Grimmrobe
Member
Having recently beaten Subnautica, I felt like making a thread to discuss survival games. It’s a genre I have yet to see get picked up by a AAA developer, and I feel like it has a lot of potential to be really awesome.
The way I see it, you have two broad sub-genres of survival game: multiplayer ‘apocalypse simulators’ like Rust on the one hand, and singleplayer games with a story like Subnautica on the other. Both are predated to a certain extent by Minecraft – log onto any PvP server back in the day and you had an early prototype of Rust, and playing the game’s ‘story’ (either the one that was eventually tacked on by the devs or one of the ones concocted by modders such as Survival Island or the Super Hostile series) gives a rough approximation of Subnautica’s design.
For the multiplayer scene, analysis is pretty simple: Rust is king, and has been since its release. It has some strong competitors, but nothing has quite managed to top it yet. I thought before I got into the genre that Ark: Survival Evolved would beat Rust, but it’s really too buggy and messy to be much fun, and it has a low player cap. Conan Exiles looked promising for a while, and had some nice features, but is really just… not as cool as Rust. I think it’s the fantasy setting that ruins it. Why should I care about making a sword and then a slightly better sword when I could be making a sword and then an assault rifle? As for all the other games in the genre, nothing else really comes close to these three. Empyrion: Galactic Survival is probably their closest competitor, but it’s really a long way off from them in terms of quality. After this you just have games that are pretty much trash like Fragmented and Out of Reach.
To give you an idea of what playing Rust is like: imagine you and a bunch of your friends trying to survive in a wood somewhere, and occasionally having to hide from madmen with AK47s who want to kill you for the scraps of cloth/ berries that you’ve found. After a while, you work out how to build buildings to secure your stuff in, then to smelt metal to make better stuff, until eventually YOU are the ones with the big base and the AK47s going out hunting for stuff. You are protecting your base and organising gathering parties. Scavenging in the ruins for better gear. Doing small raids on other bases. Eventually, you get raided, or the server wipes, and then you start again somewhere, or get bored of the game. It’s awesome, at least for the first few times that you complete the base + loot cycle.
Subnautica is my favourite of the singleplayer survival games, and the only one that I feel comes close to exploiting the full potential of the genre. You are stranded in a hostile environment, and must use whatever is at your disposal to survive, explore your surroundings, and then eventually escape by some means. The first few hours of the game are some of the coolest I have ever experienced in gaming. You have this beautiful but very foreboding alien world to explore, tons of new information coming at you, working out how to craft stuff, trying to make sure you don’t die of thirst and the radio going off non-stop with distress calls etc. Then it’s hinted at that you’ll have to do all this exploration, uncover the mysteries of the planet… It’s very exciting. The world feels very large. The main shortcoming I feel the game has, though, is that it takes too long to complete for the amount of content in it. You unlock all the vehicles after maybe 15 hours, but you won’t be able to reach the ending for around 40. Exploring began to feel laborious to me rather than exciting when I was about halfway through the Lost River. At this point you begin to realise that the game doesn’t really have anything new to show you, and that completing it is basically just a question of finding the rest of the depth modules then making your way past the slightly dopey enemies with the Prawn suit. Hopefully you also had the patience to farm a ton of potatoes so you don’t starve on the way down.
For a Subnautica 2, or any Subnautica-like made by another company, they just need to make everything more complex: environments with more depth (haha) to them instead of each biome being functionally the same but with different resources, greater enemy variety, more dangerous enemies, more complicated survival mechanics, more complicated vehicles, better combat, more stuff to do in your base, etc. etc…
The Forest and Stranded Deep are the only other games I know of that follow the same format as Subnautica. Despite having solid crafting + building mechanics and nice graphics, Stranded Deep doesn’t actually have any sort of endgame yet, and I don’t recommend it currently as you can see all it has to offer in < 2hrs. The Forest is pretty good, and has a story with an ending, but its world is rather boring compared to Subnautica’s.
Another game that I feel is worth mentioning is Terraria. It’s not really a proper survival game since there is no hunger or thirst mechanic, but played in hardcore mode it feels very similar to one. You build a base, explore the world and try to beat bosses in order to complete it. Don’t Starve is also a decent survival minigame that’s fun for a few hours.
I plan to play a lot more of these games, and will report back if any of them are worth trying. Recommendations for other games to check out would also of course be greatly appreciated. My list of singleplayer games that I intend to try, in no particular order:
Far Sky
The Long Dark
State of Decay
Astroneer
ROKH
Starbound
Project Zomboid
The Wild Eight
Planet Nomads
And for multiplayer games:
Miscreated – Rust-like in early access with a 64-player cap. Looks like it has slightly nicer graphics than Rust, but the base building seems pretty limited.
