I’m not sure there’s been a better invention for multiplayer games than proximity chat. Whether it be friends screaming vengeance down the side of a mountain after you abandon them in Peak, or the wails of one of your fellow workers fall suspiciously silent in Lethal Company. Proximity chat offers up fertile ground for hilariously wacky and memorable multiplayer moments, so you can imagine my excitement when I found out it’s coming to Subnautica 2.
“This is going to let you have an in-game voice chat option that you can do with your friends,” Anthony Gallegos, creative director, says in a dev diary. “You’ll be able to talk locally with each other and then as you get further away you’ll hear a switch to sort of a radio-sounding voice, and you’ll progressively break up as you get further away, up until a certain point where you can almost not hear me at all.”
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Now, you can use your friends as a canary, sending them down into dark caves and listening to see if anything’s amiss. At the very least, Gallegos believes it will “definitely add to the tension of” exploring the formidable alien ocean.
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But that’s not all being added to Subnautica 2 in its next update. The whole patch seems friend-focused. There’s player emotes that will “let you roll through a bunch of different emotions, so you can cheer on your friends, clap at them to tell them that you’re happy with them, or maybe that you’re a little annoyed with them, and you can also show that you’re frustrated.
“The thing that I think is the most exciting about these is actually the ways that people will use them out of context that I think will make for some really fun moments.”
Players can also look forward to better inventory sharing, which means you won’t have to go searching for discarded loot that your friends leave behind. Instead, all you have to do now is go up behind your pal and access their stash from their backpack—quick and efficient. Although, thieves-be-warned, “the person whose inventory is being accessed will get a little notification” so pickpocketing is out of the question, unless you have an especially unobservant friend.
The last major feature coming with 1.2 will be player revives. Now, if you’re playing with a group and get lost, or get too hungry and pass out, your friends will have a short amount of time to swim over to you, share their oxygen, and revive you back to the world of the living. It’s such a helpful feature that I’m honestly pretty surprised Subnautica 2 didn’t have it before.
All in all, update 1.2 seems like a helpful pitstop on the way to more significant changes, which feels But it is a pitstop that was very necessary before the map gets any bigger and more challenging to navigate: “Alongside all of this we’re continuing work on the Early Access 2 update that’s going to add the new region with the new story, and the new progression, and the new vehicles, all those things.”
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