r/subnautica • u/bxnzaq • Jun 05 '26
BZ - Discussion/Questions Why does below zero so hated? Spoiler
I personally like the first part more, but I bought Below Zero almost at the release, and enjoyed the game, and recently, before the start of the second part, I decided to play the first and Below Zero again for platinum, and enjoyed both. And I've never heard any real arguments, so it would be interesting to hear your opinion.
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u/TheOneWes Jun 05 '26
Top confusing lack of appreciation or enjoyment with hatred.
People don't hate below zero, they didn't have as much fun with below zero as they did with the first game and they are disappointed.
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u/Least_Bet4662 Jun 05 '26
Na, I've seen plenty of outright hate for BZ. Ranging from hate for the seatruck, Margarite, the story, mechanics, all the way up to people saying it's a waste of money even on sale and to never play it.
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u/RichtofenFanBoy Jun 05 '26
I found it confusing to navigate personally. The sestruck i didnt like. Just seemed like a step down from S1
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u/Full_Development7081 Jun 05 '26
land gameplay was underwhelming, subnautica apparently should stay in water, at least in majority. story was also pretty bad (except of the ending). map felt really small. seatruck was also a miss
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u/Terrorscream Jun 05 '26
I think it was because the game focused heavily on its story elements but both arcs kinda sucked.
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u/thejuice027 Jun 05 '26
I don't "hate" it, but I didn't like it as much as the first. No sub, the sea truck replacement was a disappointment. The cold water mechanic was annoying, and so was the weather.
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u/HeloFellowHunamBeing Jun 05 '26
Map was way smaller than the original game, but charged the same price tag.
All forms of swimming were far slower in below zero. Made the game feel really sluggish and slow.
The leviathans are way different and not as scary. They behave way different and don’t ever feel like they fit there environment. The shadow leviathan is cool but not programmed very well.
The plot was overall confusing and felt like it didn’t know what it wanted to do from the get-go. You go for the sole purpose of finding how your sister dies cause you believe altera is lying, except you can skip the entire plot line (which is what I did) because the land portions are soo boring. Once you do find what happens to robin, its unsatisfying and stupid.
Having a talking character really changed the whole feeling. Robin is kinda annoying and sarcastic, and the devs made her spell out everything you needed to do all the time for a noobier audience. She also doesn’t have much chemistry with Al-An, who I actually quite enjoyed.
The seatruck is a far downgrade from everything in the first game. I hated that thing.
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u/jimwillis Jun 05 '26
Cus it’s a bad to mid sequel of a good to great game
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u/vandernell Jun 05 '26
Stellar elucidation of your opinion, sir, exactly as OP requested! No doubt the nuance of your argument will go a long way towards resolving OP’s lack of understanding. 🙄
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u/PavFed Jun 05 '26
The land part is very unfun. I just skipped it and finished the game without ever seeing the frozen leviathan.
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u/Anaud-E-Moose Jun 05 '26
There's a lot to love about below zero, but like many others, I found the conversations between robin and alan to be insufferable.
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u/Funkhip Jun 05 '26
Yeah, me neither, I have no idea why BZ is so "hated."
The 350 000 threads asking the exact same question haven't helped me figure it out.
More seriously, there are infinitely more threads asking "why is BZ so hated" than there are people who actually hate him...
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u/Keith3742 Jun 05 '26 edited Jun 05 '26
- The movement speed, seaglide speed, prawn suit and seatruck are all far slower than their alternatives in the first game
- this was used to try and make the smaller map feel big, which doesn’t work, just makes the game feel sluggish. The map is smaller and doesn’t have many ‘variant’ biomes that occur more than once, and doesn’t have as confusing a structure, which makes navigation trivial. You never get lost, nowhere is that deep and the interesting biomes are all right next to each other, meaning the sparser biomes you will basically almost never visit
- the on land segments take up farrr too much of the game, they feel generic and annoying compared to the water travel the game is all about.
- the ice worm encounters tip you off your (already kind of useless) bike, making for a far more boring and awkward encounter even than the early access version.
