Subnautica 2 and Forza Horizon 6 are great sequels but they don’t take any risks

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It’s also a relief because we now have abundant evidence that, while all this nonsense was going on, the developers at Unknown Worlds were quietly toiling away making more Subnautica. The game wanted to be made; the art needed to happen, and never mind the office politics. Subnautica 2 is still in early access, but according to Polygon’s Josh Broadwell it’s in pretty great shape, and will only get better. Within moments of its launch on Thursday, almost half a million people were playing it on Steam. Soon after, Unknown Worlds boasted the game had sold a million copies in an hour. This will somehow be bad news for publisher Krafton’s CEO and shareholders, but frankly: tough. They made a bad deal and must live with it. The rest of us can enjoy the game.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about Subnautica 2 is its intense focus on storytelling and the timeliness of its themes. This is a game in which an AI assistant tries to micromanage everything you do and shape your understanding of the world. This is a common theme for sci-fi survival games (like The Alters), and doesn’t sound directly relevant to the bizarre circumstances of the game’s making. But then again… maybe it does. After all, it’s about a system trying to trip up and control the human labor that goes into it.

There’s surely no such corporate dissonance going on over at Playground Games, the developer that has quietly built itself into one of Microsoft’s most valuable studios, and Forza Horizon into an arguably more important and relevant standard-bearer for Xbox than Halo. Forza Horizon 6, which is available for some players now ahead of a full launch next week, has not broken Playground’s streak of 90-plus Metacritic scores, something no other Microsoft studio — not even Bethesda or Blizzard — can claim. The Game Pass numbers will be great; so will the PlayStation 5 sales later this year. The new Xbox leadership team will be happy. The art and the system are in harmony.

Image: Playground Games/Xbox Game Studios

But here’s an uncomfortable truth about video games, especially video games in popular franchises. They are systems too; they are machines that acquire a momentum of their own that can disregard the impulses of human creativity. Subnautica 2 is more of the same, but better. Forza Horizon 6 is more of something that was already pretty much perfect. Both are triumphant works of craft — one made in conditions of absurd, self-defeating adversity, another made in the gilded cage of its predecessors’ excellence. Neither takes any risks at all.

In Polygon’s Nintendo newsletter Switchboard this week, I wrote about the great designer Takashi Tezuka, who has just retired. In 1993, Tezuka set out to break the format of the Legend of Zelda series with Link’s Awakening for the Game Boy. Just seven years after the first game, he was already looking for ways to mess with the machine. That spirit has stayed with Zelda games ever since, and made an immeasurable contribution to their longevity.

That’s the thing about these self-sustaining sequel systems; their inertia may be huge, but it will always be overcome by players’ natural desire for new experiences. I can’t imagine the courage it took to make Subnautica 2 at all. Nor can I imagine the courage it would take for someone at Playground to suggest ripping up the formula for one of the most successful racing games in history. But if they don’t, someone else will.

Plus this: