charginggeoffrey

[charginggeoffrey]

Survival

Survival is a genre that is pretty much a joke now-a-days. It was a really neat concept when it first started coming around then started becoming very poorly done. It went from stressful moments of wondering if you’d have food for your character the next day, to the eventual payoff of having a great system that meant you never had to worry about food and it felt good until it became boring being prepared. Where my personal issues come into play is a lot of games realize that eventually people will have their system down and it is no longer enough to survive and how they handle those further moments is what makes or breaks the survival game. There are a lot of games that can handle it, with games ranging from survival-adventure, to survival-strategy. Minecraft - Simply surviving is quite easy really, and it just serves as a reason to go back to the surface rather than any real stressful moments and it rests on one end of the spectrum where survival mechanics are mostly just tacked on to give the game a sense of depth it doesn’t have. It is at its core a game about exploring randomly generated caves, and building. The fact that they added survival mechanics that reward exploration, instead of making more interesting mechanics having to do with building, that mods add, means that I have to judge the game on a survival basis, and not on a base building basis. My favorite times with minecraft were with all the factory mods, and the mods where I built airships and windmills. Otherwise it’s really basic lego with a neat semi-programming thing with redstone dust. It just emphasized survival elements in its core game and worked on that too much and came out poorer for it. Subnautica - Much like Minecraft, the core concept of the game is about exploration, with food and the like being a main reason to stop exploring for a bit. However in Subnautica it really makes sense. You’re stranded on an alien planet that is really different from your own, and a lot of the game comes down to resource management. I think that when the game is complete it’ll be an example of how to do the world exploring, resource gathering, base building type game perfectly if its basic bugs are cleaned up and it becomes less of a resource hog. Reason it does this well is that the game while it can become automated (build base, store fish, you can survive guaranteed based on the gathering of those fish, and filtered water if you have the energy) the goal isn’t just survival and building. The main story is you being stranded on a planet and wanting off. I think when it fleshes out other goals, like the mention of the Aurora wiping out the eco system creating the rush to get there before all the food dies to poisoning from the ship and the like it will become a perfect example of what makes survival games good. It’s the mirror to minecraft’s meandering side where you have a ‘The Martian’ moment where you set about goals based on your immediate needs and make the jump from survival, to exploration, with your survival abilities directly tied to your exploration abilities making them key to how far you can go. Exploration unlocks technology which makes leaving the planet and being able to survive its threats easier as you go along. Vehicles, anti-radiation suits, ways to build up your base and survive without jumping out of a cramped pod right in view of the radiation death machine that is the aurora, to swim around and desperately catch fish, way better at surviving the ocean than you and etc. all makes sense and feels great. If you explore it’s because you became curious after building up everything you really need. Perfect example of a survival-adventure. I just hope the game is eventually in a solid, finished place so I don’t end up with a foot in my mouth and all this promise is squandered and the events that feel like they can end the world do just end up silly dialogue quips that appear that don’t actually give you pressing, survival related timed goals. Don’t Starve - As the name states, a lot of it has to do with well, not starving and at first it can be a challenge. The world is outright murderous at first, and it feels great to automate that survival to the point where you’re going about and gathering your day-to-day supplies and eeking out a living. It’s really quite great because of the inclusion of seasons, so you need to change how you gather your survival needs. When you are fully automated to the max, you get into what I consider the worst part, it’s when everything goes into fetch quest territory which feels great when it’s for survival, not when it’s for the sake of progression, though the end result of ‘take as much as you can to the next area with new challenges’ does feel good meaning I consider the game ultimately great as a survival game because of how survival ties in with the rest of the game. The goal is ultimately to escape from these death islands by jumping through portals and surviving as long as you can. It’s oddly enough a hybrid between survival adventure and survival strategy. Fallout New Vegas - As much as I love FO:NV, I feel its survival elements are also tacked on, granted they aren’t a recommended core of the game. They’re functional enough, but unlike some games that do it poorly, it isn’t urgent enough in FONV. Honestly it just becomes a reason to occasionally open the inventory and eat a sandwich or drink some water. I think that my next playthrough I’m going to find a mod to make food/water/sleep a bit more important. On the flip side, fuck FO4 and its attempts at what FONV did. FO:NV wasn’t great at its attempts in a survival element, but FO4 tying it specifically to a bullet-sponge difficulty. At least FONV’s was optional and was independent from combat difficulty. It’s a survival adventure, but really lacking emphasis on adventure. Though at least it doesn’t feel non-conductive to what you do and feels like a natural part of the order. Oxygen Not Included/Rimworld - ONI and Rimworld are examples where you aren’t trying to ensure the survival of one person in an effort to gather food to stave off starvation for the night, but instead are trying to make civilization survive past a breaking point where you can’t minmax anymore. These games have roots like Dwarf Fortress where the inept can barely keep 6 people alive and stuggle with it, where others can maintain 100 person colonies that become more and more difficult to manage. It’s the core concept that 1+1 doesn’t always equal 2, and makes you think in lines of ‘this person is useless’ as you think about the efficiency of people, and you silently wish that Jobe the Priest wasn’t so reluctant to work fields and mine rocks because his ability to preach isn’t putting food on the table or even assisting with it. These two are some perfect examples of survival-strategy games. Rest of the Garbage - Now there are other games that handle survival poorly, not just because its tacked on, but because they make it far too urgent. There’s countless of these cheap games and they all miss the fundamentals of survival. Games where you are annoyed you’re getting hungry are bad. A lot of games have a system where you’ll consume 90% of your body weight in food, and then be hungry moments later. Not ‘you’re feeling capable of eating again’ but ‘you’re going to die in T minus 5 seconds if you don’t eat’ the last version of We Happy Few did this terribly and it felt like you couldn’t walk from one end of the room to another without your character starving. It’s not tense having to eat every 5 seconds when you’re supposedly in a tense situation. It’s just plain annoying, and boring.

[charginggeoffrey]

Who am I?

Well. I’m a dude who plays games, and maybe thinks a bit about them too much that can act a bit odd at times. I roleplay on DND using the rules 5e dominantly as well as Stars Without Number. I have sometimes rather general opinions that are very common, or very uncommon at times, and like many I feel the urge to type them about in poorly done paragraphs to my friends. To spare them, I have picked a site to ‘blog’ on. Hello unfortunate victims.