I'm tired of survival games...
Posted: Tue Feb 09, 2021 8:26 pm
I don't mean survival as in "try to survive by fighting oncoming waves of enemies" or anything like that. No, I mean survival games as in "you need to live by surviving wild animals and hostile weather."
The survival game is really, really popular and I can see why. It's interesting and different (assuming you're not dealing with zombies).
The problem with survival games is that they all fall into the same trap: you have to constantly eat and drink.
What I mean is the game has an accelerated time frame, so let's say a single day lasts 15 real world minutes, but in the game world that's still 24 hours. Your character during that time gets hungry and thirsty, which makes sense, but due to the accelerated day/night cycle, you spend nearly all of your time eating and drinking or looking for food to eat and drink. Why? To survive another day to — you guessed it! — continue constantly stuffing your face.
This also ignores the massive amount of food your character usually needs to eat. Seriously, no one needs to eat five whole turkeys, half a moose, and several rabbits while drinking a swimming pool's worth of water in a 24 hour period.
In the real world, you can actually go weeks without food and days without water. It'd be extremely uncomfortable to do so, but you could survive it and you certainly wouldn't need to eat an entire buffet's worth of food every single day.
Again, this is all tied to the game's accelerate time frame, so you're not only eating and drinking this massive amount, but you're doing it ALL THE TIME because 24 hours game time equals 15 minutes real world time.
Some survival games decide to step it up a notch by making food eventually spoil. So not only do you need to forage/scavenge or hunt every waking moment, but anything you find will eventually become inedible. The time it takes for this to happen? Well, remember that accelerated day/night cycle? Yeah, so food can go bad extremely quickly.
Worse yet, some survival games even extend this to non-food items, such as clothing. Yeah, your clothing will wear down even if you're not wearing that particular item. I could understand the clothing you're wearing eventually falling apart at the seams, but pants or shirts that're folded up or tossed in a backpack? Maybe if years went by, but days or weeks?
I have clothing I originally bought over 20 years ago that's still in good condition. Granted, I haven't been in a survival situation with those articles of clothing, but the point is that unused clothing doesn't deteriorate by itself (or if it does, it takes decades).
Newer survival games have even added exhaustion meters, so you can get tired and need to sleep. Is that realistic? Yeah, but it's not particularly fun to be in the middle of eating my third elk and suddenly have my character become a narcoleptic as he crashes wherever he is and goes to sleep. In survival games that including freezing to death, this can be a problem if your character decided, "Hey, that snowbank looks cozy."
Oh yeah... I forgot something else. Almost ALL survival games are Rogue-Likes, where you have one life and if you die, your saved game is deleted and you have to start over. These games also rely on autosaves (often needing you to do something like go in or out of a house to trigger it) so you can't even decide to quit the game when you want.
So what's the point of this long rant? Not sure, really. I just felt like yelling about how sick and tired I am of survival games, mostly because they rely on cheesy and frustrating game mechanics. The basic ideas behind them are sound, but the design is awful. I don't know if they all follow the same pattern because it sells or because it's what's become expected of the genre. Probably both.
The survival game is really, really popular and I can see why. It's interesting and different (assuming you're not dealing with zombies).
The problem with survival games is that they all fall into the same trap: you have to constantly eat and drink.
What I mean is the game has an accelerated time frame, so let's say a single day lasts 15 real world minutes, but in the game world that's still 24 hours. Your character during that time gets hungry and thirsty, which makes sense, but due to the accelerated day/night cycle, you spend nearly all of your time eating and drinking or looking for food to eat and drink. Why? To survive another day to — you guessed it! — continue constantly stuffing your face.
This also ignores the massive amount of food your character usually needs to eat. Seriously, no one needs to eat five whole turkeys, half a moose, and several rabbits while drinking a swimming pool's worth of water in a 24 hour period.
In the real world, you can actually go weeks without food and days without water. It'd be extremely uncomfortable to do so, but you could survive it and you certainly wouldn't need to eat an entire buffet's worth of food every single day.
Again, this is all tied to the game's accelerate time frame, so you're not only eating and drinking this massive amount, but you're doing it ALL THE TIME because 24 hours game time equals 15 minutes real world time.
Some survival games decide to step it up a notch by making food eventually spoil. So not only do you need to forage/scavenge or hunt every waking moment, but anything you find will eventually become inedible. The time it takes for this to happen? Well, remember that accelerated day/night cycle? Yeah, so food can go bad extremely quickly.
Worse yet, some survival games even extend this to non-food items, such as clothing. Yeah, your clothing will wear down even if you're not wearing that particular item. I could understand the clothing you're wearing eventually falling apart at the seams, but pants or shirts that're folded up or tossed in a backpack? Maybe if years went by, but days or weeks?
I have clothing I originally bought over 20 years ago that's still in good condition. Granted, I haven't been in a survival situation with those articles of clothing, but the point is that unused clothing doesn't deteriorate by itself (or if it does, it takes decades).
Newer survival games have even added exhaustion meters, so you can get tired and need to sleep. Is that realistic? Yeah, but it's not particularly fun to be in the middle of eating my third elk and suddenly have my character become a narcoleptic as he crashes wherever he is and goes to sleep. In survival games that including freezing to death, this can be a problem if your character decided, "Hey, that snowbank looks cozy."
Oh yeah... I forgot something else. Almost ALL survival games are Rogue-Likes, where you have one life and if you die, your saved game is deleted and you have to start over. These games also rely on autosaves (often needing you to do something like go in or out of a house to trigger it) so you can't even decide to quit the game when you want.
So what's the point of this long rant? Not sure, really. I just felt like yelling about how sick and tired I am of survival games, mostly because they rely on cheesy and frustrating game mechanics. The basic ideas behind them are sound, but the design is awful. I don't know if they all follow the same pattern because it sells or because it's what's become expected of the genre. Probably both.
