With the large amount of games implementing survival mechanics, what's Sup Forums's opinions on them?
Are they overdone and stale, just being put into every indie game because every other indie game has them? Or are they a genuinely welcome addition?
I personally wish that they weren't so damn shallow. It's always just eating and drinking so that you don't just die.
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It usually just turns into a chore and rinse-and-repeat instead of "Oh man I'm so hungry I need to go out on an exciting hunt!" Even games with disease and sickness turns into "Oh I got sick, let me just pop a few pills, oh I'm fine." I haven't found a game that I've liked the survival element I yet
I don't like how games have hunting where it is just kill animal>press x to get food.
Then there's the problem where you can carry a dozen soups in your inventory for whenever you need them.
Eating cold or unreadied food should be worse then not having any at all. Maybe add tapeworms and shit that makes you get even more hungry.
I don't mind disease stuff so much as long as the cures are hard to get. I remember blowing all of my money on a ride to the opposite end of the map to get a cure of Blight disease in Morrowind.
I think it's a very long swing to just now come back to Gauntlet
I think the implementation as a "Dying gauge" in games is just a bulletpoint for a box art. Frankly speaking most things that are added like that are poor filler elements. At the same time I do yearn to have a well-balanced game that roots itself in survival and self-sufficiency. But without writing a thesis I think what "balanced" means is different for different people.
I was incredibly interested in Rockland Software's Caveman game. Despite the interface is horrible and tactile feel for the real time combat. I enjoyed that because of both the simplicity and complexity. Do X and X goes up. But to do X you need Y, Z.
In my second game I had spent enough time banging sticks and rocks together to figure out how to make a spear. Which lead down a development tree to where I was able to carry more than armfulls of stuff once I invented sacks. To get to that point I had to spend weeks moving between adjacent areas to collect the rocks and sticks to conduct R&D all the while being happy when a predator attacked so I could get any food. I started dying of infection and hunger because just as I was ready to set traps for poaching there was a flood lasting weeks and I couldn't leave the cave on a mountainside to hunt.
On each successive playthough I generally did better, choosing locations to set up that was more resource rich, but would only barely survive some disasters. As I later found, the only sensible thing to do is to as aggressively as possible gather cavemen to accompany and join you. So 1 could become a craftsman, and several could become foragers and accomplish a weeks' worth of action in 1 day because it's not one guy making 8 trips. But even negotiation and social interaction were skills you needed to practice, and without a good deal of that; extremely debilitating gifts were the only chance to even get other Cavemen to temporarily follow you. Which sort of spun it into a 4X game.
The only game I liked them is in is don't starve cause it's the focus of the game and not just a distraction from the main focus
Do these mechanics work outside of games focused solely on survival?
I found a game I really like on steam called Neoscavenger on steam. the combat has no animation and it's indie pixel art but the survival mechanics are pretty solid in the game.
If you aren't turned of by rouguelike games I would suggest buying or downloading The UnReal World.
it is set in Iron age Finland and it's pretty great.
the engine is old enough to rent a car and receive capital punishment though.
my melanin-enriched kin; you might wanna download the mini-mod of doom to add more stuff.
I'll have to try it out, that's just some screen shot I found floating around.
If they do, I don't know an example that really clicks for me. I guess maybe Monster Hunter sort of has a noncombat downtime system that's all about prepping for fights that involves scavenging and crafting.
Follow up on what my impressions of the winning game of Caveman is; I'm imagining maybe if there was a Tropico level resource management game premised around nomadic tribesmen roving around and depleting resources that could possibly workto keep an active pursuit of food and materials without strictly being a "Survival game". But I don't know of one.
When done properly they are amazing.
Otherwise you feel like you are babysitting the protagonist and managing their needs rather than playing the game.
>no arctic survival game where you have to manage your body temperature
Survival elements are almost always just busywork that slows down whatever else it is you do in the game, rather than adding anything interesting. Most of the time, survival in a game that focuses on it is just opening your inventory to reset a countdown timer. Stock up on cans of beans and use them every now and then. They often bloat their menus and inventory systems to make it appear "deep" but they're really just very wide puddles.
I find organic instances of survival in games that don't focus on it at all to be far more interesting and challenging. Like a dungeon crawler, there's no food/drink meters, no sleep deprivation meters or anything, however you can stick your neck out and delve deep into a dungeon, reducing your well-stocked inventory of healing and whatever items to nothing. Some sneaky bad guy comes out and hits you hard. Unable to continue given your reserves, you trek back to the surface, but the way back has some shit nipping at your heels and chipping away at what remains of your health.