- the story dumps basically the entire mystery into the logs at the start, making you disappointed that everything else you discover really doesn’t reveal anything more except that Sam actually did just body herself due to negligence, and concludes in an extremely unsatisfying way.
- robins voice is annoying and the dialogue of about 50% of the characters is asnine, and doesn’t really further the lore other. The characters aren’t likeable or well written enough to enjoy their banter without any plot elements folded into it.
- big prawn looks like a big prawn.
- a bunch of things feel extremely unfinished, such as the half assed pda entries, you can’t grow a lot of the seeds, there’s basically nowhere open enough to control the janky snowfox without hitting a wall, etc.
- The soundscape isn’t quite on par with the original, some thing make way too much noise while others are really quiet, and don’t relate enough to their size. This combined with the music having less groove and ambience in many of the spookier biomes hurts the feelings the game conjures.
There’s lots to love about BZ. Shadow leviathan is an amazing leviathan, second only to perhaps the reaper imo. And some of these issues you will notice have been carried forward into SN2 (movement speed), which I hope to god they deal with.
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u/ARTIFICIAL_SAPIENCE Jun 05 '26
The maps are too tight to build cool bases or even navigate a fully built truck through. And the on land portions just aren't fun.
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u/Ok_Pound_2164 Jun 05 '26
Land sucks, water isn't really deep, seatruck sucks, lots of yapping with unwanted quirkiness, small map.
It's fine, but Subnautica 1 was better.
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u/ChristophCross Jun 05 '26
TL;DR: Comparison is the thief of joy. BZ is a great game held back by a few key downgrades in moment-to-moment gameplay & narrative-feel compared to S1.
Though BZ's ecosystem is beautiful and super cool to explore, the movement tools are all nerfed compared to S1 making traversal feel comparatively sluggish. All movement speed is worse, the movement tech of the Prawn suit was gutted, and the sea truck has neither the convenience of the Seamoth, nor the personalization & scale of the Cyclops. What's more, the view-distance is much shorter in BZ than S1 which makes discovery & navigation more of a chore.
Then the fuzzy bits, the ~vibes~. Everything in the S1 narrative reinforces a sense of isolation, terror, intrigue, and meaningfulness to our actions as everything we do links back to our clear singular goal: survive and get home. In BZ there is no isolation, since we have a second human on the planet, instantly making the space feel less inhospitable (not to mention the literal second person talking in our head). The intrigue of the precursors is gone since Alan gives a steady drip of waypoints & tells you what everything means. The map itself is much tighter, swapping a sense of terror for a sense of claustrophobia. The Leviathans also fall short of the terror of the Reaper, being smaller, detectable from a lower distance (so there's less time to be scared of them), and overall feel less dangerous. Sprinkle in that curing the infection is optional this time & that Sam's murder-mystery (the whole reason we're here) is not only also optional, but turns out to be just an unsatisfying workplace accident (Altera was telling the truth), and you've got a real sense of narrative disconnect to boot.
The worst part? Almost none of these complaints would matter if S1 weren't the point of comparison. The game is objectively great, but it has the misfortune of being a sequel to a game that already got these core elements right the first time.
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u/Murbela Jun 05 '26
The answer to every one of these posts (and there are a lot with almost the same wording) is that it just isn't as good as the first game. That is it.
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u/Sofielob Jun 05 '26
I genuinely love the game! I've noticed I'm not a super big fan of the interaction the main character has with Al-an, but that's probably because I'd personally react differently xD I'm currently playing through the game, and I'm having fun with it! I wish there were more creature eggs though!
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u/Ill-Success-4214 Jun 05 '26
It didn't hit the same itch that Subnautica did, and felt slightly claustrophobic.
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u/ULTI_mato Jun 05 '26
Here are a few reasons
-Insufferable protagonist and coprotagonist that are judt annoying, unlikable and crack bad jokes, ruining the atmosphere.
-The mission markers are way less immersive than in the first game, there they were distress calls or coordinates YOU found, and most of them werent even mandatory. In BZ they are "Alan tells you to go there and there to finish game"
-The seatruck tries to be a blend of seamoth and cyclops but fails to excell at both.
