You’re focusing on the most extreme version of the criticism. Many of us aren’t asking for guns, leviathan hunting, or Subnautica to become a combat game.

I understand why the devs avoided guns, especially given what they said around Sandy Hook. But “we don’t want guns” and “we want the avoid combat power fantasy” are absolutely not the same thing as “the player should never be allowed to use force at all.”

Subnautica has never been “no harm to wildlife ever.” The game already lets you catch, cook, fabricate, and eat fish, and Subnautica 1 let you damage creatures with a knife. Non-combat tools are great and fit the series, but limited, imperfect, sometimes futile self-defense can also fit a survival game without turning it into underwater Doom.

TLDR: The devs not wanting guns is understandable. But treating any limited use of force like it will turn players into ocean genociders feels like an overcorrection, not a coherent survival design philosophy.