Subnautica 2 will feature Space Construction (maybe)

BlueBottle

A while back I read a UWE interview saying that leading up to Subnautica they'd seriously considered a space constructor game instead. So I was intrigued to read this recent leak on the new game:





OK then we've got a base/lab in orbit from which to descend to planet to do some more ecological damage control, gather biomedical research data (Alterra always wants to make its buck) and perhaps unravel some mystery concerning the Aroura.

Intriguingly, transport to the surface is made via multiple space elevators dropped from the station. Why multiple elevators when just one would get you to and from your pad?

I can only think you'd need additional elevators to access areas of the map that would otherwise be inaccessible planet-side. This means that at times the player would have to (a) gather resources from the planet and (b) use these to extend Vesper horizontally above the new target area and then (c) drop down a new elevator.

If the idea of a space constructor seems a little bland, try out last year's space FPS called Prey for an experience of sustained anxiety!

Waddaya think?

Skope

This is for the Subnautica expansion, not a new game.

I don't think that they would go through that much trouble to entirely remake the game or core mechanics.

And last I checked, the Vesper is somewhere near the chopping-block.

BlueBottle

I believe the so-called expansion / DLC is set to be a stand-alone affair, not actually an expansion in the sense that you can travel freely between game 1 and game 2 areas (sadly). It's also gonna be priced. So it seems we're talking about a new game really.

It has been confirmed the new game will made using the new Unity 2018 software. Maybe that's why the separation. The upside may be they'll have a chance to attack some of the lingering performance issues right at the root ths time.

Avimimus

I suspect it would act as a fast-travel system similar to the portals.

elfcrisis

re: multiple space elevators
I'd think it would be so you could go up and down at the same time, but I guess we'll find out.

re: Unity 2018
I got the impression that they were upgrading the entire game to that (and that it's another reason stuff on the XBox is taking so long).

Edit:
Yep, Obraxis mentioned it in response to questions about Update 85 on XBox:

We're working on performance improvements, especially terrain optimizations which should help with I/O issues (which the Xbox and low-end machines suffer from the most). This has taken quite a long time, as well as trying to upgrade to Unity 2018. Upgrading the engine can give us some more more performance improvements but again, it's not a simple thing to do. Upgrading engines breaks many things, so you have to rebuild stuff you've already built without breaking anything else.

Recursion

Once they've upgraded to 2018, they can also implement hybrid ECS for a few of the scripts which are run more often, and that'll also result in a performance boost.