With so many survival games being practically the exact same...

With so many survival games being practically the exact same, what are some worthwhile gameplay features that would set one apart from the rest?

I find subnautica's underwater theme a refreshing take. Environments for survival games have to be pretty much completely alien for them to feel any different to me at this point imo… Alternatively having survival games with real objectives and time constraints that could be different every time you play rather than just "sandbox around until you get bored or die"

I'll list some things I'd like to see.


Having servers and other people actually sucks you out of the experience that you have to survive in a harsh world. At least have something that allows two players to cross paths and have a stand off unsure what the other person will do.


Having enemies that vary from each other would also help since all I see are creatures that just follow you and hit you. Having some ranged, some sneak up on you, and some protect a place, staring at you as you pass by would help set the mood of the world.


It's used to death like WW2 was before COD4, there are hundreds of settings more interesting then earth after outbreak or nuclear fallout.


Part of survival is punishments from your own mistakes and challenges that arise from day to day. Usually once you've set yourself up with things, the game just doesn't feel stressful anymore and you get bored. Something should always be there to fuck up your day, something should always be a concern, something should always keep you on watch.

waifus

More focus on social features; group dynamics and relationship.
Politics; ingroup rules etc.
Cosmetics! And specialization/craftsmanship! They could go hand in hand.

About 90% of the survival games I come across on Steam through the stupid discovery queue are early access. So something that'd set a survival game apart from the rest is something that's actually finished.

Ark, The Forest, Subnautica and The Isle are the only ones with decent devs and regular updates that instead of promising shit and wasting potencial actually make accomplishments and use the potencial they have to make great things.

An incentive to not shoot other people on sight would be nice in multiplayer ones.
There's room for single player focused ones too. The only ones I can think of are The Long Dark and The Forest, and I've very much enjoyed the former. The frozen tundra is a nice change from the usual zombie apocalypse

Better fundamental mechanics.
You can do a lot of shit but if it's an fps you still do 2 things.
Move and shoot/whack.
Make weapons more than just ray tracers with different stats and add some fun momentum based movement system.
This can make games more interesting in so many unforeseen ways.
If momentum is a thing and projectiles have physics you get stuff like hills turning into things to consider strategically.

And don't ever make survival games focus on one shot long ranged kills.
There's no risk for new players when they can just respawn.
When they are able to just try their luck to undo the progress of old players until the succeed there's nothing worth surviving for.

*potential

Elaborate a bit? Only thing that came to my mind is some sort of stranded on island stuff with the hopes that if some dev would do it it wouldnt just be filled with zombies.

Make it singleplayer with the AI for other survivors, have times when the player can be lost in the fog which functionally removes them from the normal gamespace (removing the necessity to have networked AI), two players who were otherwise in singleplayer can run into eachother in the fog. Spoopy

as opposed to realistic, fantasy-based
as opposed to grim, cute
as opposed to empty, an ecosystem

Subnautica is a really interesting game, but once you explore everything (which doesn't take that long) it gets really stale, really fast.
I would hardly call it "survival" because there's barely any chance to die.

sounds like you just described "The Forest" to me

A libido meter.

Something like an inverse Journey would be good. It would really instill the paranoia in people if they could just accidentally bump into a stranger who is just as liable to shoot them and take their stuff as they are to give them a biscuit.

Well, being complete at the time of release would be a refreshing change of pace.

My issue with all these survival games isn't that they're all the same mechanically, it's that they're all unoptimized, unfinished, early access garbage.

I kind of wish unhostile trading amongst players was more of a thing.

For some reason I was going to cite Recent ear, but thinking about it she was actually pretty aggressive as a merchant,but the idea of being a tradesman either wandering or with a permanent location sounds pretty relaxing, even if the chance of death is generally decently high

Instead of having half-assed combat, just go full Action game and replace every action with murder. Instead of gathering resources while avoiding enemies, kill enemies while avoiding other enemies. So to get ammo you have to hunt down people and kill them while avoiding bears or something, and in order to get new weapons you just kill shit and turn them into weapons

Once you've distilled erey action in the game into combat, you can spend some time and ACTUALLY MAKE THE COMBAT DECENT! Then people can actually ENJOY the game instead of spending hours watching a bar fill.

NPC's with interesting dialogue and quest chains.

Bonus points: It's procedurally generated

A functioning digestive system

adding to that, fecal projectiles

pick one and only one. procedural generation removes any possibility for interesting things. you'll just end up with a million go to __ and do and I'll give you __ missions

It appears you can underline things. Bully me

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*unzips bullying stick*

good gameplay

Space.
Steampunk.
Grimdark Ancient/Medieval.
Extreme environments such as a desert or the arctic.
Just to name a few. With enough creativity you make anything work.

Oh rite.
Space+Desert got me thinking of that game with world similar to Pitch Black (the one with Vin Petroleum playing bald badass with bad eyesight) and having it be survival-game would be pretty hoot.
Perhaps with the ultimate objective of you having to repair your spaceship so you can get the fuck out of there's but first having to obviously strengthen a base somewhere with resources, water, light sources'n shit.

Could even have that "monsters fear the light and come out during darkness to play" aspect into it though obviously with a day/night cycle that's a liiiiitle bit shorter than what it is in the movie but still long enough that you can actually fucking do something so no "oh your 15minutes is up here have some night/day :^)".

Consider Factorio

I did a single player playthrough of ARK recently. Ended up playing long enough to make a shelter and tame my first Dino.

That's when I started using cheats…

Still had fun for hours though.

I would like to see a Stalingrad survival simulator playable as Germans, Red Army and civilians. Scavenge food from corpses, hunt rats in the sewers, fight the cold, try to survive being sent out into suicidal skirmishes etc.

It would play more like a horror game than a traditional point and shoot.

...

Check out This War of Mine. Not exactly what you're describing there, but close.

Actually an idea I've had a long time ago was a game about the siege of leningrand (or a similar setting, so you can have the russian-like setting without the actual historical costraints) because Leningrad was the epitome of a brutal survival experience.

Too bad This War of Mine is extremely boring, it had potential.