Iām sure weāve all played at least one survival game at this point, right? Minecraft. Valheim. Subnautica. Project Zomboid. ARK: Survival Evolved. Donāt Starve. The list goes on.
So what makes something a āsurvival gameā? Well, surviving, of course! The player will often have limited resources - food, water, stamina, oxygen - that will drain over time. They will have to secure more of these resources to survive by venturing out into the (often hostile) world, while also collecting other resources in order to progress.
Survive and progress are the two key objectives here. What progressing looks like can vary from game to game. Some are sandbox games where you set your own objectives. Some have technology trees to work through. Some have stories. All of them have some kind of balance between surviving and progressing. Too much focus on moment-to-moment survival and youāll never feel like youāre getting anywhere; too much focus on progression and the survival mechanics feel sidelined.
Iāll start with the latter. Minecraft is a perfect example of this, I think. For the first hour or so in a brand new world, surviving will be something the player has to focus on at (almost) all times. Food will feel scarce, enemies will feel scary and you really have to focus solely on survival. But then, after a while, youāll reach a point where youāre got plenty of food and donāt have to worry about it any more. Youāll have decent armour and weapons so fighting monsters isnāt risky at all. The survival aspect of the game becomes something you only really engage with when youāre forced to - because your hunger bar is empty, because a monster is attacking you and you want it to go away - but itās more of a tedium than a system thatās exciting or interesting to engage with. In fact, the more you progress (whatever your version of āprogressingā is - building cool things, exploring, etc), the less engaging the survival aspect of the game generally is.
And on the flip side, you have something like Donāt Starve. The game is all about survival, with the goal largely being simply to survive as long as possible, with very little in the way of non-survival progression. To its critics, this is to its detriment; the player rarely feels like theyāre making much progress, just prolonging their suffering. This is, of course, the tone the game is going for, but it doesnāt make for engaging gameplay for many people. It doesnāt have something they can get invested in - thereās no reason to survive.
Iāve largely been talking about the negative aspects of survival mechanics so far, but I do feel they can have positive, interesting aspects to them as well. They can add to a gameās immersion, for one. They can certainly make for great, personalised stories, too; not tailored narratives, but the sort of individual, one-off experience in a sandbox game that you remember. For example, you didnāt just build a simple houseā¦
You went on a dangerous journey into the forest to the west to get some wood. Youād just finished chopping the last tree you needed when a wolf pounced on you. Lucky youād found that old, manky leather armour earlier, eh? You managed to kill it (with your bare hands after your spear broke) but you were losing blood and had to limp back to base with your lumber. You didnāt have any medicine so you fashioned some from some plant fibre youād collected - not ideal but it stemmed the bleeding for now. And at least you had enough wood to get some walls up around your cabin.
Thatās the kind of story made out of mundane events (well, āmundaneā when it comes to video games anywayā¦) that you can only experience in survival games. Because in a game where youāre not as invested in surviving, that sort of situation has far less impact. This leads nicely to my next point: there needs to be a cost to not surviving. The steeper the cost, the more invested in survival the player will be:
- the ultimate ācostā is a hardcore world/character, where the player loses all their progress if they die. I personally find this a little excessive, especially in games that are often already on the grindy side.
- a lesser cost is perhaps losing some XP, or losing all the items your character was carrying at the time. Itās a great motivation to avoid death, but it isnāt too punishing. Itās nothing you canāt bounce back from, at least.
- an interesting mention here is games like Rimworld or State Of Decay 2. You control a community of characters, each one having different stats and attributes. If a character dies, their death is permanent. It sucks, and itās almost always a major setback for your colony. But it also makes you really value each characterās survival. And a character dying becomes part of your story in the game. Itās woven into both the gameplay - you have to figure out how to adapt going forward without that colony member - and the history of the colony.
If thereās no real cost to not surviving, thereās no real reason to engage with the survival mechanics in the first place. None of it matters. If you can die, but 30 seconds later youāve reloaded the game and can just carry on from where you were, can you really get that invested in the survival mechanics in the first place?
So whatās the right balance? Itās hard to say - it depends on the game! How deep and complex a gameās survival mechanics are and what its progression looks like definitely affect what will feel right. But I think that, if a game is going to include survival mechanics, there should be an effort to make them interesting and rewarding (if not fun) throughout the entire game. If they canāt be interesting and rewarding, players shouldnāt be made to engage with the mechanics at all, and it should just be a problem that players can solve instead. And there needs to be more to the game than just surviving. There needs to be goals available - narrative, creative or otherwise - that give the player a reason to survive.
The process of surviving itself needs to feel interesting throughout the duration of the game. You need a reason to survive (something to work towards) and you need a reason to not die (some form of cost or punishment).
So do any games actually manage all this? Iām not sureā¦ Subnautica probably comes the closest for me, personally. It does a great job of constantly pushing you to progress, but the more you progress, the more scary things get and the harsher the conditions you need to survive become. The survival mechanics are not just relevant but central throughout the entire game, but you rarely feel like they take too much focus away from the rest of the game.
Iād love to hear your thoughts!
I really like one of the survival mods for Skyrim. I think itās Snowfall? Something like that; it added cold and blizzard mechanics. Now I have a reason to find a bridge over a river instead of just swimming across all the time! It also made me actually use the food I would otherwise hoard, and created a use for those otherwise cosmetic clothing items (many of them are warmer than armor, which doesnāt matter in Whiterun, but can matter quite a bit in Dawnstar). Bad guys becoming arrow sponges with one-shot mechanics just frustrates me, as a difficulty modifier, but getting a warning that a blizzard is coming while Iām in the middle of cleaning out a bandit camp adds exactly the right about of tension, and adds a level of decision-making that really appeals to me. It upped the difficulty level for me just enough to make the game twice as interesting, without making it feel oppressive.
Well, except for that one Stormcloak quest to the frozen island in the middle of an ice sea to get to that one constellation stone. That sucked. But, like, fuck the Stormcloaks.
But the point is, for me, I want the survival aspect to be a constant, predictable mechanic that I can prepare for, but that isnāt a means to its own end. The narrative direction of Skyrim doesnāt change, I just have to go about accomplishing those goals a little smarter.