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The flaw in survival games
Was thinking lately about the problems I have with so many survival games and I realized that it comes down to a lack of being punished by the indifferent gods.
Okay, so like I wrote about in my recent gameing update, I've been playing Project Zomboid. It's a lot of fun, but it has a lot of limitations, and I've had some of the veil pulled back in how the game's simulation actually works and now I can't unsee it. For example, by default, zombies sort themselves into small groups that are roughly equidistant from each other, and they'll migrate to nearby areas with no zombies. But, crucially, they'll only migrate the equivalent of a few hundred meters, because the only area that's simulated is the area that far around the character. There's a mod called Wandering Zombies that cause zombies to wander around a bit more, and it does mean I need to be a bit more careful about stragglers and zombies having shown up near houses I've cleared, but it still can't cause zombies to wander too far away. The giant horde coming toward the protagonists' safehouse, one of the staple tropes of zombie fiction, is impossible in Project Zomboid because there are no far-away horde movement mechanics. If you clear out the area near your base, base defenses are useless because no zombie will ever find you.
Zomboid gets around this by just having zombies respawn, which is pretty gamey in a game that tries hard for verisimilitude.
Cataclysm has similar problems. It also only simulates the area near the player, but while it does have horde mechanics, the area it simulates is small enough that it's very possible if you have a large enough base that hordes would appear on the edge of the simulated area which could be inside your defenses. To deal with this, hordes were changed to prefer roads and city centers, but that leads to the same problem as Zomboid, where if you build your base away from a zombie hotspot--the obvious thing to do--you can farm and play post-apocalyptic Stardew Valley without a care. In a game about the inevitable decline of the world, nothing dangerous will come to you unless you go seek it out.
Unreal World has a similar but different problem, which is that the early game is a brutal struggle for survival as you try to carve a homestead out of the unforgiving wilderness but once you do, once you have a small cabin and food stored in your food cellar for the winter and some traps set out for animals, you usually wonder "Well...now what do I do?" and stop playing. I've done that several times and never actually played through winter because I knew I would survive and it would take months of the exact same gameplay to get there. I didn't have to worry about any trouble unless I made it for myself.
And that's my problem. City-builders are very good about providing unexpected challenges that you need to have the resilience to beat, like Timberborn's droughts and Badtide or SimCity's disasters, but a lot of survival games don't seem to have anything like that even when it would be appropriate. Now, I know that some of this is because these are games and if you sow an entire field and it all dies to drought, you're just going to quit the game rather than try to recover from it the way that our ancestors did. But it's very weird to me in a game that's about the zombie apocalypse you can avoid most of the tropes that are central to zombie apocalypse fiction. Zomboid doesn't have NPCs (they've been promising them for 12 years...), which means there's no raiders, there's no person who joins the group while hiding a bite, there's no conflict over who has to do what jobs. It has no wandering hordes so bases are totally safe. Cataclysm has multiple interdimensional invaders fighting over the Earth, except none of them actually fight unless they happen to spawn near each other and you can likewise just ignore most of them unless you deliberately seek out trouble. Once you've brought in one harvest, you've won the game.
I keep looking at Vintage Story for its robust survival mechanics but that has an entirely separate thing I don't like (it keeps the Minecraft-like system of mobs just spawning in from thin air), so who knows.
Okay, so like I wrote about in my recent gameing update, I've been playing Project Zomboid. It's a lot of fun, but it has a lot of limitations, and I've had some of the veil pulled back in how the game's simulation actually works and now I can't unsee it. For example, by default, zombies sort themselves into small groups that are roughly equidistant from each other, and they'll migrate to nearby areas with no zombies. But, crucially, they'll only migrate the equivalent of a few hundred meters, because the only area that's simulated is the area that far around the character. There's a mod called Wandering Zombies that cause zombies to wander around a bit more, and it does mean I need to be a bit more careful about stragglers and zombies having shown up near houses I've cleared, but it still can't cause zombies to wander too far away. The giant horde coming toward the protagonists' safehouse, one of the staple tropes of zombie fiction, is impossible in Project Zomboid because there are no far-away horde movement mechanics. If you clear out the area near your base, base defenses are useless because no zombie will ever find you.
