I’m fascinated by the rise of the multiplayer survival genre, best known by the DayZ mod. The popularity of these games is mindblowing. During the recent Steam sale, the games consistently in the Best Sellers list was DayZ, Rust, and 7 Days to Die. Rather than being turned back by the (relatively) high pricing and bug-ridden nature of the Alpha software, people are lining up to pay.
If you don’t know, the basic outline of these games is this: You start with nothing in an extremely hostile open-world environment. The usual threat is zombies, but they’re really just in-game context for why the buildings are abandoned and everyone is scavenging for supplies. Your real enemies are other players. Weapons are deadly and player characters are delicate. Getting shot or stabbed is usually a one-hit deal. Since your character is persistent, (at least until the next game update or server wipe) getting killed or robbed can be devastating.
There are almost no rules or goals in these games. It’s just surviving each day or player encounter. Scavenge for food and materials, get weapons, craft some supplies, hole up for the night, repeat. Paranoia is a big part of this as you can’t trust anyone else. Will that guy walking up to you chat and trade, or kill you? “I’m friendly,” he says, but isn’t that exactly what someone planning to bushwhack you say? You should get the drop on him first!
Sometimes people will group up and become a roving band of post-apocalyptic raiders. Victimizing newbies, who have very little to offer and cannot fight back, seems to be the thing to do for these groups.
I’ve played a bit of these three and it’s nuts to me that this has taken off as well as it has. We’re not talking modest indie game successes either. DayZ sold almost a million Early Access licenses in the month that’s been out. That’s $30 a copy - no discount - when plenty of AAA games were on sale for $10-$20 during the holiday sale. The mechanics of these games would seem to go against everything publishers (and players) have said gaming should be about. Hardcore combat, glitchy mechanics, punishing failure, no set goals or end game.
Have any of you played these games? Did you have any crazy encounters? Why do you like or dislike this type of game?
Idle Thumbs talked about how the mechanics already exist in the game for players to capture other players, restrain them, take them off to a basement somewhere, then basically drain them of their blood like some kind of morbid cow. Keep them barely alive and use them as a blood bank to keep you and your friends alive. That’s terrifying.
I have tried to figure this out as well. There are the youtube videos that seem to show these as some kind potentially twisted computerized LARP (minus the “A” part I suppose). However in watching streams I think even that is just some morbid hi light reel or something as every time I watch these games it looks like some endless running simulator with players constantly running to nowhere.
It fits right next to my smelter and stockpile of bronze ingots.
Anyway, I always said the best part of all the scary stories in DayZ was creating an aura of danger while I played my solo stealth survival game. I’m not involved enough in coordinated multiplayer or the YouTube scene to really dedicate myself to the full experience.
But I got enough just from being there. The mood was the endgame. The ‘home’ and user-generated content in these new games seems cool in a survival setting. I just wonder if the mechanics kill the mood. I don’t know if you still get the same effect now with Minecraft crafting and recipes.
There’s definitely a lot of terrain traversal in DayZ and Rust. Since you start with nothing, a newbie player’s first goal is to get away from the spawning areas and scavenge basic supplies from the land.
In DayZ, the abandoned towns offer the best scavenging areas, so players gravitate there. Unfortunately, like a savannah watering hole, that makes it prime huting grounds for predators. Items like canned food and clothing don’t respawn with default server settings, so players are forced to move around.
In Rust and 7 Days to Die, the environment nearby holds most of the bounty. Trees are needed for wood, animals can be hunted for food, etc. Still, you won’t be able to just stay in one place forever. Stuff runs out and your constructed shelters can be knocked down eventually. Rust makes this even more hardcore by leaving your character sleeping on the ground when you log out. You’re never safe!
7 Days to Die changes things up by making the zombies a credible threat at night. You must get to shelter and defend your base or the zombie swarms will kill you. On the flipside, supplies are a lot more plentiful in 7 Days. It’s not unusual to get a firearm within seconds of spawning by looting a nearby car or abandoned duffel bag.
A friend was telling me a story about his teenage son in DayZ (so this is third hand… read it while holding this chunk of salt). His son and some buddies captured a dude, held him prisoner for a while, grew bored, and killed the guy by feeding him “a bad orange.”
Now, my own imagination fills in the blanks here since I’ve never played the game - they captured the guy somehow and he was going to die without food. They gave him spoiled food that he (somehow) had no way of knowing was bad. He ate it, and died of… vitamin C poisoning or something.
This story perversely makes me want to try the game. Not because I want to force-feed people bad fruit. And not because I have a secret desire to be captured and be fed bad fruit. But just because I want to try and game where such bizarre stuff is possible.
That emergent/simulationist style has always been compelling. Perhaps this genre is merely the latest vehicle for it. YouTube videos of crazy shit will supercharge the buzz. I feel like many indie games go for that specifically.
