Early Access Survival Trash

Wrong. Stranded 2, Miasmata, Lost in Blue 2, Ulimate Online are all good survival games.

There will never be a good early access survival game, because there will never be a good early access game, because early access is a blatant scam run by people who hate videogames

I've read it here once that Survival games are quite contradictory on their nature and young Devs don't ever realize this while making their game leading to a terrible result in the end.

Survival games derive their entire difficulty from how hard it is to survive. The more needs you have (hunger, thirst, warm), the more elements you have to handle in order to survive.
It would be like having more guns in an FPS that you gotta learn how to fire since you'll need them all to win a fight.

However, their entire gameplay revolves around treating difficulty as a problem to solve instead of an element to tackle along. You don't keep yourself fed while doing something else, you find food. The moment you got your meal, objective completed for now. This is terrible since it leads to repetitive gameplay where you constantly do a small set of actions to fulfill your needs and the game stagnates around them, especially once you figure out the one action that takes the least effort for the best result.

What's more, survival games often "improve" on this, and I put quotation marks for a reason, by coming up with automation ideas.
You need food to keep healthy, they give you a farm so food spawns right next to you.
You need walls to keep you safe from enemies, they give you the ability to build a shelter so no harm can reach you inside.
You need to defend yourself, they give you enough weapons to start an Ammunation.
And the result here is that, as the game progresses, the difficulty disappears. You no longer fear starvation, ambushes or combat while you are inside your fortified farm house stocked with fully loaded combat assault rifles.

So the game begins with repetitive actions to solve problems and ends with automation taking what little there was to do from you. All because Devs forget that the true purpose of automation is to free you for more complex tasks, and this is the crux of survival games that they never fix: a true goal.

The moment you have your fortified shed with a farm in the back, there's nothing else to do and this should not be the case. A simple "escape from the area" would be more than enough, stock up on supplies for a long journey or find a way to contact help to evacuate you. Or even better: get NPCs to join you, get factions to start their own bases and the game evolves into faction wars in that zone with the drama that comes with that, pure survival being the early game and the late game when you are away from home.

Ark improved a lot, they are also releasing officially by december

Interesting analysis. It's been awhile since I played them, but Miasmata and Lost In Blue had what you described, there was a constant expansion of complexity.

I think one problem is they tend to be noncommital between survival and infrastructure building. Robison Crusoe stranded on an island building a makeshift civilization out of leaves and coconuts is very different from russia siberia innawoods subsistence.

The latter usually fails because they don't develop enough algorithmic complexity (ie ecosystem modeling) to make continued engagement exciting and there's little to develop beyond solving basic pressing needs; the former because it tends to be an uninspired and gamey imitation of resource management/city builders and what not, just first person and grossly oversimplified and almost always unbalanced.

Lost In Blue did a great job of managing both as far as I remember, but it's been years since I played it. Iirc, it basically had the model where the more you developed your capacity for survival, the further you were able to go out and explore before returning to home base. Slowly expanding your radius, like in Space Control 2 or Chu-Lip. The world wasn't procedurally generated and it had something a story, so you were incentivized to explore.

Now that I think about it, I want to go get a rom and replay it. It was comfy

Genre is not inherently shit.
Problem is that all of these games are made with the purpose of making quick buck off kids, not with the purpose of making good game.

So the only bet you can make with these games is either modding bethesda ones, and be stuck with shit combat, or if somebody will ever actually release a full stand alone original game.
No Early Access, no kickstarter, no nothing, ready complete game outta the gate. Only then there will be a chance of it not being shit.

Only good survival games to date were UnReal World and NEO Scavenger, maybe Don't Starve if you really needed multiplayer for some reason.

I would love if we could make this a thing where we occasionally go through trash games like this.

I have great fun just looking through these unity made nightmares of poorly made meshes and stretched textures.

Especially love the ones which are shameless copies of other more successful EA games and reading the rabid fanboys defense of any criticism.