They're bringing you to within an inch of your life, the warriors are out of stamina, your mages are out of mana, your healer is reduced to giving minor aid to those on the brink of death. You may lose a party member or two before you get out, and reviving them is expensive (if not impossible, better hire some new guys). Your team has come out with a good deal of experience and knowledge, but they came close to being wiped out and in the end their wallets took a hit.
The Long Dark.
What are some games where they're done well?
Man, the Long Dark is so great. Great survival elements, great exploration, great story set up (no stupid "le zombies XD" or "Trapped in random location for no apparent reason".)
as far as minecraft mods go TerraFirmaCraft is fairly well made, it is a near total conversion of the original game it reworks hunger, world gen and crafting has a way longer wind up to the point of regular iron tools, you will start of knapping stones into knifes and living in a thatch hut and eating seaweed like a slut.
though the endgame is quite shit with different colour iterations of iron or something but it is for sure something that you can sink quite the number of hours in.
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i've never enjoyed having to eat or drink in a video game. i already have to do it in real life and even that gets annoying sometimes, why would i want to do it in a game?
a game i boughtpirated had eating/drinking mechanics, and as soon as i noticed this i returneddeleted it
Would be nice if you had a parachute for starting resources.
try the stalker games perhaps it has food and some have sleep and there are some mods that increase the focus on those elements of the game but it is really non intrusive to the shooting and questing elements of the game, it only enhances the atmosphere
I personally don't care about survival mechanics or elements in games, they usually are pointless busywork.
I also think that the term doesn't really suit the concept, because you're trying to "survive" in any kind of game that features combat. Are you not trying to "survive" in Super Mario Bros by running to the end of the level within the time limit, without getting killed by walking mushrooms? Or does it become a survival game because you have to collect sticks and meat every 5 minutes like a fucking idiot?
That being said, pic related is a lot of fun and I remember it fondly.
I like how the survival in project Zomboid works, Gather as much as you can till water and electricity gets shut off. Making barrels to catch rain etc etc. too bad the devs are incompetent as fuck
Hunger as a mechanic is pretty boring.
In most games it's just a simple bar that drains your health when empty. The influence that has on gameplay is either a mindless bit of inventory space being constantly taken up or tedious stopping to refuel the bar every now and then.
At best it's a series of bars, some of the hidden, to represent nutrients, amount of blood/energy and stomach contents. At least here it can further influence success in certain non-inventory actions but it's still got the problem of food availability being the main means of influencing player decision making when it comes to food. Players will always take the steak over the cake if the number of points it restores is higher unless limited by a perk or self imposed limits.
Effectively removing these stat differences would make room for player expression to decide which foods they take but do this and all food would essentially be the same, making the choice meaningless when food is scarce (since you won't be in a position to decide) and mechanically tedious when food is abundant (since it's just a reskinned version of the regular refuel button).
For the choice of food to be meaningful, the game will have to react in a different way depending on the choice that the player made. Characters could comment on the food you give them or what you carry around with you. I think Skyrim had a similar detail in that followers could comment on certain items the player was carrying, mods took it further and the context sensitive remarks helped add some much needed reaction to the player's actions.
>I personally wish that they weren't so damn shallow. It's always just eating and drinking so that you don't just die.
OP, I have a question for you. Does increasing the amounts of meters really increase the depth of the mechanic? Isn't it just asking for quantity over quality?
You can add all kinds of shit, sure. Sleep, Sex Drive, Social Interaction and whatever else. But in the end, wouldn't it all be the same, just with different items?
If you want a survival mechanic with depth, how about needing a varied diet? Like, if you only eat the same food for a week, your stats drop significantly.
I recently played Adventure Island which has a hunger system. It was okay in the beginning, because you just pick up food as you go through each level, similar to picking up mushrooms in Mario games.
However, at one point in the game, there's an egg that has something which makes your health drop even faster until you have 1 or 2 bars left, and you only have a few seconds to get more food. If you don't get any, you die. That felt really cheap to me, and made me stop playing.
That's interesting. I never played Adventure Island, but I know the character is based on Takahashi Meijin from Hudson. If it's really a food item that does this, maybe it's a reference to him or an in-joke? Maybe he hates eggs?
Either way I don't blame you because it sounds pretty stupid and arbitrary when you don't know about Takahashi and his preferences in food.
