Subnautica 2 design lead Anthony Gallegos has opened up about the reaction to Unknown Worlds’ decision to prevent players from killing predators in the underwater survival game, explaining the developers’ true intent.

Not being able to kill fish in Subnautica 2 is the game’s hottest topic, and while Unknown Worlds has promised to add “mitigation” to the game so you can better deal with predators, it will never allow you to kill them.

Ahead of Subnautica 2’s early access launch, Unknown World spoke about not wanting players to conquer or dominate the underwater environment, insisting it wouldn’t feature tools that would let them slay anything that gets in their way. "We aren't a killing game," level designer Artyom "Artie" O'Rielly said in the Subnautica Discord. "Go play Sons of the Forest or something if you want to kill."

That comment, among others, rubbed some Subnautica 2 players up the wrong way, and came to dominate the no killing fish discourse that emerged in the last few weeks. All the while, a narrative has emerged that Unknown Worlds actually set out to create a “pacifism game.” That, Gallegos told MinnMax in a fascinating new interview about the design of Subnautica 2, just isn’t true.

Gallegos, who joined Unknown Worlds in 2021 just a year before development on Subnautica 2 started, said “people have a little bit of a misunderstanding of why we made some of those decisions.”

“A source of a lot of the negative feedback we've gotten is that we've changed the game in the sense that we're not letting you kill predators,” Gallegos continued. “And that was not some decision made because we're like, ‘We're a game about pacifism or we're a non-violent studio.’ The studio was founded by modders who made Half-Life mods and their first mods were all about shooting aliens. They loved the movie Aliens and they wanted to make an Aliens video game that was legally distinct. That is what Natural Selection 1 and 2 are basically.”

Gallegos said that Unknown Worlds co-founder Charlie Cleveland was inspired by the movie Aliens in the making of the first Subnautica, where “he was trying to make it a game without guns because he just thought maybe there was a place for a game that didn't add more to the landscape of violent games, which wasn't an indictment on violent games.”

Still, Gallegos admitted, there is now “this idea that we really are leaning into Subnautica being a pacifism game, which wasn't our intent.” So what was the intent? It was twofold, Gallegos explained. One, Unknown Worlds didn’t want to give players the attitude that they were a “dominator over the world, because the message of the game very much is people learning to live in parallel with the world that they're in.”

And two, the intent had to do with the game design, which was inspired by the likes of Soma and Alien Isolation. Gallegos cited a blog by Soma developer Frictional Games in which the studio said it had found that when it gave players the means to fight things, no matter how miserable the developers made the combat experience, players would always deem it better to master the “crappy” combat than deal with constant threat and tension.

Gallegos cited Konami horror masterpiece Silent Hill 2, where players will master the pipe combat despite it being poor “because it's way better to kill every creature in every hallway and then freely run through it than it is to dodge them when they're scary.”

“And so by removing the option to deal with combat, it means that the omnipresent tension and stuff like that gets to be there,” Gallegos went on. “And so that's really where we're trying to lean into it from.”

Unknown Worlds has been open about its plans to add ways for players to mitigate the threat of predators in Subnautica 2 via future updates. But Gallegos said the developers also plan to add creature flinches so players actually realise when they’re bonking fish on the face with the hammer.

“For us it's mostly about seeking cool ways for the players to feel smart about it,” Gallegos said. “Some of the stuff we've talked about is like, what if you could build feeders and you could keep creatures so well fed that they don't have any interest in you, which is like something you see in real life when you see people that keep alligators as pets, right? They're like, ‘Oh, alligators are perfectly safe as long as they're not hungry, you know?’”

While the killing fish debate rages on, Subnautica 2 is a clear success. It has sold a huge 4 million copies since its early access launch on May 14, achieving more than 467,000 peak concurrent players on Steam — success Gallegos said took the team by surprise. Subnautica 2 has sold so well that publisher Krafton has reportedly agreed to pay a $250 million earnout to the developers — a bonus that was at the heart of its high-profile legal dispute with the fired Unknown Worlds leadership.

If you’re getting to grips with Subnautica 2, we’ve got a Things to Do First in Subnautica 2 guide to check out before you dive in, plus resource location guides to help you find Titanium, Silver, and more. Discover blackbox and supply crate locations on our interactive Subnautica 2 map, and make sure you don’t miss any Angel Comb Adaptations or Blueprints.

Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.