First of all, the focus for the team is still on the release version, he says. When asked if the team was going to add new biomes or creatures post-release, or if they were eager to move on to something new, Cleveland said “a bit of both”.
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We’re going to see how 1.0 does,” he says. “Subnautica is a very expensive game. People think we’re super indie and I guess we kinda are but it’s, like,
probably a nine million dollar game to make. If we just have the team making new biomes and stuff, and we’re spending millions of dollars to do it, we really have to make sure it pays off. So we’re going to be watching release closely.
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We’re about 80-90 percent sure we’re going to make a paid expansion. I don’t know how many we want to do but there’s one in particular we want to do that I think would fit really well with the game. So we’re planning on doing that.
“I know we’re going to do maintenance patches and stuff like that to the main game, and we’re probably going to add some small things but this is not like a ‘game as a service’ where we just keep adding to it, it’s a singleplayer game and it’s pretty close to done.”
But what exactly would the new stuff be?
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New biomes,” he says, “and fill[ing] out the story in different ways.
We were talking about doing an ice world, like an Arctic area. I don’t know if we should talk about that now because we want people to just focus on release but we definitely could chat about that more when we have stuff to show. But yeah, we’re excited about that.”