Subnautica 2 Has Been One of Steam’s Most Anticipated Games for Years. Now People Can Actually Play It.

Gaming | May 17, 2026

Subnautica 2 entered Steam Early Access on Wednesday, May 14, ending years of anticipation for one of the platform’s most-wishlisted games. For the first time in the series, you can bring friends.

The original Subnautica, released in 2018, put players alone on an ocean planet with no weapons and a strict instruction to survive. It became a word-of-mouth phenomenon, attracting millions of players who expected another survival crafting game and got something closer to a meditation on isolation and deep-sea dread. The sequel has been in development at Unknown Worlds Entertainment for several years, its path to release complicated by delays and a legal dispute with publisher Krafton that played out in public and left the game’s future briefly uncertain.

The dispute is settled. The game is out.

What Is Different

The addition of cooperative multiplayer, supporting up to four players, is the biggest structural change from the original. Subnautica’s loneliness was a design choice, not a limitation. The question the developers have had to answer is whether the game’s particular atmosphere, which depended substantially on being alone underwater with things that could eat you, survives the addition of friends.

Early player reports from the first day of access suggest it largely does, though the experience is genuinely different. Dividing the labor of early survival between four players accelerates the pace considerably. The deliberate, slightly anxious rhythm of the original, where every dive felt like a resource calculation, compresses into something more social and less contemplative. Whether that is better or worse depends almost entirely on what players wanted from the first game.

Solo play remains available for those who want it.

The Development Backstory

The road to Early Access was not smooth. Unknown Worlds parent company Krafton filed suit against the development team in 2024, alleging breach of contract over the game’s direction and timeline. The case generated significant coverage in the games press and created the unusual situation of a publisher appearing to fight publicly with the studio it owned. The dispute was eventually resolved, terms undisclosed, and development continued.

That the game maintained extraordinary interest on Steam throughout the legal turbulence says something about how deeply the original had lodged itself in players’ memories. The sequel’s wishlist numbers never meaningfully dropped.

The Broader Month

Subnautica 2’s launch is the headline release of a particularly busy May for PC gaming. Forza Horizon 6 arrives on May 19 with a full Japan map that early previews call the best setting in the series’ history. 007 First Light, developed by IO Interactive, the studio behind Hitman, launches on May 27 as an origin story for James Bond, set before the character becomes the spy the films established. Path of Exile 2 rolls out its Return of the Ancients endgame update on May 29.

For Subnautica 2, Early Access means the game is playable but unfinished. Unknown Worlds has not announced a timeline for the full release, which is standard practice for early access launches and also, after the development saga of the past two years, probably wise. The studio will update the game as it goes; players who buy in now get access to whatever it becomes.

Given the original’s trajectory from early access curiosity to beloved survival classic, the bet has worked out before.

Sources: PC Gamer | Insider Gaming | DLCompare