I should love a game where im in some wilderness or ruined city scavenging and building up defenses as shit skitters around in the dark at the edge of my campfire. That concept should be my gotyay, buts it not. It never is.
I wonder if its the execution, the shallow nature or something more because i still would love to see some game like a 200 player per server ruined manhattan full of monsters or zone/fear style shit to avoid.
I guess the only problem i can easily name is procedural generation leads to a complete loss of environmental storytelling and a massive disconnect between player and world and the trouble is the less random it becomes the more replay value is lost.
Is there any way to salvage this concept?
Dominic King
I saw an horror movie recently called Backcountry.
The most mundane shit ever happens in the movie: a couple goes innawoods, the husband is stupid and doesn't bring a map, they get lost, a bear eats the husband face, the wife wander the woods terrified until she manages to find her way back by sheer luck, the park rangers find her, end of movie.
It was so refreshing to see a horror movie that kept things simple and just presented a normal scenario that could happen to anyone and the story wrapped itself up nicely, in a sea of contrived bullshit.
Brayden Carter
Not at all.
Realistic post-apoc or innawoods survival (even if you threw monsters into the mix) especially if you threw monsters into the mix could never be translated into good gameplay.
Wew, it sure is fun sitting here for 6 hours baking in my own sweat and piss because I thought I saw movement a couple hundred yards away. Maybe it was nothing, maybe they're gone? I'll poke my head up for a- and you're dead.
Survival is all about tedium and fear, and that just doesn't make a good game, so you might as well scrap the survival mechanics altogether and make it a fun action game.
Luke Wilson
If you want to get mad at a movie that overreaches its premise go look up "yellow brick road". It starts great but holy shit i cannot remember the last time a film genuinely got me mad.
Gabriel Sanchez
You willingly choose mediocrity.
Josiah Thompson
mmos make it even worse because they are made for plebs never before has an image of penn gillette with a garbage can been more appropriate.
Cameron Morales
Because those early access sandbox games forget to actually put a game ontop of the survival shit.
Oliver Lopez
The whole point of survival mechanics is to gate the "fun" parts of the game behind a shitty time sink to hide the lack of content and stretch the gameplay hours. The typical survival mechanics (hunger, thirst, sleep, resource gathering, resource farming, crafting) are really no different from the grinding required in a bad MMO; they both exist for the same purpose, and that's why there is such a ridiculous amount of early access sandbox survival games.
Brandon Hughes
My nigga.
I think there is a way to do survival right, but it has to be genuinely difficult to survive and not just a time sink. If you can farm super fucking easily without a worry, then there's no reason to have hunger. But if farming takes ages (farming in Cataclysm takes 21 days on the default season length and food will rot unless you do something to keep it fresh) and scavenging is tough, then it can put you in a tough spot, forcing you to range farther for scavenging, get more efficient while hunting, and/or go nomadic.
Yes, this does make Minecraft's hunger mechanics the shittiest shit to happen to the game, especially since it just discourages exploration more than anything else.
Jason Campbell
I don't think that makes for fun gameplay, especially if you have a spoilage mechanic which is just another blatant time tax on the player. Why not just have Food give the player a long health regen buff (but also let the player's heath regen normally at a very slow rate without food), and instead make the resource gathering focus on offensive resources like weapons, ammunition and armor? You could also shake things up with interesting things like a Noise mechanic where things like un-supprressed gunfire (or even, say, using a chainsaw to quickly cut down trees to build a shelter) attracts enemies from a large distance, which is a mechanic that could be utilized defensively or offensively, or maybe you just get your shit fucked up.
If you look at the traditional implementation of those mechanics and you ask yourself "Is this making the game more fun?" I think you'll come back with a resounding FUCK NO nearly 100% of the time, good gameplay should always be the #1 concern.
