Honestly I actually liked BZ more than the original, but it’s difficult for me to figure out why exactly. I play those games a bit differently from the proper way, I basically ignore the plot beyond what is needed to get the tools and location I want and mostly just play them to build and decorate bases in a pretty environment with survival elements to make the base feel like it has design requirements and resource constraints, like Minecraft almost, but I’m not going to say that BZ has prettier environments for that either. Might be the creature design, my favorite subnautica critters are mostly in BZ, though not all, and they feel like they fit together more tightly than the ones in the first game, if that makes sense, like one can look at certain features and get a greater sense of them all seeming to descend from a few common ancestors.