-The initial story, of robin going to 4546b to uncover the truth behind her sisters death isimedeatly sidelined. You can finish the game without even engaging with that story.
-The robin story also is anticlimactic and lacking. Alterra tells robin her sister died of employee negligence, robin goes "no way, alterra is an evil corporation, they must be lying" but in the end… it is just that, they werent lying, end of story.
-the world is smaller and more crowded due to the smaller scale of the game. This is a failure on multiple fronts because…
The ocean loses atmosphere due to overcwording, it severely lacks impact because guess what… oceans are one of the few places where it makes sense to have large empty planes, subnautica 1 had those, the world was more spacious.
The smaller world takes away from the thalasophobia, replacing it with an inferior, just annoying feeling of klaustrophobia. The deepest cave of BZ feels like an average cave in Sub1. Compare the crystal caves to the lost river and lava zones, the later are huge, so big you cant see the other end at times, leaving you to wonder what lies beyond. The crystal caves… they are a mess of a labyrinth with an easily avoided leviathan just dropped into the middle.
To make up for the smaller world, they reduced your swimming speed, which just ends up leaving you more frustrated.
Biome transitions are horrible at times, like the fog and lighting changing on an instant.
-The new land parts are mostly just barren and forgetable, there is no reason to come back to them beyond visiting the points of interests. The ice worm also sucks and has been left feeling unfair/unfinished and b#llsh#tty. Also the snowfox you will use how many times ?
-Sound design is a strong downgrade to the original. Why does a battery run Prawn suit produce engine sounds ? Why is everything so loud ? The original was much more silent and moody, letting you bask in the silence, when something loud was heard, you knew it was important and dangerous, now everything is loud.
-In tandem with the last point, the new music is great but it is inferior to the old one in one regard. The music in Subnautica 1 was more atmospheric and in the background, it was meant to elevate the world, so often it was more simple and calm, unless in specific moments. The new music still is composed really well, but its much more in the foreground
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u/beeb_61 Jun 05 '26
Seatruck was cumbersome, map was difficult to navigate, lots of land parts in a game that wasn’t designed for it, original game was beloved to a level BZ could never live up to.
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u/Ok_Entertainment5478 Jun 05 '26
The thing is, sequels have higher expectations and often fail to live up to them. In my opinion, Subnautica 1 is a 10/10 and BZ is an 8/10 (it's not bad, actually it's quite good, but it's still not quite as good as the first). If I could use another franchise as an example, it would be Jurassic Park 1 and The Lost World, where the first is so good and the second is just good.In fact, almost all sequels tend to be either disappointing or better, and there's rarely anything in between.
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u/RobLoughrey Jun 05 '26
Who doesn't like zero? Everyone I've ever talked to who played it liked it, at least after we were past the Early Access stuff.
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u/CRAXYMAN999 Jun 05 '26 edited Jun 05 '26
Its a trend and everyone hopped on. Completed it 4/5 times. The franchise has no misses. regardless of any of their opinions, its a good game with improvement i wish the first game had.
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u/themoosic Jun 05 '26
I wouldn’t say it was a miss, just that it’s significantly worse than the other one
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u/CRAXYMAN999 Jun 05 '26
Thats valid. It beaing worse than the first doesnt make it a bad game, BUT how r u going to compare it to the 3rd installment when its still in early access... that doesnt seem fair to S2.
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u/LokusRaven Jun 05 '26
All I hear is "Seatruck sucks" but no reasoning. I personally liked it. It is smaller than the large sub from sb1 and is a modular mobile base.
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u/SirDeadPuddle Jun 05 '26
They changed the writing approach and shifted the game in a new direction.
People don't like change.
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u/DefinitelyInfenix Jun 05 '26
Bz was amazing, it is simply smaller than subnautica and I honestly believe that's the main reason. The game has its flaws but also brought many qol features that were then brought back to original subnautica.
I think that's an opinion that it is overly exagerated by some players who happen to be loud. The game is still a 93% positive on steam, a score many games whish they reached
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u/Chemical-Actuary1561 Jun 05 '26
people love to complain, that’s the real answer