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+--- Thread: The Eternal Survival Game (/showthread.php?tid=17396)
The Eternal Survival Game - Slamz - 08-31-2026
I read an article about the guy who made DayZ lamenting his inability to solve the formula: a survival game that doesn't wear thin.
I know we've thought about this a fair bit in general because we like survival games and they do always wear thin. I thought I'd try to assemble some thoughts on the topic. I think it just comes down to needing some sliders that get set just right because if you set them wrong the game will die. And maybe it's not even possible to set them so perfectly that we could play a survival game nonstop for three years.
In particular I think of this in terms of PvP survival games but I'm actually not sure which survival games have made it harder on themselves: PvP or PvE. They both have issues that can very easily turn crippling for the game.
Some factors (sliders?) I'm thinking of....
Staleness vs upheaval.
Transience vs investment.
Obviously people get bored and quit once things go stale, which can happen for any number of interesting reasons:
- You win. You are the top dog and your position is sufficiently unassailable that no one wants to challenge you.
- You lose. Someone else is the top dog and their position is sufficiently unassailable that you can't challenge them.
- Either of the above especially combined with "moving is hard". We have won or lost and either there is nowhere else to go (as in Conan Exiles) or it's such a pain in the ass to move that you don't want to do it (as in Myth of Empires or Life is Feudal).
- You neither win nor lose but it's pretty much the same fight every day forever so if you ever get tired of the combat then you're tired of the game.
- The game is PvE content based, you have done all the content, the developers cannot keep up with your pace of consumption.
- The game is PvE content based, and to draw it out they made it slow to do, and to make you want to do it, the carrot is a big jump in power, so if you don't do it, you're useless, and now the game is a grind for unemployed sweats.
I think in the end, it's the same problem as MMORPGs:
How do you make a game with no endgame, or, maybe more reasonably, how do you make an endless endgame (whereupon, ideally, your entire game is "endgame"), and can it be done.
It's tempting to say it can't be done but I can also think of games that might have easily gotten another 1000 hours out of me, had they not had some fairly specific problem.
RE: The Eternal Survival Game - strife - 09-02-2026
(08-31-2026, 05:51 PM)Slamz Wrote: a survival game that doesn't wear thin.
fixed. All games wear thing after a while. I think the main thing with survival games is they all appear to be more indy-type games and they just don't have the content needed for long term play or if they do, they require too much time per play session to get anything accomplished.
I've pretty much stopped playing any game that I can't get on for 15-20 minutes and then get off. I'm about to hit 1,000 hours(988) on Marvel Rivals for that exact reason.
It's hard to have a survival MMO, so playing with friends pretty much has to be PvE. MMO survival games you just get your shit kicked in while you're sleeping.
If it's not an MMO then you're basically playing an offline version with friends and if your friends don't get on as much as you, you're pretty much just playing alone(Valheim).
I think the solution actually could be AI... If a publisher implements a good AI and you can download it locally, it can learn you, it can learn your friends and actually be interactive and fun, that could be a pretty big game changer for it. Imagine a game that actually learns you and changes... you could play the game for 40 hours. Your friend could play the game for 40 hours... and you both have completely different experiences. I think it would have to be single player though... not sure any online hosted game would be able to store the amount of AI and history for every player to make it work.