>>718060393 (OP)
The real story is genuinely quite tragic.
Subnautica got caught very badly in the middle of the post 2013 industry-wide hysteria, and it's lead developer, Cleveland, basically went mental.
It was a mixture of shit he wasn't at fault (just being targeted by dumb obsessive harassment his studio wasn't ready for, namely the BIZARRE "no gun" harassment campaign from burgers and the whole "la creatura" meme bullshit that mostly originated from here), and shit he 100% was responsible for (he literally got into the whole "fuck gamers, gamers aren't supposed to be your audience" moral panic, and started lying compulsively).
As a result, the guy just became progressively more insane. It started with shit like him making the infamous "sandy hooks inspired the no gun decision" post (that was objectively and provably a lie), past firing the sound designer guy over a single wrongthink tweet, to just going full mental and turning the ENTIRETY of Below Zero into his personal political manifesto.
He literally started changing EVERYTHING about the original plan for Below Zero to actively piss off original Subnautica fans, and to manifest his own deranged, narcissistic obsessive virtue signaling. Shit got really bad. Actually, the game we eventually did get isn't even HALF as terrible as it was supposed to be. The sheer amount of dialogue was cut by like 70%, the amount of time spend in exposition and above the sea by like half, whole bunch of awful decisions were scaled back but... yeah.
Below Zero was made literally out of spite, by a man who was driven by manufactured on-line outrage into a state of literal, 3-year long psychosis. That is exactly and precisely what went wrong.
My god was it painful to watch, too. I used to follow Subnautica since it was still a proc-gen demo, all the way down to the bitter fall.