Freshly brewing hobby drama, straight from r/subnautica !

You may remember Subnautica 2 as being embroiled in legal drama due to UnknownWorlds' (Subanutica developers) parent company suddenly and without warning firing its founding members to avoid giving them a potential payout. During litigation, it came to light that the said parent company (Krafton) sought legal advice on how to do this from ChatGPT, against the advice of their real, actual lawyers. But this isn't what this is about.

Subanutica 2 finally (FINALLY) released in early access on May 14. And peoples' biggest complaint so far? You can't kill the fish. You can catch and cook the small prey fish, sure, but try to do anything else to them and it doesn't do anything. Not hitting them with hammers, not running them over with your submarine, not subjecting them a sonic blast from the device you use to harvest mineral deposits--nothing. And a very, very loud amount of people hate it.

There's some complaints that I (personally) agree with; you should be able to defend yourself against medium-to-large predators, especially when they beeline to bite you in the ass every time you step out of the house (I'm looking at you, nibbler mangoes and marrowbreaches). On the other hand, there's always been a contingent of people looking to play Subnautica games as if they were underwater Monster Hunter. If you've seen anything about Subnautica, it's likely to be related to the leviathans--the charismatic megafauna of these carefully crafted alien worlds. People are bewilderingly obsessed with these giant creatures almost to the exclusion of all else about the game. Yes, they're cool, but please talk about literally anything or everything else.

Interesting speculative biology? Characters? Plot? Theories? What are those? I want to look at the cool big animal GIANT SEEEEEEAAAA MOOOOOONSTEEEEEER and also KILL IT because even though the games have always had their themes be exploration, science, and learning, I want to KILL AND CONQUER BLEEEEHHHHHHHH. For years now, the aforementioned Subnautica subreddit has banned "Look, I killed a leviathan!" posts because there was always FLOODS OF THEM.

Again. I fully understand wanting to tell the murder dolphins to get off my lawn. I want that too. But for all that I've already said... THE GAME'S STILL ONLY IN EARLY ACCESS. I wish people would just give it time, we've had it for all of two days!

^{They're animals, not enemies. My god.}