress. Often crashing when saving, too, so after having accomplished something. He got it on the switch as some kind of double-feature with subnautica and below zero on a single cartridge. He played through subnautica and loved it but ditched below zero after barely a handful of hours played, purely due to the frustration, not even being at the point where those game design points would have mattered.
I think a large part of why everything was segmented is they released the game into EA way too early. It made it to where they had to have a 'gating' system where they could stop players from going to areas that weren't developed out of finished yet. Overall this affected the maps flow, validating all your points there. Also completely agree with the voiced narrative. Part of what made Subnautica great was the silence. It gives more room for hearing the crazy sounds around you. Instead you had some chatty voice in your head that had commentary about every damn thing.
Eh I know what you mean from a development standpoint (remixing the map would be a huge effort), but I still find it a kinda' copout excuse. I bet we'd be here heralding the design instead of lambasting it if they took the time to really mix the biomes together properly once they had the assets complete.
In fact, I remember some early early access games doing exactly that: basically having demos that were WAY different than the final product. Ugh I wish I remembered any names, though such effort in to game development was over a decade ago, when some companies still treated it like an actual art form instead of a money vessel...
Oh no I wasn't excusing the behavior, quite the contrary. I'm saying the map sucked because they went into EA too early and didn't put effort into changing the map for full release. I agree with you!
Now this has been rather disproved, do we think we could retract the post? It's probably done harm already but we can at least acknowledge it's no longer accurate.
What do you mean this has been disproven?
Can you provide some context. A link maybe?
If you visit the official website of krafton https://www.krafton.com/en/ you should get this pop up:
Basically, Krafton claims that the 3 founders they fired did not do their job in overseeing the project, leading to a game without any direction. Since the game would not meet their standards, they decided to rework a lot and push the release date back.
This is an official statement of a company, meaning they can be (and if I read it correctly have been) sued for slander should they lie here. So a legal department looked over this and decided "Yep, we can claim that they abandoned responsibilities, we can prove that in court". Whether or not this is actually true or just an attempt to regain public opinion, it's a real shitshow.
I wouldn't call this proof. Krafton is known for pulling stuff like this.
Yea but what are executive responsibilities to a company? They generally are not creative and dynamic positions and instead focus on producing results for the corporate body. I could readily see Krafton firing them for trying to make a fun and compelling game as opposed to a profitable game ripe for DLC, for example. Of course they'd couch such money grubbing expectations in to language of the managerial class...
Can you elaborate on that please?
Is Flayra not pursuing legal action against Krafton over this?
Planning on not buying it, that being said I was likely never going to even if this controversy didn't happen. I'm apparently part of 3% of Subnautica players on steam who really didn't care for the game. Gave it a decent chance (7 hours playtime) and talked with several people who adore the game but found many aspects of the game to be overrated, poorly designed, or frustrating. Just about the only thing I can remember honestly enjoying about the game was the aesthetic, which even then was held back by some sometimes downright bad graphics.
Just gonna copy paste my comment on a related post...
Similar shit happened when they were PUBG Corporation. Fuck these lying assholes. Player Unknown was a smart, capable dude, and they exiled him to a remote office because he got pissed at the CEO for over-monetizing things in a way that cost them players.
When they released the battle pass while the game was retail, all of the non-Korean employees nearly revolted. It wasn't smart, and it was a money grab on the players. When the team lead of market research told the product manager that the feature was a bad idea and would lose them all their Western players, the product manager got him demoted and moved to another team.
When the numbers didn't look good, the data analysts were freaking out because they couldn't deliver bad news up the chain of command, even if it was accurate.
When they acquired Mad Glory, they promised that the dev team would still be contracted to other game companies to build APIs and tools for them, keeping the game industry tooling ecosystem healthy (think op.gg). When PUBG Corporation acquired them, the company canceled their contract with Bethesda for the API they were in the middle of building and forbade them from working with other companies.
Fuck Bluehole. Fuck PUBG Corporation. Fuck Krafton. Fuck game studios in Korea. Don't play Korean games. Kpop and cosmetics and whatever are chill. Don't play Korean games. Korean game companies are fucking cancer.
Don't buy Subnautica 2. The Subnautica franchise died when Krafton became the publisher.
Dude what did Korean devs ever do to you ? You ARE generalizing a bit. What's next ?
Friendly reminder that Korea invented and perfected micro-transactions. MapleStory has done more damage to both worldwide gaming and Korean game devs than anything else could ever hope to.
Wasn't it the Chinese that perfected Microtransactions ??
You know Genshin Impact, Azur Lane, ZZZ, Wuthering waves etc...
gachas are japanese in origin
Which is very sad because MapleStory was such a great game, at one time. I still play it (private servers) often, 20 years later. The game had such creative passion in it before Nexon took over and monetized the shit out of it.
Kpop is extremely exploitative to the artists, much worse than game development.
We're talking physical and sexual abuse levels here.
Not chill at all.
Probably would not add kpop to the list of chill. That industry is rife with abuse like slave contracts.
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Subnautica is one of those games that's incredible hard to recreate. Once they started trying to explain every little thing about the aliens I completely lost interest. You may be able to bottle lightning, but you certainly can't do it twice.
Honestly, I do not plan to buy it after Below Zero. Now that they did all the evil stuff I guess my decision is well justified.
jokes on them, i already pirate their games ☕
Pop it in your calendars? Maybe I'm using calendars wrong, but mine aren't filled with things I should avoid doing. But, I'm willing to learn. What date should I put "Don't Buy Subnautica 2" on?
Yup, that title was pure brain fuck.
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Well this just wrecked my evening.
But this is an ongoing, recurring story. Thief 2014 was a mockery of the original titles.
It's a canon event for any game company that achieves moderate success
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They did all this because they know that the vast majority of the playerbase will never hear about this, and many of those that do will either forget, or simply not care enough to boycott the game. We're in an age of apathy across the board, with so much bad press that any given scandal just fades into the background noise.
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The three people were replaced with a guy who used to work at EA. And one of their first announcements was an unprompted "we wont put loot boxes in the game"..
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