A lot of things are the same and there are pretty much no surprises. We know the drill because not so much has changed. The thing is, this is completely lost to BZ because we already know what to do. That amazes you and frightens you in equals parts. You find out that there is only one way to go: deep. When you have no idea what you do, you are alone, you start to figure things out, everything is new and every little thing you do shows you how the world works.

I think there is something so beautiful that makes us fall in love with Subnautica: it's the discovering phase. I'm a hardcore Subnautica fan and I'm trying to be 100% honest with you without spoiling anything. I played the latest and final update of BZ. Each alien structure in the first game had meaning and purpose. They are literally just plot MacGuffin to arbitrarily place you in the next story chunk. The alien structures you find have no significance.

In below zero you just kind of putter around a little aquarium running fetch quests. S1 constantly made the player go into uncomfortable situations. The way that they forced you to go past huge dangerous creatures to get uncover the mystery. Yea, I’m Subnautica 1 you had so many dangers! The things that would hunt you down. (Not scary at all!) everything underwater was just mushed together and confusing for some reason. The on land beast things were just annoying. Everything to do with the land sections, I hated.

That was unknown, creepy, and otherworldly. The one cool part was the giant vent gardens. The ones in BZ just look like sharks and whales. The leviathans were threatening and otherworldly. Idk, In the first game, I was terrified pretty much all the time. Maybe the sea truck to make it all faster. The parts where some deep diving was necessary, all you have to do is use oxygen plants. The robo penguin was cute, but it was ultimately useless except for one plot point. The part with the spoiler(ice Worm), yup, I just ran through. I literally just ran and swam through most of the game. I found myself with no need to upgrade stuff to prepare for a big journey. To me, BZ was lacking in depth literally and figuratively. There was not one time in BZ where I was scared.

Subnautica below zero placeholder wiki