An Identity Crisis
Survival games are one of my favorite genres. I probably have more hours in Ark and 7 Days to Die than most other games. However, it’s also one of the least uniform genres I can think of. Most survival games have a huge identity crisis that stops them from meeting their full potential. Many individual games address some of these issues, only to balloon other ones.
You can find a video version of this article on YouTube!
The good news is that they can be fixed and many developers are actively trying new things to circumvent the biggest problems. I’m gonna go over some of the biggest issues with the genre, as well as give examples of games that do a good job at addressing these problems, and ones that do a really bad job at it.
A Lack of Danger
The main loop of a survival game is to face danger out of necessity in order to survive or progress. In almost all survival games, you have to gather a ton of resources all game. The act of gathering resources itself isn’t interesting. There is nothing engaging about swinging an axe at a tree over and over again. However, the act of resource gathering is not contained in a vacuum, there are two other elements that intertwine with it. Efficiency, and danger.
The first has you finding more and more ways to efficiently gather the resources you need. In a game like Satisfactory, it’s the joy of setting up Automation, in a game like Ark, it’s taming and using a dinosaur that gathers certain resources faster. The other half is danger, and this is where most survival games drop the bag.
Most survival games have very static worlds. They are initially fun to explore, but nothing ever changes. Enemy spawns are set in stone in certain areas. This means there are many safe zones for resource gathering, and the stronger you get, the more safe zones appear.
For example, in Grounded, you play as shrunken kids trapped in a backyard. Most dangerous enemies in the game have a set spawn location. Anytime you find a location that doesn’t have a gigantic spider patrolling through, it never will. This means that it’s always 100% safe to gather resources in these areas. Again, the simple act of swinging an axe or mining stone is not engaging gameplay, it’s other factors that MAKE it engaging.
Without the danger of being attacked and possibly dying, resource gathering ceases to be gameplay at all. It’s just a chore, something you literally burn time doing just to move forward with nothing engaging you while you do it.
There are two examples of games that I think handle this really well. State of Decay 2 and 7 Days to Die. In both games you are never safe. Every time you go out to gather resources, you are in danger and there is a non-zero chance that you don’t come back alive. This is due to the fact that most enemies in the game don’t have set spawn locations, you don’t know what you are going to encounter out there ahead of time. There aren’t many, if any safe spots you can find, at least without cheesing the game.
That fact constantly keeps you on your toes as you explore the world, and that element of danger keeps the resource gathering from becoming routine.
Leaving Your Base Alone
Almost all survival games allow you to build a base, but in many of them, it feels relatively tacked on. It feels like something your character logically needs to do but is ultimately hollow. That’s because, on the PVE side, a lot of games will not mess with your base. Your base is always a safe haven, unassailable by the forces beyond.
Realistically, in these games, you could slap down your crafting tables in the open and never bother to make walls around them because the walls serve no function other than to look pretty. Building bases is a huge resource grind, and often for no mechanical benefit.
This is one of my bigger issues in Ark. If you’re playing PVE your base is largely cosmetic, most dinosaurs can’t hurt stone tier structures and beyond and they never come to attack your base unless you built in one of their set spawn locations.
On the other hand, games like Valheim, Grounded, Palworld, and The Forest have the option to enable raids, forcing you to periodically defend your base from being assaulted. 7 Days to Die, by far handles this the best. The entire premise of the game is that every 7 Days, a zombie horde will attack your base, making a large part of the game not only about progressing in power but also making your base a defendable bastion against the horde.
You can still unleash your inner designer and make something pretty. You just have to make it defendable too, and that’s a very engaging gameplay loop.
Not Enough PVE Focus
A lot of survival games feature PVP, which is not a problem on its own. The problem comes when the PVE side is neglected because that’s the side players are going to be interacting with most often. The simple fact is, that more players play PVE than PVP in these games, largely due to a lack of structure that I’ll talk about later. Even in Ark, most player-owned servers are PVE, and a good chunk of the ones listed as PVP are PVE but use the PVP ruleset to avoid some annoying PVE restrictions. That’s something I myself do when I play Ark.
But even in a game with PVP, players are going to be interacting with the PVE side much more often in between those PVP encounters. Many games completely neglect this side of the game. Ark again is one such example, although it has tried to remedy this through certain expansions.
Ark lacks a challenge beyond the opening hours because so much of the game was made for PVP. You become stronger than the wild dinosaurs very quickly, your base is never attacked and there is overall, just not a lot to do other than grind resources (without a sense of danger).
People are compelled to play it anyway, myself included, because it’s such a unique game with dinosaurs at the forefront. We dinosaur lovers don’t exactly have a buffet to choose from right now. In my case, I have to heavily modify Ark to get even a taste of the experience I actually want.