Life is Feudal: MMO – very complex medieval Survival-MMO with 10k players per server. Looks like it has the potential to overthrow Rust, but I haven’t had the chance to try it yet.
The way I see it, you have two broad sub-genres of survival game: multiplayer ‘apocalypse simulators’ like Rust on the one hand, and singleplayer games with a story like Subnautica on the other. Both are predated to a certain extent by Minecraft – log onto any PvP server back in the day and you had an early prototype of Rust, and playing the game’s ‘story’ (either the one that was eventually tacked on by the devs or one of the ones concocted by modders such as Survival Island or the Super Hostile series) gives a rough approximation of Subnautica’s design.
For the multiplayer scene, analysis is pretty simple: Rust is king, and has been since its release. It has some strong competitors, but nothing has quite managed to top it yet. I thought before I got into the genre that Ark: Survival Evolved would beat Rust, but it’s really too buggy and messy to be much fun, and it has a low player cap. Conan Exiles looked promising for a while, and had some nice features, but is really just… not as cool as Rust. I think it’s the fantasy setting that ruins it. Why should I care about making a sword and then a slightly better sword when I could be making a sword and then an assault rifle? As for all the other games in the genre, nothing else really comes close to these three. Empyrion: Galactic Survival is probably their closest competitor, but it’s really a long way off from them in terms of quality. After this you just have games that are pretty much trash like Fragmented and Out of Reach.
To give you an idea of what playing Rust is like: imagine you and a bunch of your friends trying to survive in a wood somewhere, and occasionally having to hide from madmen with AK47s who want to kill you for the scraps of cloth/ berries that you’ve found. After a while, you work out how to build buildings to secure your stuff in, then to smelt metal to make better stuff, until eventually YOU are the ones with the big base and the AK47s going out hunting for stuff. You are protecting your base and organising gathering parties. Scavenging in the ruins for better gear. Doing small raids on other bases. Eventually, you get raided, or the server wipes, and then you start again somewhere, or get bored of the game. It’s awesome, at least for the first few times that you complete the base + loot cycle.
Subnautica is my favourite of the singleplayer survival games, and the only one that I feel comes close to exploiting the full potential of the genre. You are stranded in a hostile environment, and must use whatever is at your disposal to survive, explore your surroundings, and then eventually escape by some means. The first few hours of the game are some of the coolest I have ever experienced in gaming. You have this beautiful but very foreboding alien world to explore, tons of new information coming at you, working out how to craft stuff, trying to make sure you don’t die of thirst and the radio going off non-stop with distress calls etc. Then it’s hinted at that you’ll have to do all this exploration, uncover the mysteries of the planet… It’s very exciting. The world feels very large. The main shortcoming I feel the game has, though, is that it takes too long to complete for the amount of content in it. You unlock all the vehicles after maybe 15 hours, but you won’t be able to reach the ending for around 40. Exploring began to feel laborious to me rather than exciting when I was about halfway through the Lost River. At this point you begin to realise that the game doesn’t really have anything new to show you, and that completing it is basically just a question of finding the rest of the depth modules then making your way past the slightly dopey enemies with the Prawn suit. Hopefully you also had the patience to farm a ton of potatoes so you don’t starve on the way down.
For a Subnautica 2, or any Subnautica-like made by another company, they just need to make everything more complex: environments with more depth (haha) to them instead of each biome being functionally the same but with different resources, greater enemy variety, more dangerous enemies, more complicated survival mechanics, more complicated vehicles, better combat, more stuff to do in your base, etc. etc…
The Forest and Stranded Deep are the only other games I know of that follow the same format as Subnautica. Despite having solid crafting + building mechanics and nice graphics, Stranded Deep doesn’t actually have any sort of endgame yet, and I don’t recommend it currently as you can see all it has to offer in < 2hrs. The Forest is pretty good, and has a story with an ending, but its world is rather boring compared to Subnautica’s.
Another game that I feel is worth mentioning is Terraria. It’s not really a proper survival game since there is no hunger or thirst mechanic, but played in hardcore mode it feels very similar to one. You build a base, explore the world and try to beat bosses in order to complete it. Don’t Starve is also a decent survival minigame that’s fun for a few hours.
I plan to play a lot more of these games, and will report back if any of them are worth trying. Recommendations for other games to check out would also of course be greatly appreciated. My list of singleplayer games that I intend to try, in no particular order:
Far Sky
The Long Dark
State of Decay
Astroneer
ROKH
Starbound
Project Zomboid
The Wild Eight
Planet Nomads
And for multiplayer games:
Miscreated – Rust-like in early access with a 64-player cap. Looks like it has slightly nicer graphics than Rust, but the base building seems pretty limited.
Life is Feudal: MMO – very complex medieval Survival-MMO with 10k players per server. Looks like it has the potential to overthrow Rust, but I haven’t had the chance to try it yet.
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