I'm not sure, but apparently it's an eggplant.
>As the instruction manual clearly states, it is "Master Higgins' most unfavorite food." If you open an egg containing the eggplant, it will chase you even if you don't physically touch it.
The only way to avoid it is to memorize where it is in the level.
I think survival mechanics probably fit well into a stat heavy RPG, where nutrition had effects on your stats.
Carbohydrates help your stamina
Protein helps you increase strength
Salt for intelligence, sugar for speed boost, etc
Water could help stats regenerate, while a lack of sleep would stop your stats from increasing.
That's just what I would do. I just don't like it when it's by itself and just ends up being a countdown.
You can't play your games till you finish your jar of piss.
I think the problem is that such a mechanic is pretty hard to write and balance. Couple that with the market interest for it, and it's clear why Survival mechanics are shallow. I mean, if you would ask 100 casual players if they would want deeper survival mechanics, I'm sure the majority would say yes. The thing is, I'm also sure the majority would drop the game after an hour because they get bored of the system. And to be honest, I would probably too unless the mechanic is really really well thought out and engaging.
think the majority of the market would be overwhelmed by it. I think we all agree here that countdowns aren't very interesting, but it's an easy way out and can be understood immediately by any player. The deeper stuff that is being discussed here would scare people away, especially because it isn't centered around something flashy like combat.
Yeah, that sounds like an in-joke/reference to me. Pretty interesting.
I'm kinda bored, so I'm gonna ramble on for a bit longer.
On the matter of balance on stat based food-systems, Legend of Legaia 2 comes to mind. LoL2 has a cooking/eating system that isn't particularly deep or even mandatory, there is no hunger system. Food solely exists for temporary Stats buffs/debuffs. It's a dirt simple system that only requires you to have specific ingredients in your inventory and a cooking place (usually the camping ground in dungeons).
The problem, if you want to call it that, with the system is that it is very easy to abuse. Ingredients cost basically nothing, and at around the 60% mark of the game you can buy the ingredients to make the second best food at any time you want. The cost of the ingredients is usually pretty cheap, so you always have access to very strong stat changes.
Of course there is bad food as well, but you actually don't have a reason to cook it, you're better off not eating anything.
I think LoL2 would be a case where a countdown would have helped the system, because it would force you to cook constantly. Additionaly, a penalty or at least diminishing effects by eating the same food again and again could've helper it.
But, is it really fair to punish the player? The strongest food can only be made with an ingredient dropped by monsters (and most of those are at the endgame dungeon). Is it really fair to punish the player that spend time collecting a lot of "Monster Meat"?
And even if you implement a system that punishes repeated use, you would also have to make sure that it is not easily circumvented by alternating two types of food, or simply eating something else before you eat the Atomic Meat (that's the best food I'm referring to, funny name imo).
In the end, the real strength of this system, other than abusing Atomic Meat, was something else entirely. They copied Grandias idea of character interaction between the party while eating. LoL2 is pretty generic jrpg shlock, but I really really liked that.
continued because I rambled too much:
Like I said, it's the interaction between the characters that really made that system more interesting. For every type of food, characters had different reactions. The cooking was done by all the characters, so when the Martial Arts Master was cooking, the party would react accordingly by commenting on his cooking skills. You would get more insight about the characters dislikes/likes, even if it is only about food. It's one thing to read a Character Bio page that says "doesn't like spicy food" and watching a scene where the party eats spicy food and the character complains about it.
It's a different kind of depth, I would say. Rather than depth of mechanics, it's a depth of writing.
LoL2 isn't regarded as a good game, and I would agree to that. But I do think the food system is something really special, and I wish more games would put this kind of effort and thought into the system.
Alright, I'm done. If you actually read through my ramblings, thank you for your time.
Just fuck off, most genre name conventions don't make much sense if you look at them like that, survival is supposed to refer to games where the main challenge is to manage limited resources in order to satisfy the mid and long term needs of a character or group of characters.
I wasn't being serious about it mate, but I do think it's a silly name. Although I don't know about your definition of it, because it could easily fit The Sims as well.
Actually, wouldn't The Sims classify as having survival elements?
Survival genre and mechanics are fine. The problem with survival mechanics arouses when they are being implemented in a non survival game. Example of a good survival game is don't starve. An example of poorly implemented survival mechanics is starbound. Only time survival mechanics work is if the games objective is to survive.
>having survival elements
of course it has as part of its loose simulation of real life.