How Subnautica's community helped create an underwater world dying to be explored

Steam Early Access has changed the way games are launched: gone are the years of waiting for a game, only seeing gameplay snippets in a string of trailers. With Early Access you can sometimes be playing a game as soon as it is announced. It has brought a new thrill, the thrill of a journey and a collaboration between community and developer.

Subnautica is perhaps one of the best examples of this new way of developing games. It is an underwater survival game, where you play as an unfortunate soul who has crash landed on an lonely sci-fi planet. With few prompts, it is up to you to decide how you will eat, drink, and escape - all while carefully managing your oxygen supply. It launches from Early Access today and, in the words of design director Charlie Cleveland, "there's not much to ship."

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