Anthony Gallegos Pushes Subnautica 2 Toward Blur and Horizon Fear — Subnautica Games
subnautica games took a sharper turn toward uncertainty in a gameplay deep dive ahead of today's early access. Lead game designer Anthony Gallegos said the sequel is hiding the horizon so players still see blurry, moving creatures at the edge of view.
The original Subnautica already used a watery space that darkened and teased shifting shapes just out of sight. Subnautica 2 is using Unreal Engine 5 to push that idea closer to realism without giving away too much of the ocean at once.
Gallegos and the horizon line
Anthony Gallegos spelled out the approach during the presentation: “We really try and hide the stuff that’s on the horizon so that you still get those blurry, moving creatures on the edge of your view”. That is the design choice sitting underneath the sequel’s fear factor, not a louder monster or a more aggressive pitch.
The practical effect is simple. The game is asking players to read movement, not clarity, and that keeps distant water from turning into a clean map of where danger sits.
Unreal Engine 5 lighting choices
Unreal Engine 5 is doing more than making the sequel look sharper. Gallegos pointed to the jump in fidelity from Nanite and said Lumen opened lighting opportunities that let the team build some really beautiful areas.
That visual tooling also supports the structure of the world itself. Early biomes lean heavily on bioluminescence to keep things readable and inviting, while deeper waters gradually strip away light and become more oppressive.
Reading the deeper waters
The sequel is not chasing realism for its own sake, even if the ocean behaves in a physical way. It is using visibility as the main pressure point, which puts the player in the same basic position the first game established but with a more advanced rendering stack behind it.
For players, that means the early hours should be easier to read than the depths. Once the light falls off, the game is betting that what you cannot quite see will do more work than anything it can show directly.