Survival is a gameplay element you can't base a game around. The problem is that for it to be anything but annoying, you need to invest an insane amount of effort into making it sufficiently complex and polished for players to actually enjoy it.
The idea of "survival" paints a very romantic and desirable image in our minds. We think about huddling around a campfire, sizzling meat on a spit, sleeping on makeshift bedding in a crappy little shack, and we like that stuff because it appeals to our basic instincts. But in a game, things like that are usually represented by pressing e on things, putting them in an inventory, clicking on icons to refill various timers and other very abstract concepts. You lose that basic, organic feel that your brain wants to experience because everything is so abstract, so to get closer to the ideal you have to make everything feel like it would in real life, and we're simply not capable of doing that kind of realism with current technology.

Won't stop 10 year olds playing Rust after they watch Pewdiepie, though.

Survival is completely doable, many games like Unreal World, and Cata DDA make survival very enjoyable.
The problem is nothing to do other then survive, also Rust isn't that bad, went back to it after a year and half and its improved considerably.

My argument was that survival games are too abstract to be enjoyable based on survival alone so I don't know why you're telling me about these roguelikes. I'm assuming they are more complex than the average early access steam main page survival game but they take even more autism to get into.
I wanna see survival done as close to real life as possible, both in complexity and presentation, before I can enjoy it. But that's just me.

I enjoy survival for being able to adequately prepare and stock items.
Also seeing the progress of going from a castaway/amnesia victim to creating a small village with every commodity for survival.
The only hang up is that progression needs to lead to somewhere but then the survival element factors into that, by taking enough supplies, water and other things so you don't run out of necessities during your quest/mission.

Many roguelikes aren't that complicated in survival but still do it right.
Like giving food calorie values and calculating how quickly your burn your calories would be easy to program.

This is really the main point. If survival is the entire goal of the game, it WILL get stale fast. Either because you just do a bunch of repetitive actions over and over or because you automate survival with shelters and farms.

Personnaly, I mod survival mods into pretty much any Bethesda game to give a sense of progression with time. I can't just wait for 24 hours until an NPC comes back, I'll be starving, tired and parched by the time he shows up.
Traveling between towns even becomes a proper adventure, stocking up on supplies before the journey, looting food from bandit camps to replenish mine, picking a safe spot to sleep at night.
Most memorable moment for me was when I cured my vampirism and immediately rushed some bakery for a cake to sate my hunger like a regular human.

However TES games are still about roaming the land, doing quests and exploring locations, survival just makes the journey more interesting but it's not the journey nor the destination itself.
Now if only the rest of the game wasn't shit…

Unreal World is pretty much just survival but taken to such levels you'll be hard pressed to reach a point where you are bored.
Cata DDA does a lot of neat stuff that I wish other games did as well. Temperature and clothing, as well as getting wet and cooling down, Focus as a resource based on your mood is also a clever idea.

Survival is easily possible as a game mechanic. What's not possible is a completely impractical, unrealistic 14 year old idea guy style conception of "I wanna see survival done as close to real life as possible, both in complexity and presentation, before I can enjoy it. But that's just me."

That's not how videogames work. The other user is right, those games show how it can be done. How it won't ever work is how you described, for the reasons you described - that doesn't preclude survival as a game element, only the stupid psuedo-realism implementation you want. Are you from reddit?

Unreal World doesn't work forever. It's working now, but that's not the same thing.

The game has a lot of content to it related to survival, hunts can take a lot of time and are very detailed, building a simple house can take weeks and there's a lot of trading and side activities to do as well. To reach that point in most Survival games where survival isn't a problem anymore takes much longer in Unreal World than in other games. However you can still reach that point and face exactly the same problems other games have.

In a way, this can be considered a solution. If you never reach the problem, it doesn't need to be solved, right?
But it's a very ugly solution that doesn't really fix anything anymore than it frustrates people. I'd expect more content in lategame, not a longer mediumgame.