Games like 7 Days to Die, Valheim, Don’t Starve, and State of Decay 2, are almost entirely focused on the PVE side of the genre and are often better games for it.
That’s not to say liking PVP is wrong, and I’d wager a lot more PvE players would try it if it was more structured, which brings me to my next problem.
Leaving PVP Unstructured
I might ruffle some feathers here, but the PvP element in games like Rust, and Ark are complete trash that only a tiny segment of the community has a chance to actually enjoy. That’s because there is no structure to them and they often allow you to be raided offline.
That’s right, you can lose days of progress while an enemy destroys your base while you are at work, school, or asleep. You don’t even get to have the engaging experience of trying to defend it.
Furthermore, this mechanic is all around bad for everyone, the attacker and the defender. The attacker would likely have more fun if the defenders were present. If the defenders are offline, I fail to see how this can even be considered player vs player in the first place. You aren’t fighting anyone, it’s an empty base, that’s just PvE with extra steps.
The thing is, our brains are wired to take the path of least resistance. This means that even though the attacker would probably enjoy fighting the defenders, it is more logical to attack when no one is home because you aren’t risking anything.
It leads to an incredibly harsh and toxic gameplay loop. The only way you could reasonably work a day job and still play is to form a mega clan of people and make sure to alternate schedules to make sure the base is always defended. That type of effort and coordination is very job-like, so you would just be working two jobs. Any unexpected life event forces you to choose between your rigid game schedule to protect your base or the life event.
That is not a reasonable expectation for most people.
Conan Exiles tried to address it by having PvP at specific days or times of the day. A step in the right direction, but a band-aid, it still shackled people with a set schedule.
The upcoming Dune Awakening, however, has me very intrigued and I hope it may have solved the issue. In Dune Awakening there are PvE zones and PvP zones. The PvP zones are where players will go to war for Spice, and you can even build bases in these zones, knowing they can be attacked. Furthermore, the zones aren’t static, they get wiped out by storms over time, but you have the ability to blueprint your bases to set them up in other places later.
This to me, seems like a smart idea. There is a great benefit to engaging in the PvP, but you choose when to do it, and you know the risks when you do. Only the bases and gear you bring into the PvP zones are at risk of being stolen, you don’t have to worry about your base in a PvE zone getting raided when you aren’t even online. I’m very much looking forward to seeing how it plays out.
Being too Soft
I’ve talked before about how the “default” settings in games are not actually the “intended” experience. They are the mass appeal settings, the settings made to cause the least amount of frustration to the largest amount of players. That does not mean those settings interact the best, or even well with how a game was designed.
The problem is that most people won’t give a second thought to those settings, even when something feels off.
I’ve been kind to 7 Days to Die so far, so now I’m going to bully it. 7 Days to Die, almost gets everything right. It’s PvE-focused, it’s always dangerous, and it attacks your base. It also screws it all up.
By default, you don’t lose anything when you die in 7 Days to Die, and it undermines everything. The danger, the base defense, all of it. What’s danger with no consequence? I actually did a whole piece on this back when Alpha 21 was released because a whole lot of problems people were having in the game were solvable by changing that setting.
You can make it so that you lose everything on death, and you should. Any survival game that has no penalty for death is just pretending to be one because it cuts off its own mechanics at the knees.
Is losing everything on death harsh? Yes, but it makes you prepare for it. You prepare for your expeditions knowing that whatever you choose to take with you might be lost forever. In 7 Days to Dies case, it straight up fixes most of its problems. Such as only ever needing to find or make a single good gun for the entire playthrough, because once you have it, it’s yours forever, which undermines both the exploration and crafting.
By risking that gun, the game changes. Back in Alpha 21, you could even avoid entire diseases by exploiting death. If you had an infection, you could just die, the infection would be gone and you would lose nothing.
7 Days to Die does well in the fact that you can change these settings, but not all survival games do. But the soft ones shouldn’t be default simply because people are more likely to seek out and change settings if they are having a hard time, rather than an easy time.
When something is too easy, you might feel that something is wrong but have trouble pinpointing what. That was the case for many 7 Days to Die complaints that I’ve seen, and most of them hooked back into the fact that you never lost anything, ever.
Yeah, harsher settings might be frustrating, but they are called survival games, not cozy games. I have seen a few games use the tagline cozy survival, but that makes about as much sense to me as saying my sandwich is hot cold or that my old family pets are dead alive.
A survival game shouldn’t undercut its own design by having soft settings by default. Worse yet are the few games that don’t let you change them at all.
Positive Notes
Alrighty rant over. To end this I’m going to leave you with a list of survival games I recommend. They aren’t perfect, but they are the ones I enjoy the most. Leave your favorite survival games down in the comments and tell me about them! You might also be interested in checking out two other pieces that I’ve done. The Anatomy of Challenge in Gaming and Erasing Your 7 Days To Die Complaints
