The future of survival games

It seems like the games that have true survival elements (games like Minecraft or Don't Starve) are exciting and enjoyable, but I've yet to see a 'AAA' game really embrace the elements that make these games fun, if there is hunting it is not necessary for survival and foraging/exploring is based around optional collectables. Any time a big-budget game puts you up against enemies it's either hundreds of faceless dudes in an action game or a horror game where you have little to no ability to fight back.

Do ya'll think there is room for a game with the system/world Design of a Farcry or Tomb Raider, but with true survival elements: scarce supplies, necessary food/water/shelter and truly dangerous enemies? I don't think graphics make a game, but there is a level of general fidelity Farcry 3 has that Minecraft lacks. and I kinda hope Fortnite gets a little closer to this idea.

i think if they really wanted to do it properly- with thirst, food, health etc. mechanics- the real nuts and bolts of survival- you'd never get the budget that a AAA game (such as tomb raider) gets. in order to do that you'd almost certainly have to work with a large publisher, and by the time they were through focus testing the hell out of it, you'd inevitably end up with a product that was designed to sell many copies and be instantly 'fun' (aka, "shoot that guy") rather than push game design forward.

edit: as a side note, i'm really interested to see how tomb raider sells. there's no reason why it shouldn't do well, but it's also releasing in the same month as bioshock, starcraft, sim city, gears, etc. i know i'll probably pick up the game sometime- but certainly not this month.

meh, survivor don't seem to good. people don't have interest in those types of games.

i'm curious of tomb raider. i kind of feel like it might end up like duke nukem forever. heard some bad games for that game, which people have been talking a lot about, been waiting for long time for.

@elwoodan: When I read this I thought of The Last of Us. I've read it saying that you get extremely limited supplies including food, guns, ammo, and medic packs. This game is a AAA title as well. What do you think?

@lord_xp: It's entirely possible, if they lean as heavily into it as they seem to be, and keep the combat small-scale (no machine guns, grenade launchers, ect.) I'll be first in line!

@elwoodan: As far as I know it's probably going to be mostly civilian weapons like handguns and shotguns. You may run into one machine gun. But I don't know. But what I do know is that games don't come in until later in the game. It's mostly melee weapons that you find in the environment

You want to talk about survival games, what about XCOM: Enemy Unknown? You're trying to survive an alien menace with limited resources and fragile units. It was probably my favorite survival horror game last year.

Metro 2033 was pretty good even if it didn't come with the whole survival package.

Dwarf Fortress has similar elements, but that's the only other game I can think of that hasn't been mentioned. I would love to see developers explore this style of gameplay though, I thoroughly enjoyed the survival elements in games like Minecraft and ZombiU.

speak for yourself.

i'm dying for a big budget survival game to come out.

i'm fed up with being overpowered and killing a million things. i want to be hunted and afraid and cautious and clear headed, i want the game to be intense, and most games nowadays are not.

my ideal set-up would be something like Skyrim crossed with ZombiU, with permadeath, dynamic stamina - affected by conditions, energy levels, morale - , realistic inventory, gear inheritance maybe, random starting areas, no main quest, just lots of different lives and stories to interact with, you could have bosses and huge beasts, but all of their areas would come with warning signs and plenty of information from npcs about how best to deal with them, and whether or not you were ready. marriage, affairs, vendettas, money, houses, followers, troops, alliances, factions, with certain doors closing as other ones open, no all-story, no chosen one, just pure competitive survival.

Give the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series a try. Shadow of Chernobyl was a lot more scarce on equipment than the others but the others are still really good. Call of Pripyat is amazing as well, Clear Sky was a little disappointing but still a great game.

The first time I tried S.T.A.L.K.E.R. all I thought of was this is what survival horror is all about. You have to eat eventually because you get hungry, equipment can be difficult to find at times and incredibly expensive to buy, enemies are incredibly dangerous as you can be attacked by a pack of mutant dogs while in the middle of a firefight with a group of bandits, you can die just by running into an anomaly that you didn't see until the last second, etc. I wish there were more games like S.T.A.L.K.E.R. but unfortunately there aren't. If and when you do play them, make sure to install the Complete mod though. I never played it without the Complete mod but it's to my understanding that it fixes A LOT of bugs as well as adding some nice textures packs.

DayZ is the closest I've played to that ideal, and despite the mod's obvious flaws I loved every moment of that game. There's definitely a market for games of the type, but given the nature of mainstream media in pretty much every field (be it music, film, games) we probably aren't going to see a fully fledged AAA game with hardcore survival mechanics any time soon. The mainstream takes more hardcore ideas and makes them more palatable to bigger audiences (I'm not trying to sound like a hipster, it's kind of just the way of the world) so if you want survival experiences in gaming that are very pure and unfiltered, it's best to look at scenes like the whole Eastern Bloc school of game development, the mod scene, indie games, etc.

I'm not going to say it can't work, it's not implausible there's some clever and powerful way to do this that's never been done before, but it's at least very difficult to see what the AAA industry could really do with survival games. It's hard to look at something like Minecraft or Don't Starve and see what kind of great new things they could add to those games that could only be facilitated by big budgets and large teams of people working on them.

Games like Far Cry or Tomb Raider may have better graphics and in some ways smoother systems, but they're very different types of games, and as much as things like "I wish we could have Game X combined with Game Y" get said, such statements leave a lot of unanswered questions about how you'd do that, or what those two types of game even really benefit from by being combined. This is before we even start getting into the fact that investors would have to be feeling very uncharacteristically adventurous to fund anything this experimental.

The first S.T.A.L.K.E.R is the best game that ever made me feel vulnerable and low on supplies, trying to survive while on the edge of my seat.

Don't be ridiculous, here, have a flame thrower.

Eh, I am currently playing Skyrim like a survival game. Role playing a hunter lady, shooting shit with my bow and arrow, camping out when I need to, eating, etc. It's fun. Also I made night times actually dark as well. Mods are wonderful.

@alexw00d said:

This is interesting. So you restrict your weapons to only bow and arrow, and don't use potions and healing spells? Just food?

If Konami put the money behind a big budget Lost in Blue, I'd totally play it.

all they need to do is add atmosphere, make it vivid, that's all.

isn't that half the reason why people play shooters? because they allow for so much memory and processing power to go towards great graphics and animations? because they are atmospheric and visceral?

XCOM was more of a turn based strategy game for me. Horror? No it was funny, but not scary in the least.

It's so early in the survival genre that all anyone would need to do is copy the mechanics of minecraft over to an engine like crysis is ran off of. Hell, any engine without the stupid blocks would work for me. You wouldn't even necessarily have to have terraforming. What is it, 14 million people bought Minecraft? You'd think those same devs that tried to copy World of Warcraft's success would try the same for minecraft. Especially since it's an unsaturated market ripe for as many games as it can get.

Yeah, try not killing yourself after you buy and play War Z. It's real life survival!

Class 3/state of decay is the future! Looks awesome!

Some games have tried that whole concept of needing water, food, sleep, etc. However, what I find is that the mechanic for eating, drinking, and sleeping is just not very fun.. Its more of a "keep the status bar in the green zone so the annoying messages don't come out" for me.

I'm not sure, but is Fallout considered AAA? If so New Vegas had that hardcore mode where it included all the survival elements.