I had a lot of fun with the game, 55 hours in total.
It's already a good package as it is but they are of course numerous factors which could be improved.
The number 1 issue of the game is the performance, the world streaming is super bad with FPS drops and geometry pop-ups even on relatively decent PCs with an SSD.
If that could be improvement the game would already feels massively more polished for a lot of players on consoles and PC.
The other aspects are tight to more/better content.
I was already suprised that the game is handcraftet and has a decent narrative.
Initially I thought this might be just a randomly generated map with no meaningfull story behind.
Couple of things which could be improved/expanded:
- Just a bit more different bioms/wildlife and also from a game perspective force the player to explore and visit all or most of the bioms, through items or story pieces.
There are bioms and wildlife I never encountered because it wasn't necessary to go there or I was always swimming passed it.
- Tied to it is also the lack of possible endgame content.
Subnautica has a lot of features which could be improved but I feel especially the building mechanics and exploration of the whole world suffers from the structure of the game.
In the beginning you are limited in your abilities to gather resources and you spend your materials into building new tools and going further story wise, you don't invest it, at least I didn't, into building a large base or even multiple bases, although this is something I quite enjoy doing.
At the end of the game when the story is finished and you have all tools and vehicles to really collect a lot of resources and explore the map, there is simply no motivation point.
Personally I also really wished that the thirst/hunger wasn't progressing so fast.
You can play the game without it but then a couple of game mechanics/items are simply useless so I went for the survival mode.
But it's so aggressive that's it was mostly annoying in the beginning of the game.
I like to read about the story pieces, the wildlife I scanned or the objects but since your character literally dies if you don't give him a bottle of water every 10 minutes, you can't afford to casually read all the stuff.