[STEAM] Subnautica 2 Patch Adds Buddy System, Dev Reveals Glimpse at Early Access 2 Update

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gets its Buddy system update today, August 19. It adds a number of new features revolving around multiplayer in the underwater survival and crafting game.

In a new

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, creative director Anthony Gallegos ran through everything players can expect from the co-op focused 1.2 update, which adds Proximity Chat, Player Trading and Revives, and an all-new Tracking Tag.

Gallegos said 1.2 includes developer Unknown Worlds’ first iteration of Subnautica 2 proximity chat. It includes an in-game voice chat option that you can use with your friends to talk locally with each other. As you get farther away it will switch to a radio-sounding voice that will progressively break up to a point where you can almost not hear your friend. “I think it definitely adds to the tension of it,” Gallegos said.

Also added is player emotes via a small menu that lets players cheer on their friends, clap, or tell them you’re a little annoyed or frustrated. Gallegos said he’s looking forward to seeing players use these emotes out of context to create fun moments, such as sarcastically clapping.

Inventory sharing lets players walk up behind another player, access their inventory and quickly swap items between one another, rather than having to drop inventory items out in the world and have them pick them up.

Player revives are also added, so if your friend is downed for whatever reason, you’ll have some time to share some oxygen with them and bring them back to life.

Two additional player characters (Grace and Jegna) are added alongside two new suit colors, “which should help with a little bit more of the diversification of players when you’re in multiplayer,” Gallegos explained. “You can still all look like the same character if you want — that’s something we support — but we like to have more options for you, and we will continue to roll out new options as we go through early access.”

Also included is the tracking tag, a short-range beacon you can throw out in the environment or put inside an inventory such as a portable locker, so if you ever leave it in a cave you can find your way back to it. If you die holding a tracking tag or have one in your inventory, it will extend your ****** box signal to help you find the stuff you left behind.

Improved HUD icons means all the icons will not be at full scale by default, but when you mouse over them after a half second or so they will scale up and give you the full details. “This is really nice because when you get really farther away from a region and you might have like six beacons, you turn and look at it, they're all really grouped together. But this allows you to more precisely pick the one that you want to know the information for without it feeling so busy on the HUD,” Gallegos said.

Alongside that, there are improved pinned recipes, which means the UI should feel a little less confusing, and improvements to the base builder tool that should help make it clearer when you can and can't build something.

Gallegos said this is just a chunk of the larger features added in 1.2, so expect more when the patch notes are available. Meanwhile, Unknown Worlds is continuing to work on the Early Access 2 update, which adds the new region, new story, new progression, new vehicles, and a lot more. The video showed a tantalizing glimpse at gameplay footage of this work-in-progress.

“The whole reason that we do make games at Unknown Worlds in this way is because we think we make the best games possible when you participate in this development alongside us,” Gallegos concluded. “And I think that this update shows that we really want to listen and prioritize the things that our fans are asking for.”

Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on

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at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at [email protected] or confidentially at *****@*****.tld.

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