I have to ask: does anyone else like traversal as much as I do? Orienteering and planning a safe route through the terrain was a lot of fun for me. Like any horror game, I guess I could sprint everywhere and break the illusion.
It’s even worse than that. One of the actions you can do in DayZ is “feed” when you select another player with an item of food in your hand. If you do it, the other player will just eat the item, whether they want to or not.
There are countless troll videos of people murdering other players with spoiled food.
That’s another thing. Zombies seem to not be a threat or even there in these games. All I see is running, running, 10 more hours of running, a quick bit of players grieving each other, then more running. Oh, and some running. I struggle to remember ever seeing a zombie in these games.
The most interesting thing about these types of games is they are the antithesis of modern AAA games - low tech, made by small teams, multiplayer only, steep learning curve, high skill, instant death, permadeath.
Hell they are even the opposite of what you average internet forum poster says they will tolerate in games - no save anywhere, always online, buggy/perpetual alpha.
It is really neat to see the gaming landscape broaden so that this type of stuff is viable along with the AAA games and the rise of what many deem ‘non-games’ like Gone Home, Journey, etc.
7 Days to Die is the opposite. Zombies are the primary threat. They spawn in neverending waves at night that will dig through your defenses and tear down walls. Other players are a threat, of course, but at night most of the trolling ends because zombies will destroy anyone out in the wilderness alone.
Even though it’s the roughest looking game of the trio, I prefer it so far because the NPC enemies in DayZ and Rust are a joke. More of an annoyance than anything else at this point.
To be fair to complainers like myself, I put up with different things for different experiences, especially when the design is expected to accommodate them. I have low tolerance to replay the exact same content in a directed singleplayer game, but roguelike permadeath has always balanced that with the excitement of a new beginning.
I still think early access is stupid for holistic experiences. Wake me when it’s done. But some games will never be done until they’re abandoned. It’s nice to grow with them.
We ought to keep challenging developers to match the annoyances with the right experiences.
Infestation: Survivor Stories, which used to the The WarZ, is a bad ripoff of DayZ with in-game purchases and a scummy dev at the helm. Despite the controversy at launch, (the game had been delisted from Steam at one point) and the obvious money-grubbing mechanics, the game seems to continue to truck along with a few thousand players now.
The Dead Linger is really rough. The dev just switched over to Unity as the engine and it seems they haven’t gotten a handle on it at all. It’s unoptimized to the point of unplayability - not that there’s anything to really “play” at this point. It’s an empty wasteland of bad-looking procedural terrain, terrible construction mechanics, and two zombie types (one in a decaying Santa costume) that have no AI at all.
The dead linger is very early alpha though, and I think its fair to say that it has a ton of potential. If nothing else, then the pure procedural approach to an entire world is something to be applauded. They do have art issues, but I think thats because of how huge the world is, something that appeals to me personally a lot.
I want to like games like Rust and Dayz, but the other players make it impossible. Nether looks great, but runs like shit and as always, the pvp is killing it before its even released.
edit: and I agree - people that do these kind of things in games make me sick and weep for humanity.
That video looks staged to me. I know nothing about this game, but why was that guy already in the hanger in a surrendered pose? Why would someone in this game voluntarily give up (especially as most gamers will be sociopathic and just kill you?)). Why didn’t he communicate with the players at all? I only saw one piece of text that said “I would like a drink”, and I don’t know if that’s something the player typed or if it’s something the game generated.
Anyway, I suspect that these games, much like Eve, generate millions of hours of very dull gameplay but yet also a handful of very, very interesting stories. Everyone external to the game reads these stories and thinks the entire game is like that, so they go and play it, only to find the millions of hours of running around and crawling through the grass that everyone else puts up with. But everyone playing the game puts up with the dull gameplay in the hope of being involved in one of these ‘epic’ stories. Or maybe they encounter someone and get shot within seconds and their hours of gameplay effort dissapear, etc.
My experience of Eve was mostly sitting around waiting for things to happen, but when they did happen I was usually asleep as I don’t live in the US. I imagine DayZ etc is just like that, only in the terrible Arma engine.
Which perhaps in turn explains why some people just go along with the “I’ve been captured” play acting which generates the epic stories. What else are they going to do? At least pretending/allowing yourself to be captured only to end up in fights to the death or performing for food is a break from the monotony of restarting and running around a barren landscape for another few hours.
I have problems with most of these games, as I feel they lack goals. It’s just “survive”. Just drink water, eat food, search for loot, run away from zombies/monsters, do it again, and again, until someone kills you. It isn’t that I don’t like the idea of survival games, but I would prefer games about surviving, where surviving it’s a means to an end, no the end itself.
If I have some kind of vague long standing objective I can give a damn about surviving because death would get me again farther to the goal, I can feel more paraonia if another player gets close to me, etc etc.