Zomboid gets around this by just having zombies respawn, which is pretty gamey in a game that tries hard for verisimilitude.
Cataclysm has similar problems. It also only simulates the area near the player, but while it does have horde mechanics, the area it simulates is small enough that it's very possible if you have a large enough base that hordes would appear on the edge of the simulated area which could be inside your defenses. To deal with this, hordes were changed to prefer roads and city centers, but that leads to the same problem as Zomboid, where if you build your base away from a zombie hotspot--the obvious thing to do--you can farm and play post-apocalyptic Stardew Valley without a care. In a game about the inevitable decline of the world, nothing dangerous will come to you unless you go seek it out.
Unreal World has a similar but different problem, which is that the early game is a brutal struggle for survival as you try to carve a homestead out of the unforgiving wilderness but once you do, once you have a small cabin and food stored in your food cellar for the winter and some traps set out for animals, you usually wonder "Well...now what do I do?" and stop playing. I've done that several times and never actually played through winter because I knew I would survive and it would take months of the exact same gameplay to get there. I didn't have to worry about any trouble unless I made it for myself.
And that's my problem. City-builders are very good about providing unexpected challenges that you need to have the resilience to beat, like Timberborn's droughts and Badtide or SimCity's disasters, but a lot of survival games don't seem to have anything like that even when it would be appropriate. Now, I know that some of this is because these are games and if you sow an entire field and it all dies to drought, you're just going to quit the game rather than try to recover from it the way that our ancestors did. But it's very weird to me in a game that's about the zombie apocalypse you can avoid most of the tropes that are central to zombie apocalypse fiction. Zomboid doesn't have NPCs (they've been promising them for 12 years...), which means there's no raiders, there's no person who joins the group while hiding a bite, there's no conflict over who has to do what jobs. It has no wandering hordes so bases are totally safe. Cataclysm has multiple interdimensional invaders fighting over the Earth, except none of them actually fight unless they happen to spawn near each other and you can likewise just ignore most of them unless you deliberately seek out trouble. Once you've brought in one harvest, you've won the game.
I keep looking at Vintage Story for its robust survival mechanics but that has an entirely separate thing I don't like (it keeps the Minecraft-like system of mobs just spawning in from thin air), so who knows.
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I saw a mod called Rustbound Magic that seemed to have very Lovecraftian take on sorcery that made me interested. There was someone posting about their game with their friends where only one of them described to become a wizard and the way they described it, it really appealed to me. Like, they'd be showing off their server to a new player and be like, "Yea, here are the fields, and that building is the blacksmith. Oh, that house by the woods? That's John. We, uh, don't really know what he does over there, to be honest, when he talks it sounds like he's playing a completely different game." There were some other mods that looked pretty attractive too.
The only problem I have is one of the same problems I have with Project Zomboid, which is that a new patch is coming out in the not-too-distant future and I don't want to start a game on the old patch.
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Have you taken a look at RimWorld? I think it addresses most of these complaints, though I don't know if it suits your taste in other respects. The AI storyteller spawns threats on a semiregular basis, scaled based on colony wealth. The base game provides lots of options for tweaking storyteller behavior, and your choice of settlement location and starting colonists have a large impact on the problems you face and your options for dealing with them. It's remarkably flexible with mods and DLC.
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Yes! I have this issue in most survival games! Don’t Starve + Together, Minecraft, and ARK are all contenders for this issue for me, even though there’s theoretically other things to do. It’s the “chop wood, carry water” issue for me. No matter how far you get, you end up doing the same exact things, and it can get boring. D:
Rimworld is a pretty good survival game, imo. It’s got optional levels of randomness/challenge that keeps the game fun even well after having a truly established base. I highly recommend it!