I recently tried Subnautica, a game that sat in my library for years after I picked it up in a humble bundle.
Despite my dislike of survival games I enjoyed the first game from Unknown Worlds, Natural Selection 2. I thought it had a great concept and with a few tweaks would have been a success. They also released a lot of updates and seemed pretty active. So I thought what the hell, I heard good things I'll try it.
Subnautica exceeded my expectations and I genuinely enjoyed it. Upon completion I looked up a few videos for the sequel, Below Zero, and...didn't like what I saw.
I decided to pick up Below Zero for free to try it out and confirm my suspicions before paying for it...and holy shit am I glad I did.
It is such an incredible departure from the original, and disturbingly woke. For no reason. It's a survival game on an alien world, seemingly impossible to fuck up.
And somehow they managed. They made the same mistake Dead Space did and gave your character a voice and personality...except surprise surprise you are now a sassy black female scientist / adventurer who don't take no shit from nobody!
On the surface that may seem small, but the beauty of the original was how minimal the voice acting was. You'd find hints and clues scattered around the world, there was no hand-holding or even a map. It was sparse, you felt isolated and alone considering no other humans are around and you only have dead data logs to figure out what to do.
Now this dumb black bitch straight up tells you what to do. "Oh I need to do ____" "Oh looks like I'll need to go ____" "Sounds like I should ____" and to make things worse it pops up exactly where they are on the map.
So exploration is now a giant fetch quest for a person you can't stand. But wait! It gets worse.
The entire plot now revolves around a dozen characters, 10 of which are women who get 90% of all the voice lines. The two men are both constantly fucking up, being berated, or acting like idiots in every voice log. The 10 women are all scientists in a myriad of various lesbian relationships (I wish I was kidding) but all young and oddly unattractive. Weird how all these young female scientists are all the leads and head of departments while the older men are underlings...
Eventually you even find another human on the planet with you who just so happens to be the classic badass survivalist character who kills everything and drips masculinity...who is also a middle aged woman. Christ I wish I was kidding.
The worst part is despite the addition of all the crap woke elements and disgustingly poor voice acting they managed to somehow make the game worse too. A smaller map...for a sequel? What the fuck, who makes the open world SMALLER in a follow-up? And a huge chunk is on land, which is awkward and defeats basically the entire point of the series.
I looked up the devs and it looks pretty bad:
https://unknownworlds.com/about/
Only a few women but the classic types you'd expect to be working at a game company.
I noticed on a job posting they had this:
We make games that are accessible and engaging for players all over the world. We believe in hiring and supporting the most talented and creative people of diverse backgrounds. That support includes annual professional development and home office stipends, as well as paid time off for volunteer/non-profit work. Join us and be a part of our growing and innovative studio.
Unknown Worlds Entertainment, Inc. is an Equal Employment Opportunity Employer. Qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender perception or identity, national origin, age, marital status, protected veteran status, or disability status.
I have never seen a bigger split between an original game and its sequel before from the same devs. It is insane how badly they fucked up the 2nd one.
Don't give these morons money.
Original: 8/10 great immersive game.
Beyond Zero: 2/10 stay away.
Natural Selection 2: 10/10 give it a shot.
Just...don't pay them for it.
Wasn't the entire reason your options for fighting back limited in the original Subnautica due to a hard political stance the devs were taking against guns and how evil they were? And the player character some mulatto?
I'm not disagreeing with what you are saying. Its what I've heard for years, the original was masterful and the sequel was hot shit. But the wokeness was so deep it literally influenced the entire game premise and mechanics even in the original. You just didn't notice because it wasn't thrown in your face until they got famous enough to try and "mask off" with the sequel.
I mean natural selection 2 was a shooter so that'd be a pretty extreme shift for the devs. I hadn't heard that before I'll have to look into it more.
Yeah they were pretty verbal during Subnautica's development and that was definitely one of their blog posts about not having the ability to kill the wildlife.
And yeah, it did seem like a unnatural departure from their previous work. Even at the time it sounded insincere and more like desperate begging for cred with the game Dev cliques that hate gamers and think they all need their toys taken because they can't be trusted to think for themselves.
Well they fucked up then, cause you most certainly can kill animals. In fact, you have to if you want to survive the first stage of the game. You can't actually grow anything until you make it way out to one of the islands, and most people take a couple hours just to get settled first.
I've noticed that in general, this has been a growing trend in game development as a whole for the last 10-15 years.
It's something I immediately noticed with games set in space/sci-fi types of settings, where there's a dramatic shift away from games with any kind of major wars or conflicts as part of the premise for the game. A lot don't even pretend to have any kind of combat at all.
I suspect this is for a myriad of different reasons. Some are obviously ideological, while I suspect other reasons are for more... cost related reasons. Namely, that a smaller developer could "probably" cut a lot of development time and costs by completely forgoing any combat mechanics and instead just dumping everything into cookie cutter casual gameplay.
IE, crafting, UI-based management gameplay, walking simulators, building games, and standard survival mechanics. When you shift your target to casuals who just want something distracting and mildly stimulating, you don't have to worry about making the gameplay engaging, snappy, satisfying, fun, or bug free. Audio and visual departments also have it easier. No need for thorough level design or even a story most of the time. Game difficulty and balance is no longer an issue to deal with. Etc etc.
As far as I know, having not played it, Subnautica has combat mechanics. They are just extremely limited to poor melee that can only really be helpful against small things.
So even as a "small" dev, they still had to program in almost all elements of combat regardless. They just took away any of your tools and left in all the reasons why you'd want those tools. All for a politic statement.
Beyond this specific example, which the devs made their reasonings clear for, I think the shift away from conflict in sci-fi is due to their inability to actually portray nuance. War is inherently political, both sides will have a point and you will have to portray bad people doing good things. That is the only option short of "they are literally born evil and only exist for evil" writing. When that's the two choices, the modern writer will simply throw it all away because one is too scary and the other is too "below their ability."
Especially as the audience for modern sci-fi is "I fucking love science" followers. Mindless sheep who want to OOO and AAA at wild shit without having to actually think. Which war in space would naturally bring about.