Rick Lane charts the rise of the survival game.
Survival games have proved a hardy breed. Their numbers have exploded recently, and they're evolving quickly. From the relatively simple systems explored in Minecraft, survival games have expanded into full-blown simulations, conquering almost every environment imaginable in the process.This month, we're exploring two ofthemostinteresting-lookingexamplesof the genre, which approach the survival idea in very different ways.
Endnight Games' The Forest sees players stranded in a verdant woodland after a plane crash, where they must forage for food and construct shelters while evading a highly aggressive tribe of blue-skinned natives. Ben Falcone, creative director on the project, says the game was inspired by Italian Cannibal Horror films from the 1970s. ‘We wanted to throw players into a world and let them survive. No missions, no real direction, just letting people be creative against a smart enemy threat.'
The Forest stands out from other survival games in two main ways. The first is its visual direction.lt's exceptionally pretty for a game about fighting murderous cannibals. More important, however, is its sense of tactility. It's superbly animated. Moving around the forest, choppingdowntreesand building shelters has a real sense of weight to it,engendering a strong connection to the virtual world. A part of the reason is that ‘a lot of the team has backgrounds in VFX', explains Falcone. ‘I worked as a look developmentartistonTron:Legacy.300, and many other films and TV commercials over the years.'
Yet what really makes The Forest fascinating is its approach to enemy AI. The tribes people you encounter in the forests aren't mindless drones that attack you on sight. Instead,they're cautious and cunning, using teamwork and their greater knowledge of the environment to gain an advantage. ‘There's a scene in Apocalypto where two tribes meet for the first time in the jungle and they just stare at each other for ages,' Falcone explains. ‘It's a great, tense moment, and we wanted to capture some of that feeli ng with our cannibals in The Forest.' The Forest's AI behaviours are already highly convincing, and they're still unfinished. Endnight intends to add more routines and environment interaction, such as the ability to burn down player structures.
Alongside the more dynamic elements of The Forest, Endnight is also adding a story arc. Events that progress the narrative can be explored at your discretion, or stumbled upon naturally during play. One example sees the player being kidnapped by the cannibals and taken to their lair. 'We want it to be a world in which players can mess around, and an open-world building game, but also a game where players will eventually want to find out what happened to their missing son,' Falcone says.
Survival games are defined by how they interpret the word 'survival'. The Forest focuses on its cannibalistic tribes people, framing the player's experience around the dangers posed by this unique and unpredictable opponent. By comparison, Hinterland Studios' The Long Dark takes a very different approach. In The Long Dark, the enemy is the environment itself.
The Long Dark is set in the Canadian wilderness in the wake of a geomagnetic event that destroys all the world's electrical equipment. The game was inspired by Hinterland founder Raphael von Lierop's experiences playing Fallout 3. 'I started pondering the possibility of creating an experience that was primarily built around the exploration of abandoned places, where the environment was the real threat, as opposed to zombies or aliens,' he says.
Von Lierop envisioned the Long Dark some time before the recent explosion in survival games, and is keen to emphasise how it differs from games such as DayZ or Rust. ‘We have a pensive, solo exploration and survival experience. Our game is more about learning to understand the systems and struggling against the elements as you continue pushing yourself to survive for longer. We don't hold the player's hand, and we don't really tell them much. We just throw them into the experience, give them the info they need, and leave it up to them to figure it out.'
To that end, Hinterland has developed a complex, granular simulation of human needs that the player must address. Cold, dehydration, hunger and fatigue are all requirements and potential problems that the player must constantly bear in mind while exploring the wilderness for food and supplies.'You need to find food, fuel for fires, shelter from the cold or storms, tools to help you maintain your equipment, plus flares and lanterns for light sources and keeping hostile wildlife at bay.'
Von Lierop points to player descriptions of the game as a 'vulnerability fantasy' as opposed to apowerfantasy.'You're going to die - it's just a matter of how and when. There's a kind of fatalism there that our players really enjoy.'
Aesthetically, The Long Dark treads a different path from the Forest's highly realistic look, instead opting for a far more stylised wilderness. Von Lierop explains that' the beauty of the world stands incontrasttothe stark and dangerous setting'. He notes that the art development is the most difficult part of the project so far. 'It took many months and collaboration with several different artists. Creating an entirely new lookthat isn't just agraphic novel with a toon-shader style, or that isn't photorealistic, is a pretty big undertaking.'
The Long Dark further diverges from The Forest in its approach to storytelling. WhileThe Forest weaves its narrative into its sandbox, The Long Dark tells its tale in a completely separate section of the game. ‘It will be delivered episodically, and we'll continue expanding the sandbox and story across multiple seasons, like a TV series. Our goal is to tell the full first year of The Long Dark.' That doesn't mean the sandbox mode will be a completely lonely experience for the player. Hinterland plans for the environment to be populated by other AI survivors. 'We're trying to do something a little different, and we'll be talking more about that in the future,' says Von Lierop.
Like first-person shooters in the 1990s, survival games have grown from a simple, individual concept into numerous grander, more ambitious projects. The key difference between the two genres is that survival games allow for greater variety within the framework, with dedication to exploring and experimenting with game worlds rather than following instructions dictated by the developer. It's an exciting trend, and we look forward to seeing the final versions of The Forest and The Long Dark.